New iPod
Well, it came today, four days before the estimated delivery date. This is one of those things I really like about Apple. When they get their supply chain going, they always under-promise and over-deliver. By setting expectations, then beating them, they leave a sense that they are besting themselves, on top of their game, in a way which you don’t get when you deliver when you say you will. It’s smart, and I like it.
But, on to the device itself.
Pros
- Search is really cool. It works better than I thought it would.
- They weren’t kidding about the screen being brighter. Some of the comparison shots I’ve seen have been with the new models and more recent older ones. Apple supposedly started putting the new screens in the older models before the 5.5G iPods came out, so the pictures don’t show much difference. However, the difference between my 30gb 5G and the new 80gb 5.5G is dramatic.
- Battery life is much better.
Cons
- Search is cool - but I crashed the iPod while using it.
- It’s so much thicker than my 30gb. I wish they bumped the slimmer 30gb to 60gb. I would have bought that over the 80gb in a heartbeat.
Recording
Something I’ve been meaning to do for far too long now is put together a bootlegging setup. I go to a lot of concerts, and I’d really like to have recordings of them. I’d looked at various gear before, but never made any purchases.
I’ve been looking at the XtremeMac MicroMemo. It records to uncompressed WAV at CD quality (44.1khz 16 bit stereo). It comes with an omnidirectional mic on a bendable boom. You can plug in another mic, or flip a switch and use it for line in. This is precisely the sort of rig I wanted, so I went ahead and picked one up.
I gave it a shot with a show last night, and the results are very good. I got permission from the bands and hooked a line right in from the soundboard. The low end was much too loud, but I suspect this was an issue with the mix rather than the recording device. I can run it through an equalizer to bring it back in line with the rest of the recording, but it did result in clipping in some places. Nothing to be done about that, but it’s still very listenable, and much better than I could have managed with a microphone.
The Achilles Heel is the battery life. The whole show (four bands) clocked in at 2h40m, and I had no more than 10% - 15% battery left at the end. There’s no way to supply power to the iPod when the MicroMemo is plugged in. I may see about cracking it open to splice in a USB cable to provide power. I wouldn’t expect it to last more than 3.5 hours, tops, so that’s your limit. The whole recording was 1.6gb - vastly less than the 40gb of free space I had. If you had a power source, you could record a whopping five days of audio on an empty 80gb model.