first-impression review: yesterday's iPod firmware update

[mmcirvin]

In case you stopped bothering to check (I had), yesterday's updater is actually the first one in a long time that has updates for iPods older than the fourth-generation models.

After updating, the menu items now match the newer iPods: "Browse" is now called "Music" and includes playlists, and there's a new Shuffle Songs menu item that just plays your whole library on shuffle. (I'd prefer it if it switched the shuffle option on and off for general play—you still have to burrow into the settings menu to do that. But, as with the flash iPod, Apple seems to have responded to studies showing that shuffle-the-whole-library is how people mostly use their music players anyway.)

The front menu is as customizable as before, so you don't have to have the shuffle thing there, and you can still have Playlists on the front menu.

I may be imagining things, but the update also seems to have reduced the surrealism of the battery indicator: it is now capable of remembering that it's fully charged right after you stop charging it because it says it's fully charged. This will probably prevent a lot of people from falsely believing that their batteries have died. The big "charging" icon that fills the whole screen when it's plugged in and not playing has changed slightly in appearance, and no longer looks like the long-gone four-bar battery indicator.

Other than that, nothing much; there are no major new features. There are probably other bug fixes in there, and it didn't make anything explode or irritate me, so I'd say get it if you have an iPod.

Finally, I do wish Apple would stop making Software Update auto-launch iPod updaters. It's asinine: more often than not, I download these things along with a Mac system patch that requires reboot, and the iPod updater's auto-launching cancels the reboot.

Comments

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

The iPod, unfortunately, always puts a tiny gap between tracks, a small fraction of a second. It's noticeable. However, you do have the ability in iTunes (the host computer software) to fuse the CD's tracks together into longer ones when importing the music into the computer, and then they will play with no gap on the iPod. On the other hand, that makes it harder to listen to the movements separately.

I'd like Apple to fix the gap issue; it seems like it ought to be possible, since iTunes itself (and some rival MP3 players) can play the tracks gaplessly.

The arrangement of tracks depends on the people who made the recording; most classical CDs today have the pieces divided into movements, and that division will be preserved on the computer and the iPod unless you tell iTunes to join the tracks together.

[iayork.livejournal.com]

How do you mean, in reality there is no gap between movements? The reason the composer designated them "movements" means that they are supposed to have a significant gap between them. That's how they are performed live, that's how they are presented on CDs and LPs and everything else.

Are there symphonies in which the "movements" are intended to be played without a gap?

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Well, maybe not symphonies according to the classic symphony form. But there are lots of 20th century classical pieces in particular in which the movements identified in the program, or on the CD, run into each other without gaps. (Sam just got a recording of Copland's Appalachian Spring that is divided into several tracks, for instance; that's definitely supposed to go without breaks, and it sounds to me as if they may have actually been recorded separately for the CD and edited with slight awkwardness.)

Also, there are CDs with odd track divisions. I have a recording of Beethoven's Ninth that divides the last movement into two tracks, one for the instrumental part at the beginning and the other at "O Freunde! nicht diese Töne..."

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

The people who complain about the tiny gaps the most, though, are fans of (a) rock concept albums in the Sgt. Pepper mold and (b) some forms of electronic dance music, both of which rely heavily on seamless track splices. I'd imagine that opera CDs would be similar.

Discussions of this seem to imply that it's partly an issue of limitations of digital music formats such as MP3, which compress music in blocks such that there is usually a tiny silence of unpredictable length at the end of the track. So even if the player anticipates and pre-caches the next track, as the iPod does, eliminating that gap would involve detecting its presence and making timing adjustments, and the software really has no way of knowing how much of it is intentional.

Still, some music software makes the heuristic attempt and the iPod doesn't. You eliminate it in iTunes by selecting crossfade and turning the length of the fade down to zero; rather than anything subtle, I think it may simply be brute-forcing the timing by doing a fraction-of-a-second crossfade, which in some ways is not much better than a sound gap.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...People who do the gimmick of DJing parties with iPods solve the absence of crossfade in an old-fashioned manner, by using two iPods connected through a physical fader just as if they were using turntables. It's really more practical to use a laptop, of course.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I should clarify that in the above I'm talking about how to eliminate it in iTunes on playback when the CD has been imported as separate tracks. I believe that if you join the CD tracks upon importing, it can actually splice them with no artifacts at all, since the CD track is just uncompressed data right up to the end.

I'm talking to myself again... Time to get dressed and shovel out my car.

[pantom.livejournal.com]

Thanks for all the info.