Software

iPod Capabilities include playing:

1. MP3 audio file formats.

2. WAV audio file formats.

3.M4A / AAC LC audio file formats.

4. Protected AAC audio file formats.

5. AIFF audio file formats.

6. Audible audiobook audio file formats and

7. Apple Lossless audio file formats.

iPod capabilities of the 5th generation version plays .m4v and .mp4 MPEG-4 video file formats.

Microsoft Windows version of iTunes can transcode regular non copy-protected WMA files to an
iPod supported format. WMA files with copy protection cannot be played in iTunes or be copied to an iPod.

What I do not like about the iPod is the inability to play some other formats, in particular the Ogg Vorbis and FLAC formats. MIDI files cannot be played on iPods as well, but can be converted into a compatible audio file format by choosing the “advanced” menu on iTunes.

Apple has designed the iPod to work with the iTunes media library software, which lets you manage your music libraries on your computer and on your iPod. iTunes can automatically synchronize your iPod with specific playlists or with the entire contents of a music library each time you connect your iPod to a host computer.

You can also set a rating (out of 5 stars) on any song, and can synchronize that information to an iTunes music library. iTunes lacks the ability to transfer songs from iPod to computer because of legality issues.

However, several third-party programs exist that provide music synchronization facilities similar to iTunes, but also offer the ability to copy music from iPod back to your host computer. Notable examples include vPod and the Ml iPod plugin for Winamp.

iTunes Music Store

The iTunes Music Store (iTMS) is an online music store run by Apple and accessed via iTunes. It was
introduced on 28 April, 2003 and sells individual songs relatively easily and cheaply (e.g. 0.99 USD,
0.99 Euro, 0.79 GBP).

iPod’s are the only portable music player that can play the purchased music, and this exclusiveness has

helped the store become the dominant online music service.

The purchased audio files use the AAC format with added encryption. The encryption is based on FairPlay Digital Rights Management (DRM) system. Up to five authorized computers and an unlimited amount of iPods can play the files.

Burning the files onto an audio CD removes the Digital Rights Management (DRM), at a cost of reduced
quality when re-compressed from one lossy format to another.

iPods cannot play music files encrypted with other rival Digital Rights Management (DRM) technologies,

such as Microsoft’s protected WMA or RealNetworks’ Helix-DRM.

Hardware

iPod capabilities was to connect it to a user’s computer to update songs and recharge its battery solely
through FireWire originally. It could also be charged by connecting it to a small power adapter which are shipped for free with several of the first generation iPod’s.

The now standard dock connector was not added until the 3rd generation in April 2003, allowing users

the option of using FireWire or USB to make data transfers, although the device could still not be
charged by USB and the USB cable was not included.

Most PC’s don’t have FireWire ports so this move effectively opened the Windows market to iPod, although USB only Windows users had to keep their FireWire cables to plug into the wall adapter.

The dock connector also made it possible to transfer data, sound, and power back and forth to iPod accesories, which created an explosive market of devices that has been extremely profitable for third parties such as Belkin and Griffin. The resulting myriad of connecting devices is still one of iPod’s greatest strengths over its competititors.

iPod capabilities of the 4th generation version could be charged with USB, and eventually Apple started shipping iPods with USB cables instead of one’s with FireWire. Many Macs shipped before 2004 had only USB 1.1, which has a transfer speed of 11 Mbit/s, as opposed to FireWire’s 400 and USB 2.0′s 480.

Although none of these actually transfers at these exact rates, USB 1.1 is much slower than the other two, and for some USB 1.1 may simply be unusable for transferring music collections to fill a 40 GB iPod. Later introductions has continued to lessen iPod’s reliance on FireWire.

iPod Shuffle, released in January 2005, plugs directly into a USB port, without a dock connector and has no Firewire support. The iPod Nano, released in September 2005, uses a dock connector that allows a FireWire cable to be plugged in to charge the device, but not to transfer data. With the 5th generation iPod, Apple dropped all support for data transfer over Firewire to any model iPod.

