4 Wishes for the gen 5 iPod
1. Gapless audio
Quick, what’s one thing a ten dollar cd player can do that a six hundred dollar iPod can’t? That’s right, play gapless audio. Don’t get me wrong, I love my photo iPod. Showing pictures is cool and all and the album cover integration is sweet. Still, more than seeing the cover of Kind of Blue, I’d love to be able to listen to it in the original way it was intended. It is outrageous that a $600 iPod can’t do this.
2. An Equalizer
Another item that medium level walkmans have had for eons is an equalizer. The iPods’s current equalizer is limited to presets; you are stuck with generic settings like jazz, rock, etc. Apple needs to integrate a fully adjustable equalizer.
3. An adjustable UI.
The current iPod interface is renowned for its ease of use. But it is too simple for us power users. There needs to be an additional layer or way to navigate through the iPod. My friend Dave brought up one great example: let’s say you are enjoying a randomly playing song and decide you want to listen to the next song on the album. The only thing you can do is navigate back to the setting menu, turn off shuffle, then navigate back to the album and pick the song. Ugh. There are countless other examples of where the UI falls short.
3. A sports iPod.
Remember those wonderful bright yellow sony wallkmans. They kept the elements out, and could survive the slings and arrows of portable music player misfortune with aplomb. Apple should come out with a sports iPod. Assuming it is a HD based device it would be able to absorb the shocks of a mountain bike excursion and the sand from a beach. A sports iPod would also have the benefit of being marvelously retro.
4. A Radio
This is another item that can be found in even the cheapest of walkmans and even in iTunes. But not in an iPod. This fall, on my bus ride home I didn’t want to listen to my iTunes Music Store purchases: I wanted to listen to the Red Sox cream St. Louis (sorry, Chris).
del.icio.us
Digg
Facebook
Slashdot
StumbleUpon
Comments
Only 1 and 4 make sense
You missed #5, which I think would drastically change everything for the better.
Imagine a touch wheel that allowed alpha input, much like a palm device. If you’re like me, you have thousands of songs/hundreds of artists and if you want to hear one in particular when driving, you have to scroll through one long list. Just thumb the first few letters on the wheel and it takes you to what you want instantly.
:HAn.
1. Gapless Audio- Agree totally. I think there may be a limitation in the AAC format that makes this difficult. iTunes crossfades but that takes some power.
2. Equalizers IMO aren’t that important. What is important is that that you can designate EQ settings in iTunes that are properly played back on the iPod. Great headphones/speakers shouldn’t require constant eq tweaking.
3- RuggedPod-Probably should be handled by a weatherproof case. Not a major factor though unless you call the coat pocket a hostile environment.
4 Radio- I kind of like the simplicity of not having a Radio (although you have the option to add FM through accesories). I find it incredulous that people carry around their whole music library and want to listen to the radio. For those that need FM sportscasts simply buy an add on tuner. I know I know ...it’s more money.
iPods really don’t need that much. I think we need more features in iTunes but the iPod is a marvel of modern day simplicity and minimalism.
Gapless Audio…
This is not a weakness of the iPod. It’s a weakness of the mp3 and AAC formats which do not support gapless playback on any kind of device. You could sort of hack gapless playback for mp3 if you used LAME as an encoder with a special extension that created a fancy table of contents file. Then you needed a player that was capable of understanding the extra file (I know of a plugin for WinAMP, but that’s about it). No hardware mp3 player will ever be capable of true gapless audio. It’s just not possible the way that mp3s are encoded.
If you want gapless audio, you should use OGG or one of the lossless encoding formats (which don’t really support gapless audio so much as they don’t get in the way of playing gapless audio, unlike mp3 which makes the task downright frustrating).
I’ve heard rumors that Apple was toying with AAC to try to make gapless audio possible, but I doubt they’ll ever get it just right. AAC’s compression suffers from the same shortcomings as mp3.
Bottom line: It’s not the iPod that doesn’t support gapless playback. It’s the music you’re playing on it.
