As in the FLAC that the iPod can not play? Can you really tell the difference with earbuds? I can't wear my Sennheisers on the BART.

iPod can play MP3, WAV, AAC/M4A, Protected AAC, AIFF, Audible audiobook, and Apple Lossless file formats. It cannot play Ogg Vorbis, FLAC, Windows Media Audio (WMA), or RealAudio files.

:band:

iPod can however play Apple Lossless which is for all purposes, the same. Why use FLAC? Horses for courses, for a portable player with limited space a compressed format makes more sense. I challange anyone to tell the difference between a 320kps AAC and the CD audio. I use the apple in-ear buds, excellent bass. Gwennie - AAC is an open and commonly supported format.

AAC is an open and commonly supported format - Protected AAC ("fairplay") will allow Apple to prevent you from accessing your entire library of music if you mistakenly install your itunes on a friends computer and then have two systems in for service.

And other bizarre far-stretched scenarios, what UT is obfuscating as far as possible is that fairplay allows 4 machines to be authenticated at once. Of course fairplay also allows you to burn those tracks onto normal audio cds so as soon as you do that, this becomes irrelevant. Apple also tell you how to back up your music. Apple also have a customer service system to deal with the problem UT is talking about, free of charge.

Fairplay is however just a layer sitting on top of iTunes tracks purchased from the iTunes store and has absolutely nothing to do with ripping CDs.

UT - I don't like DRM either but the iTunes store is far better than any other scheme I've seen and has done more for digital music than anything else. You should also declare that you own part of a competitor to iTunes.

Declare? That's a weird take on the entire community.

possibly a bit too far but you see my point. I have to admit I admire the fact you don't make any commerical use of the cellar but that was a very, very biased example on iTunes, I felt it was relevant you do have a financial interest in its failing.

Actually, that's not the case! itsaboutmusic.com puts its artists on 100 different downloads sites, including iTunes and all the major ones, and I get a commission on those downloads too.

It's the *artist* who really makes more if the product is bought at itsaboutmusic.com/net.

point taken. so why the bias on iTunes? You should know better than most that what you said isn't correct.

ok, before everyone starts measuring their pecker size, can someone explain something to me?

i love my cd's. i have a lot of them. if i buy an Ipod:

-how do i get my music from cd to ipod?
-if i have 250 cd's worth of music on my ipod, how can do i find the music i am looking for at a given time? is there some sort of index?
-my hearing loss is at the point where i am a little afraid of earbuds and the like. other options?
-if i buy an ipod, how long before it is obsolete and i have to buy another one, and reload all of my music?

yes, i'm that far out of date.

Itunes or another program 'rips' the music, it copys it to your computer and converts it to a format like AAC or MP3 which are of comparable quality but much smaller.
iPod can index by playlists you make on your computer as well as that you can browse by artist, album, song name, composer.....It's not hard.
Big chunky headphones? Plug it into a pair of battery powered speakers? Anything with a mini stearo jack really.
Only need to buy a new one when it dies or you run out of space. Got mine in 2002, going strong.

It's not commonly supported. I haven't seen a non-apple portable player that supports AAC.

Part of what I meant by AAC-lock-in was that it's easier to share MP3 with friends because they can't always use AAC files, not that I do that or anything.

We have three iPod minis and a shuffle. At one point we got a Creative Zen Micro, but the PC software for it really sucked. So, we returned it for our third mini. It's easier if everyone in our family has the same setup.

portables I don't know but software-wise it's common.

Apparently Sony is pissed at Apple for forcing the use of Itunes for Ipods.

Apparently Sony's DRM installs a rootkit (i.e. very sophisticated "trojan horse" software that can completely take over your PC and do anything with it) if you play one of their CDs in your computer!!!

This is the worst I've ever seen. The end times are upon us.

Undertoad: a lot of protected CDs are like this. Before you put the CD in, simply hold down the CTRL key to disable autorun (or you can disable it permanently). This will keep the DRM-software/driver from loading.