music button is not lit up on ipod touch 6th generation

[cjmnews]

USB 2.0 and writing to hard drive is a slow combination.

No you can’t put 6.1.6 on the 6th Generation iPod Touch, it came with 8.4 when new. It seems you got lucky with the 4th Generation iPod Touch.

Good luck

 

[john_robot]

hi cj,

do you know anything about flac ?

it is probably a lifetime project for me, but i am converting all of my cds to this lossless format

up until now, i had to convert my stuff to mp3 to listen to it on a player

but with terabyte storage capacity on an ipod, i think i could just keep them in lossless format, and load them onto the ipod, and forego the mp3 process completely

do you have any ideas or opinions ?

 

[john_robot]

i am actually using wavpack, not flac. the guy i would buy the ipod from tells me that i need to use rockbox, instead of the apple software. but he can load it on for me. now i need to find out how to mp3gain my wavpack files. so far, a product called replaygain seems to be a good option to look into ?

 

[cjmnews]

FLAC is a lossless music format, not really supported by Apple. Apple used their own format called ALAC that is also lossless.
iTunes only supports ALAC, just like iPods and iOS does.
iOS (not iPods) may have started to support FLAC with iOS 11.

Both formats range from 16 bit at 44.1 khz & 96 khz, 20 bits @ 44.1 (HDHC) & 96khz, all the way to 24 bits @ 196 khz, (SACD, DVD audio & Blu-Ray)
Your source media has to be very high quality to get the benefits of the higher bits.

Hopefully you have the space on the computer to make all your music lossless. The file sizes are huge (325 MB for a whole CD, around 18-20MB per song). About half the size of the CD as raw data (650MB).

If making them lossless is what you want, then sure, you can do that, but if you are using the headphone jack, it isn't worth it. I wouldn't because my music listening is limited to scenarios where I would not be able to discern the difference in quality of a lossy (MP3, M4a) or lossless track. Maybe if I were running iPod audio out the bottom port to my sound system directly I could tell the difference. I typically play my audio through the headphone jack or Bluetooth (iPhone) and those connections make it so you can't tell the difference between a high quality rip and lossless.

iPod can't play FLAC files, they must be ALAC files using Apple's firmware.
Rockbox can play FLAC.

Wavpack is interesting. It basically creates 2 files, one is lossy (compressed about 60% of the original size) and a correction file that together recreates the music in lossless format.

Rockbox plays the lossy Wavepack file without applying the correction file (at least in 2009) in an iPod, so you may be good enough with MP3.
I am also seeing issues with higher bitrate files on the iPod with Rockbox, and recommendations to limit it to 44.1khz with either 16 or 24 bits. Higher bit rate files may skip.

ReplayGain can handle FLAC files, no mention of wavpack files though.
WVGAIN is a utility that comes with Wavpack and it can do this.

It really depends on how much you want to invest and learn. This is well outside of my expertise. And since it is getting away from Apple, getting off topic for this site.

I personally would just use high quality lossy rips (256 AAC) because I use headphones or Bluetooth and both are bad at real reproduction.

 

[john_robot]

hi cj,

this first ipod loaded fine, and i used it today. the other 3 4th generation ipods are all using the same ios - 6.1.6

for those users who want to look into the updated classic ipod, they can still use the apple firmware for mp3 playing

the only reason i am getting rockbox is so i can listen to wavpack files directly - when this is done you just drag and drop the files - no connection to itunes

i think there is just some wvgain notation in the command line when the wv file is created, that will add the proper notation to the file to allow any regainplay enabled ipod to read and automatically adjust the volume.

the ipod classic is regainplay enabled. and i plan to get the max of 2tb, now. no doubt that number will be significantly increased in 10 years. i never even dreamed of that much storage on an ipod, especially flash memory.

so i think i have all the bases covered

 

[john_robot]

just an update - it is a simple task to use foobar to equalize the gain on all the songs. it puts them all at or close to 89db.

rockbox offers a preamp option, if you want to give them all an equal boost

when checking my wavpack files, they seem to average about 1.5 mb.

2 terabytes is 2 million mb ?

that is 1.3 million songs ?

i have a lot of songs, but i sincerely doubt i have that many !!!

 

[john_robot]

just a note of interest - i have recently loaded up all 3 of my 4th generation 64gb touch ipods - they are zipping thru the copy process - loading 9200 songs in less than an hour. whereas that 7th generation took over 12 hours.

 

[cjmnews]

There may be a hard drive issue with the 7th generation that should be repaired. That isn't easy, as it requires removing the hard drive putting it into a computer, running hard drive repair software on it, then putting it back. Probably a bad block.

 

[john_robot]

thanks cj,

since i cant use it, and dont want to bother with trying to sell it, i am just gonna forget about it - LOL