Digital step forward

I succumbed to one of the new fifth-generation iPods, a nice

sleek black one, which shows video and has an 80 gb hard drive. Quite cool, especially

since iPod prices have come way down. I’ve had an iPod for quite a while, and

before that another digital player, but now I’m looking forward to ripping CDs at

much higher bitrates, giving me much better sound. (The extra hard drive space

leaves plenty of room for the larger files.) And, of course, to watching

episodes of Battlestar Galactica when

I’m traveling, not to mention that

DVD about Poulenc I’ve been meaning to get to.

But this isn’t why I’m making this post. The new iPod –

along with the new version 7.0 of iTunes — fixes one well known and really

annoying problem. That’s the gap that shows up between tracks, a momentary

hiccup while (or so I’ve read) the player reads textual data from the hard

drive (like the track’s name). This is no fun when you’re listening to an

opera, or to a symphony like Beethoven’s Fifth or Sixth, where movements flow

into each other, or, for that matter, when you’re listening to live pop albums.

But all of us who use digital players have been putting up with this for years.

And now the problem is gone. The new iTunes allows you to

specify “gapless playback” for any of the music you put into it, and that music

then plays back on the new iPod (though not on my old one) without any hitch or

hesitation. A small but significant blessing. So now if only the tagging of

classical music – the labels that tell

you what each digital classical track is — would improve…(I’ve had a grimly

funny time putting the new Mariss Jansons complete Shostakovich symphonies on

my iPod, discovering that separate CDs might show up with different versions

of, just for instance, the composer’s name.)