An Equalizer…
Electronic EQs suck first off. True audiophiles won’t settle for anything that isn’t analog. Secondly, EQ circuits draw power. If you want better battery life in your iPod, you want EQ presets. If you want a better EQ, you’re getting lower battery life. If you want battery life and a better EQ then you want a bigger iPod with a bigger battery.
A sports iPod…
I hate to break this to you, but a HD is not “able to absorb the shocks of a mountain bike excursion”. You really shouldn’t even go jogging with your iPod. Hard drives are pretty fragile devices in reality. Lots of shocks and bumps and crashes will tear up a hard disk pretty well. The iPods counter this by only spinning the disc when reading data into the cache, but still, the iPod is not designed for mountain biking (or snowboarding contrary to Burton’s jacket).
A true sports iPod would have to be solid state. The hard drive models are just not intended for that kind of rough treatment.
3. An adjustable UI.
This is actually what I had thought would be nice. You are listening to a song, and would like to listen to that album, or that genre, or that artist, or ect… The iPod should have a feature where you hold a button down for a period of time, and then you are given additional options. Cool, people think like me
:HAn, I like your number 5) Push another button and hold to perform a search specific to artist name, or album title, or etc…
oharag
Oh, and an FM Tuner would be nice, I suppose.
Another thing Apple should provide is an LCD controller for both the iPod and iPod shuffle. This LCD would be capable of displaying info, but also allow for control (ie. advance, play, pause, volume). This will quite the detractors to the iPod shuffle, but also versatility to the iPod family (oh, and it will be an extra revenue stream for Apple). I listen to my iPod in shuffle mode. There are times I want to see what song is playing (I have a bad memory). I have to pick up my iPod to see the screen. Maybe it’s my pocket, or hidden away. It would be easier to look down to this internediate LCD panel for this info.
Just my 2 cents.
oharag
I agree with :HAn.
You missed #5, I have thousands of contacts and going directly to letter X from A is a long way…
# 6 could be search a contact by name or anything else
# 7 Photo of people in contact and perhaps also logo of their company
It seems as if you’re describing an Iriver. Except for the sports part of course. Iriver’s have a more advanced UI, the ability to play gapless audio, and an FM tuner. All in a package that’s cheaper, is the same size as an Ipod (looks just as good if not better in my opinion), plays more codecs, has better sound (in my opinion), and has a longer battery life (with a user replaceable battery in the new H300 series). Not to mention all the other extras, such as voice recording, an lcd remote, and a usb host for storing pictures from your digital camera (on the new H300 series, without a $30 add-on).
The Ipod just dosen’t cut it. It’s design (which really isn’t all that revolutionary, and in fact is quite boring/drab) dosen’t make up for the fact that it’s missing such key features. The Ipod is a perfect example of consumer tendency to act like sheep, and flock towards what isn’t necesarily the best product but the most popular, i.e. the “Ipod/Apple Cult.”
Oh, and by the way, go Yankees.
Re: Gapless audio: True gapless audio is functionally impossible with MP3/AAC/etc. files, as the PCM audio stream has to be broken into specific block sizes to be compressed, and there is almost always a small gap of silence left over at the end. However, the iPod could do a much better job and pre-cache the next track (which it only does sometimes, and not very well), reducing this gap to a barely audible hiccup and not a noticable pause. I suspect it is partly a HD issue (reading the data pre-emptively) and partially a processor issue (cannot begin a new decoding process while there’s already one going; it’s an iPod, not a computer, and multitasking is not exactly its forte).
Hell yeah, RADIO. I dunno why Apple is behind the ball, but maybe demand isn’t there?
Equalizer would be great too, but they could compromise by allowing you to load your custom equalizer settings from iTunes onto your iPod.
Sports iPod? Well, the shuffle may fit that bill. Except that its lack of screen make’s it tough to actually navigate. But given the shuffle’s sales, maybe most people don’t care. And flash is much better for sports than HD based.
Except for gapless play, most of what you want is already in mp3 players by other manufacturers. My 2 year old RioSport does all of this, except for equalizer.
