heyjp,

I heard that it makes possible high quality 24kbs audiobooks. That with the bookmaring ability of .m4b would be great for my purposes. I believe Vodaphone is already using it, I presume for their phone transmissions. AAC Plus is also being used with DiVx to enable better video compression.

AAC is currently really no better than MP3 at low bit rates as it is optimised for 128kbs.

If it were possible to reduce audiobooks or web transmission of speech from an acceptable quality at 32kbs down to 24kbs, this would at one stroke reduce transmission by 1/4 or increase bandwisth or storage capacity by a third. Both could revolutionise web radio, audio information purchased on the web, VoIP, video phones or a number of uses still to be discovered.

AAC is low complexity compression so I presume requires less number crunching in the authoring app. AAC Plus is high complexity compression and by inference requires more processing, but I don't know what is required to de-compress it and whether the iPod has sufficient processing power to do it.

Makes it hard to plan ahead. I hardly want to toss a newly purchased iPod if it can't subsequently do the job. Likewise neither do I want to reprocess my audio, yet again.

You plug it right into your usb port

Apple knows the value of simplicity. Part of its design genius is understanding that leaving features out is as impt. as putting them in.

That said, the iPod Shuffle would have benefited greatly from supporting multiple playlists. This could have been done very simply and cleanly by adding up/down buttons for cycling through playlists- just like changing the station presets on a radio.

I would have bought a shuffle to supplement my regular iPod, but I need a different kind of music for exercising than I do for walking down the street.

No LCD shocked me at first, but then I recognized this as classic Apple design insight into what's important, and what's expendable. I wish I could say the same about the decision to force users to throw 240 songs into one big "pot."