View Single Post
  #21  
Old 2005-04-12, 03:32 PM
BassmanRon
 
Re: AAC vs. .WAV for IPod's

I am not sure exactly how you're defining "skip." If you mean a brief but annoying pause while a song is playing, it could represent the iPod spinning up the hard drive and accessing more data from it to keep the music playing.

A friend of mine had to stop using his original 5Gb iPod to play back drum or bass tracks for live gigs because of that pause. Research on Apple's support boards found many users all reporting the same hiccup at something like 3:37 into a song. However, the rest of the circumstances and solutions varied greatly.

One solution was switching from big AIFF files to the much smaller MP3 or AAC files, which seems logical if the iPod is moving music data from the hard disk into RAM for playback. Exactly when the RAM gets flushed and reloaded from the drive, I'm not sure. (Between songs or at 3:37, whichever comes first?)

Switching to smaller lossy files wasn't an option in his case, once he heard how much better AIFF sounded. He ended up getting a minidisk player, which worked well except it was more clumsy to control on stage. (The iPod was velcro'd to the side of his standup bass.)

There were also people on the Apple board insisting they had identical circumstances and never, ever heard any sort of pause, hiccup, skip or whatever you want to call it.
Reply With Quote Reply with Nested Quotes