Granted we’re all entitled to our own tastes (which are ineherently subjective) on design matters (though I do agree the Pontiac Aztek is quite possibly one of the ugliest creations on the planet, along with the Hummer). However, to sacrifice so much functionality, and moderate value for the supposed better looks of the Ipod, for an MP3 player which is meant to be a portable music player as opposed to a status icon (which is what it has, in my opinion stupidly become), is illogical at best. Apple will most likely never update the functionality of the Ipod to include the features you’re hoping to get, mainly because they have become such a regressive company (in my opinion, again). Just look at their computers, they still use one button mice (sure you can buy an extra two button mouse, but who wants to go through the bother, and what about laptops). The Mac mini is basically another version of the shuttle PC that came out a couple of years ago, yet Mac is being credited as being an innovator because of this product. They were also credited as being an innovator on the basis of the Ipod, which wasn’t the first hard drive based MP3 player on the market by any means (correct me if I’m wrong, but creative did that).
As for itunes, it may work great on a Mac, but my experience with using it on PC’s has been frustrating at best (and no, it’s not because the Mac is a better system). Installing the software is a nightmare at best, and while running it, the software frequently distorts tracks. Granted, the music sharing over LAN (which was nicely integrated, but again Apple wasn’t the first to do this), and the organization are phenomenal (although it does mess up ID3 tags every so often). However, the possibility of playing my music in a distorted manner, just dosen’t justify me using it to play music while on my computer (Winamp is better in my opinion). And you don’t have to have an Ipod to use itunes to organize your music, I actually use it to organize music on my Iriver (again, it’s organizational function is superb, much better than that Musicmatch garbage). The music store would be nice if it was possibly to play the music you download on other music players, and in other audio playerson your computer without having to use crackers, etc… to do so. Supporting the Itunes music store is basically supporting a medium that dosen’t allow you to freely use something you paid for. Say for instance you decide 20 years down the line that the new line of Ipods are ugly as hell, and you want to buy another music player. What are you going to do with your itunes store music collection? Which is besides the fact that the itunes store is the only store Ipod owners can buy music from, there’s no market when it comes to online music sales for Ipod owners, just a monopoly. Of course this is all beyond my personal preference to buy cd’s over online music (basically the same price, better for a collection).
You may not be a sheep, but lot’s of people who Ipods are, which I find quite perturbing. I find that many Ipod owners never even bothered to research other music players on the market before they purchsed their Ipod, they bought them because they were “popular” or etc…” As for Apple, I think the company makes substandard products for the most part, mainly because there is just not enough intermarket competion (PC’s and Mac’s are different products in my opinion, that happen to be substitutes). For the people out there who use Apple because you like the GUI, and find them easier to use, or other sensible reasons, ride on, but for the most part Macs just don’t cut it in my opinion. Thankfully nobody on this site has regressed to using the phrase “M$” or other internet slang like that, so I have respect for you guys, I just don’t agree with your choices in products.
That said, I have some work to do.
I forgot to mention the Ipod shuffle. What the hell were they thinking? No screen…
Baaaaah. I have no problem being a sheep. That IS why they call it the Cult of Mac. Let’s agree that there are some people who agree and some that disagree.
Just give me better battery life (16-24h) and i’ll be happy! Oh, and built-in recording…with direct encoding to AAC/MP3/Lossless…
there is only one lacking feature that prevents me from getting an ipod to replace my MD player…. 1/4” input. I want to be able to use this thing as a sampler. Thats all… It would be the best tool ever invented for a musician if it just had some way to get a 1/4” input into it. Think about it, all you would need is a small mixing board and voila, you have a portable studio!! It would be perfect. If recording wasn’t your thing, you could just hook a mic up to it and take samples, or record dialogue (if your a student film maker)—I know belkin makes that little mic, but it would be a joke to use it for anything other than recording lectures or interviews.
My ideal would be either balanced TRS 1/4” or XLR jack… Though I would be more than happy with a simple 1/4” jack! Please, if someone knows anyone who works for apple or belkin or something, tell them to make this… The pro audio guys would eat it up!
...that and an adjustable eq. an adjustable eq would be neat too.