So I see that the Nano finally catches up with other players (practically all non-Apple MP3 players have had those features for ages, except the camera). I guess that means other players will probably drop in price. :P
Mickey Wrote:If it has a camera i don't see how it can be bad, you have an extra camera, if you don't want it what do you lose?
Money.
Haha I want an old non-color phone
classic nokias are great ^^
for once i don't want to switch my old nokia 5110 with newer colored cameras, they tend to be more brittle, and with mo old phone i can throw it with my neighbor without breaking anyparts, beside the antenna part, lol
but meh, it's lame that they don't include fm radio transmission in older ipod nanos, my gf have still bought an add-on for headset for fm radio, so meh
i used to have a motorola i265 i accidentally dropped it when getting in my friends car, and he rolled over it. it still worked. my lg rumor that i have now, i love the phone, except that even with a full charge the battery dies during a five minute phone conversation, so i have to carry the charger around with me...
Apparently have read that the camera isn't that bad actually.
But anyway, I actually downloaded iTunes 9, after hearing it apparently has a HE-AAC encoder. One thing, this damn installer is 88.8MB (32-bit, not going to guess how big the 64-bit version is)! No seriously! It's like bigger than all of the commonly used audio and video programs put together.
Tried installing on my VM'd XP SP1, but it complained that I didn't have a high enough SP, so installed on my other Windows VM, Win7 x64, and the installer complained that I should be using the 64-bit version (but did allow me to continue anyway). As you'd probably expect from something which is bound to be full of bloat, it took a few minutes to install. The Program Files\iTunes folder is 106MB, though I suspect this doesn't include the whole heap of other junk it installs. Like with older versions, it tries to take over your system with its two kernel mode applications (iPod service and Bonjour). Why a media player should ever need kernel access is beyond me. It also installs two background user mode applications (iTunes helper and some QuickTime poo poo) to help ensure it screws up all your RAM. Didn't bother to check whether it installed any device drivers - I presume the kernel mode services are enough... Interestingly enough, thing takes forever to start up even having just closed it with Windows' Superfetch...
Right-clicking the song gives you the option to convert, however to actually be able to find the settings, it's actually stored next to CD import settings, when I can't seem to find the relationship about converting a file on my HDD with CD importing... So much for good Apple interfaces.
Anyway, enough of my spiel.
Spoiler for for those who care:
The encoder only does CBR and ABR modes (no VBR), does HE, but not HE+PS (a little odd). Did 32, 48 and 64 kbps ABR HE-AAC encodes with iTunes and the latest NeroAAC (single pass for Nero). At 32kbps, both sound horrible, but I personally would prefer Nero's. At 48kbps however, they seem to sound very similar and it seems my sh!tty sound card (integrated Realtek) is close to reaching the limit it can handle (lol). Nero's sounds a bit sharper than iTunes', but hard to pick a preference.
I tried a song I found which was pretty much designed to destroy encoders or something. For both 64 and 80kbps (iTunes won't go above 80kbps HE-AAC, probably for good reason cause SBR starts failing at that point) they sounded quite similar with each other, though I'd probably favour the iTunes encode slightly over Nero's, but the difference is pretty minuscule, and each encoder really had somewhat different sound artefacts. For 48kbps, I'd say that iTunes actually sound better for this sample.
Well, iTunes' HE-AAC encoder certainly seems to be at least about on par with Nero's and seems to exceed it in certain cases. Haven't done a large sample to really test it though, and differences in general are small, so I'd still use Nero due to the fact that it's so much more flexible, has more options and isn't a 89MB download lol.
Apparently new iPods will support HE-AAC. Well, I'm not interested in iPods, but this will probably mean that others will follow if Apple does it.
i like the new skin for iTunes, and the program actually runs smoother for me. Syncing a 16GB (14GB of which is full) iPhone still takes an age (due to backups). The genius mixes thing is good, but as usual with unknown stuff it just completely ramdomly chooses. Ahh well.
![[Image: motorola_i265_nextel_z1.jpg]](http://www.wirefly.com/images/phones/motorola_i265_nextel_z1.jpg)
i accidentally dropped it when getting in my friends car, and he rolled over it. it still worked. my lg rumor that i have now, i love the phone, except that even with a full charge the battery dies during a five minute phone conversation, so i have to carry the charger around with me...