[Iceman]

Hey fellows,its been a long time since iv logged on to Team-Bhp,so il be short and il introcuce myself as GTO'S younger brother.Anyways id appreciate it if you guys could help me out,I have a 30gb Ipod and finding it hard as to on what format should i import my songs,in such a way that i neither compromise on sound quality nor on size of the song.(Because my friend has a similar Ipod to mine and i noticed that the bigger the size the more juice the battery ate.So guys keep rolling in your posts and give me a hand,Thanks Bye

[a4_attitude]

am also using the 30 gb video Ipod and am transferring files as mp3 only issue comes only whn I have to ripped any music video or dvd
how can a lenghty song eat more battery as battery pulse totaly depend on usage...
if am unable to understand ur query please elaborate a little
Cheers
Wadhwa Ajay

[muni]

Originally Posted by a4_attitude

how can a lenghty song eat more battery as battery pulse totaly depend on usage...
if am unable to understand ur query please elaborate a little
Cheers
Wadhwa Ajay

Wouldnt accessing too much of data for a song of say 12 Mb/song drain the battery more comparitively than the song which is of 6 Mb/ song

[Iceman]

Ajay,Yes your right about battery life depending upon the usage but i was reading the ipod help and it was mentioned that "iPod plays music out of a solid-state memory cache to provide skip-free playback and maximize battery life. iPod spins its hard drive to fill this cache, which uses power. There are a couple of factors which affect how often this happens, and if you minimize these factors, you’ll extend battery life.

Fast Forward: If you fast forward through your playlist, iPod will need to fill its cache more frequently, thus accessing the hard drive more often and using more power. This will decrease overall battery life. By creating great playlists in iTunes that cater to your personal taste, you can decrease your need to fast forward. Using the shuffle feature may also help to minimize your use of the fast forward feature.
Use Compressed Songs: iPod’s cache works most efficiently with songs of average file sizes (less than 9 MB). If your audio files are large or uncompressed (including AIFF or WAV format), you may want to compress them, or use a different compression method, such as AAC or MP3, when importing them into iTunes. Also, consider breaking very long songs or tracks into shorter tracks that have smaller file sizes. If you encode your music at 128 Kbps, your iPod will fill its cache about every 25 minutes.

So you see size of song also play some role in battery life(a point mentioned even by Muni).That why i was asking in which format should i import my songs and what bit rate.Let me know.Cheers

[VWBugy781]

I have Ipod video 60Gb and use 192 AAC. The quality of the music is indistinguishable (at least to my ears) even on my home theater system which uses far higher quailty components than what is found typically on car audio. But you should go now lower than 128.

I use constant bit rate encoding. Variable bit encoding tends to allocate too much bits to the higher end of the frequency at the expense of bass. I hear more sharpness and hissiness (esp when it comes to Indian music, where noise falls in the higher frequency range and is probably encoded as music).

If battery life is your concern, it depends (as observed earlier by others) among other things on how often the flash memory cache is replenished.

I think the flash memory can hold about 30 minutes of music at 128kbps. If you used 192kbps, it will need to replenish every 20 minutes. But that doesn't mean that battery will last 30% less. Hard drive seek time is likely to be in seconds (as is the time to write into flash memory). The bigger culprits could be the duration your screen is on. You can change the setting to minimize that.

[Iceman]

Yeah your right AAC 192 gives good quality sound.But then what bout the Sample rate and Channels should i keep them at "Auto" and would it better to tick the Optimize the Voice option.By the way id really like to know what the above 3 mean.

[VWBugy781]

Sample rate is how many bits are sampled per second. In our case 192kbps or 128kbps or whatever.

Optimize voice option - I am assuming this is some kind of variable bit sampling that allows more bits to be sampled from 300Hz to 3000Hz. May be good for speech recordings but not for music.

Channels - left and right

I personally favor Constant Bit Rate (which sounds a lot richer to my ears). Mathematically VBR gives the best curve fit. However our ears do not listen "linearly". Their sensitivity spans logarithmically. A VBR will happily leave out a bit that is one thousandth the size of another one. But our ears can perceive the difference.

[Iceman]

Hey VWBugy781,thanks for your input.I imported my songs on AAC format(128kpbs) and im happy with it.I also did some extra research in which APPLE also recommended AAC for the iPOD,so im going to stick with this format.Cheers.