September 28, 2006
Zune
So, after the iPod price drops Microsoft has rethought their offering and lowered their initial price. Like with the Xbox, they'll be taking a loss per-unit to try and break into the market. But even at a loss, they're charging slightly more than the iPod (99c more).
Even more confusing is to buy songs for the Zune you buy "points" (80 points per dollar) and songs cost 79 points each. Obviously a ploy to get folks to think the music is cheaper than iTunes Stores $0.99 per track, as well as banking all of those single points that are going unspent, until you buy 79 songs then you will have enough extra points to buy one more.
If you do the math, the Zune tracks actually are cheaper, $0.9875 per track. You save a whopping $0.0025 (1/4 cent) per song compared to iTMS! So if you buy 396 Zune songs you'll make back the extra $0.99 you paid vs the $249 30GB iPod? After you buy 396 it's ALL PROFIT!
And it comes in BROWN too?
I can see the marketing headlines already: "Zune, the 'number two' music player!"
Posted by Kevin Railsback at 02:59 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
October 14, 2004
How-To: Podcasting (aka How to get Podcasts and also make your own)
Excellent HowTo from Phil Torrone @ EngadgetHow-To: Podcasting (aka How to get Podcasts and also make your own): "
This week’s How-To is a three part special complete with our first Engadget “Podcast” MP3. The first part is how to get “Podcasts” on your iPod. So what’s a Podcast? To put it simply, a Podcast is an audio file, a MP3, most likely, in talk show format, along with a way to subscribe to the show and have it automatically delivered to your iPod when you plug in to iTunes. The show isn’t live, so you can listen to it whenever you want.
Doc Searls may have said it best: “PODcasting will shift much of our time away from an old medium where we wait for what we might want to hear to a new medium where we choose what we want to hear, when we want to hear it, and how we want to give everybody else the option to listen to it as well.”For the second part of the how-to you can listen to a Podcast we made featuring Lenn Pryor and Phillip Torrone. It’s about 40 minutes long, and we’re thinking about doing one each week (let us know what you think, this was just a test).
The third part of the how-to is about making your own Podcast. Think of this as DIY Radio. We looked around for resources, and while there were many ways to do this, most required buying some sort of sound software application, so for our how-to we’re using a Mac, GarageBand (came free with our Mac), and two free sound tools.
Getting Podcasts on your iPod
Here are the Mac and PC ways to download the Podcast MP3s, with listings for some different feeds (audio shows) following.
Mac
On the Mac side of things, there’s iPodderX, which is basically a newsreader that reads RSS 2.0 feeds with enclosures. It takes those enclosures and automatically downloads them in the background. If the file is an audio file, it then moves it to iTunes for download to your iPod, so with iPodderX you constantly have fresh content to listen to. iPodderX downloads any type of file, (even Torrents) so you can wake up in the morning with a fresh set of audio shows, video programs, or whatever else you’ve subscribed to.
PC
iPodder.NETis a media aggregator that automatically downloads content to your machine. All you have to do is subscribe to RSS feeds, and your machine handles the rest for you. It integrates automatically with iTunes, creating playlists and synching with your attached iPod.
The Feeds
Once you’ve installed the Podcast retriever, add some feeds to which ever application you’re going to use.
Now, if you don’t want to use a tool to automatically download the MP3 podcast you can right click / option click this link and grab the MP3 directly. The good part about this method is that you don’t need an iPod, just anything that plays MP3s.
Here are some feeds that are currently floating around.
Engadget PodCast feed (our beta)
http://www.engadget.com/common/videos/pt/rss.xml
Adam Curry’s Daily Source Code
http://radio.weblogs.com/0001014/categories/dailySourceCode/rss.xml
Dave Slusher’s Evil Genius Chronicles
http://www.evilgeniuschronicles.org/audio/bittorrent.rss (Torrent Feed)
http://www.evilgeniuschronicles.org/cgi-bin/blosxom.cgi/index.rss20 (MP3 Feed)
Dave Winer’s The Scripting News
http://www.scripting.com/rss.xml
Legal Torrents
http://www.legaltorrents.com/musicrss.xml
Others
Keep an eye out here for new feeds, on podcaster.net, podcasts.org as well as googling for “podcasts” and also check out the Podcaster’s Yahoo Groups list. We’re also going to ping some friends who do web shows as well and see if we can help get their files up in Podcastable format. We’d love to see Off the Hook and Off the Wall, just to name a few.
