What happened to you iPod? It used to be about the music man..

I have never in my life considered myself an audiophile. I grew up during the mp3/napster days of the nineties; when poorly/improperly tagged mp3 files were swapped like stds. I was young and didn't know to look for songs with good bit rates. I once made the mistake of burning an audio CD from low bit rate mp3s and then ripping the wav formatted cd to files of higher bit rate. In effect bloating the size of the files without actually increasing the sound quality... I had much to learn about technology in those years.

Even now in my library there is a good portion of music that is 128 kbps or below. Any audiophile worth their salt would cry at this abysmal quality. However, I have not been particularly bothered by it. I have never been someone with an abundance of storage space. I have always tried to keep my music on my primary laptop, and until a few years ago I was limited to 30 gigs of music max. Many times when I put a recently purchased CD in my computer to rip I pondered what format to rip to and what bit rate. In the end I would usually pick something lower than I would like simply so I would not waste space.

Recently however, I have been made aware of the FLAC music format. I had just beaten the phenomenal game Braid and was interested in purchasing the soundtrack online. The site gave me many format options and many people seemed very pleased to see FLAC listed. For those of you unfamiliar with FLAC formatting, it is a lossless format that unlike WAV and AIFF is compressed. Which means you get lossless audio quality that takes less space on your hard drive.

After reading up on FLAC format I decided it was just the thing for me. I only wanted to check if iTunes and my iPod could use it... They couldn't. There exists an elaborate hack, which allows iTunes to play the format. But natively it just balks at it.

Naturally the iPod also does not know what to do with the format. I find this stupid because rockbox, a firmware replacement for many mp3 players including iPods, can play FLAC files.

Many other mp3 players actually support the format. I am not going to get into the argument of which headphones you have to use to even appreciate the format or what sounds better x or y. I think people who get into those arguments sound like jackasses (see comments on that useful article).

I do think it is embarrassing that apple does not support this format. It may be that they are trying to encourage people to use their own lossless ALAC format. However, I don't see what the motivation would be to do that. The iPod is no longer only a music player (it can also do 100s of other useless things). But I have an iTouch and the thing I do the most with it is listen to my music. Even people with iPhones I would argue most often use their device either as a phone or a music player.

There are really 2 solutions. Use the hack workaround to listen to FLAC files on my laptop and forget putting them on my iTouch. OR Pick a new music player on my laptop and a new portable music player.

So far I have just held back on using/getting FLAC files. Which, I suppose means Apple is winning. If an update for iTunes and the iPod are not released soon. I may be changing my primary computer to one of my Unix or Windows machines so I can enjoy all of my music. This would be a sad day indeed.

WTF Apple. Step your game up.

Edit:
Also, Apple make ID3 tags more transparently editable. Like when you add that field to make things podCasts, allow us to disable it. And Propagate the information across both types of ID3 tags....