The Ipod

[The Foolish Horseman]

i bought a 19.99 gbp 1gb mp3 player from argos at the weekend...so easy to use and upload songs on...soun=d quality good..good battery life too

[Xiahou]

If it's for running, I'd get something solid-state that doesn't have all the moving parts of an iPod. That way, all of the bouncing around, dropping, ect. that could be associated with jogging will be less likely to damage the mp3 player.

[Blodrast]

Xiahou is right. I dunno if they get damaged, but even skipping can become annoying enough.
If it's gonna be only for running, a flash stick with 4GB on it should be ok, whether it's an ipod or not. I dunno if they have ones with more memory, at a still reasonable price.

[drone]

At Christmas-time, I think I saw an 8GB iPod Nano. So the flash-based players are getting up there in size.

iPods will play standard mp3s (I think it even plays wavs, if you don't mind the file size).

[Dutch_guy]

iPods will play standard mp3s (I think it even plays wavs, if you don't mind the file size).

Yes, it converts them into MP3 files if I'm not mistaken.

[Blodrast]

At Christmas-time, I think I saw an 8GB iPod Nano. So the flash-based players are getting up there in size.

iPods will play standard mp3s (I think it even plays wavs, if you don't mind the file size).

cool, I didn't know that. 8 GB is pretty good.
Actually, with some of the older models, you can mod them to play pretty much anything. I am not sure about newer ones, last time I checked you couldn't do that with the last couple of generations of ipods.

[drone]

Googling got me this:
http://www.everymac.com/systems/appl...d-quality.html

All iPod models have an upgradable firmware that "enables support for future audio formats". According to "About Compatible Song Formats" from the Apple Support Site, iPod models using the most up-to-date firmware support "MP3 (from 32 Kbps to 320 Kbps), MP3 Variable Bit Rate (VBR), AIFF, WAV (with no compression), M4A AAC, M4P AAC (Protected), M4B AAC (iTunes Store Spoken Word files), and Apple Lossless".

Same site had this:
http://www.everymac.com/systems/appl...ndex-ipod.html
which lists 8GB as the largest Nano currently available.

I wonder if the Lucent-Microsoft ruling is going to affect mp3 players. doc_bean, you might also want to follow the European iTunes debate:
http://blogs.pcworld.com/digitalworl...y_outlaws.html
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070122-8676.html

[Blodrast]

Well, I was rather referring to this: http://www.ipodlinux.org/FAQ#Applications

Is there an MP3 player?

Currently we use Intel's highly optimised library for the ARM processor that includes MP3 decoding support. The MP3 player in podzilla that uses this library runs quite well, but it isn't perfect - some songs will skip, VBR isn't handled too well and high bitrates aren't always decoded fast enough. With current developments on 4G iPods, realtime playback is possible and these problems generally don't apply.

The MAD (http://www.mars.org/home/rob/proj/mpeg/) player also runs, however it is not quite real-time.

The Helix MP3 Decoder (http://datatype.helixcommunity.org/mp3dec) has been tested and runs almost as fast as the Intel library.
[edit]
Is there an Ogg player?

The Tremor (http://www.xiph.org/ogg/vorbis/) player is running at about 80% real-time. With current developments on 4G iPods, realtime playback is possible.
[edit]
What about FLAC, AAC, Mod, and wave files?

Right now some development is happening on MPD which supports these formats as well MP3 and OGG Vorbis.

An AAC player is in the current beta of podzilla. See the blog entry (http://www.ipodlinux.org/blog/index.php?p=15) for details.

I'm interested in FLAC, mostly.