Cool idea for iTunes

[WannabeSQ]

For people with iPods, and because apple is starting to take things off the processor like Quartz extreme. My idea is to let the iPod do the MP3 decoding when it is hooked up charging or updating. That would make iTunes use less processor cycles than it does now.

Anyone think this would work?

 

[dricci]

I doubt it'd be worth the effort to make something like that work. And you'd be draining your iPod battery down while it's charging.

 

[WannabeSQ]

how would it drain the battery if it is being powered by the FW port? Granted it might take longer to charge, but not drain the battery, there are plenty of hard drives that are powered just by the FW port. This wouldnt take too much power anyway, I think.

 

[mmoin]

I think that's a really good idea. I wonder if Apple has thought of this, seems like it would be a relatively simple software add-on.

 

[alex_ant]

This seems like a good idea, although maybe not that big of a deal. It wouldn't take much work, either - all Apple would have to do is write a driver that bypasses the built-in audio and routes sound I/O through the iPod. Presumably, thanks to CoreAudio's supposed sophistication, it would be easy to switch between iPod sound processing and built-in sound processing on the fly via Sound Prefs. (I know you can do this with USB audio devices.)

 

[arn]

Re: Cool idea for iTunes

Originally posted by WannabeSQ
For people with iPods, and because apple is starting to take things off the processor like Quartz extreme. My idea is to let the iPod do the MP3 decoding when it is hooked up charging or updating. That would make iTunes use less processor cycles than it does now.

Anyone think this would work?

Where would it store the decoded music? On the hard drive?

Even if you did, you'd end up using up more battery power as you'd fill up your cache faster as you loaded in raw uncompressed audio from the drive more often.

arn

 

[WannabeSQ]

I think you may be missing my idea, I am talking about using the iPod as no more than an outboard sound card, but still route the audio through the main audio output from the computer. A sort of sub audo processor. Not to be used when the iPod is just playing its own music on the go.

 

[jholzner]

Well, I don't have an iPod so all though the feature might be usefull I wouldn't gain anything...my sister would I guess...she has the original 5GB iPod. What I would LOVE to see in iTunes (something I think would make it complete) would be the ability to print labels directly from iTunes. It could automatically take the info for the songs from the play list. I hope they add it...it's the feature I've been waiting for since iTunes 1.0 shipped.

 

[gopher]

The problem with that is that Firewire syncing is still flakey as it is. I've had my Firewire drives spindown without notice and had to write this Applescript to prevent it:

http://www.macmaps.com/spindownfix.html

Mind you, this spindown is happening when Energy Saver is set to go off NEVER!

 

[Schlomo]

I thought it would be a great idea for customizable metadata in itunes. I have become anal about making sure that artist, album, rating, genre is filled in and accurate, but I think it would be great to have other fields like mood or occasion. I had, at one point used sub-genres, like "hot blues" "acoustic rock"or "Old Skool Hip-Hop" But i found that that results in too fragmented of a library, so I am changing them back, for the most part to rock, classical, jazz, blues, R&B, Hip-Hop, etc.

any suggestions for succesful library management?