The classic retains the supported codecs of the fifth-gen video iPod -- it plays MP3s, AACs, Apple Lossless, WAV, AIFF music files and audiobooks from Audible. It'll also handle high-quality video in H.264 MPEG-4 format, plus QuickTime movies and your photo libraries. No longer can you output video via the headphone socket though. Apple now forces you to buy another proprietary video cable for playing content on your TV. So much for investing in Apple accessories.
Some fun games are included, including a game show-esque title called iPod Quiz, which asks a plethora of questions about your music collection. Any games you've already bought from the iTunes Store won't work, or indeed any you go ahead and buy now. Rumour has it that a firmware update is coming to rectify this issue, but hasn't been confirmed at the time of writing.
A handy search feature lets you tap out words to search for in your library. Again, this instantaneous search mimics the lightning-fast system in iTunes. Podcasts no longer reside inside the 'music' sub-menu; they now sit as an option within the main menu. Still sitting in the 'extras' menu, however, are the stopwatch, calendar, alarm clocks, notes, contacts and so on. No new additions here.
Performance
Sound quality is mostly unchanged and if
you don't use decent headphones, you won't notice anything.
Significantly, Apple has changed its supplier of audio-decoding chips.
These are responsible for sound quality, and until now Apple has used
chips from Wolfson Microelectronics. The new chips from Cirrus Audio
produce a moderately 'cleaner' sound, with a marginal increase in
treble. Maximum volume is also slightly lower, though playing an iPod
through headphones at maximum volume has never been a good idea.
We pumped a lossless rip of Electric Uncle Sam by Primus through our classic, using our Denon AH-D5000 headphones. Highs were neatly defined and exceptionally clear, and mids were punchy and powerfully well-reproduced. The unfathomably deep and explosive bass of Pendulum's Tarantula was nothing short of galactic in its warmth and power. Whether you're calmly enjoying KT Tunstall or revelling in the sound of a thousand suns imploding, you'll be happy with the sound the classic produces.
Navigating through the main menu, however, can quickly become tedious. When you return to the main menu, album art is loaded from the hard disk. This requires the iPod to find the art on a spinning disk. This takes up to three seconds, during which you might find yourself getting frustrated. This can almost certainly be fixed with a firmware update from Apple. Cover Flow works well, though. The classic loads a great deal of art in one go, but if you have a boat-load of music, fast scrolling results in some generic covers as the 'Pod catches up with itself.
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User reviews4
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Chris_Ryles 11 September 2011
Good: HUGE storage, Menus
Bad: Nothing
Comment: This is my favourite bit of tech that I own. Over my phone, computer- everything. It take pretty much every song you've ever heard and fit it in your pocket. Sounds great, looks great preforms great. I have 7500 songs and over 24 hours of video on mine and I've just passed 50% capacity. Awesome
rlankine 22 November 2007
Good: Memory size, physical robustness
Bad: Slow and unreliable firmware (v1.0.2)
Comment: I bought my iPod classic in mid-October and started converting my collection of ~40000 MP3's to AAC@128 . While doing it for a couple of weeks the iPod worked just fine - if perhaps a bit slow when load playing lists and other UI features. Alas, when nearly all of my collection was converted, my iPod froze during sync so badly that even Apple service could not revive it and replaced it with a new one. So I synced that one, it froze, too, and was exchanged. And so on... I'm now at my fourth unit, and after reducing the number of my iTunes play lists (from ca. 75 to ca. 60) it sort-of works. It still reboots spontaneously in random places related to playlists, searching, shuffling, and loading lengthy lists of e.g. artists, but it can be used when it works and exchanged when it locks up next time.
Anyway, I'll continue experimenting (and also awaiting a better firmware update) as long as Apple is willing to replace frozen units at no cost to me. I really wish they'de get the FW right, since it is the only player on the market having the size (160B) large enough to contain all of my music collection.
FWIW, I run Windows Vista in a genuine Intel laptop no older than three months.
Greeny 20 October 2007
Good: The menus are great but the Storage is incredible
Bad: Slightly slow loading on the coverflow
Comment: Apple have very nearly perfected the Ipod now. I recently got an 80Gb Classic and have been blown away by new menus and its interface with my computer. It took me about 10 minutes to load 2000 songs onto it and about 5 minutes to load 14 hours of video. The menus have been designed around the old 5th generation Ipods but have been revamped and modernized and have your cover art floating around in the background which is a nice aesthetic touch. The one thing everyone seems to be raving about with this new Ipod is the coverflow feature. This does look good but means you have to go through your whole library getting the correct art. This gets even more complicated if you have lots of compilations or older albums that don't have the cover art necessary. On the Ipod this feature takes a while to load and if you have lots of albums, when you flick through there is a lot of generic grey before it loads. Despite this the Ipod classic is a quality piece of kit and I would recommend it to anyone who has more than 1000 tracks in there library. If you have less than that then I would recommend the new nano or an equivalent as you will never get near filling this beast.
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