Special needs for iPod

vanguard

Registered
I have a 2 year old with special needs. One of the things that he does is listening therapy. Basically, he listens to special music through special headphones a few times a day.

The music is your normal kids stuff (wheels on the bus go round and round, abc song, bingo, etc.) but the tone is modulated so that it varies up and done. One second it's high pitched, a few seconds later it's low pitched. These changes are critical to giving him an "auditory workout" and the loss associated with converting to MP3 would not be acceptable.

My problem is that the CD player we use now doesn't do well keeping up with a 2 year old. It skips, it stops playing, it's large, etc.

Questions:
1) Can the iPod shuffle play a format that has no loss at all? Is it hard to do?
2) Does the iPod shuffle use a normal headphone jack? Our therapy headphones are standard but I want to make sure the iPod is too.
 
I am pretty sure the shuffle supports all the audio formats that the normal iPods can. So you should be able to put uncompressed wavs on the iPod, it won't hold a ton of songs but it should work.

Also you could try using the apple lossless codec and cranking up the bitrate. The higher the bitrate, the better the sound will be.

As far as the headphone jack goes, it is the standard 1/8 inch headphone jack.
 
apple's AAC codec (which is the default on itunes) has been developed with Bose and apple, and testers from Dolby were unable to distinguish it from the CD at 128kbps. it's basically a modern MP3 (mp3 being more than a decade old now). that's an option.

the other option is apples lossless codec. it compresses it completly losslessly, so the sound is untouched, but the files sizes are not small (they are however smaller than the uncompressed wav). you may not be able to fit many on a shuffle, perhaps 25-50 songs. all ipods support this.


all ipods use a standard 3.5mm jack.
 
If I do remember correctly, the latest iPod updaters make it possible for even iPod shuffles to support Apple Lossless codec. That as Burns tells, does not lose quality. The files sizes are about 50 % of the original, so you can fill the 512 MB iPod shuffle with about 1 GB of CD quality material - which I believe is plenty in this case, about 1,5 CDs of 70 minutes, so 100 minutes of really high quality; the 1 GB double these.

And all standard headphones should fit. So I think shuffle will be great for your son - easy to use, light, hard to destroy ... :) and encoding to Lossless is easy - in iTunes options you select how you want to encode your music, there you can select Lossless for all the music he needs.
 
Capacity
512MB or 1GB USB flash drive(1)
Holds 120 or 240 songs in 128-Kbps AAC format(2)
Stores data via USB flash drive

Audio
Skip-free playback
Frequency response: 20Hz to 20,000Hz
MP3 (8 to 320 Kbps), MP3 VBR, AAC (8 to 320 Kbps), Protected AAC (from iTunes Music Store, M4A, M4B, M4P), Audible (formats 2, 3 and 4) and WAV
Upgradable firmware enables support for future audio formats

Headphones
Earbud-style headphones with 18-mm drivers using Neodymium transducer magnets
Frequency response: 20Hz to 20,000Hz
Impedance: 32 ohms
 
in that case, rip the cd's into aac at 160kbps or higher. it should be nearly indistinguishable, even to the most sensitive of ears.
 
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