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iPOD question

Rolfe said:
So, back on the .m4a vs .mp3 question. I've got a friend's geeky son lined up to convert some cassette tapes I have to audio files. I was asking him about using .m4a because I didn't like mp3 - or so I thought. But if I just ask him to use 224kBit data rate, then I should be OK? (I'm having trouble filling my 8GB iPod, it took the entire Ring cycle as a snack as .m4as.)
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He could digitize the audio in uncompressed, CD-compatible format: 44.1 kHz sampling rate, 16-bit stereo, WAV (or AIFF, if on Mac).

I assume the classical music won't have to be cut into convenient 4-minute tracks? Then in the end, you'll have a single, 30 or 40 minute recording of about 300-400 MBytes of data - not a problem for any current USB flash stick.

Working from this source, a) listen to the uncompressed recording to make sure he hasn't accidentally mis-leveled the signal. Distortions in louder parts are a dead giveaway. You'll most likely also not want any of the auto-gain that some converters offer (making quiet parts louder, and dampening loud parts)?

If you're happy with that raw source file, have him convert it to MP3 or MP4. Or you could also do it yourself easily - drop the .wav file into iTunes, check the preferences for the compression settings, then right-click the .wav and pick "convert to MP3".

If you don't like the sound, throw the new MP3 from iTunes, adjust the compression (higher bit rate, or maybe AAC), then compress again. Repeat until happy. :)

Then keep the MP3 and discard the WAV...
 
Most classical pieces are most conveniently cut into movements - the Berlioz piece for example has six movements varying in length from just over 5 minutes to just over 12, and the Mendelssohn on the CDs I have is broken into 47 chunks, some as short as a minute.

The boy who's going to do this is studying for his Advanced Higher Music, so it won't hurt him to have to analyse the pieces as he goes. He can check on iTunes or somewhere how the music is normally divided.

My inclination is just to ask him to put the stuff on CDs, and then I can do what I like with it. How would that fly? (The tapes were taped off-air from live BBC broadcasts of copncerts I was actually involved in.)

.m4a's a container nayway
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What does that mean? Sorry to be so ignorant.

Rolfe.
 
Rolfe said:
Most classical pieces are most conveniently cut into movements - the Berlioz piece for example has six movements varying in length from just over 5 minutes to just over 12, and the Mendelssohn on the CDs I have is broken into 47 chunks, some as short as a minute.

The boy who's going to do this is studying for his Advanced Higher Music, so it won't hurt him to have to analyse the pieces as he goes. He can check on iTunes or somewhere how the music is normally divided.
Click to expand...

The usual way to divide music on iTunes is the "track", which is a separate data file (mp3, m4a, wav, whatever). Problem is, you may notice the "gap" between two tracks. It’s short and may go unnoticed, except if you set iTunes to play with cross-fade between tracks. Otherwise, you get one track with 40 or 45 minutes (my longest was a 1 hour 10 track I bought off iTunes). Maybe tricking the system into believing your music is an Audiobook would work - maybe you could add "chapter markers" then.

Rolfe said:
My inclination is just to ask him to put the stuff on CDs, and then I can do what I like with it. How would that fly? (The tapes were taped off-air from live BBC broadcasts of copncerts I was actually involved in.)
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Sounds good. You can convert the files from CD into iTunes and, if the conversion sounds too bad, can go back and re-read it from the CD. Plus, you've got another copy/backup. Keep away from sunlight, heat and humidity.

Rolfe said:
What does that mean? Sorry to be so ignorant.
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Regarding the "m4a is a container": Well, the actual "music" is a stream of bytes, with its content in the AAC encoding format. This stream is cut up and stored as blocks of data according to the format specifications defined by the MPEG folks in the MPEG-4 documentation. Which means there are additional chunks of data, like the number of the block, annotations, how the blocks are ordered and lots of other - optional - stuff. All these things together make up the "m4a" file.
It's sort of like Quicktime's .mov file format, which can contain lots of things like JPEG images, WAV audio, AIF audio, MP3 and lots of other things.
 
theMark said:
The usual way to divide music on iTunes is the "track", which is a separate data file (mp3, m4a, wav, whatever). Problem is, you may notice the "gap" between two tracks. It’s short and may go unnoticed, except if you set iTunes to play with cross-fade between tracks. Otherwise, you get one track with 40 or 45 minutes (my longest was a 1 hour 10 track I bought off iTunes). Maybe tricking the system into believing your music is an Audiobook would work - maybe you could add "chapter markers" then.
Click to expand...


