Tag: itunes

Now this is podcasting

And like that….they were gone. All podcast software writers must be jumping with joy now that iTunes 4.9 is out with podcast support – not. No need for iPodder or Odeo (nice knowing you) when iTunes supports it all from within the one package for free. Speaking of free I notice that all the podcasts have the word ‘Free’ text to the subscribe button – I can see some podcasts costing a few pennies in the not too distant future but for the majority to keep a fan base and charge the quality will need to increase. then again with the BBC and other broadcasters looking at podcasting, web technologies and alternative revenue streams it seems only a matter of time before a charging model is introduced. If thousands are willing to pay for ringtones who knows how big the podcasting market could grow to. Podcasts in iTunes also support chapters with pictures for each chapter and clickable links in iTunes. All sounds like a step to a new format of audible books and makes more sense when you think how easy it is to buy from the iTunes Music Store?

There’s some nice features for managing podcast transfers to the iPod – all episodes of a podcast, latest episodes only etc. I can’t see a feature I’m missing right now that I’ve seen in other software so this looks to be a good update to iTunes and a reduction in the amount of apps I need on the pc which is officially a good thing.

Also new is the iPod. No more iPod photo, the 20Gb and 60Gb iPod’s both have colour screens and support for bookmarking podcasts and displaying album and podcast art as well as photo’s. £299 for a 60Gb iPod is very tempting. Nice updates from Apple – again.

Rated

Finally I have achieved one of my long term goals. It’s not one of those vitally important life changing ones, but it brought a smile none the less. All 3501 songs in my iTunes library have now been rated and listened to at least once. Joy. The advantages this brings……mmm. Well, the playlists will be fully functional and at least I’m able to listen to all my top rated music. The radio playlist will also work 100% with all my music. And that’s it. Thank you for listening.

iPodder

I’ve been using iPodder for a few weeks now with mixed results. iPodder allows you to download podcasts of your choosing to your iPod. Podcasts, in case you didn’t know, are audio files (like normal radio broadcasts) that can be easily downloaded from the net and stored on your iPod, or any digital player for that matter – pc, Xbox etc.

While the software works well and integrates nicely with iTunes, it’s the quality of the content I’ve been most disappointed with. Out of the popular top 10, Reel Reviews, IT Conversations and Engadget have been the only ones that perked my interest with the rest being fairly poor. Adam Curry (who started off the concept of podcasting) was just irritating – if I want to listen to someone coughing in my ear I’ll just listen to the guys in the office whose banter is far more entertaining. The others I have tried have been fairly poor. I guess it’s no surprise really as like blogging, some things should be left to the professionals. Still worth a try even for the two shows above although it goes without saying that this is for broadband users only – the IT Conversations shows can run over an hour…but they can at least be fast forwarded for when they get a little dry.

Playlist meme

From d2r, select whole music library and list the next random ten tracks that are automatically selected by your music app.

Mine are (thanks to the grammer Nazi):

Whatever Happened To Corey Haim – The Thrills
Johnny Come Lately – Catatonia
Don’t You Want Me Felix – Felix
The Drugs Don’t Work – The Verve
Shes The One – Robbie Williams
Flowers In The Window – Travis
Escape – Muse
…Baby One More Time – Britney Spears
I can’t give it up – Artful Dodger
Start Me Up – The Rolling Stones
With Or Without You – U2

Band Aid

Watched the documentary last night and finally came to the conclusion that I should have made ages ago – the quality of the song is irrelevant. It’s all about the money. It doesn’t matter who sings, how it’s arranged or whether the rap should have been included (although thankfully Justin from Darkness didn’t get to sing Bono’s line as what I heard last night was awful). We need to buy it and we need to contribute what we can and hope that one day the politicians will one day make a sensible decision and write off third world debt which I know is over simplistic but the millions that will be raised will not even dent the problems in Africa.

The original Band Aid was my first ever record purchase…20 years ago. To mark this anniversary I made it my first purchase from iTunes Music store…and then bought the Band Aid 20 version.

iTunes Update

Well, Apple have sold 1 million tracks in the 3 days since the windows version of iTunes was released. Very impressive, but hopefully they will fix a couple of issues with the software. The biggie for me is that iTunes dumps every file mp3 file into one folder on the iPod meaning it skips tracks when trying to seek a file. Other software spreads the tracks through 20 folders to avoid this problem. Apart from this is all works pretty well.

However the increasing amount of mp3’s means I need a new hard disk. 45 gig just isn’t enough anymore, and thats without backup! So I’ve ordered a 120 gig Seagate which will hopefully get here for the weekend. Then its just a case of starting from scratch with Windows. Lovely. An hour to install, probably 2 hours downloading from Windows update. Then I can start to install some software. All legal off course 😉