Making your own Podcast
We suspect there are going to be a zillion ways to make your own Podcast, after we show you how we set up ours, we’ve also including some links for other methonds that people have posted up. Once we figure out how to do the same with our PC, we’ll have another how to on that as well. The main reason you need to do anything other than hit record in a sound app for a Podcast is you’re likely to want to have other people talking, with a proper Podcast you can use iChat and record both parties talking as well as mixing in music. In our first attempt we were able to invite a friend and talk, play music as well as feed other sounds, all recording to one final track in GarageBand.
Ingredients for our Podcast recording set up
Mac (15-inch G4 Powerbook)
Headphones
Microphone (we used the built-in mic)
Garage Band
SoundFlower + SoundBed (free)
Line-In (free)
We’re going to assume you have your Mac set up, Garageband is installed, headphones, mic and you have iChat running. We’re also going to list the applications that need to be downloaded, then how to configure them all.
Soundflower
The first apps to download are Soundflower and Soundbed. Soundflower is a Mac OS X system extension that allows applications to pass audio to other applications. Soundflower presents itself as an audio device, allowing any audio application to send and receive audio with no other support needed.
Once you install the Soundflower application, you’ll need to restart. Then it’s time to run SoundBed.
SoundBed
When using Soundflower to send audio to and from applications, you may find that you are not able to send audio through another device to monitor audio output. In those situations you can use Soundflowerbed, an application that resides in the Finder’s Menubar allowing you to tap into Soundflower channels and route them to an audio device.
While this is not required, it makes it easy to test audio devices and turn it all on and off.
Line-In
Line-In is a simple application for OS X to enable the soft playthru of audio from input devices. In simpler terms, you can use LineIn to play sound coming in through a microphone or any other device plugged in to your Sound In port.
Configuring the applications
Once you downloaded and installed the applications, now it’s time to route all the audio to their final destination: GarageBand.
Using Soundflower
Open the Sound Preferences (Apple Menu > System Preferences > Sound).
Click Sound Effects and select “Built-in Audio: Headphones”. This will play any sound effects through the headphones and not into the recording.
Click Output and click Soundflower (2ch). Before you do this you may want to adjust the volume, which is what you’re hearing in the headphones.
Click Input, again, adjusting the Input level if needed, and then Select Soundflower (2ch).
Later, if you want to turn Soundflower on or off on the fly, you can use Soundbed by opening it now, it appears in the FInder’s menubar as a flower.
Line-In
Next up, Line-In. Open the application and click “Enabled” “Built-in Audio” in the Input Device area and for Source choose “Internal Microphone”.
For Output in the Line-In under device choose “Soundflower (2ch) and for source default.
This will take the microphone sound and add it to the Soundflower audio, which is where we’re pushing all the audio to and then recording it.
iChat settings
Open up iChat and go to iChat > Preferences > Video.
For Microphone choose “Soundflower (2ch) and for Sound Output choose “Soundflower 2ch” again.
This takes the iChat sound (the person you’re going to chat with) and adds that to Soundflower for recording.
GarageBand
Open up Garageband, it will likely ask you to start a new song, so click “Create New Song”.
You can name yours whatever you want, and Save As any location you wish on your system. We chose test and put it on our Desktop. When starting a project, you also have other options such as Tempo, Time, Key, bpm, but we’re leaving those all as default, since we’re not going to be recording a song.
Click Create.
When GarageBand starts up, it will automatically have a Grand Piano track, click that track and then delete it (Track > Delete > Track).
Add a new track, Track > New Track. Click “Real Instrument” Vocals and “No Effects”. Also Choose “Stereo” in the Format selection. Click OK.
In preferences (GarageBand > Preferences > Audio/MIDI choose “Built-in Audio” for Audio Output and for “Soundflower (2ch) for Audio Input.
This will take all our sounds and record them directly in to GarageBand.
You are now ready to record. Believe it or not, this is the easy way to do this for now, though we suspect there will be a simple application that will do all of this (just like blogging started out complicated, then all these great tools hit the market). Once you hit record, you’re on your way. To add sound, we opened up MP3 files in Quicktime and played them in the beginning and end of the show. We also tested to see if playing sounds from website (Macromedia Flash) would get recorded too, and it does, so that means there’s a lot of potential to choose what types of sounds, music, and effects you want to add to a broadcast.
