Results tagged “iPod” from ScottandMargo.net

"Gizmodo iPhone Hands On Part Deux: Why Isn't it White and Other Questions" via TUAW

Gizmodo's reporting that, among other things, that the iPhone isn't really running OSX and that they're not going to allow third-party developer support. I guess that answers a couple of questions that I had about it.

That's kind of disappointing. I understand Apple's need to keep the platform pristine and seamless and that they tend to do that by strictly controlling what goes on it (like the way the iPod is controlled). I'm guessing that any applications that come out for the iPhone will be handled through the iTunes store like the iPod games are.

That's a little disappointing to me. Restricting third-party development support like this makes the iPhone a prettier but less flexible Windows mobile phone. The Cingular 8525 isn't as slick, but it's a lot more flexible and ultimately usable because I can go out and find (or potentially write) the software I need to do what I want with it.

Technorati Tags: Apple, Gadgets, iPod, iTunes, Marketing, Technology

I mentioned this earlier and here's the pics.

It started with a realization that the iPod earbuds kinda suck. I started doing a bit of research into what I could do about it. The goal was to go as far into Hi-Fi territory as I could without spending a lot of money. I was originally going to just get a nice pair of headphones.

The Yamaha HP-1 headphones are othodynamic semi-enclosed studio headphones from the 70's. They have a reputation for sounding great and being relatively inexpensive to buy. I got these for just shy of $20 on eBay including shipping. Being vintage headphones, they're pretty inefficient though...125 Ohm, actually. I don't expect that my Nano is going to have the juice to drive these things.

Time to find a headphone amplifier. Again, I found something with a reputation for sounding good and not being horribly expensive....the Little Dot II+. I also picked up an iPod line-out to stereo RCA cable to hook the Nano up to try to get the cleanest signal into the amp that I could.

Results? Yummy. Lots of detail. Way better than the stock iPod earbuds for sure. The bass isn't huge, but I'm not after that...I want a good, balanced sound which is what I'm getting with this setup. The amp's a bit too microphonic and I'm having a hard time finding a good way to isolate it from the vibrations in our furniture but other than that I'm really, really happy with this setup. I'd put it up against any other sub-$200 iPod headphone solution.

Technorati Tags: Gadgets, iPod, Music

A look behind the iPod/iTunes report - Paul Thurrott's Internet Nexus

This analysis pops up every year, it seems. Someone does the math on how many songs iTunes has sold and divides by the number of iPods are out there, and the number they end up with is pretty small.

I'm one of those people. Here's a screenshot of my Purchased folder in iTunes (7):

I've had an iPod for almost 2 years now (since the first Shuffles came out in Jan 2005) and I have five songs Purchased from the iTunes Music Store. Three of those are from the 5-track sampler that I got free when I registered my Shuffles. I deleted two of those songs since because they suck. I like TKO so that'll always be around. The other two haven't been listened to recently enough for me to decide whether to delete them...though the Blow It Out track has a 1-star rating, which I use as a "this sucks" marker. I'm a bit of a NIN fanboy, so when The Hand That Feeds came out, iTunes was the faster way to get it (I have the CD single too, and the vinyl picturedisc). I needed Cars for something relatively quickly so I didn't have time to track down a copy of The Pleasure Principle to use it from there.

I will probably always prefer buying CDs over digital downloads of songs. Gary Numan's Replicas album is $9.99 on iTunes, and it's $11.98 at Amazon. For that extra $2, I get a non-compressed version of the album, all of the artwork and a physical CD and an MP3 version for my iPod (after importing it to iTunes, of course). I consider that to be a better value than the iTunes version where all I get is a DRM'd AAC file.

There's always a risk when buying recent albums that you get a couple good songs and a bunch of filler crap, which kinda kills the value argument. Some times I do better at avoiding that issue than other times. I used to buy a lot of singles. Lately, I just avoid bands that do that altogether. Going indie helps (I love CDBaby) since unsigned bands have less of a reason to add filler crap to an album. I think that's another topic for another post though.

