Software & Firmware Updates

[jeffgarden]

so does this mean i can use my mini with the Belkin accessory that lets you dump digital camera pictures into it ? the media reader thing ?

does it have the "import photos" option ?

 

[jxyama]

I'll tell you the problem I have with people saying they "would never buy online music until it's provided in a lossless format".

You've been buying music in a lossy format for over a decade. The sampling done to make a CD is lossy, and can introduce some awful harmonics. Fortunately it's too subtle for most people to notice.

The TTL circuits that are probably used in your amp / stereo system (unless you have vacuum tubes) are lossy. They are again sampling and reconstituting the music, creating some awful harmonics.

Heck, odds are the amp used when recording the music was digital. Guess what?

It's not a question of "lossy" vs. "lossless". Everything we are sold is lossy. Walk into a music store and buy a CD, it's encoded in a lossy format. That's okay though, because even if it wasn't your amp will re-encode into a lossy format.

The question is how much are you willing to accept, based on the style of music you listen to and how well attuned your ear is to specific harmonics?

i think it's a bit misleading to lump the sampling loss or reconstruction loss (two examples you mentioned) with frequency-based compression losses, such as AAC/mp3 encoding.

there are subjective measures on how the frequency-based compression algorithms decide which frequency to discard - based mostly on psycho-acoustic studies.

 

[stcanard]

... And so there's no confusion, I understand where you're coming from.

Thanks, and sorry! I got lost in all the whining about 3G and misattrbuted an opinion. Normally I try to read a thread I'm in carefully, but this one I've been skimming trying to avoid my pet peeves.

 

[stcanard]

i think it's a bit misleading to lump the sampling loss or reconstruction loss (two examples you mentioned) with frequency-based compression losses, such as AAC/mp3 encoding.

I don't think so. They are both attempting to achieve the same effect. Reducing the amount of information so that it can be effectively stored in a digital medium.

The difference is that they take different approaches: AAC/mp3 encoding tried to take away frequencies that won't be heard/noticed by the human ear. Sampling for CD's does it buy introducing frequencies without regard to the listener, and trying to minimize it.

there are subjective measures on how the frequency-based compression algorithms decide which frequency to discard - based mostly on psycho-acoustic studies.

Precisely. The frequency based compression is attempting to discard frequencies that will have minimal affect based on our knowledge of human signal detection.

Sampling frequency loss is purely mathematical formula, and can introduce distortions what we are much more sensitive to.

But it is very disingenious to try and claim that CD's are encoded "lossless". There is a huge amount of frequency information lost during the encoding. Most people have decided they can accept that. The vast majority don't even realize it's happening.

Same thing with MP3/AAC/WMP. I say again, it's not about "lossless" vs "lossy" it's all about how much and what type of loss you are willing to accept. That depends entirely on your hearing and type of music.

There's the same issue in video. After a couple of years of evaluating the quality of video encoding and decoding, NTSC TV sets drive me insane. The vast majority of them cannot properly decode the boundary between two primary colours (the opening sequence of Start Trek TNG is a good example of this outside of the artificial colour bar screen).

Almost nobody else that I watch TV with notices.

 

[AidenShaw]

Thanks for clarifying the obvious

I'll tell you the problem I have with people saying they "would never buy online music until it's provided in a lossless format".

You're right - I should have explicitly said that I consider the losses in a CD to be acceptable (as if there were a real choice in the matter).

I don't want to pay for music that's worse than a CD - which was obviously my point even though it wasn't explicitly stated.

If a better format (say 96KHz/24-bit) becomes common - that's what I'd want to download as well.

My position is not based on having perfect hearing or acute sensibilities - it's based on protecting my investment from becoming obsolete. I compress to 235Kbps VBR for the library on my laptop - with most music that's good enough that I can't hear annoying artifacts and small enough that I can keep plenty of music with me.

With the lossless originals, however, I can always re-encode with a newer, better codec and the result will be better than my previous compressed version.

You can't improve a lossy source by recompressing it, however...so if you buy lossy you're stuck with lossy.

