Friday, August 29, 2003

iPod and iTunes: equalizer settings

About the Equalizer

This is fairly confusing! iTunes has a global equalizer and "presets". Presets are assigned to a song through the "get info" fields. If the global equalizer is enabled it overrides the presets, if its disabled the presets work.

This makes sense. One could set the equalizer to "classical" as a default behavior, but enable the global equalizer for "small speakers" when not connected to a quality sound system.

It's not quite so logical on the iPod. Assume there's an iTunes preset already.

- If the iPod EQ setting is "Off", the iTunes preset is ignored.
- If the iPod EQ is "Flat", the iTunes preset is used. (If there isn't one, no equalization is done.)
- Any other setting: the iTunes preset is used! In other words the setting is ignored.

The last seems wrong to me. The correct behavior should be to override the iTunes preset. Otherwise, when there's an iTunes preset present, the third option is meaningless. If one hooks small speakers to the iPod, for example, one may wish to switch to a "small speaker" setting.

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