okies, I just got an Alpine w205, and I'm thinking of getting an Ipod and the adapter. What i'd like to know is, can you put the song on an Ipod uncompressed? I can tell a huge difference between XM and a CD, and the difference between an MP3 and the original CD, which isn't too bad, but noticeable to my ears. I just don't want to splurge and pay 200 bucks and not like the sound quality of an Ipod when I could just burn a crap-load of songs to a dvd and play it instead at the same degraded quality. I just don't like ejecting disc's all the time as it'll wear the face motor over time. What should I do?

 

My Ipod has always had great quality when it comes to playing music. It does have gapless playback and gets rid of the few seconds of silence in between songs on a whole album. Also now Apple is offering iTunes Plus which is really high quality songs but It also costs money.

 

I am pretty sure that most of the file types you can put on an IPOD are in some way or another compressed. Which is never going to sound quite as good as a CD, but as long as you rip cd's to itunes with a pretty high bit rate it will sound decent. If you can plug in the ipod direct to your headunit it will sound the best rather than some crappy tape adapter or that wireless junk. I have mine direct in and you have to mess with the EQ'ing a bit to get to sound good, but once you got it it is not bad. It will never be as good as a CD but its alot easier than having to change CD's all the time.

 

thanks for the replies guys

my head unit has full ipod control, i just need to buy a cable for 30 bucks, i'm gonna get that and try out my buddies Ipod to see if I like it or not.

thanks again

 

Any digital media player uses compressed codecs. iPods use a goofy .m4a, which is the same format as a .mp4 movie, except only the audio track(Apple thought this would increase security. Apple is a moron.)

Other players use standard .mp3 or .wma files. All of these use a compression technology. The amount of compression determines quality. The "standard" codec that is considered CD quality is 128kb/sec for mp3, or 64kb/sec for wma. This means a 4 minute song takes roughly 3.5mb. A 4 minute song on the original CD album takes like 40-50mb, so there is a quality difference but it is very difficult to pick up on. iTunes fixes the codec on every song, regardless of the original quality. Other mp3 players will play any codec typically up to 320kb/sec, the max for most sound cards.

There's a myth that iPod audio sounds better out of the PC jack than it does out of the headphone slot. That's BS. It's the same audio being played at the same codec through a different cable. Now if the cable was 10 miles long it might make a difference, but 3 feet? Don't think so.

Honest-to-goodness advice from experience: Stay away from iPods. They are made very cheaply(and sold at outrageous prices) and have low quality. EVERY SINGLE person I know with an iPod(6) has had a problem requiring in 3 cases a unit exchange(one was defective out of the box), twice a new battery, and once a firmware re-load after it crashed. Not to mention iTunes is quite possibly the crappiest program ever to hit a computer screen.

For less money you can get a Creative Zen. They're much better quality, support high quality codecs(whereas ipod only supports "standard"), and play multiple formats, and don't get finicky if a file is missing tags or DRM crap. They also have more features like a recorder, radio, and better controls.

Otherwise burn a mp3 disc(CD, or if your unit supports a DVD). Even at max quality, 320(you wont hear a difference from a CD, if you do it's in your head) you'll get several hours of music on there. 4.7gigs worth? That's more than a Nano's capacity, and a DVD costs what, like $2? An ipod costs $200.

Just something to think about. iPods are popular because they're trendy, not because they're a good product. Less features, more money, and terrible reliability.

$30 for an iPod cable? Apple is starting to rape you already. A headphone cable costs like $5 at radio shack that works with any other player. Do you really need to control the music from the head unit? You can just pick up the device to play with it. Either way you take your eyes off the road.

Not trying to shoot down your idea here, just want you to know the whole story.

 

thanks for the info. the cable i need is sold/made by Alpine, its a special adapter, the older one's are around 80 to 100 bucks. The only reason i'd go with the ipod is because it will plug and play with that cable, if I wanted a different mp3 player i have to go buy the alpine usb dock, which is also around $120, so it's gonna be expensive either way. Also, I ride a motorcycle 30 min to work most of the week and really want an mp3 player to make the trip less boring, there's never any traffic so i get bored really easily...

i might just put all my songs on my xbox 360's harddrive and put the 360 under my seat, but i have to worry about it getting hot, or maybe the original xbox as it doesn't get as hot, and i don't really use it anymore. Do you happen to know what format the songs get saved to on the 360 and original xbox? I threw away the owners manuals long ago.