Technorati Tags: Gadgets, Marketing, Music

Apple pushed out an iPod update yesterday along with the 6.0.5 update to iTunes. I downloaded the update and it pushed to my Nano. The iPod update page says the following about what's in the update:

What's new in iPod Updater 2006-06-28:

* Nike + iPod support for iPod nano
* Volume limit for iPod shuffle
* Bug fixes

I think I noticed another change. The stars used for a song's rating are smaller. I didn't notice any change in the text part of the display, but I don't have another non-updated iPod to do a side-by-side against. I don't know why I noticed it and I don't know why Apple did it and didn't mention it...but it is what it is. Makes me wonder what else gets changed on these updates.

Technorati Tags: Apple, iPod, UpdateStars

Vowe posts a link to a study by Paul Lamere on the statistics that were gathered by his iTunes Registry.

The whole article is worth reading. I found a couple interesting points in the analysis:

“It turns out that 80% of all plays are concentrated into just 23% of the tracks. Perhaps even more interesting is the fact that 64% of the over 20,000,000 tracks had never ever been played (not even once). This means that the average ipod user (with 3542 songs), actively listens to about 800 songs in their collection, and has never listened to about 2200 songs.”

I think that's just nuts! I can't imagine what it's like to have listening habits like that. Are people just listening to the same songs over and over because they like to, or because the random shuffle feature doesn't take play frequency into account? I'm hoping it's the latter but I'm afraid it's the former...those numbers sound like they'd line up with how radio stations work.

Personally, I'd hate a rotation like that. I hate commercial radio because of it. I'm becoming increasingly dissatisfied with XM Satellite Radio for the same reason. I've spent a lot of time since I got an iPod trying to work out how to get a good thorough mix across my music library when I'm listening to music. My most recent thinking is based on what I found in a post I did in March about some Smart Playlist resources I found. Below is a breakdown of my iTunes library:

Collection Size: 4022
Plays: 5694
Number of songs purchased from iTunes: 2
Active songs (80% of Plays): 50%
Sings never played: 872
Manually rated songs: 1215

It looks like my persistence is paying off. I'm getting a pretty good mix of music across my library. Definitely higher than average. How much higher was kind of surprising to me to be honest. Looking at the numbers, I think I'm going to need to raise the representation of unplayed songs in my main mix playlist, and I need to get back into the habit of rating my songs.

Technorati Tags: iPod, iTunes, Music, Technology

When I first heard about the 3-23-2006 update for iPods that adds a volume limiter setting, my first thought was that the lawyers won again. Personal media devices in general and iPods in particular have been in the news on and off over the last few months with studies about their contribution to hearing loss.

Then I actually started playing with it and it's actually kinda useful for how I use my iPod. I mostly listen to it in the car through the headphone jack into a tape adapter (yeah, I know). I found a balance between the volume setting on the iPod and the volume from the car's stereo that minimizes distortion and when I go back and forth between listening in the car and listening with the headphones that I have to hunt for that "best" volume level in the car.

With the volume limiter, I set the upper limit to the level that I listen to the car....so now I can just max it instead of hunting and pecking for the sweet spot.

Technorati Tags: Apple, iPod, Technology

Since the iPod Nano needs Autofill post a while back I'm still thinking of how to manage my music on the iPod and in iTunes in general. On Thursday, I came across a blog posting called iTunes Smart Playlists at Andy Budd's blog.

I don't know why but for some reason, I never noticed that one of the rules you can set for a smart playlist is to have it use another playlist or set of playlists as a source. That helps a lot of the issues I have had in the past with keeping an interesting and fresh mix of my music available. I used the playlists in Andy Budd's post as a base and took some tips from SmartPlaylists.com and I've built a decent playlist. It'll get better as I get more music listened to and rated, but it's definitely a good start.

The playlist that I'm feeding the iPod with is limited by total size which I still have to adjust up and down as the size of my podcast list. The Autofill problem still isn't solved, but at least the mix is better.

Technorati Tags: iPod, iTunes, Playlist