Secrets of the iPod and iTunes (Fifth Edition) [Electronic resources] نسخه متنی

Contents: iPod Photo

The newest additions to the iPod family, both the 40 and 60 GB iPod Photos, come bundled with all the accessories that accompany the fourth-generation iPod's boxFireWire cable, USB 2.0 cable, Apple earbuds, power adapter, documentation, and a CD-ROM disc with software compatible with Windows and the Mac OSas well as a few extras.

The A/V Cable

Not only can you view pictures on the iPod Photo's two-inch display, with the proper cable you can see your pictures on a television. This is that proper cable and Apple included it in the box. Measuring just under five feet long (59 inches from tip to tip, if you must know), the cable bears a three-ring mini-plug on one end and three RCA plugs on the otherone for composite video and the other two for the left and right audio channels (Figure 1.5).

To put the cable to best use, you plug the miniplug into the iPod Photo's headphone port and the three RCA plugs into the appropriate jacks on your TV.

iPod Photo Dock

The iPod Photo Dock differs from any other iPod dock in its inclusion of an S-Video port. As you might suspect, this port is intended for connecting the iPod Photo to an S-Video inputthe input on your TV, VCR, or camcorder, for example (Figure 1.6). As I'll explain in the chapter devoted to the iPod Photo, S-Video provides a cleaner video signal than what you get from the iPod's headphone (composite video) port. Apple doesn't include an S-Video cable in the iPod Photo's box, although you can purchase one at any electronics store.

You can purchase an additional iPod Photo Dock for $39.

Carrying Case

Move along, nothing to see here. It's Apple's standard iPod case.

Capacity

As this book goes to press, Apple offers three iPod modelsthe iPod mini that houses a 4 GB hard drive, the two white fourth-generation iPod models that include 20 or 40 GB drives, and the iPod Photo that houses either a 40 or 60 GB drive. Rather than fill this chapter with the phrase "Oh, and that includes the iPod Special Edition: U2 too," let's just agree that the U2 iPod is nothing more than a gussied-up 20 GB fourth-generation iPod.

The hard-drive capacity is a bit deceiving. The drives technically hold 4 GB, 20 GB, 40 GB, and 60 GB respectively, but after they're formatted, you'll find that the mini holds 3.7 GB, the 20 GB iPod holds 18.5 GB, the 40 GB fourth-generation and iPod Photo holds 37 GB, and the 60 GB iPod Photo formats to 55.7 GB. The reason for the discrepancy is that Apple and hard-drive manufacturers measure megabytes differently. Drive manufacturers maintain that 1 MB equals 1 million bytes (1,000 x 1,000 bytes). Apple claims that a megabyte is actually 1,048,576 bytes (1,024 x 1,024 bytes). So this difference is really a difference in semantics. The drive manufacturer and Apple agree that a 20 GB drive is a 20 GB drive. It's just that the computer and iPod OS show that such a drive actually holds less information if you use Apple's definition of a megabyte.

Regardless of how megabytes are calculated, you do lose a portion of the hard drive's space. The iPod can't run without the files necessary to make it work, and those files take up some space. Also, when the drive is formatted, a small portion of the hard drive is reserved for internal chores.

Is the possible loss of 0.3, 1.5, 3 , and 4.3 GB something to lose sleep over? Hardly. You have ample room to store music, files, and, in the case of the iPod Photo, additional files as well. The mini, for example, can hold 1,000 four-minute AAC songs encoded at 128 kilobits per second (Kbps)more than 66 hours of music. The 20 GB model holds 5,000 songs (that's 333.3 hours or almost 14 days of music), the 40 GB iPod and iPod Photo hold more than 10,000 songs (equaling 666.6 hours or nearly enough music to play your iPod nonstop throughout the entire month of February without hearing the same song twice), and the 60 GB iPod Photo houses 15,000 tunes when the player is packed with music, which equals just over 41 days of non-stop rockin.' I'll discuss kilobits and music encoding elsewhere in the book, but for the time being, all you need to know is that this 128 Kbps rate produces files with remarkable sound quality. Many files that you'll find on the Web are encoded at the same rate of 128 Kbps, but in MP3 format. To most people, such MP3 files sound distinctly inferior to their AAC counterparts.

Skip Protection

All iPods sport a 32 MB DRAM (Dynamic RAM) memory buffer. When the fourth-generation iPod and iPod mini move music from the hard drive to your ears, they load into that buffer about 20 minutes of music (if you're playing an MP3 file encoded at 160 Kbps). The iPod Photo appears to move less music into the buffer in order to also place pictures in memory. After shoveling the music into the buffer, the hard drive spins down, saving wear and tear on both the drive and the iPod's battery.

This scheme also allows up to 25 minutes of skip-free music playback on the fourth-generation iPod and iPod mini and 17 minutes of skip protection on the iPod Photo. Yes, for the time it takes to get a decent cardiovascular workout, you can jump, jive, and wail, listening to your music with nary a glitch. The iPod will skip only when data is being moved off the hard drive and into the buffer.

If you've never owned another disk-based music player, you might not realize how impressive this feature is. Lesser players offer skip protection that's measured in seconds rather than minutes.

What's the Difference?

The iPod once came in two flavors: one for Macintosh and another for Windows. The current and last generation of iPods work with either computer platform. Are there differences between iPods formatted for the Macintosh and those formatted for Windows?

As the iPod matures, there are fewer differences. They measure up this way:

The software is slightly different. Prior to October 16, 2003, the software was wildly differentMac users used iTunes and Windows users were given Musicmatch Jukebox. That changed when Apple released a Windows version of iTunesa program that is nearly identical to the Macintosh version. iTunes 4.6 for Windows and Mac differ in that the version written for Windows can convert .wma audio filesan audio format not compatible with the iPod that was created by Microsoftto the AAC audio format. The Mac version doesn't include this conversion option.

The way that the iPod's hard drive is formatted is different as well. By default, the iPod's hard drive is formatted as a Mac OS Extended (HFS+) volumethe same kind of formatting that's used by default on the Macintosh. When you plug the iPod into a Windows PC, the iPod's hard drive is formatted as a FAT32 volumethe native formatting scheme for Windows.

Chapter 6, the iPod mini won't boot either a Mac or a Windows PC).

Supported Audio Formats

Although the iPod is usually referred to as an MP3 player, it can actually play music encoded in a few formats. AAC is the most desirable because (as I explained in the introduction) thanks to their relatively small sizes, you can jam a lot of AAC files into the iPod. The iPod supports importing and playback of AAC, MP3, AIFF (Audio Interchange File Format, the kind of files used on audio CDs), WAV files (the Microsoft Windows audio format), andnew to iTunes and the iPod with the release of iTunes 4.5Apple Lossless Codec. It does not play files encoded in Microsoft's proprietary .wma (Windows Media Player) formatmaking the iPod incompatible with online music services that sell music in that format.

Because they're not compressed, AIFF and WAV files are of higher quality than AAC and MP3 files. But AAC and MP3 files encoded at 320 Kbpsthe maximum resolution allowed for MP3 files on the iPodsound amazingly good.

Chapter 5. The Musicmatch Jukebox software that shipped with iPods before late October 2003 doesn't support AAC files (for either encoding or copying to the iPod).

Fortunately, iTunes for Windows does bring AAC encoding and playback to the PC, as well as AIFF and Apple Lossless Codec compatibility (other formats unsupported by Musicmatch Jukebox). This is reason enough for Windows iPod owners to download iTunes, if it wasn't bundled with their iPods.