You can either have your friend on iChat before or after you start recording. We had our pal on the entire time just to do some testing, and that’s what we’re going to suggest here. Do some tests and bang away until all the settings are working and the results are what you’re happy with.
Once you’ve finished recording, click the record button again to stop recording. You can also click the rewind button here to listen to your handywork and make any edits if you wanted to.
Exporting to iTunes
Click File > Export to iTunes to export to iTunes, this is where we’re going to convert it to a MP3. iTunes will then open up and you can listen to it there as well, but we’re not done yet.
Exporting to MP3
iTunes can convert the huge file we just sent over to it and convert it to a MP3 all with the built in encoder. For this test we used the following settings:
iTunes > Preferences > Importing, Click Setting “Custom” and choose 32kbps for the Stereo bit rate, Quality Medium, Sample Rate 16.000 kHz, channels stereo and Stereo Mode: Joint Stereo. We may ultimately change these, but for now it sounds good the file it will create is under 10mb. Click OK and then click the song and Click Advanced > Convert Selection to MP3.
Once the file is converted, you can drag it out of iTunes to the desktop or find it via Music > iTunes > iTunes Music in your music folder.
From here you can send the file, post the file, put it on your iPod, whatever, but if you want people to download it automatically, here’s how.
Making the Podcast feed (RSS feed with enclosures)
RSS 2.0 allows you to have an enclosure (much like you’d send an email with an attachment), so after the feed is pulled down the file is there with no waiting (besides the download time, of course). The key premise is No More Click-Wait. Ideally, when your computer isn’t doing anything, it can be using RSS feeds to automatically download audio and video content. Anyone can do this, and there is no central authority, no spectrum to allocate, and it’s open to amateurs, just like the Internet itself. More on that here and here.
For our tests, and for now, here’s our Podcast RSS 2.0 feed that you can use.
Here’s what it looks like…at least the mp3 part that is…
<enclosure url=”http://http://www.engadget.com/common/videos/pt/Engadget_Podcast01.mp3” length=”1023800” type=”audio/mpeg”/>
Enclosure is where the file lives, length is how big it is, and the type is what it is.
So, there it is…as this gets easier, we’ll likely update with a new how-to, and if you’re looking for another way to do this, Hugo Schotman has an excellent overview of how he rolled his together.
Phillip Torrone can be reached via his personal site http://www.flashenabled.com
"
(Via Engadget.)
Posted by Kevin Railsback at 10:59 PM | TrackBack
August 20, 2004
Update: Duke iPods get Voice Recorders
When I posted in July about Duke handing out iPods to all incoming freshmen, my first thought was Why not give them the voice recorders so these are actually useful for more than music?
Belkin saw the opportunity, and has decided to give 1650 of their Voice Recorders to go along with the iPods.
Posted by Kevin Railsback at 12:11 AM | TrackBack
July 29, 2004
Wow... way cool iPod amp
Tubesville is a custom amp shop in NYC that builds whimsical bespoke amplifiers like this Victrola-oid iPod amp.
(via Gizmodo)
Posted by Kevin Railsback at 03:43 PM | TrackBack
July 22, 2004
Recently Played in iTunes
Delving deeper into the innards of Movable Type this evening, I found a link to a cool AppleScript on AWholeLottaNothing. It uses MT's TrackBack Pings to update your main index page with the tracks you've listened to recently in iTunes. Just set up a category for it (NowPlaying for example), set up that category to accept TrackBack Pings, and drop this into your Main Index template:
<MTPings category="NowPlaying" lastn="5">
<$MTPingExcerpt$><br />
</MTPings>
For details on setup, see here and here.
Cool stuff....
Posted by Kevin Railsback at 11:05 PM | TrackBack
July 20, 2004
Free iPods for all incoming Duke freshmen
Aren't there already enough distractions for freshmen?
Duke University has entered into an agreement with Apple to distribute iPods to all of the incoming freshmen this year - that's 1650 iPods! This agreement is part of an initiative to "encourage creative uses of technology in education and campus life" The iPods will have audio and text on them including special university content such as "faculty-provided course content, including language lessons, music, recorded lectures and audio books." Faculty will be assisted in creating new content for these devices by Duke's Center for Instructional Technology And here you thought iPods were just for music! [Slashdot]
Posted by Kevin Railsback at 10:24 AM | TrackBack
June 07, 2004
Airport Express... AP + music streaming
What a damn cool innovation... bundle an access point targetted at home users with the ability to stream any audio format from iTunes across your wired or wireless network. I could definitely see using this when travelling to set up an ad-hoc wireless network in conference rooms, hotel rooms, etc, aside from the streaming capability.