Usually, there are gaps. In most classical stuff the music is arranged into movements or numbers. The divisions I noted above are real gaps.

I've got one thing like that which isn't playing with gaps, and it's very annoying. Where there should be space to separate the movements, instead the next comes crashing in. I think there's a setting in iTunes to cope with this, and it's probably wrong for that particular piece. I need to look at changing it.

There is stuff, mostly romantic opera, that is continuous - sometimes for as long as a couple of hours in extreme cases. CDs normally have track markers in these too, to make it easier to find the bit you want. When you import the CD into iTunes the track numbers are retained, but the music seems to be continuous. As I said, I think there is a box you tick to tell iTunes whether or not any particular CD or playlist should have gaps.

Thanks for the info by the way.

Rolfe.
 
Rolfe said:
Usually, there are gaps. In most classical stuff the music is arranged into movements or numbers. The divisions I noted above are real gaps.

I've got one thing like that which isn't playing with gaps, and it's very annoying. Where there should be space to separate the movements, instead the next comes crashing in. I think there's a setting in iTunes to cope with this, and it's probably wrong for that particular piece. I need to look at changing it.

There is stuff, mostly romantic opera, that is continuous - sometimes for as long as a couple of hours in extreme cases. CDs normally have track markers in these too, to make it easier to find the bit you want. When you import the CD into iTunes the track numbers are retained, but the music seems to be continuous. As I said, I think there is a box you tick to tell iTunes whether or not any particular CD or playlist should have gaps.

Thanks for the info by the way.

Rolfe.
Click to expand...
CDs and computer files are somewhat completely different in that regard. Tracks on a CD are not separate files -- the CD has some legacy from vinyl album as it is designed to have a continuous stream, and the tracks are just markers. Gaps at the track marks are almost always 'artificial' constructs, much like the track markers on a vinyl.

All this was, and sometimes still is, a problem when transferring music between the two formats. Most older software players had trouble playing two different files seamlessly one after another, so there was big trouble to get continuous streamed music play correctly if you transferred each track from a CD into different files, since also quite often track markers on CDs with continuous streams did not coincide always with proper places in the music (you would hear a bit of the first note of the 2nd track in the file of the first), due to the resolution of the track markers not coinciding with 'artistic resolution' of music. Conversely, burning audio CDS required to add the gaps if you burn single songs. This is so common that most CD burning programs add a 2 s gap automatically, which would mess up continuous streaming music.

BTW, the part you want looking for is right-click on each title in iTunes, select "Get Info", and select the tab "Options". There's a tick mark for "Part of a gapless album". You can also select all titles from one album, and change this settings for all of them at once to save time. You have to do that when you have converted a CD with iTunes, since, again, iTunes expects gaps at track markers. Of course, when you come across CDs copied from other people (legality questions aside), the length of gaps can be all over the place, when people doing the copying have not paid attention. Things such as having gaps now being part of the file itself (silence at the beginning or end). Very annoying if people have done this to continuous streaming albums.
 
Thanks for the info guys/gals
I'll try it out when I have some free time (which is at a premium just now)
 
Just fyi, in case anyone needs to recover music from their ipod to their machine:
All the music is kept in a folder on the ipod. Manage it like a memory stick and search for them. They're in a hidden folder (you'll have to unhide it) under something like ipod control/music/blah. After they're unhidden, in itunes just say "add folder" and point it at the folder you just unhid. It'll reimport everything. Might have a problem with DRM on tracks, personally I don't use it so I don't know.
 
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