Twelve Black Code Monkeys

Those of you following my blog for a while probably know that I write a lot about two gadgets in particular that I own – the Treo 650 phone (which I just upgraded to a Treo 700P) and the iPod (which I currently own the 5^th generation 60GB model capable of playing video). While I love both devices, my ultimate goal as a gadget freak is to only have one to carry around. You know, the whole “convergence” thing taken to it’s essence.

Some recent studies have suggested that most people want a phone that’s just a phone and doesn’t do a zillion other things. This may or may not be true, but if it is, I think it’s partly due to the current set of phones that “pretend” to be all-in-one devices. These phones are not the “smartphones” that comprise the Treo, Blackberry, and Windows Mobile phones, but rather are tiny stylish devices like the Motorola Razr which have cameras, calendars, and now often MP3 players built in.. The small screens and limited space for buttons and controls, not to mention a tiny batteries that have to cope with more demand for power, means that these devices end up being mainly good for novelty uses compared to dedicated MP3 players like the iPod or full-fledged digital cameras – even the sleekest compact of these.

For those of us who are too old or geeky to care about looking fashionable and don’t need the smallest phone on the block, the Palm (and previously Handspring) Treo have long been a great phone that combines a huge array of other uses due to its sporting the PalmOS operating system, the one used on Palm personal digital assistants for more than 10 years. Thousands of programs, many free and many others inexpensive shareware, have been written for this platform to the point where you could almost compare Treos to tiny PC’s.

For example I used my Treo 650 as a GPS (along with a tiny GPS receiver that hid in my glove compartment and which the Treo would connect to wirelessly) in order to get constant indications of where I was on the road, turn-by-turn directions to a destination, and even dynamic rerouting if I missed a turn – all communicated via both the Treo’s screen as well as a large choice of audio voices. I had all my contact information, schedules, to-do lists, and notes that I could sync with my MS Outlook and hosted exchange account. I had a version of Quicken (“Pocket Quicken” as it’s called), so I could record transactions on the road and sync with my main Quicken program when I got home. I had a program that allowed me to view my desktop of my PC at home and control any aspect of my computer no matter where I was. I got my email, of course, and was able to communicate via instant messages, text messaging, etc. I could also view full web pages and access most websites with no problem. Oh yes, and there was a phone too!

While the Treos had several MP3 players, none really gave the same degree of elegance as the combination of iTunes and the iPod. Many had features that the iPod didn’t, though. Pocket Tunes is the best known of these programs and has probably the largest array of capabilities - in addition to playing MP3’s, it can play Ogg Vorbis format files (an open-source format that has better quality and smaller files than MP3), and Windows Media Audio file format (a proprietary format that MS developed). Within the last year it also started supporting DMA-protected WMA files from music subscription sites like Yahoo! Music, Rhapsody, and Napster To Go. This allows you to subscribe to a service for a $10-15/month fee and download an unlimited number of songs to your computer and subsequently to your portable device. Pocket Tunes in its Deluxe version also has had the ability to stream a type of internet radio called Shoutcast (MP3 streams), so you could listen to live radio, although until very recently not at a very good quality level due to the network speeds at which cell phones have been able to communicate. If you are an audio book fan and have an account with the largest digital audio book company out there, Audible.com, Treos, as well as all PalmOS and PocketPC-based phones and PDA’s have long been able to sync Audible format files from your computer and play them. More recently those who have a phone with a cellular data plan or a PDA with a Wifi connection could also download programs from their Audible library on the fly via a program called Audible Air.

Most of the MP3 players for the Treo have traditionally done their syncing, at least on Windows PC’s, through Microsoft’s Windows Media Player which is free and built in to the Windows Operating System. Alternately you can simply copy files directly onto an external memory card on your Treo and then let the program search for these files and add them to its library. While this works, it’s far from ideal now that cards with very large capacities are being sold inexpensively and for those of us who have tens of gigabytes of audio files, be they music, audio books, or podcasts. Some people fare well with Windows Media player, but in my brief time trying to use it to sync with my Treo, I had numerous problems, ranging from it recopying files that were already on my device each time I synced, to not copying files that should have been copied, etc. It simply wasn’t reliable.