 

[jxyama]

You're right - I should have explicitly said that I consider the losses in a CD to be acceptable (as if there were a real choice in the matter).

i guess that's the point i wanted to get at... currently, the standard for the most consumers are set by the CD. yes, CD is "lossy" compared to theoretical perfect music re-production, i guess...

i think it's borderline nitpicking to start from the theoretical perfect music re-production... whenever we talk about lossy/lossless, i think we pretty much start from CD/AIFF...

i don't even know if there's a way to quantify the lossy-ness of CD production. right now, AIFF hovers around 10 MB/min. mp3/aac hovers around 1 MB/min. that's an order of magnitude compression. if theoretical perfect music was on the order of 100 MB/min or more, then i can see how CD is just as "lossy" as mp3/aac is compared to AIFF, relatively speaking, but i don't know if this is even a sensible discussion... the question is, have we ever had access to anywhere near such theoretical limit? i don't think so - we all know even live performance isn't perfect... so what's the point of starting from there?

sampling rate for CD, 44 MHz, i think was chosen to be the upper edge of the human hearing? i'm not sure. but it's a lot less subjective, i feel, than removing frequencies we aren't "supposed to be able" to hear. anyway, just my opinion. i feel like more "ordinary" people can hear the loss due to mp3/aac codecs than can due to encoding of the CD. in that sense, i'm not sure if you can lump those two together and say "we never have lossless anyway so what's the complaint?"

 

[beatle888]

clicker sound through headphone is a nice touch for the mini - wanted that since the beginning...

by the way, 3G owners complaining... you don't have to get over anything. if these minute (imo) improvements in mini and 4G but not 3G mean *that* much to you - so much that all the reasons you bought an iPod from apple to begin with go out the window - remember this in a few years and don't bother buying another apple product.

$$$ speaks louder to apple than any complaints you can log at MR...

3G ipods arent broken jxyama. what would they be protesting, apple not constantly upgrading the features of their old products? sounds like a rebel without a cause, or otherwise known as immaturity.

 

[jxyama]

3G ipods arent broken jxyama. what would they be protesting, apple not constantly upgrading the features of their old products? sounds like a rebel without a cause, or otherwise known as immaturity.

what? (what i was saying in the post you quoted is that if being "left behind" in the iPod update cycle is such a big deal for 3G owners, and apple has been doing this for quite a while now - ex. when 3G came out and there were updates, 1/2G owners were left behind - then they would do well to remember that apple does this and not buy their products instead of ranting about it at MR...) (which is basically a twisted way of saying, the update is not a big deal, older users being left behind is nothing new, so get over it. )

 

[jxyama]

one more thing i noticed with the mini update... the mini no longer wakes up when you plug in the headphone...

 

[Geetar]

. yes, CD is "lossy" compared to theoretical perfect music re-production, i guess...

There is no proof that has stood up to a double-blind test to date that will reliably show red Book 44.1 KHz to be lossy in terms of discarded audible material, when combined with upsampling A/D/As that have been common tech for some time now....you could perhaps point to some studies from the last few years that back this contention up..?

 

[~Shard~]

There is no proof that has stood up to a double-blind test to date that will reliably show red Book 44.1 KHz to be lossy in terms of discarded audible material, when combined with upsampling A/D/As that have been common tech for some time now....you could perhaps point to some studies from the last few years that back this contention up..?

I'd actually be fairly interested to see something like that. Might even do a search on my own, I alwaysf ind things like that fascinating...

 

[BWhaler]

This is a great update for the mini. Adds some new excitement back into a product I bought some time ago.

I hope we see a bump in January for the mini. The 5gig drive would be nice, but it's not what I am waiting for. I really want a 12-15 hour battery life. (For those long flights overseas.)

 

[iRez]

Commence Rant......Apple not updating the 3rd gen iPod is like them not allowing Panther to run on machines sold two years ago because they're not the current machine being sold. How would you guys feel if you spent hard earned cash on a dual G4 tower a year ago and found out that Tiger won't be able to work with your machine. That's just ignorant of the owners of the new iPods, I bought a piece of hardware and if it could be updated then they should update it, I wouldn't even care if Apple would charge for the update......Cease Rant.

 

[stcanard]

Apple not updating the 3rd gen iPod is like them not allowing Panther to run on machines sold two years ago because they're not the current machine being sold.

Oh, I was unaware that the current crop of songs being sold on iTunes wouldn't play on a 3G anymore. Sorry. In that case I agree entirely.

Sarcasm aside, it's acutally more like Jaguar users complaining they haven't backported expose from Panther (wanting the features of the new firmware).

Or it's like Powerbook users complaining that Apple refuses to port the new 64 bit G5 optimizations to their G4's (complaining about missing features while completely ignoring that it's different hardware with different capabilities).

 

[pianojoe]

There is no proof that has stood up to a double-blind test to date that will reliably show red Book 44.1 KHz to be lossy in terms of discarded audible material, when combined with upsampling A/D/As that have been common tech for some time now....you could perhaps point to some studies from the last few years that back this contention up..?

