Jonathan Ive, the designer of the iPod (and iMacs, iBooks, PowerBooks and more) was awarded by Britain's Queen Elisabeth the Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire for his achievements in industrial design.
Songbird to bring down iTunes? Songbird is open-source music management software that would give users access to more than one music store. It is being compared to the Firefox experience. I still think people miss the fact that it's not the software - it's the seamless integration of the device (iPod) with the software (iTunes). That's going to be difficult to duplicate.
Macworld bestowed their Editor's Choice Awards on the iPod nano and the iPod with video. Playlist Magazine (both magazines are published by the same company by the way) bestowed their Plays of the Year Awards on the iPod nano.
Some might call it the very first twinkle of the iPod future. Now, it can be yours. One of every kind of the Apple Newton is on sale via eBay. Good luck.
You want lyrics? Get them now - the industry is at it again.
**UPDATE: Electronic Frontier Foundation slapped Warner/Chappell with a letter saying the company's actions could be violating law. Warner/Chappell and Pearlyrics issued a joint statement saying, "we are committed to working together to provide consumers a convenient, legal way to find accurate song lyrics."
To earn free songs, order an iTunes Music Store gift certificate from the PayPal website. For every $20 iTunes Music Store gift certificate you purchase, you’ll earn 10 free songs; for every $50 gift certificate, you’ll earn 25 free songs. But, hurry, the promo lasts only until December 31, 2005.
There's some cool new video tutorials on the iTunes Music Store from Ripplecast. Learn how to podcast, learn the new Aperature program, automator and more. And the best part is they're FREE!
MTV and Microsoft are planning to ignore the iPod culture and willtry to compete with iTunes by creating its own rip-off that will not be compatible with the most popular personal media player on the market. The only way they can do this is to bully us into it by integrating it into Microsoft software and by playing even less music videos on the air so they can add more promotion time for a lame venture that we iPod users can hopefully destroy. But I have no strong opinions about this. Let the market decide!
If you're not as anal as I am about having all the id3 tags (the title, artist, album, etc.) of your MP3s, IDTunes might interest you. It will go into your music collection and will fill in 'unknown' or 'unnamed' file names, corrects syntax, corrects spelling, removes duplicates and fills in artist, album, genre and year information. It even adds lyrics to your songs.
If you have a lot of music which is 'unknown' or have a ton of duplicates, IDTunes would be worth it.
So you've been desperate to use your iPod or iTunes to Karaoke that Flock of Seagulls song you love so much. But there are no lyrics or way of doing this, is there? Well, now there is. iStar Composer will find lyrics for your music, and then synchronize it on iTunes or iPod. Pretty cool concept.
Time for the annual "best-of" and "year-in-review" lists. Here's a start:
Macworld (Apple stuff in general)
Playlist
iLounge
Keep checking back. We'll post more when we run across more. Or let us know what you find. I predict we'll see a lot of overlap. As good as the new iPod market might be, it seems to be dominated by several big players, for now anyway.
Apple has launched the iPod 101 site. This site will not only introduce potential iPod buyers to the device, but also provides support, hints, tips and more for existing users.
Check it out!
In probably the most amazing announcement this week was the availability of the 80's classic TV show, "Knight Rider". Before recording albums and hanging out with hot babes, David Hasselhoff was TV's Michael Knight. Apple has really outdone themselves this time.
Oh yeah, the deal also includes Law & Order, The Office, Surface, The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, Late Night with Conan O’Brien, Monk, the Sci-Fi Channel’s production of Battlestar Galactica, and classics like Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Dragnet, Adam 12 and Knight Rider.
Joking aside, the addition of the "Vintage NBC" content is pretty interesting - and must be a very profitable offering for the networks.
Let's say you want to listen to music through iTunes while you fall asleep. However, you don't want to have it play all night. You can set up a semi-automatic smartlist, but you still have some manual work to do.
Or, you can use a program like iTunEcho. Set the time you want iTunes to play, and iTunEcho will automatically stop iTunes at the specified time.
Want to wake up to iTunes? iTunEcho also allow you to do that as well!
As a big fan of the steering controls on my Nissan Maxima, I had high hopes for Griffin's SmartDeck. Let's just say it's not so smart, at least not in my vehicle.
My first huge complaint is that the tape adapter is extremely LOUD in the cassette deck. I'm not able to crank the volume loud enough in the car to overcome the annoying noise of the adapter itself.
My second even bigger complaint is that it just doesn't work. "Forwarding" the tape adapter does not forward the iPod. It just makes the noise of the cassette adapter LOUDER and stops the music from playing. No amount of adjusting, tinkering, etc. will make it work. I'm sure it works in other cars - it just doesn't in mine.
Even if it did work, I would never be able to get over the annoying noise of the adapter. This cassette adapter is way over-hyped. Buyer beware.
**UPDATE** When calling Griffin to obtain an RMA number, they quized me about the car and the reason for the return. They were very nice and understanding. And they didn't even charge me the normal 20% restocking fee.
There's been a lot of chatter about the new iPod Nano scratching easily. However, it's made out of the same exact material as the full-size iPod. And while you do hear about scratching, it's nothing like the iPod Nano complaints. I think it is just so portable and convenient that it gets tossed around quite a bit in your pocket, purse, etc.
You could get an case for it of course, but it kind of takes away from the sleekness, thiness and sexiness of it.
An alternative is a "film" or "shield" where a thin coating of clear plastic coats the iPod. Macworld has a great article on this type of scratch protection.
If you do happen to have some scratches on your iPod, you can use good ol' fashioned inexpensive Brasso metal cleaner. It's mild abrasion buffs out scratches. I've done this on 3 iPods and the results are amazing. No need to spend a ton of money on special formulas.
Okay, they're number 1 in online music sales, they're number one with MP3 players, what do you mean they're number 7?
They're number 7 in the top 10 list of record sales; beating out Tower Records, Sam Goody and Borders for overall sales. Yes, you read that right, overall sales. And the three mentioned above of course are all retail stores.
Now on to beat Best Buy, Wal*Mart and Amazon.com.
TiVo announced today that you will soon be able to transfer TiVo'ed programs to your iPod (and PSP) via TiVoToGo. I'm all for maxing out both TiVo's and the iPod's capabilities. This is a great idea to add value to both great technologies. Hopefully, it will boost TiVo's financial position so they stick around long term (assuming they're careful about privacy and "red flag" issues for which they've been criticized previously). I'm not concerned about the iPod's longevity!
See also
The recent iPod battery class action settlement has been delayed due to an appeal. Apple confirms that the appeal is not from them. It is likely from a consumer who is smart enough to know that the only ones that benefit from class action lawsuits are lawyers.
Let's just hope that EMI has learned something from the Sony fiasco.
What is up with Sony anyway? Awful MP3 players, letting Microsoft get a giant leap on the PlayStation 3, and so much more. Looking at my Sony TV, Sony DVD Player, Sony Receiver and more, I'm thinking these will be the last...