While there were certainly limitations before that made the earlier Treos not the ideal choice of everyone as an MP3 player, many people have and do use the Treo 650, 600, perhaps even earlier ones still as their only portable music player. The Treo 700P, Palm’s latest version of the Treo, has features that make it a much more powerful device, all the more capable of replacing your primary MP3 player. The main feature that helps make the phone more powerful is its ability transfer data at much higher speeds than previously via a newer wireless (cellular, not Wifi) network technology, called EvDO. While the version of EvDO that’s currently available and accessible via the 700P is still not quite as fast as what most people have in their homes via their DSL or Cable Internet connection, it still ranges from three to ten times the speed of a dial-up modem. This speed will improve, especially when future versions of EvDO get deployed. The difference in speed means that your Treo can now stream live video and high-quality audio. You can download applications in seconds rather than minutes. Surfing the web is now a lot more like it is on a broadband connection on a PC, albeit with a much smaller screen. Just as broadband on the PC gives you more freedom to explore the Internet on demand, EvDO on a phone gives you more motivation to use it for accessing the Internet. It used to be that for many uses I would just delay what I needed to do until I got home because doing it on the slow data connection on my phone was too painful. It was only when I knew I wouldn’t be near a PC for a long time and I really needed to get some information on the web that I would use the Treo for accessing a website.

Another key new feature is the Treo 700P’s ability to handle memory cards that can hold more than 2GB, the limit of previous Treos. Although installing a hack could let you work around that limit on those older models, it required some degree of technical expertise to do. Now you can just plug in your 4GB SD card and it will work as a 4GB card without any extra work. Presumably when 8GB SD cards and even 16GB and 32GB SD cards come out in the next year or two, these will all work as well without additional software or hacking. While 4GB is still low compared to the storage on some MP3 players, it’s large enough to hold dozens of albums worth of music, not too shabby for a card the size of a postage stamp.

With these (and many other) new capabilities and a couple of new applications from third-party developers, it looks like the Treo 700P could easily replace an iPod for many people, myself included. The third party applications that I speak of are Motion Apps’ mOcean, CodeWave’s myTunesRSS, and Softick’s “Softick Audio Gateway.” There are additional applications that enhance the Treo’s multimedia capabilities worlds above the current iPods, but I’ll tackle those later.

Motion Apps’ mOcean is an MP3 player for the Treo that syncs with your iTunes library and actually has an interface that looks and acts a lot like an iPod. Obviously the Treo doesn’t have the famed iPod “clickwheel,” so instead mOcean provides a graphical version of the clickwheel that you can use via the Treo’s touchscreen. In fact, Apple is rumored to be coming out with similar touchscreen clickwheel interface for a future Video iPod that will do away with the physical clickwheel in order to recoup space for an expanded screen. It almost feels like I have a future iPod in my hands when I’m using mOcean! mOcean actually improves on the iPod in some ways due to the Treo having a keyboard – for example you can skip to the S’s in a large list of songs my just hitting the ’s’ key, rather than have to scroll with the clickwheel until you got all the way to the s’s. Although though there are some minor inconsistencies that probably in many cases only advanced iPod/iTunes users would notice, for the most part it is an extremely close replica of the iPod/iTunes experience, and Motion Apps appear to be constantly working on new features and functionality. The only obvious shortfall is the lack of ability to play AAC files and video files, but other programs are available on the Treo that that will do this, like the free TCPMP.

MyTunesRSS is a streaming server that you run on a PC that’s connected to the Internet. It syncs up with your iTunes library and makes your PC a streaming server for any audio and even video content that is in your iTunes (although for video you have a really good, fast connection for it to work well). For those of us with tens of gigabytes of audio and video files in our libraries, this allows you to have immediate access to your entire library without having to go out and buy ten or twenty 4GB memory cards, or have to wait until they come out with larger capacity cards. Of course, your ability to play these files is dependent on being in an area where you can get a data connection, and probably even an EvDO connection, which is still mostly in major metropolitan areas. So, for those who spend any time traveling or in more rural areas, this may not be a great solution.

