8 Feb 2004 by Chris     No Comments    Posted under: Other Stuff

iPod: cool but where’s the crossfade ability?

OK, I’ve got myself an iPod at last. Lovely bit of technology, and the way it hoovers up everything from iTunes on your Mac is quite astonishing. OK, I’ve made Dawn into a bit of an iPod Widow for the past fortnight, frantically organising all my iTunes library on the iMac. But I’m sure she understands. However, there’s one major disappointment with the iPod: it can’t handle iTunes’ crossfades between tracks! They don’t tell you about that in the publicity, do they? And surprisingly, it’s a topic which seems to have been very sparingly discussed in the forums. If you’re playing your iTunes library in random mode (and who doesn’t?), the one downer is the jarring cuts into tracks which are part of a continuous piece, such as live tracks. With crossfading, the tracks fade in and out much more smoothly. I get the impression that from a hardware point of view the iPod probably could handle crossfades, so we just wait in eager anticipation for a software upgrade on that front.

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