 

I never had an xbox, but considering it's a Microsoft product, I'd be willing to bet songs you ripped right to it's HDD are in .wma format. Not 100% sure about that. You could use just the red/white plugs of the standard TV cable and plug it into the back of the head unit. But then you'd need an inverter, have one of those huge-*** xbox controllers lying around, ect. There's easier ways.

Not that anybody really cares, but using headphones/earbuds while driving or riding a motorcycle is illegal in many states. Might want to check on that.

Since that's a high-end unit I'll assume it has red-white RCA jacks on the back for an aux in(or a headphone jack on the face?). Either way, go out and buy a flash memory media player(as opposed to a hard drive model, like ipods). These are in general much more reliable and durable, and cheaper and smaller as well. Disadvantage: They are limited in memory size, the largest I've seen is 4gb. Pick one of these up for like $60 and you'll be good to go. Use either a straight headphone cable, or a headphone-to-RCA adapter cable depending on what your stereo has.

To just listen to music for entertainment, 4gb or even 2gb is more than plenty. You don't need 30 or 80gb of storage space. 80gb will hold like 5,000 songs or something. Most people I know with the larger ipods aren't even close to filling the space, not with music.

Even a "modest" 2gb (go back 15 years and show people 2gb of memory in the size of a gum pack and they'd poop a brick) will hold a good 250 songs, that's all you need. Most support playlists or folders. Add new music, take off songs you're tired of.

 

My HU has a 3.5mm input jack, so I can hook an iPod directley up to it. I dont have an iPod myself, and I never will own one, but I bought a Male to Male cord so I could hook an Ipod or something up if I wanted. My buddy has one that we hook up sometimes when we are just cruising around, and I must say it sounds like absolute *****. I can hardly stand it, but then again Im pretty **** about my sound.
Any type of compressed music is just horrid IMO. My last CD player could play MP3/WMA files, and even burned at a high bit rate, I couldnt stand to listen to them hardly.
CD's or nothing for me.

Thats my 2 cents.

 

For maximum sound quality use the .wav format when transferring CD's to your iTunes. It is uncompressed but will use the most space. I use Apple Lossless Compression which to my ears and those of everyone that I know is indistuingishable from .wav files and saves space. It doesn't take a high quality system to be able to hear the difference between files encoded with Apple Lossless and MP3 or AAC formats, which are lossy compression codecs.

 

BlazinHazin:

See my response to this thread...

https://www.f150online.com/forums/sh...highlight=iPod

I have an Alpine, it's 2 years old so I had to use the KCA-420i cable ($100) not the newer KCA-422i ($30-$40) that you are probably going to use. Read reviews carefully on it. If any of the reviews mention slow song navigation then beware. The reviews of the 420i mention slow navigation, but great sound quality. I am impressed with the sound, but am getting ready to go nuts over the slowness. It really is a PITA. I installed it last night, used it for a total of 1 hour and today went back to Best Buy to get a normal cable that connects to the docking port of the iPod so that I have to use the iPod to control the music. I hope that I didn't rain on your parade, but the slowness really is terrible when compared to the speed of the native iPod interface. If you plan on simply pressing "Play" and not looking for albums, artists, or songs then you may not mind the slow interface. If you are still torn on what to do then I would suggest doing a partial installation just to see how it behaves. Install it, but don't spend too much time hiding wires and making it permanent until you determine if you'll keep it. The idea of controlling with a head unit is great in concept, but the user experience is clunky when compared to using the iPod's interface.

 

You must be an extremely finicky "audio-phile" if you "can't stand" to listen to a song on a mp3 codec. Try listening to the the oldies AM radio station that every city in the universe has at least one of. Your head will explode from that if mp3 music bothers you.

Apple loss-less is a direct and shameless ripoff of WMA lossless. Another reason Apple sucks *****. Not that I'm a big MS fan, but still.