The other piece of this content puzzle is something that isn’t quite as obvious, but for me was an important factor in realizing that using my Treo for listing to podcasts, audio books and music might be a better solution that using my iPod. If you have an MP3 player like an iPod and you’re listening to music and your cell phone rings, you have to shut off the iPod, take your earbuds out, and answer your phone, all before the caller on the other end hangs up. It can be a bit of a hassle, and if you have to use a handsfree device for your phone it makes it that much harder still. The 700P comes with a handsfree headset that doubles as stereo headphones. This allows you to listen to audio on your Treo, and then when a call comes in, it interrupts your music or podcast or audio book and prompts you to answer the phone, at which point the stereo headphones simply become a handsfree headset through which you can have a conversation. While this makes things a lot easier than having a phone and an MP3 player as separate devices, it still means you need to take the Treo out of your pocket or off your belt in order to answer the call.

Earlier this year, a company that has been making other well-known and useful software for the Treo and other Palm devices for years came out with a way to do this all wirelessly. Some quick background first. The wireless technology which I’m referring to here, and which you’ve undoubtedly heard of by now, is called “Bluetooth.” It was designed specifically for devices to communicate with other devices at short range (30 feet or less) and at relatively slow speeds (much slower than wireless networking known as Wifi). Probably the most popular use for this technology so far is the wireless headsets for cell phones that you might see planted in or over people’s ear. If that ear is on the side of their head that’s not visible to you, it’s easy to initially think they are talking to themselves when they are actually having a phone conversation. While Bluetooth has been very useful for this use, it does not, as you might expect, allow you to listen to audio other than that of a phone call. To listen to stereo music, you need to have a phone and a device that implements something called an Advanced Audio Distribution Profile, or A2DP, which allows wireless digital streaming of different types of digital audio formats fromone device to another. Unfortunately even the latest greatest Treo does not support A2DP. Fortunately for us, the genius programmers at Softick worked around this lack of capability of the Treo so that it could actually do A2DP with compatible Bluetooth stereo headsets that have started to become available in the last year or two. So now you don’t even have to bother with taking the Treo out of your pocket or off of your belt to answer a call while your listening to something. You can do everything wirelessly, including pausing the audio and skipping to the next or previous track. I can see one really nice use of this for me – I can now do yard work with a headset on and keep my Treo on the deck, safe from getting wet or full dirt!

A couple of caveats about this should be mentioned, though. While Softick’s program works on previous Treos, it still doesn’t quite work on the 700P. Palm updated the Bluetooth implementation on the 700P, breaking the compatibility, and so now Softick is hard at work trying to come up with a version that will work on the 700P – something that they are hoping to get out in the next week or so. Also, to be fair, you can buy Bluetooth headsets with an attachment that plugs into an iPod. This does add a considerable amount of bulk, though, to the otherwise fairly small iPod, making it a good deal larger than the Treo, although you could also use these on the much smaller iPod Nano.

When Apple came out with the Video iPod, it was the biggest leap in functionality since the first iPod debuted in 2001. The success of the video capability has convinced many movie and television companies to offer video for sale on the iTunes Music Store, or even for free over the Internet. And while mOcean still doesn’t sync video content yet, you can watch both streaming video as well as video files you’ve transferred from your computer to your Treo via a cabled hotsync. Not only that, but you can watch video in many more formats than you can with the iPod. The iPod allows only for a couple of types of Mpeg 4 formats, whereas programs like TCMP and Kinoma allow for AVI, DivX, XviD, and various Mpeg formats.

Finally, through yet additional third-party software and services, you can listen to or view a slew of additional content on your Treo that will not be possible on an iPod unless Apple actually develops an iPod phone that does EvDO, or an iPod with Wifi built in. Orb is a product that lets you use you stream all your audio, video, and even pictures to any computer capable of receiving them, and it has been tested successfully with the Treo 700P. Not only that, but if you have a TV Tuner card in your PC you can actually stream all the live channels you get through that tuner card as well. A similar service/product called Slingbox also will also let you do this, although they are still working on the software that will let you do this with a Treo. For those who subscribe to Satellite Radio, there is a way to use your Treo to stream your XM or Serius channels directly to your Treo. There are other streaming servers like Gloonet, and I’m sure ones that I’ve not even heard of yet, but the ones I’ve listed are probably the best known.