Like the Nano, the 5th generation iPod’s dock connector will accept a FireWire cable and can draw power from it, but only the USB connection, not the one with FireWire, will support data transfer – a message stating this appears on the iPod screen.

This has drawn some criticism from the Mac community, since FireWire has been a standard feature on Apple Macs for many years, while USB 2.0 support was only added in October 2003.

The first three generations of iPod used two ARM 7TDMI-derived CPUs running at 90 MHz, while later models have variable speed chips which run at a peak of 80 MHz to save battery life.

The iPod use 1.8 inch (46 mm) ATA hard drives (with a proprietary connector) made by Toshiba and the iPod Mini uses one-inch Compact Flash microdrive hard drives made by Hitachi. It has a 32 MiB flash ROM chip which contains a bootloader, a program that tells the device to load the operating system from another medium (in this case, the hard drive).

All iPods, except for the 60 GB 5th generation version, has 32 MiB of RAM, a portion of which holds the OS loaded from the firmware and the vast majority of which serves to cache songs loaded from the hard drive.

For example, an iPod could spin the hard disk up once and copy about 30 MiB of upcoming songs on a playlist into RAM, thus saving power by not having the drive spin up for each song. (The 60 GB fifth-generation iPod holds 64 MiB of RAM, to further extend battery life.)

iPod was originally introduced with a black and white display but no current model uses one. iPod Photo (an addition to the functionality of the 4th generation iPod released in late 2004) introduced a color screen, while iPod shuffle (released January 2005) has no screen at all.

When iPod Mini was replaced with iPod Nano it received a colour screen (and photo capabilty) and starting with the 5th generation all full size iPods have color screens and photo capability.

Here is a link in reference to this article iPod Capabilities

iPod compatibility on the original iPod was designed for use with Macintosh computers running Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X but Apple began selling a Windows-compatible iPod too on July 17, 2002. Apple released a Windows version of iTunes on October 16, 2003; previously, Windows users needed third-party
software such as Musicmatch Jukebox (included with Windows iPods before the release of the Windows version of iTunes), ephPod, or XPlay to manage the music on their iPods.

iPods originally shipped formatted with Apple’s native filesystem, HFS Plus (Hierarchical File System) and consequently would only work with Apple’s Mac OS because Windows does not support HFS Plus. An iPod formatted with HFS Plus is able to serve as a boot disk for a Macintosh computer, allowing one to have a usable, portable operating system installed on their iPod.

With the advent of the windows-compatible iPod, Apple switched iPod’s default file system to FAT32 because FAT32 is the only file system that can be used natively with both Mac OS and Windows. Fourth-generation and earlier iPods could still be made to boot a Macintosh by reformatting their hard disks with HFS Plus.

The iPodLinux project has successfully ported an ARM (Advanced RISC Machine) version of the Linux kernel to run on iPods. It currently supports first through third generation iPods, and features simple installers for Mac OS X and Windows. The Linux interface is known as “Podzilla”.

The interface will run on all iPods, however the development team does not support its usage. The iPod uses standard USB and FireWire mass-storage connectivity, and therefore any system with mass-storage support can mount it and use it as an external hard drive. The iPod will also charge from any powered USB or Firewire port, regardless of software support.

Here is a link in reference to this article iPod Compatibility

A new wave of mobile phones equipped with tiny yet powerful hard disk drives is threatening to put an end to the meteoric rise of the iPod as the public’s favourite portable digital music player.

When you look at the typical consumer, there are three things that they may come back to their house for if they have left one of them behind: their wallet, keys and mobile phone.

Now the cellular industry is trying to get to the point where even the wallet and the keys are part of the handset. There is a clear trend by which the mobile phone is positioning itself as the singular device that you take with you at all times.

Two years ago Samsung Electronics became the first handset maker to incorporate a hard disk drive (HDD) inside one of its models, featuring 1.5GB of data storage. Soon afterwards Nokia was launching its N91 phone/music player with an embedded 4GB HDD. Then Samsung responded again with an 8GB device (the SGH-i310), which is scheduled for a European launch during the second half of 2006.

