[BGK]

Can someone please explain this? Does this mean that the other 9 hours and 40 minutes MP3s are prone to skipping on it like CDs?

[rampant]

Flash or ram stick Mp3 players dont' have a harddrive, and cannot skip because they aren't reading from anything physical. A Firewire HD, like a CD, will skip if you jump on it, thus the need for antishock.

[vvedge]

if you dont get anti-skip... its when a reader reads ahead so many seconds (and in this case minutes), and stores them in memory.

If the device is severely jolted, it will continue to read from the stored memory, and not skip. Without it, you would hear every jolt and interruption.. and thats bad...

[oscar]

The next logical question is this: Why 20 minutes, and not 5?

it caches 20 minutes of audio, and then the drive spins down, saving battery life.

[Nebagakid]

i think apple is just pushing words out there to impress other folks :o

[Jerommeke]

you can jump and jog and run for 20 minutes without having a problem in your music quality

seems funny to me how those times are being tested

[Nebrie]

Originally posted by oscar:
<STRONG>The next logical question is this: Why 20 minutes, and not 5?

it caches 20 minutes of audio, and then the drive spins down, saving battery life.</STRONG>

The battery life savings are signifigant as well. Anyone who owns an IBM Microdrive will attest to the drive's instant-death battery feature

[dopeavy]

The 20 minutes of protection comes from the 32MB flash memory that comes with the device. This was a smart thing. Other MP3 players are limited by the amount of memory, some have hundreds of megs. But non can approach 5GB. Apple used a 5GB drive to actually store the music and then a 32 MB flash memory card. So, the player reads the first 20 minutes of songs into memory so that you will never hear a skip from the drive being bumped. This also saves battery life from the drive not spinning. The benefit is the best of both worlds - stoarge capacity and anti skip. Your CD player at home, in your PC, in your car - all of them - emplpy this same feature. They buffer 1-2 MB of data to avoid any skips as a result of the CD being bumped. Apple is doing the same thing to avoid the high costs of several GIG's of flash ram and give you the option of several gigs of storage at the same time. - See my post - "iPod - Seven reasons"

[BGK]

thanks to everyone for this information. it was very helpful.