Some pre-context as to what led me up to this moment:
Spoiler: ShowWell, I have never had a portable music player before. I've always been too snooty for one, either opting to use my cellphone, or my laptop; and between the two, there's always been 0 time gaps where I was left without music. Therefore, I apologize if my questions seem too silly, but I can't find any direct answers to them, considering I'm too late to this game, and people are talking way over my head.
Apple's new iPod Nano hit a soft spot with me. It's small enough not to be a double-burden when lugging it around with my HTC Diamond. It's simple enough to be something I'd consider carrying with me, and no matter what some nay-sayers say, I love the form factor. It caters to the OCD/neatness freak that I am, between a simple album art display, a clean UI uncluttered by retarded applications, and brushed aluminum. So, if anyone could answer these rather simple questions for me, preferably anyone who's ever owned an iPod (READ: most humans that visit this forum), I'd be duly indebted.
My questions:
- Can any iPod handle ALAC tracks? If so, I'm willing to encode the chunk of my library that I'm willing to take with me into ALAC just for that reason.
- I've heard a lot of horror stories about apple DRM and stripping that off (mainly from DDL gurus etc.) but does that cause issues when playing music on iPods? That is, will it check to see whether the track has DRM on it or not?
- Their headphone jacks. This is a deal breaker for me; are they 2.5" or 3.5"? The entirety of the Apple website doesn't mention that fact, and I find it bloody retarded that they feel mentioning impedance takes precedence over the supported headphone plug sizes.
- Do iPods have inbuilt shuffle/randomizing features? I'd probably use this thing just to run around with it randomizing the ~8GB's of music I'll stick in there. I won't be carrying any full length albums.
- Are there any OS short-comings I should know about? I remember helping a friend tweak a custom OS for one of his PMP's a while back, and some parts of the old OS had restrictions like ~800 songs library etc. I don't want to have limitations like that out-of-the-box; so is there anything of the sort? Max bitrates limitations would fall in here, if anyone has experienced anything similar in ipods before.
- I'd appreciate if I wasn't recommended anything besides the nano. I've done my general lookup (iriver/sansa etc.) and I truly don't think anything besides it would please me.