The iPod has become so popular for good reasons. It’s not just that it’s had a great marketing force behind it (although it has), or just great looks (that too), or that it was one of the first players to incorporate a hard drive that could store hundreds (or thousands) of songs. It’s also that the user interface on the iPod is for most people a very easy and intuitive one to operate. Its syncing abilities are also easy to set up and understand, at least compared to most other platforms out there. iTunes, the PC part of the iPod, is also pretty streightward and manages music (and now video) in a simple and powerful way.

I realize that some people truly don’t want anything but a small device to play their 30 favorite albums on, and for them, I suppose, an iPod (as well as many other MP3 players) is still a great choice. Heck, for them, anything more than an iPod Nano would be overkill. However, for those of us who are always looking for more powerful gadgets, ones that can serve most if not all of our requirements for a portable device (be they to listen to audio, watch video, make phone calls, read email, etc., etc.) the Treo 700P really is a powerhouse of convergence. With the services and software I’ve mentioned in this article, it can do everything and much more than current iPod models, and with mOcean can even look and act like an iPod. It does this at a price that’s at least equivalent to the top 60GB iPod model (if you buy the Treo 700P along with a 2-year cell phone contract), or at most for a couple hundred more, if paying buying at the top retail price with no discounts. The main disadvantage to the Treo, other than what some people would consider to be it’s inferior look fashion-wise, is the fact that it doesn’t have a big built-in hard drive. While 4GB is a lot for some people, and certainly is still the most you can have on an iPod Nano as of now, it still pales in comparison to the mammoth 60GB hard drive in the top-of-the-line iPod model. With myTunesRSS and other streaming solutions, you can get around this, but you are still dependent on having an EvDO signal, which is still far from ubiquitous. EvDO coverage will increase, of course, as will memory card capacities, making this less of an issue, but for now, some will still consider it too much of a limitation to give up their iPod altogether. Plus, as coverage and storage capacity increases on the Treo, it’s unlikely that the iPod will stand still. The rumor is that a new video iPod with a much larger screen will come out later this year and will make watching video on the Treo look weak in comparison. Along with that bigger screen may come additional features that will remove more advantages of the Treo, such as Bluetooth or Wifi capability.

For right now, though, the Treo does still seem to win in all but storage capacity. Heck, even its battery is replaceable, unlike the infamous non-replaceable iPod’s! I for one am going to ditch my iPod. That doesn’t mean I won’t be tempted by future ones. If a new one comes out that has a screen twice the size of my Treo’s, it’s going to be hard to resist. Then again, since I don’t watch nearly as much video as I do listen to audio podcasts, audio books, and music, it would be hard to justify having both of these. Hopefully, though, Palm’s next Treo will also sport a larger screen, or at least a video output as the iPod does which allows for plugging in video goggles that make screen size irrelevant!

My killer feature for the iPod is something that probably doesn’t appeal to you. Ok, maybe some of you, but not many. It’s the feature that Apple introduced with the 4G iPods back a couple of years ago. The feature is the ability to speed up (or slow down) audio without changing the pitch (if you are familiar with variable speed tape recorders, you understand that simply speeding up the playback of something tends to also make the speaker sound like a chipmunk).

Why is this a killer feature? It lets you play one minute and fifteen seconds of audio for every minute you listen. In other words, you get an extra 25% of content. I listen to a lot of spoken audio – audio books and podcasts – and this means that I get to enjoy a lot of extra content in the same stretch time. It’s a time saver. You get to save countless hours by listening at faster speeds, just as a speed reader gets to read many more books in the time a normal reader would.

There are some downsides, but I don’t think they are significant for most audio. One is that you have to pay closer attention, since drifting off a bit will mean that you will miss a lot more than you would normally, plus it just takes more concentration to comprehend everything at a higher speed. There are some audio artifacts that sometimes occur as well. Those artifacts aren’t jarring, but do degrade the sound quality slightly. Oh yes, and of course you just have a different listening experience. For some audio, timing and cadence can be a big part of the narrator’s performance. Speeding this up can wreak havoc on it - especially for dramatic naration of audio fiction. On the other hand, I’ve gotten so used to listening to nonfiction at this speed that now when I listen to podcasts at the normal speed, the speaker sounds like he’s talking in slow motion! So to some degree it’s just a matter of getting accustomed to it.