I can also use this to give my network-enabled PS2 a permanent 'net connection, instead of having to use my PowerBook or Denise's iBook to share its Airport link to the world when I want to play online games from the PS2. Cool!
Enjoy your iTunes music library in virtually any room of your house. Share a single broadband Internet connection and USB printer without inconvenient and obtrusive cables. Create an instant wireless network on the go. Extend the range of your current wireless network. How many devices do you need to do all this? Just one.Presenting AirPort Express. [www.apple.com/airportexpress]
Posted by Kevin Railsback at 03:44 PM | TrackBack
May 20, 2004
Quick Hymn / PlayFair howto
HOWTO: strip access-control from iTunes music
Today on Engadget: a HOWTO for using the open-source hymn utility to strip the access-controls out of iTunes Music Store tracks so that you can play them on devices that Apple hasn't approved.
(via /.) [Boing Boing]
Posted by Kevin Railsback at 10:45 AM | TrackBack
May 19, 2004
List of online music free/pay sites
Post by CDBaby about various online free and pay music sites:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=106760&cid=9085738
Posted by Kevin Railsback at 05:00 PM | TrackBack
April 27, 2004
iTunes and iTMS changes
I was playing around with FLAC this evening, contemplating whether it's time to re-import my whole CD collection once and for all in a lossless format so I don't have to do it again in the future. I ended up clicking over to the iTunes Music Store and what did I see on the front page? A link to "iTunes 4.5 (New features and download)"
Clicking the link takes you to a page with info on the new features of iTunes 4.5 and new stuff in iTMS. Free download singles each week, iMix playlist sharing, Music Videos and Movie Trailers sections of iTMS, Radio Charts with playlists from lots of radio stations, wishlists, WMA imports, and most important Lossless encoding built in to iTunes. Hopefully they mean FLAC, since they talk about 50% size reductions with no quality loss which is about what I've been getting with test tracks using MacFLAC.
If you go into the the Learn More page about iMix, there is a link to "Download the latest version of iTunes" but that just links to http://www.apple.com/itunes/download/ which still has the current version of iTunes available.
There's another link on the main iTMS page that says "iTunes Anniversary Free Download - Foo Fighters" but clicking it just takes you to the page for "The Colour and the Shape" album but no free track or free album info there. I'm guessing this will all change overnight and things will be live tomorrow.
Posted by Kevin Railsback at 11:48 PM | TrackBack
April 13, 2004
Pod Shield: Finally a thin clear iPod protector....
Pod Shield clear iPod protector. Way cool.
Trendy Geek on Tuesday introduced the Pod Shield, designed to protect your iPod from scratches, dirt and fingernails. The Pod Shield is made from a thin, transparent material that clings using static (instead of adhesive) to the front and back of your iPod. One size fits all iPods, old or new, although Trendy Geek notes that it's optimized for third-generation models. Each Pod Shield can be removed and re-applied.... [MacCentral]
Posted by Kevin Railsback at 09:44 PM | TrackBack
April 09, 2004
Streaming iTunes music remotely
From the MacWorld Editor's Notes blog:
Stream Your Home Music to Work... For Free
I have been impressed with Slim Devices' Squeezebox (4 mice, April 2004 issue) and its predecessor, the SLIMP3, for some time. But even if you don't have $249 to spend on an awesome network music player for your stereo cabinet, you can take advantage of Slim Devices' remarkably good server software to stream your home music library to your work. [Macworld Editors' Notes Weblog]
Way cool. I've wanted one of those SliMP3 or Squeezebox players, but they're a bit pricey. Being able to use the server side piece for remote streaming is an excellent compromise. The Slim Server can even reencode your music on the fly, so you can keep just your high quality version on your server (256kbps VBR MP3 or 192kbps AAC) but stream the music across the 'net to work at 128kbps.
