Flash as Opposed to Hard Drive?

Hey,

To put it simply, a flash drive has no moving parts- all the data is stored on what's called a "solid-state" chip. On hard drives, there is a spinning disk and a moving arm, which generally means that it is more susceptible to skipping, and mechanical failure.

Does that generally answer your questions, or were you looking for more technical detail?

-Matt

I imagine there are no more caveats about joining tracks for gapless playback of live performance or symphonic movements. That's a tremendous benefit.

HALLELUJAH!!! Finally! Hard-drive-less iPods! When can I get a 20GB Flash iPod Color?!?!? Even if it is the same size as the current 20GB...

Eddie,

I don't understand your comment....you are aware that the nano has the same non-gapless playback of other iPods, right?

(The gap has nothing to do with harddrive or flash technology).

Tom

In order to have actual gapless playback iTunes gives you an option. You can combine tracks from the original CD. The result is one large file instead of many short ones. This is how you can have a movement of a symphony (if there are multiple tracks) or an entire live (tracked) performance without gaps.

The warning was always that this would wear down the battery because these large segments couldn't fit into the buffer. Also that the drive would spin continually and the chance for skipping was much greater.

If the above is true then the flash memory new iPod is not subject to either of these concerns I would think. That's why I made the comment.

Basically the only advantage of this is when out running. On the older iPods it would be skip free for about 10-15 min, then the data stored in memory would already have played. So you would need to stop so that the hard drive could access the next songs.

With the Nano this isn't neccessary.

On the old iPods, if a file was larger than the size of the buffer, could it put portions into it until the whole thing was played? I seem to remember very early on that if a file could not be placed in the buffer, it would play directly from the hard drive. I'm talking about a AIFF or lossless files.

Did this behavior change somewhere along the way so that it could grab bits of the same file one after another?

I'm not 100% sure, but my guess is that it is able to load a portion of the file.

Yes, it would load as much of the file as it could (I believe 32mb).

-Matt

Don't forget with flash it loads songs as fast as they can come across the usb cable. For me it loaded over 400 in about 3 or 4 minutes. Way faster than the hard drive mini.

Eddie,

yes, one can always join tracks....but this is not a good solution as the tracks have no ability to then be individually selected. While this might be fine for the tracks in a classical performance, it doesn't work well for popular song tracks where many folks want to be able to mix their music up like a radio station.

yes, the joined tracks should have less performance impact on the nano than on the hard drive iPods...but again joining is not a general solution I imagine for the large majority of iPod listeners.

what many of us want from Apple is a more sophisiticated buffering scheme that enables gapless playback for all songs, even when the songs are not joined....this is a feature of other digital players, but seemingly requires more effort or compute power than Apple is willing to invest. When people speak about a "gapless playback" feature on these forums, it is this capability (or a similar crossfade capability that iTunes provides) that is being discussed most of the time, and that's what I thought you were referring to.

Tom

Hey Steven,

We're actually talking about a different part of the iPod- the buffer memory. This memory is used to load the next couple songs that are to be played in an easily accessible area, so that the iPod doesn't have to keep accessing the main storage. It was mostly designed for the hard drive based iPods, so that battery would be saved by not having to spin up and down constantly. The iPod Nano still has a buffer, but I'm not sure if the shuffle does.

-Matt