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.

I bought a ticket to a show this weekend, and requested that they mail them to me. I’ve done this several times before, with no problem. This time, however, my ticket did not arrive. I wasn’t terribly concerned about this, since the person I was going with had an extra ticket. I used that to get in, and called Ticketmaster the next day to get my money back.

Things did not start off well. I called their customer service line and navigated the usual maze of voice menu options, at which point they requested that I key in my order number. I began doing so, only to find that there were terribly detailed instructions on doing this, and keying in didn’t stop their playback. I patiently waited until the instructions completed, then keyed in my order number, which was promptly rejected. I guess it picked up on what I keyed in the first time, even though there was no indication to tell me this. I then had to wait through the excessively verbose instructions a second time before keying the order number in again. It accepted this time, then put me on hold.

When I was taken off hold, the first question the person on the other end asked me was “What’s your order number?” Maddening! After explaining that I never got my ticket, he asked if I had recently moved. I told him that yes, I had. I got the impression that they sent my ticket to my old address, though he wouldn’t confirm nor deny that, and the conformation email they send doesn’t have the physical address the tickets are sent to. He told me that since this was regarding an event that had already taken place, he’d have to transfer me to customer service. This seemed odd, since I had called their customer service line in the first place.

So, I was transferred again. And asked for my order number, and address, and all my information again. And then the rep told me she’d have to talk to her supervisor, because this was for an event that had already taken place. So I waited on hold a while longer, and then the supervisor came on the line to talk to me. I explained my situation again, and she told me that there was nothing they could do. That the promoter had already been paid. I told her that I was very unhappy that I paid for a service which I did not receive due to their error, and I wanted her to work with me, and either give a refund, or credit. She told me that I was supposed to work with them by calling 48 hours before the show, and that since I hadn’t, there was nothing they could do.

At this point, I stopped being nice. I told her that she had two options: refund my money, or deal with Visa when I contest the charge. She refused again, so I hung up, called Visa, and got the charge reversed.

Then I went to Ticketmaster’s web site, and bought a ticket to another show.

Talk about taking the subway to the moral high ground.

The GTKPod video patch is in GTKPod CVS now. I haven’t tried it yet. CVS+patch worked for me, but nukes all the cover art and lyrics when I sync.

The Apple Remote is worthless. The menu button doesn’t work, so you can only skip around a playlist, pause/play, and change the volume. I should have read the reviews first. It’s full of nothing but people screaming that you can’t navigate the iPod menu.

Video out is kinda neat, but you only get the playing video. No iPod menu. So even if you could use the remote to navigate, you’d have to get up to peer at the iPod screen. Some friends suggested that a firmware update could fix this, but I think it’s extremely unlikely that will happen. According to the vivisection, the MPEG decoder chip also handles the video out, so I don’t think the video for the screen can be piped through it. Who knows, though, I could be wrong.

The command I’m using is:

$ ffmpeg -vcodec xvid -b 300 -qmin 3 -qmax 5 -bufsize 4096 -g 300 -acodec aac -ab 96 -i input_file.avi -s 320x240 -aspect 4:3 ipod_output.mp4

You may want to change:

• -aspect (if your source is 16:9)
• -s (if you want 480×480 video for TV display)
• -b, -qmin, -qmax (if you want higher quality or are encoding higher rez video)

Since I don’t have video sync working, I can’t verify that this works, but I don’t see why it wouldn’t. One-pass encoding is about 2x realtime on my 2.4ghz P4, and file sizes are very reasonable – 70mb for a 20 minute TV episode. Quality is not fantastic, but should be fine for the iPod screen. Some tweaking should locate a sweet spot, with ~1.5 – 2x encoding and better quality.

Edited to add: It works, though I can’t seek in the video – lame. Quality is fine on the iPod screen. If you’re compiling gtkpod from CVS (needed for video syncinc), revert src/file_itunesdb.c to revision 1.65 – the last commit was bad.

Also: Ripping my 14-disc Monty Python DVD set to iPod video now. Will it be done by Monday? Who knows!

Front 242 is tomorrow. That should be a sardine can full of fun – they’re 25 tickets away from being completely sold out, and The Fenix is not a large venue

I’m not a big Queensrÿche fan, but they put on a good show. They were, however, blown away by Priest. These guys are ancient – they’re all in their mid-50s. They’re wrinkled and gray, decrepit, and they rocked harder than nearly any other band I’ve seen. They were utterly amazing. All these years, and they are still out there kicking ass and making metal. Amazing.

These guys put on a hell of a stage show. They started with Electric Eye, which had a massive Eye backdrop, with Halford in the iris. Midway through the song, he vanished and popped up from a trapdoor on the stage. For Revolution, Halford rode halfway up the height of the stage in a throne with a (fake) burning pyre in front of it. Victim of Changes was perhaps the best song, with a very extended solo in the middle.

The highlight was Breakin’ the Law. During the intro, the guys lined up (left-to-right)- Halford, Downing, Tipton, and Hill. The guy on the left reached over to play the instrument of the person next to them, while fingering for their part on theirs. I.e. Hill fingers the bass, but doesn’t play; Tipton fingers his guitar, and plays Hill’s bass; Downing fingers his guitar and plays Tipton’s guitar, and Halford plays Downing’s. Absolutely amazing.

I have my friend Led to thank for the ticket to the show. Thanks, Led!

If they’re playing near you, go now!