But here's where the minute quality differences cease to matter. Your truck is not a silent acoustically correct room. You have wind/engine noise, other electronic devices that create "noise", et cetera. Even "pure" CD quality will be corrupted somewhat in the trip from the laser diode to the speaker magnets. If you're using the factory speaker wires, the hundreds you spend for peak quality will be wasted right there through cheap wires.

ATRAC-3 is a seldom used format, it was developed by Sony, who hoped it would rival MP3 as the "standard" music format. It eliminates the noise in audio streams and also pitches that are un-audible to the human ear. Since computers "hear" everything, these pitches nobody can hear take up space, and quite a bit of it. Problem is, the only program I know of that works with ATRAC is SoundStage, and only Sony devices will play this format. I've played around a bit with my PSP. Sounds good enough, though honestly even with good headphones I can't tell a difference between that and a good 192kb/s mp3.

mp3 has a lot to do with the computer that rips it. Most computers now have an "on the mobo" sound card that shares memory and processing power with everything else in the case. These are typically functional but not particularly useful for the music fan. Now say a CD song ripped at "standard" 128kb/s is ripped on a PC with a boring, built in sound chip. It WILL NOT sound as good as one ripped at the same codec from a machine with a quaility, PCI slotted sound card. Even I can tell the difference there. Typically bass is the first to go, and in "heavy" music, as it it's loud or there's lots of instruments at once, it gets staticky and crappy sounding. Using a mediocre sound card even at high codecs will not yield a file that sounds as good as a quality sound card at a moderate codec.

Sound cards aren't expensive. You can get a good one for like $50 or less at most computer houses or at newegg.

But I agree, you should "try out" a few setups. Some people are very finicky about having the absolute best quality possible while others don't care as much about codec numbers as "does it sound good?".

Here's a quick comparison between a good ripped mp3 and something else
32kb/s- AM radio quality. Typically used for audiobooks or voice-only
64kb/s- FM radio quality. This is pretty seldom used.
96kb/s- Considered cassette tape quality. This was the max codec of older machines before everything was upgraded.
128kb/s- Listed in every program as CD quality. Now I know some beg to differ here, but whatever. On some songs I can tell a slight difference from the original CD recording
256kb/s- I've seen this listed in good programs such as Nero as "studio quality". I cannot distinguish this from any CD.
320kb/s- The maximum of most PCs. I can't distinguish this from 256 even with Bose headphones.

Keep in mind very few if any players will play wave format files. Wave was replaced with WMA lossless, which Apple ripped off to be compatible with their crappy ipods.

 

well, first off, thanks for all the responses and info ya'll...

I shopped around, and decided the Zune was the best route to go for me, I looked hard at the 30gb Zen, but read alot of reveiws of it locking up. I have an aux port for my car stereo so it should sound halfway decent, better than xm is what i'm hoping for. I didn't get the ipod cause I don't like itunes, and wanted to be different. I like my zune so far, been ripping songs to it at 128kb/s and the headphones sound pretty good, and my computer speakers with them plugged to the zune sound good also....

anyways, I'm not too into sound quality, but I do want it to sound good, cause the last time I listened to an mp3 was around 1999, and it sounded horrible, the software and compression has come a little ways since then.

thanks again

 

Late 90's mp3's were in their infancy more or less so codecs were very lossy.

Zune is a nice player, though some of the WMA stuff can be a hassle. If you run into DRM(digital rights management) crap that is stopping you, look up a program called FairUse4WM. It works very well and is totally legal, it removes the DRM encoding granting you a full license(unlimited use of the song file)

 

wow! thanks, i've been surfing the zune board's pretty hard and haven't seen this yet... that is pretty sweet, as the zune marketplace has some cool pro's, but the major con is when you stop paying the monthly fee, all the downloaded songs go poof, i think this will help with that....

i like this thing more and more as I use it, I put all my fav songs on it from about 80 cd's and still have 25 gig left, wow.... now i just need to find a good dvd ripper/decoder and start putting some movies on it

 

Pretty good information, except someone mentioned Creative Labs products. Usually they are good products, but if you have a problem, forget about customer service you are on your own. I think they are operating from Taiwan, but I am not sure.