iPod Mini Software Update?

[micvog]

This update won't block Rhapsody because in order to do that, Apple will have to change their copy protection scheme up some (again)...

This is not necessarily true given that it is being reported that only the iPod recognizes the Real Music Store songs; iTunes refuses to play them. Given that, on a bit-level basis, there is something different about the Real songs that does not make them 100% compatible. Whatever that is, Apple just needs to implement it on the iPod and can leave their existing DRM system in tact.

Although I agree with another poster that Apple should just forget about it. If you go to Real's Music Store and read what is involved in playing these "compatible" songs on your iPod you wouldn't want to bother.

 

[pyrotoaster]

Does this mean LONGER BATTERY LIFE for the minis???

please please please...

I'm not sure, since the extended battery life of the 4G's mostly comes from highly increased efficiency in the software.

The new mini software will probably be billed as "iPod mini Software 2" or "1.1" or something like that. It won't actually be Version 3.0.1, so it might not have all the advatages of the latest iPod software.

Since Apple's probably plugging regular iPod features into the mini's pre-existing software, we might not see the same battery life increase we saw with the 4G.

That said, let's hope I'm wrong.

 

[morkintosh]

Forgive me if this has already been asked, but wouldn't it be the consumers who purchased from Real the ones geting screwed?

sure they would, but an unhappy customer base makes for an unhappy company. given the nature of what real has done I don't think apple owes it to either them or the customers to play along.

 

[G4-power]

I'm not sure, since the extended battery life of the 4G's mostly comes from highly increased efficiency in the software.

The new mini software will probably be billed as "iPod mini Software 2" or "1.1" or something like that. It won't actually be Version 3.0.1, so it might not have all the advatages of the latest iPod software.

Since Apple's probably plugging regular iPod features into the mini's pre-existing software, we might not see the same battery life increase we saw with the 4G.

That said, let's hope I'm wrong.

It's true that Apple said 4G model software was made more efficient, but I think most of the extra playback time was made with increasing capacity. The 1G and 2G iPods had Lithium-polymer batteries worth of 1200 mAh! And 10 hours of playback. 3G had moved to lithium-ion, but had only half the capacity, 630 mAh! Playback time dropped only to 8 hours. (From Mactracker ) I say, there's some efficient software. With only dragging the battery capacity up, it should be about 950 mAh to reach the claimed 12 hour playback time. But what Apple also said, not about battery capacity, nor software, but more efficient hardware. New chip, more efficient HD etc. Since the mini has the same chip, I doubt playback time will be increased much, even by the most efficient software in the world. I think so because the mini has pretty much the same hardware as bigger iPods, but sure, a lot smaller battery, because of weight and size reducing.

Just what I reckon.

 

[derekamoss]

Well I gues since they are updating the software to be like the 4g then that means hardware updates to the mini are a ways off.

 

[morespce54]

BTW, am I missing something on the one-click shuffle or whatever it is? On my 3G iPod, if I press play on the remote from teh main menu, I get a shuffle of all songs on my iPdd. Isn't that the same thing?

... also if you press 2 times on PLAY (even without the remote).

 

[swissmann]

Makes me wonder if they could update the 3G and older iPods to be able to do a lot of the things the 4G can. Not saying they will but could they?

 

[JDOG_]

Re: Crossfading

I think this whole crossfade thing is possible with an iPod, but not really necessary right now. I think Apple will implement it in the next generation of iPod to have a few new features as a selling point.

You have to remember part of the reason the battery lasts as long as it does is that the songs are loaded up into the cache off the hard drive and including cross-fading into the picture would mean not only a faster cache-refresh (for the additional 5-15 seconds of the next song) but also processing power dealing with the crossfade itself.

I think this can easily be fixed on Apple's iPod design-side by making the cache larger and having Portalplayer design a chip with some nice cross-fading power that will do just that without using up too much energy. The extra cache would also be a selling point to runners & active-folk with longer anti-skip.

