Originally Posted by
WillCAD
Not at all. I am also an album person and I don't listen to individual tracks, only whole albums.
Depending on the bit depth of your music, you can fit a lot of albums onto a 64gb card and a 32gb phone.
Most of my music is 192kb. The music that I write, arrange and record is in AAC, Apple's lossless codec, at 320kb.
Together they equal 96gb, minus a few gb for the OS and apps, giving you 2/3 of the storage of your 160gb iPod.
And that's not enough -- right now, I have about 120gb of music stored.
I never know what I'll be in the mood to listen to, either, but I load up my phone with 20 or 30 of my favorite albums and pick from them while I'm traveling.
And that's exactly what I DON'T want to do. I have enough to do when I'm getting ready to travel. The last thing I want to do is sit down at a computer, load up some micro SD cards, and decide ahead of time what I will feel like listening to.
If I were doing a long-haul and would be traveling for 30 hours, I might run out of music toward the end of the trip and repeat, or if I had additional albums on a spare 64gb MicroSC card I might swap the card once during the trip.
And that's you. Your listening habits are very different from mine. That's my whole point.
This is only an issue for long-haul flights.
It's on long-haul flights that I am most dependent on my iPod for entertainment.
On short-haul flights, you won't have to swap cards at all, because 20-30 hours of music will be more than enough to get you through a 2-6 hour flight with plenty of album variety and choice.
Once again, the point is to have my complete music collection accessible, not to merely fill time with music.
In time, MicroSD cards will be available in 128 or 256gb capacity and eliminate the need for swapping to equal your 160gb iPod.
Yes, with the key words being, "in time." There is also the expense -- a 128 gig SDXC card is nearly $100.
But even at 64gb, you only need 3 cards at the absolute max to equal the 160gb iPod, and only 2 if you count the internal storage of a 32gb or 64gb phone.
And, once again, having to shut down my phone, open the back, remove the battery, swap tiny cards that can be easily dropped and lost, re-insert the battery, close the black and then wait for the phone to boot up is far, far more trouble than simply using my iPod. And that ignores the inconvenience of not being able to scroll through my entire library to decide what I want to listen to.
I understand not wanting to go through the 2-minute odyssey of swapping cards and rebooting while you're "in a nicely buzzed state", but you've got to come out of your stupor at some point during a long-haul, if only to eat without spilling your food all over your lap.
No, I do not, nor do I want to.
This isn't impossible, PT, it simply requires a little advance planning and the right equipment to get what you want - freedom from iTunes.
AS I said, this IS the Apple philosophy personified, i.e. "We know better than you do how you should be using this gear/software."
I have an Android phone. And I'll tell you when I use it, rather than the iPod: when I travel to somewhere I will rent a car and have to drive for a couple of hours, I'll put an audio book on it. I use it with a Motorola Sportster speakerphone that can receive audio via Bluetooth and transmit it via FM to the car radio. For me (and those are the operative words), that is far more convenient than using an iPod FM transmitter, particularly because I'm also using the phone's GPS for navigation and both the audio and the spoken directions come through the car's radio.
Using the phone as my music player? No thanks. The compromises that entails -- disassembling the phone to swap microSD cards, using lower bit-rates for music, and not having my entire collection in one place and browsable -- makes it completely unacceptable. If it works for you, that's great. It wouldn't work for me. My goal isn't to "dump iTunes" but to have my music, my way when I travel.