While the iPod is the only (or one of the few) digital audio players that has this functionality built in, it doesn’t let you just listen to anything in this fashion. Nope, you can listen to Audible.com audio books (or Audible’s other paid content like radio programs, newspaper transcripts, etc.), and you can listen to files in AAC spoken word format (.M4B). Since most podcasts are in MP3 format, you have to convert them. This is one reason why I use Doppler Radio as my podcast program, or “podcatcher” – it is the only podcatcher that I’ve found wihich converts files to .M4B. Some others convert to .M4A, but you still need to rename them and that implies updating iTunes with the new filename – a manual and cumbersome process.

While Doppler’s conversion works well, it has its disadvantages too, the main one being that iTunes (which is the program actually doing the conversions) can take a while to convert files. The fastest I’ve seen it work is 20X (or 20 times real time). So an hour-long show will take about 3 minutes at that speed. But most of the time, it seems to range from 5 to 12X, or 5 to 12 minutes per hour-long show. iTunes can only convert one show at a time, and so if you have a couple of hours worth of shows downloading at a given session, this could take upwards of 25 minutes to convert! It’s far from ideal.

Now, while I do have this killer feature with the iPod, I would rather that such a feature existed on other devices so that I wasn’t forced to only use an iPod. Don’t get me wrong, I like my iPod, but there are certainly things I don’t like about it as well. The main thing that irks me about it is that you can’t use music subscription services like Yahoo! Music because it won’t play Windows Media files. Apple’s system is built to be proprietary – you can only use the iTunes Music Store to download music (other than free MP3’s from independent artists or your own ripped from CD), and the iTunes Music Store only supports Apple devices. For those who need the speeding up feature, unfortunately, the iPod still seems to be your only choice.

While I could not find other players with this functionality, I thought I’d see what I could find out about speeding up audio in general. My main find proved quite interesting. It’s a Windows software program that does this very thing called, inappropriately enough, Amazing Slow Downer (or ASD), by Roni Music. I guess the name is somewhat appropriate because it can slow audio down, but it can also speed it up. I’m not sure about the utility of slowing things down, but my guess would be so that musicians can listen to a song at a much slower rate in order to pick up notes and chords more easily?

ASD allows you to take any MP3 file (or other formats as well), speed them up or slow them down arbitrarily with a fine degree of control, and then rip them to MP3 (or another format for other encodings). You can control the pitch yourself, although it seemed to automatically handle that. You can also control the audio qualities via an equalizer in order to yield the best quality sound. I played around with the trial version I downloaded from Roni Music’s site and was able to speed up a sample podcast by 42% and still follow everything. I figure you could probably train yourself to understand higher and higher levels of speed.

This was a great find and maybe there are other such applications out there but I haven’t found any yet. As nice as it is, though, I can see using it for major jobs, but not on such a regular basis as Doppler. Much of the spoken word audio I listen to is downloaded via Doppler on almost an hourly basis. So when I listen to something, it’s often only hours or at most a few days old - an ongoing stream of current podcasts. Unfortunately there’s no way to have Doppler “talk” to this program and have it automatically convert these podcasts into faster ones. Neither is there a command-line interface as far as I can tell, so even if Doppler could issue external commands (which I’ve seen in some other podcatchers), this wouldn’t work. What you would have to do is dump all my podcasts into one directory (Doppler puts them into separate directories named after the podcast’s title) and before uploading them to the iPod you would have to run this program and tell it to convert all new files – also determining which of those files were new so that you weren’t reconverting already converted ones (you could change the names or put them in different directories but this would then mean having to go into iTunes and tell it where those new files were, or what they’d been renamed to – otherwise iTunes would remove them from the iPod). Neither will ASD do anything with Audible files, which is to be expected since they have a proprietary DRM. Then there’s the issue of speed. The trial version of ASD only lets you work with 3 minutes worth of audio. I was able to rip this to a 2-minute-long MP3 in a matter of seconds, but it’s hard to extrapolate this to a 30-minute podcast, let alone a bunch of podcasts of various lengths adding up to a couple of hours worth of listening.