I just see the whole cross-fading thing as a future feature. 🙄

 

[awinn233]

*crossing fingers* 😉

 

[bigandy]

there be two reasons i'm not even thinking about a 4g ipod right now:

1. i have a 6month old 3g. it's 40gb. it didn't cost me anything (learning difficulties + university = free ipod and powerbook 🙂). Until 60 or even 80gb mine's fine.

2. am i the only person in the world that thinks the click wheel doesn't look right on the ipod? i mean ipod mini yes, looks great, but the whole white on grey thing going on isn't quite spot on for me. what was wrong with the 3g design? i like it!

until they fix my quibbles i'm sticking with my 3g 40gb.


---------
40gb 3g ipod
15" powerbook g4, 1.5ghz, 80gb hdd, 1.5gb ram, superdrive, backlit keyboard osx 10.3.5
powermac g5, dual 2.5ghz, 1.6tb hdd (4x400gb), osx 10.3.5 server
sony ericsson p900
2meg sdsl + wireless router
and you'll be upset to hear none of it cost me a penny! 😱

 

[elo]

It's not just you--I actually hear people complain about this all the time. I love everything about my mini except the gap between songs (which often interrupts instruments that are [supposed to be] holding between tracks), but won't buy another iPod as long as that issue remains.

Complain to Apple, though, and not just here. They don't record any comment that isn't sent to them.

elo

I dont have an ipod (yet - c'mon 60gb!), but I recently set up airport express and this gap issue is driving me nuts. never heard anyone mention in before anywhere - glad it's not just me. itunes can obviously buffer enough to deal with this - you can set a 12 second cross fade. it really surprises me that these gaps exist - as you said, if cds fixed the problem 20 years ago...

sorry for off-topic....

 

[puckhead193]

why can't they do it for the 3G model...... i would like those features!

 

[puckhead193]

2. am i the only person in the world that thinks the click wheel doesn't look right on the ipod? i mean ipod mini yes, looks great, but the whole white on grey thing going on isn't quite spot on for me. what was wrong with the 3g design? i like it!

:

I agree it is so ungly. i wish the 4g would have the same buttons but the lights were differnent instead of red, (maybe even a customizeable light scheme) that would be nice. i like my 3g, i only got the new one because it was basicly free with the cram and jam through apple. so i fig. i would give to my parents as a gift for paying for my laptop 😛

 

[pyrotoaster]

Makes me wonder if they could update the 3G and older iPods to be able to do a lot of the things the 4G can. Not saying they will but could they?

why can't they do it for the 3G model...... i would like those features!

Well, yes and no.
The 3G's chip may not support the variable-rate audiobook playback, but most of the other features (other than the better battery life) could probably be added to "Version 2" of the iPod's software.

That said, it ain't happenin'. Don't bother complaining about it, because those complaints were done to death when Apple moved from the 2G to the 3G 'Pod.

 

[SoGood]

Ext FW HD functionality

Would this bring in an Ext FW HD functionality to the Mini? I understand this is one area of differentiation b/n the iPod and the Mini.

 

[LaMerVipere]

Now for the REAL question...

WHERE THE HELL ARE ALL THE IPOD MINI'S???

There is still a month or more long waiting list for them, I mean what the hell. I know a lot of people, including myself, who would have bought one by now if they were AVAILABLE. 🙄

 

[plastics2]

nope

got the ipod software update. no new mini update.

 

[simX]

Yeah, this is some really sweet news. I just bought a mini a couple of days ago and have been looking at pictures of regular iPods longingly and contemplating a switch for some of those new features. One of my favorites is the pausing when the headphones come out, I really hope that comes along with this update as well...

Wow, I didn't even notice that my 4G iPod did that -- but it does indeed pause the music when I pull the headphones from the jack. That's really slick, even though it usually takes 1 or 2 seconds to pause.

