Oh, duh. After a bit of research, it turns out that my PocketPC situation isn’t as dire as I thought. I can remap one of the buttons that’s recessed a bit along the side of the unit to deactivate and reactivate the touch screen, and it’s out-of-the-way enough that it won’t get pressed accidentally.
There are still a few problems though: it’s clunky, the screen is going to get scratched up if I don’t get a case which leaves the earphone jack available, and one thing I forgot to mention before: the WMA format.
More music is better than less music, of course, so I want to cram as much as I can into the 256 meg card I have (the biggest I can get for this unit, I believe). The important factor here then is bitrate, since it directly determines how much time’s worth of music I can put in that space. I usually rip tracks at 192kbps, which sounds good enough to my ears (I’m not much of an audiophile). Unfortunately that would only give me around three hours total.
High quality isn’t really necessary for travelling music though, since there’ll be a lot of environmental noise interfering anyway, so I did a bit of testing with various MP3 bitrates. I found that in my own opinion, the cutoff point was at 96kbps; below that too many higher frequencies got cut off and it sounded way too muddy. But, I also did a few tests with different formats, and I found that I could go down to 64kbps with WMAs and still keep roughly the same quality. Yes, unfortunately, Microsoft wins on this one. 64kbps WMAs sound better than 64kbps MP3s, at least as encoded by LAME. It makes a big difference in capacity too — nine hours at 64kbps versus only six hours at 96kbps.
This presents a few problems. I already have a large number of MP3s but it’s not easy to convert them to WMAs; Media Player will only let me rip CDs to WMA, not convert existing MP3s, and I don’t want to have to rerip damn near everything (not to mention the files I wouldn’t be able to rip again….). One possibility is to convert to the Ogg Vorbis format since it does fairly well at 64kbps too, but then I can’t use the built-in player and would have to shell out money for some third-party player.
Still, it’s better than having to buy a whole new gadget. I’ve got too many of them lying around already…
Not to sound any more like my monolithically opinionated self than I already do, but I suspect those results are LAME-specific.
I can honestly say that I’ve never heard any Windows-proprietary format sound better than MP3; at any bit rate. The only format I can say has MP3 beat on both the audio quality (in terms of clarity, pitch, tone, and depth) and the size is AAC, but it’s Mac-specific, and I’m not about to spend either the time or the effort to convert — Hell, because of my own POV on the whole MP3 issue, I refuse to even back any of them up.
Or, maybe I’m just lazy and indifferent because I can’t afford an iPod yet. :-)
…And before I forget, amigo…
Since WHEN is there such a thing as too many gadgets??? :-)
(Pure self defense here — I have a garage full of dead PCs, Macs, and an SGI Indigo2 that I may never get the parts for… We won’t even talk about the *other* non-computer electronics piled up in there… Remember THE AMP?)
MS has been putting a lot of research into low-bitrate compression since they want to steal the streaming market, of course. It’s pretty well recognized now that MP3 does poorly at really low bitrates, as it wasn’t really intended to go that low. There is a variant of it called MP3Pro that is specifically designed for better quality at lower bitrates, but it’s not well supported at the moment since you need a special non-free codec.
I managed to find some results from a listening test that compared various formats at 64kbps. In general, AAC and MP3Pro came out on top, Ogg Vorbis was slightly behind, WMA was a distant fourth, and regular MP3 was a very distant last place.
Realistically though, my only options are plain MP3, WMA, and Ogg; the other formats just aren’t widely supported enough. I’ve done a few tests with Ogg and I like what I’m finding though, so I’m tempted to start using that on the PocketPC instead.
And in principle you can never have enough gadgets, but when it comes time to travel and you’ve got to pack all those AC adapters and cables and batteries and cartridges and cases and… :-)
I suppose I’m being a bit self-centered in relaying my results… Having been a musician long before you opened my eyes to the world of these damned infernal machines [grin] , I always thought I had a pretty good tonal ear…
It’s said the human ear “has trouble” discerning any quality above 44 KHz, and since a lot of these new formats encompass higher bit rates, I’m hard pressed to believe the statistics.
As for the actual sound, perhaps it’s the speakers, amps, and headphones I use, but I still can’t see much of a difference. MP3 seems to still be the best bang for the buck, and until AAC becomes completely supported (read as: Linux & Solaris at the *very* least) by everybody, there’s no way in hell I’d switch.
The only thing I have to say about the infamous AC cable & adapter problems is this: Ya know that bag you have for your camera? Get a bigger one. Much bigger. :-)
Yeah, there isn’t much of a difference at the higher bitrates, so it doesn’t really matter there. It’s really only down at the low end, around 48-64kbps, where the differences between them really start to become obvious. And I’ve got nothing better to do than obsess over it anyway. :-)
It’s not really a ‘conversion’ per se; these are completely separate copies made specifically for use on my PDA. All of the ‘masters’ are still in high-bitrate MP3.
Of course I could stop being such a cheapskate and, as you mention, get and iPod and then it all becomes irrelevant, but where’s the fun in that? :-)
You make a good point. :-)
This message is for the P-DaddyFunkityFunkDude –
You should write again! Write about tech stuff! write about something your interested in! I wouldn’t mind reading a blog from yas. At least I’d know you’re alive. Btw, Fire just came out with a newer version that gets around Yahoo never being able to connect. I’ve had no problems at all.
Paul,
Under “Lust” on your page, the word “believe” is spelled “belive.”