Although current portable MP3 players such as Apple’s iPod and its competitors can store as much as 60GB of digital music, companies like Toshiba and Seagate are already developing handset-friendly hard drives that measure around one inch and will soon be able to match this capacity.

With this level of memory, you can replicate all the audio functions currently found in a standalone MP3 player. So the question becomes, why do you need two separate gadgets to accomplish the same goal? .”Both the standalone MP3 player and the mobile phone are pretty much the same form-factor – play music – the mobile offers an increasing number of features, with playing music being just one of them.

This new breed of mobiles has the potential not only to rival but also surpass the MP3 player as the portable music device of choice, but it wont happen overnight. There’ll be a timeframe during which the cellphone will still need to catch up technologically with established MP3 players. Besides, these advanced hard drive-enabled handsets are currently being priced at a premium $600 or £320 to $800 or £430, while you can get a standalone MP3 player for around $200 or £110.

So, I think we still have a few years out before the phone overtakes the MP3 player, but the trend has already started.

Since HDDs used in hadnsets incorporate the same moving parts found in PC and laptop disks, engineers have had to add a series of drop accelaration sensors designed to detect when the phone is starting to fall to the floor and automatically switch off power to the hard drive. Seagate’s latest one-inch HDD (12GB ST1.3 series) has an optional drop sensor that takes operational shock resistance up to 2000 Gs, letting the device survive a 1.5m drop onto hard concrete.

Within three tenths of a second, the protection mechanism moves the read/write heads off the platter and turns the motor off. The decision to incorporate MP3-playing functionality into high-end mobile phones seems to have originated with the handset vendors rather than the network operators.

Will operators be able to take any special advantage from added features? – “An ideal scenerio for the
operators would have been if people used the cellular network to download their songs and play
them on their handsets. But the problem is that this has tended to be a more expensive proposition.
Some of the operators charge between $2 or £1.10 and $3 or £1.60 to download a song. That doesn’t
even include what they charge you for the minutes you use when you do that, and on top of that some of them actually have a monthly subscription fee to use the service. When you compare that with an iTunes model, which is $0.99 or £0.55 a song, that’s not even a fair comparison”.

I believe operators might benefit from this trend by causing handset sales to go up once users start
to demand the embedded MP3 function. “And, in a situation where phone penetration has already
surpassed 100% of the population, if you can cause handset sales to spike again, you can see it as a new revenue opportunity”.

For all the threats that hard drive phones are posing to the iPod, there seem to be a few scenerios
where a dedicated, standalone MP3 player would still be preferable for some users.

Current market trends show that consumers are now replacing their mobile phones approximately every 18 months. Which invites the question: would the need to transfer all this multimedia content
deter users from storing so much on a phone?. “This might turn out to be of a minor annoyance than
anything else. Because, for example, the data transfer rate for USB has gone up to 480Mbit/s, while
ultra wideband wireless technology will hit up to 1Gbit/s. If you can do 1Gbit/s, you could transfer the content of an entire 8GB hard drive in 64 seconds, which is not really too bad.”

Indeed, Samsung’s new SGH-i310 comes equipped with USB 2.0 plug and play connectivity, which
effectively turns the phone not only into an MP3 player but – perhaps more conveniently for the average business user – into an 8GB removable hard disk.

Featuring Windows Mobile 5.0 as its operating system, the handset can be used to transfer most common file formats to and from a PC. Its powerful storage capacity even allows users to record
digital video via its 2Mpixel camera and MPEG4 / H.263 codecs. This makes one wonder whether
digital camcorders might be the next consumer electronics gadget to suffer from the mobile phone’s ambitions to become the single device we need to carry.

So is Apple Computers actually worried about such an imminent threat to its all-conquering iPod? “I’m unable to answer this question, but we live to see what happens in the future”.