 

[Zaty]

Would this bring in an Ext FW HD functionality to the Mini? I understand this is one area of differentiation b/n the iPod and the Mini.

You can already use the mini as external FW/USB2 HD.

 

[AoWolf]

WHERE THE HELL ARE ALL THE IPOD MINI'S???

There is still a month or more long waiting list for them, I mean what the hell. I know a lot of people, including myself, who would have bought one by now if they were AVAILABLE. 🙄

Well if you really want a mini heres what you need to do. Go to an apple store and go early in the morning. Don't bother to call them either because they never seem to know if they are getting any.

 

[PowerMacMan]

WHERE THE HELL ARE ALL THE IPOD MINI'S???

There is still a month or more long waiting list for them, I mean what the hell. I know a lot of people, including myself, who would have bought one by now if they were AVAILABLE. 🙄

I went to Best Buy and saw like 20 of them all at once, I just couldn't take it 😛

 

[bankshot]

The iPod does buffer, 25 minutes worth to be exact. So it's basically always playing from memory anyway...

Well, yes and no. I believe the iPod's memory is used for buffering the contents of the files. That makes sense because its purpose is to prevent the hard disk from spinning too much. This means that it's always reading from the memory buffer but it still has to decompress the audio (MP3/AAC/whatever) in real time as it plays.

What I'm talking about is the actual audio output - once it's been converted to 44.1 KHz 16-bit stereo audio. If the iPod buffered this, it would only have about 3 minutes worth, so obviously it doesn't. Even though it's buffering the file contents, I believe there's still a slight delay when switching songs because the iPod has to reinitialize things and restart playback with the new file. iTunes suffers the same problem - a while back I experimented with manually setting the end times of songs in the song info to see if that would produce no gap. No good. There was still a gap, even if I set the end of playback well before the end of the song. It's poor design, plain and simple.

If they were to use just a small portion of the iPod's memory to buffer, say, 5 seconds of audio output, this part of the problem would be solved. The playback software would simply keep filling this buffer as long as it has room, while the hardware reads from it to send the actual audio signal out. Portable CD players have had anti-skip buffers like this for years now. In the case of the iPod, it wouldn't be for preventing skips (the main 32MB file buffer handles that), but for prevent gaps at song change. Same with iTunes, except it could buffer a lot more if it wanted to.

I just don't believe that this is such a difficult problem, and it amazes me that Apple - a company that prides itself on attention to detail - has let this go for so long. Because listening to music is a very important thing to me, I have to make this my personal crusade. 😉 I send Apple feedback on this regularly, and I post to message boards hoping to recruit others to do the same.

Join me, won't you? 😎

And of course, other than that issue, I absolutely love my iPod and you can pry it from my cold, dead fingers. 😀

 

[picklescott]

I'd also like iTunes custom equalizers to show up on iPod. So you can custom-adjust for different headphones, noise conditions, etc. (I don't even care whether you can set EQ levels on the iPod itself.)

The custom equalizers set in iTunes are supposed to also be in effect on your iPod. (To save battery life, override all of them by going into iPod settings and setting the EQ to "Flat".)

 

[JDOG_]

Hmmm...looks like they're not going to post this update til next week.

Maybe they're saving it for the Paris Expo as something to talk about and "release." That's what I'd do.

--------

In regards to the aforementioned post about buffering, Apple uses a 32mb buffer because it's cheaper than providing a 64mb or higher buffer. There isn't really that big of a need to give people a bigger buffer, but it would be nice.

 

[xsmi]

Maybe they pulled it!

Hmmm...looks like they're not going to post this update til next week.

Maybe they're saving it for the Paris Expo as something to talk about and "release." That's what I'd do.

--------

In regards to the aforementioned post about buffering, Apple uses a 32mb buffer because it's cheaper than providing a 64mb or higher buffer. There isn't really that big of a need to give people a bigger buffer, but it would be nice.