EMI is rumored to announce tomorrow, with Steve Jobs on hand, that they will be now selling their music with no DRM baked in. Way to go EMI, now just get your other music label buddies to follow you to the good side and the world will be a better place. (via Daring Fireball)
Just to show EMI some love, I will find something to buy from them. They’ve earned it.
Smart Playlists Auto-Update on the iPod
Smart Playlists is one of iTunes strongest, and probably most under-used features. You can make an automatic playlist with nearly any criteria you want – a particular word in the title, the number of times a track has played (or not played), how you’ve ranked a track (either good or bad) and so on. iTunes comes preloaded with a few smart playlists, one for ’90′s Music’, ‘Recently Added’, and ‘Top 25 Most Played’. Well, you can also make a Smart Playlist to make all of your podcasts play one after another, which is the point of this rambling.
I’ve got roughly 30 podcasts that I subscribe to. Most are fairly short, coming in at under 10 minutes in length (C|NET, Slate, Onion Radio, various NPR shorts). While it’s pretty easy to pick out and play a single podcast on the iPod, it becomes cumbersome when you’ve got a dozen episodes to listen to because you have to let a single podcast run thru to the end, have it go back to the main menu, and then navigate manually to the next program to want to listen to.
You can make a Smart Playlist that puts all of your unplayed episodes into one playlist and they will all run in one long really good radio program. Go to File -> New Smart Playlist
You should get a window similar to the photo accompanying this post (click on the photo for a larger version). Choosing the genre and play count are key – putting a restriction on the time is my personal choice. Set genre to ‘Podcast’, and play count to ’0′. I chose to make this playlist a collection of all the short stuff because I want to make sure that I have the time to listen to a longer podcast. 20 minutes works well for what I’ve subscribed to.
Now, while this so far has been a mind-blowing ‘Oh God why didn’t I think of that’, this next revelation will just make you weep with just how amazing the iPod really is. Make sure that ‘Live Updating’ option is checked. If you’ve got a newer iPod (Nano, and I would assume Video iPods) this playlist updates itself live, on the iPod, away from iTunes. So, you can start with a jam-packed playlist and as you listen to each episode they drop out of the playlist one by one. The smart playlist works for the older iPods, but does not update itself away from iTunes. Despite not auto-updating on the older iPods this tip is most-usefull for you long-time iPod users. Your iPods don’t show what podcast episodes you’ve listened to already. Newer iPods place a dot before new episodes, just like in iTunes. For the 3G and earlier iPods this smart playlist takes the guessing out of ‘have I listened to this yet’? Let me know if this works differently on any of the various iPod models that I’ve not been able to test it on.
As I Like to Think Paulie Shore Would Say: Linkage
Notable links from around the web that don’t really need a full post about them:
- Why did Google make their page building doohicky? I could see it as a way to pretty up your Google home page, but if thats not whats its for, then I really don’t see the point. Thats all I’ll say for now, everyone is pretty much beating this story to death already.
- iTunes finally hit the 1 Billion mark, and some lucky bastard hit the Apple jackpot by winning that contest.
- The MacBook Pro gets it first real review. What a surprise, it was done by MacWorld.
- Gadgetopia discovers the thrilling world of Snow Melters.
- kit_kat008 is proclaiming her self a slacker and is pondering the whole “Why should I blog if noone is reading it?” Been there. The secret it just write about fart jokes. Who doesn’t like fart jokes? Trust me it works. Even if noone reads it, its still funny to you. If you are feeling like a giver, head over to her blog and drop a comment.
Update: It seems that kit_kat008 has turned off her comments to people that aren’t listed as her “friend” on livejournal. I think that might be a major thing to recitify before one blogs about how no one comments on their blog.
Jumping Steve Is Very Entertaining
Sometimes its the simple things in life that fully entertain you during every commercial break in American Chopper on another slow Monday night at Hell Yeah Bitch! headquarters. Tonight, that thing was Jumping Steve. Here’s the in depth explanation on what exactly “Jumping Steve” is directly from their website, just in case you can’t figure it out by the picture above.
Jumping Steve is an iTunes visualizer with an animated Jumping Jack of Steve Jobs that will dance to your music.
If anyone downloads and uses this and does not laugh, then they clearly have no soul and they probably spend their time stomping on kittens, kicking old ladies and never using a blinker in his car. Seriously, there is not excuse for not using your blinker.
I should also mention that Jumping Steve will only work on a PowerPC OS X machine.
Via: TUAW
I am Totally into Podcasts
Bring ‘em on – the more the merrier. I gravitate towards the tech podcasts (This Week in Tech, Diggnation, CNET BuzzCast, SETI) and news casts – NPR has a ton of their stuff available for download. I drive a lot for work and regular radio is just not an option. On average my iPod has about 10-15 hours worth of podcasts at any one particular time. I could go on with what I listen to, but no one cares.
The point of this ramble-in-progress is that with the 33 different podcasts that I subscribe to, iTunes starts to break down a bit. iTunes will pull the newest RSS feed from all the podcasts all at once. This is not too bad since it’s just text that is being transfered. But then it tries to download every single new episode also all at once – 10 or 15 or more large mp3′s all fighting for bandwidth.