Posted by Kevin Railsback at 11:55 PM | TrackBack
April 07, 2004
Cool iTMS RSS feeds
iTunes Top 10 Albums (RSS 1.0 feed)
iTunes Top 10 Songs (RSS 1.0 feed)
Posted by Kevin Railsback at 04:58 PM | TrackBack
April 05, 2004
Removing Fairplay DRM from iTMS songs
Over at MacSlash:
Tired of the DRM wrapper in songs purchased from the iTunes Music Store? An anonymous U.S. citizen has created a tool called playfair that strips the FairPlay DRM from those songs. From the README: "So what will playfair do for you? The playfair program is quite simple. It takes one of the iTMS Protected AAC Audio Files, decodes it using a key obtained from your iPod or Microsoft Windows system and then writes the new, decoded version to disk as a regular AAC Audio File. It then optionally copies the metadata tags that describe the song, including the cover art, to the new file." Note that this is not a GUI application. You'll need to have Xcode installed and chant the "configure/make/make install" mantra to build fairplay, then use it from the command line.... MacSlash
For my everyday use, the Fairplay workaround from Aaron Swartz that I posted yesterday works great. It allows me to play my .m4p music on all of my systems, instead of being limited to 3.
For the long term though, I don't really want to depend on the iTunes infrastructure to still exist in 10 years time. Without a non-DRM version of all of those iTMS AACs I would end up buying all of this music again. The switch from tape to CD wasn't too bad, since I didn't have a large music collection back then, but I want to make sure I won't have to make that transition again in the future.
Posted by Kevin Railsback at 10:26 AM | TrackBack
April 04, 2004
Authorizing more that 3 systems for iTMS AACs
Aaron Swartz gives an excellent in-depth explanation of how the iTunes Music Store and Freeplay (the Digital Restrictions Management technology used to protect iTMS files) work here.
Here's the Fairplay part, and the simple procedure for doing a phantom authorization of a system:
The iTunes client hashes some system information to get a unique ID for the computer. It sends this hash to the iTunes server. If it doesn't already have three hashes, the iTunes server attaches this hash to the user's account and sends back the account's decryption key. The key is stored in iTunes's SC Info file, encrypted using the hash (so the file cannot be moved to another computer).When you go to play a song, iTunes simply hashes the information together, uses this to decrypt the SC Info file and retrieve the key, and uses the key to decrypt and play the song.
(The hash is MD5 and the song encryption is AES.)
When you place an encrypted song on an iPod, it decrypts the SC Info file, reencrypts it using the hash of the iPod's info, and copies the resulting SC Info file to the iPod.
Deauthorization simply runs the process backwards: the hash is sent to Apple, Apple removes it from their list, and the SC Info file on the local machine is deleted.
This leads to a hole in the system which allows you to authorize as many computers as you want: authorize the computer, make a backup of the SC Info file, deauthorize the computer, replace the SC Info file with the backup. Now the computer thinks it's authorized to play songs, but the store thinks it isn't (and thus allows you to authorize other computers).
Excellent detective work, Aaron. FYI, the SC Info file is found in /Users/Shared/SC Info/SC Info.sidb in case you don't feel like searching for it. It's hidden in Finder of course, but you can see it from the command line.
Standard disclaimer applies. This shouldn't be used as a way of allowing an unlimited number of machines to play your .m4p's. but is a good way to extend your fair use rights so you're not limited to playing the music on only 3 of your systems. =)
Posted by Kevin Railsback at 04:58 PM | TrackBack
April 02, 2004
RSS to speech to iPod? Cool!
Playing around with iSpeak It 1.5, which uses the Mac's built in text-to-speech ability to create mp3/aac files from any text source. That can include Word docs, PDFs, RTF, HTML, etc, so you could have your favorite RSS feeds converted to audio then sync'd automatically to your iPod every morning, to listen to on your commute.
May be more trouble than it's worth, but the voice simulation tech is getting good enough that I can definitely see this becoming a viable option in the near future.
Now, what really would be cool is a speech-to-blog gateway so you could just record your thoughts on the fly with any voice recorder, cell phone, or iPod with the mic kit and then have it generate the blog entries for you.
Posted by Kevin Railsback at 10:49 PM | TrackBack
March 30, 2004
iPod: This Season's Must-Have for Muggers
iPod: This Season's Must-Have for Muggers
KH writes "West Midlands police have issued a stark warning to iPod users: ditch the white headphones or pay the price." Apparently, muggers recognize the ... [Slashdot]