Come over to my recording studio. This one's easy to prove.

 

[CubaTBird]

i think the majority of ipod users, pc and mac, have the 3rd genners though... i think that was the model that really helped the ipod sky-rocket into tons of sales

 

[pounce]

Come over to my recording studio. This one's easy to prove.

agreed, and seconded. when you spend all day working on higher quality audio, and then you knock it down to 16 bit for a cd it's a difference. and don't even get me started about how ****** mp3's sound. really it's not hard to hear the difference. no papers are needed, just listen and it's right there.

ps: i am getting an ipod photo for xmas. looking forward to it.

 

[~Shard~]

agreed, and seconded. when you spend all day working on higher quality audio, and then you knock it down to 16 bit for a cd it's a difference. and don't even get me started about how ****** mp3's sound. really it's not hard to hear the difference. no papers are needed, just listen and it's right there.

ps: i am getting an ipod photo for xmas. looking forward to it.

Yep - my ears hate MP3s...

 

[Mitthrawnuruodo]

Will you 3G owners stop whining!

Of the three last iPod updates before this one, 3.0, 3.0.1 and 3.0.2, only one of them (cant remember which) actually updated the mini (from 1.0 to 1.1).

Now we gotten our long awaited version 1.2, and, maybe sadly, this time they hadn't anything to upgrade on the 3G. So what? You still have an iPod that should perform better than it did when it was new, due to earlier updates.

Since many has complained, I just have to rub it in: Has anybody else with minis noticed an improvement in batterylife after upgrading to 1.2? When my mini was new, back in February, I could barely get 7 hours of continuous playback. Yesterday, after installing 1.2 and letting it get a full charge the night before, it played happily on for excactly 9 - nine! - hours straight. Is that great improvment or what?!?

 

[Geetar]

Come over to my recording studio. This one's easy to prove.

The thing is that proper filter design, which has been the general stumbling block at lower sampling rates, is not throwing back aliased images into the audible band- oversampling takes care of the need to write a steep filter beginning at the top of the hearing range (let's assume that is around 20 KHz) and ending at 22.05KHz (half the sampling max of 44.1 KHz, as per Nyquist). Unless you have gear that is cost-limited into poor filter and power-supplydesign, that is. If you doubt me, go to:

www.lavryengineering.com/index_flash.html

and read the relevant white papers. Dan Lavry is correct in his application of theory to the practical engineering of A/D/A chains, and puts none of the usual marketing bull into his products. Nor do Weiss, dCs, Prism or Benchmark. I'll concede that there are arguments to raise the sampling rate to, say, 65 KHz, but it probably won't be for reasons provable in your studio

Oh, by the way, good to see you over here, Mr. Pounce, sir.

 

[uv23]

Shuffle is completely useless. Wow, I can randomly listen to 488 songs on my iPod Mini. Great, there's nothing I like hearing more than jarring hard drum & bass followed by ambient then shoegazer. How about a shuffle feature within playlists? That I'd actually use, and use often. Gah.

 

[mfacey]

Shuffle is completely useless. Wow, I can randomly listen to 488 songs on my iPod Mini. Great, there's nothing I like hearing more than jarring hard drum & bass followed by ambient then shoegazer. How about a shuffle feature within playlists? That I'd actually use, and use often. Gah.

As far as I know that's already possible! You just start your playlist, then go to settings and switch on Shuffle Songs. That should do the trick. I'm pretty sure I've done that on my friend's 4G.

 

[uv23]

As far as I know that's already possible! You just start your playlist, then go to settings and switch on Shuffle Songs. That should do the trick. I'm pretty sure I've done that on my friend's 4G.

You sir are a genius! Either that or I'm an idiot. I'm willing to accept either explanation.

 

[jxyama]

Shuffle is completely useless. Wow, I can randomly listen to 488 songs on my iPod Mini. Great, there's nothing I like hearing more than jarring hard drum & bass followed by ambient then shoegazer. How about a shuffle feature within playlists? That I'd actually use, and use often. Gah.

by the way, i know you found the other desired use, but i find shuffle mode to be awesome. i've "distilled" my collection of music down to about 750 songs on my mini - and all the songs i really like and "know." so just letting mini play one at random has been great - it's fun not knowing what's next, but knowing that i'd at least recognize the song. brings back randomized memory of my life when the song was popular.

 

[Wonder Boy]

i'm always disapointed when my 3g iPod doesn't get a software update. for some reason i hope for a performance improvement. but then it dawns on me that there is nothing wrong with my ipod's performance. everything is fine.