Re: [Phys-l] iPod music compression

["John Clement" <clement@hal-pc.org>]

> Answering some of Anthony's questions...
>
> With modern CDs that have text data in addition to music data, when you
> load the CD into iTunes it reads the composer, album title, artist,
> recording date, track titles, genre, etc.  These also download into the
> iPod.  Then, when you listen to the iPod, you can choose to listen to a
> particular album, or a particular artist, or a particular genre.  It's
> really quite wonderful.

Actually only some commercial CDs have CD-text, and iTunes does not read
text on the CD.  Rather it downloads the information from the web based on
the identity of the CD.  There are only a few players that read actual text
from the CD, and none of the widely distributed players do this.  So you
must have your computer connected to the Web if you want to automatically
get the track names.  Neither MS media player, iTunes, nor Music Match
players read CD-Text.  I can not say if the Mac has a player that reads
imbedded text, but as iTunes does not, I doubt that the Mac does either.

There is a new alternative to the iPod being marketed by Samsung soon.  It
is designed by the original iPod designer, and may be even easier to use.
See:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/27/technology/27mercer.html

for some more information about it.

CD-Text was designed for use with CD changers and also can be read by some
portable CD players.

John M. Clement
Houston, TX