I’ve found that because of this a good number of episodes just die in downloading and you end up with 5 minutes of a 30 minute show. One of my CNET BuzzCasts was 9 seconds long.
There is no ‘reload podcast’ button.
If iTunes choked your internet connection and botched a download your S.O.L. You can’t reset the feed to redownload an episode. You may be able to unsubscribe and then resubscribe and get a new feed but that is a pain in the ass and I’ve not tried it (and won’t).
Please iTunes, do two things for me in your next version:
1) Download just one mp3 at a time.
2) Give me the option to redownload a podcast that got botched in transfer.
Love & Thanks, Dan.
How To Download iTunes Music Videos For Free
How’s about three “How To” posts in a row? Ok, great idea! Here’s another one:
Derek at Uneasy Silence has written a little PHP script that translates the iTunes links to regular links so that one could download videos from their servers.
Let me explain. The iTunes Music Store has music videos that you can play, for free, through the iTunes program (Which is really just a specialized web browser.) Well, Derek found the way to translate the links that are used in the store to links that you can access with any broswer (like Firefox)
So if you want to download any of the music videos on iTunes, just right click on the “Small” or “Large” links and copy them. Then head on over to his translator and paste in the link. It will then hand you back a regular link to download that Kelly Clarkson video you’ve had your eye on! Right? …Just me? Ok then, download whatever you want, but your missing out!
iTunes 5 and some crappy phone
Meanwhile at Apple’s media event….
iTunes 5 has been announced, and released today at some point. It sports a new, cleaner look and options for a more refined shuffle.
Here is a great, blurry bigfoot-type picture of the new iTunes.
They also released some crappy phone with Motorola(picture).
But here is the big news: All of Madonna’s music is now available on the iTunes Music store! Finally you too can tie a string around your wrist and talk about how important your money-grubbing religion is while listening to Madonna on your iPod (or crappy cell phone).
Update: There’s more (thank god). Looks like an iPod Nano?
If I were you I would keep checking that flickr gallery below for more.
Pictures courtsey of ipodlounger’s flicker page
What’s your Podcast subscription list?
Before iTunes 4.9 added podcasting support I didn’t listen to all that much content. It was too difficult and scattered to keep track of the podcasts, and I only found the ones that were mentioned on some random blog. I followed the TWiT Cast and that was it. With iTunes though, my list of shows has grown substantially. At the moment I’m following Diggnation, Engadget, Gillmore Gang, The MacCast, MAKE, Battlestar Galactica, NPR Science Friday, Chris Pirillo and I’m still with the TWiTs.
I’m wondering for how long I can keep up with all the audio (I already don’t listen to every file I download) and what’s going to be first to be removed from my list. As far as I can tell from other people’s experiences it’s not uncommon to subscribe to a dozen feeds and whittle that down to 3-4 after a while.
Like every company wanting to push a product, Apple had good self-centric motives on adding support for podcasts. An average song is what? 2, 4 minutes max? But podcasts can go on for 30 minutes to an hour or more (damn long-winded GillmoreGang). If we’re just talking music moving from house to car is no big deal. I’m not involved in listening to music – it’s in the background so walking out on a song is easy. Podcasts though, it’s a show and I want to keep listening to that conversation wherever I go until the show is done.
Every time I have to pause a podcast because I have to take my dog on a walk, every time I have pause to go to work I get a twinge of frustration and irritation that I can’t keep listening to my show.
That twinge of frustration is immediately followed by the desire for an iPod.
And now they’ve got color screens (not like that has anything at all to do with podcasting, but dang it’s cool).
I’ll be placing an iPod order sometime soon.
Blue Coconut, I love you.
Today Paul Mison released a new version of Blue Coconut, and if you are like me you have never heard of it. It turns out Blue Coconut is a wonderful little app / Apple Script that allows the user to download tracks that are shared by other people via iTunes. The real beauty comes when you find out that you don’t need any software to run to the person that is sharing the files…its strictly client based! Beautiful. Actually, I don’t really go around a lot and find shared iTunes libraries, but every time I do find one, there is always a song or two that I really wish I could have.
Now, I should tell you that Blue Coconut just downloads the shared files as they are…meaning you can only get files that are shared, not just any music on that computer and if they bought that song via the iTunes music store the DRM on that song will be downloaded along with it.
Oh yeah, one more thing…Apple OS X only folks. So this download is only for the cool kids.
Link: Blue Coconut [via] TUAW
iTunes meets Podcasting
Apple has finally unveiled their latest update to iTunes. iTunes 4.9‘ only real new feature is its integrated support for podcasts (Don’t know what podcasting is? Click on the last link and Apple will be glad to tell you.)
I’ve already downloaded the new iTunes on my work PC and its not bad. Podcasts are directly integrated into iTunes just as you would think Apple would do it: Very smoothly. But the question is does anyone care? For those that are very serious podcast listners, and there are plenty of them out there, iTunes’ upgrade might not be enough power and have enough features for them. For me? I really only listen to the occasional podcast so this is great. Being able to deal with all of that in one application is what I was looking for. We’ll have to wait and see if Apple tries to make this into more of a business model that just the current model which is just making you pass through their store to get to the ‘casts.