Where ASD might come in handy is if you find a bunch of MP3 spoken word files that you want to listen to - say open source stuff from Librivox or Project Gutenberg. Or possibly if you find a podcast that you’ve never heard but has been recording for many months and you want to catch up and listen to all the old episodes. Or you buy a new audio book on CD and want to rip it to MP3 to play it on your portable device. I can see using this for such things because they are one-shot deals rather than a constant, ongoing process.

We can dream that Erwin Van Hunen, the creator of Doppler, will put this type of functionality into Doppler 3.0, but considering how busy he is with other things, it’s hard to imagine that he could devote such resources to what is essentially donationware.

Despite the probably small number of people who find this functionality irresistible, perhaps there are enough of us to encourage a developer out there to create a podcatcher that has similar functionality, or maybe the developer of ASD will actually consider developing a podcatcher with it? Or perhaps we can get Roni Music to partner with Erwin and come up with a premium podcatcher that has this functionality. Well, we can dream!

It seems like everyone and his brother received an iPod for Christmas this holiday season. For the last month, my blog has gotten almost double the number of hits it usually gets, and I’m almost positive this is because of the two articles I wrote (here and here) about the Video iPod. Those articles are long and somewhat technical at times, so for new Video iPod owners they might be a little overwhelming.

Because Apple wasn’t sure how well their new video features would go over, they didn’t put a whole lot of effort into making it easy for people to learn how to put videos on their new toys. They also started with so few titles in their own store, that most people would naturally be quickly seeking ways of getting additional content from elsewhere. Really, all Apple was telling people was to buy an additional piece of software called QuickTime Pro. This has changed recently, but it can still be confusing for new iPod owners who expect to be able to just go home and click on the “put DVD movie on iPod” button. Of course there is no such button and you still can’t do this sort of thing with the ease that you can add a music CD’s to your iPod.

This all gave me the idea to compose yet another article about the Video iPod, but this one would be geared more towards people who were new to the iPod, to the world of digital video, or to both. You may even have some technical expertise, but this article should hopefully at least give you a real run down on what kind of options you have for getting video on your iPod.

I urge you to also read some additionl material that will really reduce your frustrations with your new iPod. Because Apple has a reputation for making things as easy as possible, they often don’t put information about how to do things they deem too “advanced” into the paltry manual that’s included with their product. While this is good for our trees, and perhaps a fair decision considering a lot of people won’t read manuals anyway, it often means that when people do want to do things that aren’t quite basic, they get lost. Well, luckily, there are plenty of places where you can get information online, so I thought I’d mention just a few.

Ilounge.com: this is a great place for information about iPods, an incredibly extensive collection of iPod accessory reviews, and a very active forum of users, some of whom are very knowledgeable (much more than me!) and are very willing to help those new to the iPod.

Apple iPod Yahoo! Group: If you’re more comfortable with an email list than a bulletin board, than the Apple iPod Yahoo! Group has some great information and users willing to help (including myself). One of the resident experts is a guy named Kirk McElhearn, who’s written a number of computer books, including a bunch on the Mac and the iPod.

Apple: Apple has a great support site for the iPod with answers to frequently asked questions, forums, and a special area called iPod 101 which has some great tutorials for beginners which go into a lot more detail then their manual.

But lets get back to Video, shall we? Where to begin? Probably the thing that comes to mind before even thinking about the iPod itself should be “what kind of video am I going to put on my iPod and where will I get it?” It’s a very basic first question that probably most of us don’t think about because we already have a specific source of video in mind. Even so, many people may also be unaware of some other kinds of video that may prove as valuable as the one they did have in mind! There are at least four major places to look for video that I can think of:

Where to Get Video

1. DVD’s: the source probably most people think of first is that of their own DVD library. You can’t simply tell iTunes to take your DVD and put it on your iPod. You need additional pieces (or piece) of software.
2. Home Video: probably the second most obvious source is video that you’ve shot yourself via a camcorder. You will probably need to convert this into a format that’s compatible with the iPod.
3. Online: Not quite as obvious is video you might find on the Internet. Ok, one of these is very obvious (iTunes), but the rest may not be:
   1. iTunes: the iTunes Music Store (which you can get to only through the iTunes program that came with your iPod) has a growing collection of TV shows ranging from really old ones to currently running ones, all selling at $2 a pop. It even has some free videos - short clips from Saturday Night Live, previews, short featurettes akin to what you might see on a DVD, etc. So far, there are no feature-length movies, but I have no doubt that these will come at some point. None of the iTunes video content require any real additional work other than making the purchase transaction and waiting as your file gets downloaded to your computer.
   2. File Sharing: there are certainly ways you can download copyrighted material illegally off the Internet. The entertainment industry, as it’s done before, is bungling yet another paradigm shift to online media. The can’t think creatively about how to work with this new world, but instead want to impose their old rules which just don’t work here. Eventually they will catch up, but in the mean time, they are forcing many people to illegally download material because they aren’t providing a legal (or affordable) way to get it legally. While we can all disagree on what should and shouldn’t be legal, I’m not going to suggest that you do anything that is obviously not legal, like downloading a movie that you’ve never paid for legally, and which you could easily do by buying the DVD or even renting it.
   3. Free Stuff: Why limit yourself (and put yourself in legal jeopardy) by downloading illegal material when there’s plenty of perfectly legal stuff out there? This massive amount of free video can be found primarily as:
      1. Video Podcasts: if you haven’t heard of “podcasts” you may have been living under a rock for the last year. Podcasts started out as just audio, but now come in video as well. They are basically just audio or video files that are hosted online for people to download. However, they usually are not just isolated single files, but an ongoing “show” that comes out at some regular interval and which you can, with the help of software like iTunes, subscribe to so that they are automatically downloaded and then transferred to your iPod whenever you plug it in. This makes the process of getting new episodes to watch something that doesn’t require any additional work after the initial setup. As I said, iTunes lets you subscribe to podcasts (just choose the “Podcasts” genre within the iTunes Music Store), and there are a bunch of other podcast applications out there as well. While not all of these video podcasts will play on an iPod without conversion, I think more and more are being offered in iPod-compatible formats.
      2. Public Domain: this content includes old movies and TV shows which have gone into the public domain mainly due to their copyright having run out, although some may have simply been offered to the public domain to start with or as a gift to the public way before the copyright would have expired. You can download these from the site Archive.org. There may be other online sources, but Archive.org is definitely the biggest.
      3. And More: there are still other sources of free content which aren’t podcasts and also aren’t on Archive.org. These include Google Video (here’s Google’s instructions on downloading video for your iPod) , and various other sources. There are at least a couple of websites that provide an ongoing list of new sources of video specifically made for the iPod which are very helpful: freeipodvideos.org and podguide.tv.
4. TiVo: yes, you can take the programs that you’ve recorded on your TiVo and transfer them to your iPod. Currently this isn’t supported by TiVo, although they have stated that they are planning to offer this functionality soon. In the mean time, there’s a third-party application that claims to do this from TVHarmony.com. I tried it, but it seemed to go so slowly that it would have taken many, many hours to convert just a 30-minute video, so something must have been wrong. Whether you use this or an upcoming TiVo product, you still have to get your video from your TiVo box to your computer, and that can sometimes be a slow process depending on what kind of setup you have. If you have a different DVR than a TiVo, in particular one made by a Cable or Satellite provider, chances are you won’t be able to convert video programs on it to your iPod. This may change, but for now you can’t do it as far as I know. Some of these companies have stated that they will be creating the ability to put the video on a portable device, but that device is not the iPod.

Adding Video to your iPod

Ok, so you’ve gotten your video that hopefully is in iPod-compatible format (if not we’ll deal with that later), but now it’s still just on your computer, you need to actually get it onto your iPod. While this is an easy task for anyone who’s owned an iPod before, for new iPod owners it may not be. If you buy videos (or download some of the free ones) off of the iTunes Music Store, then you don’t really need to worry - they are automatically added to your iTunes library and transferred to your iPod the next time you connect it to your computer. The same should hold true if you subscribe to a video podcast via iTunes.

If you’ve gotten a video from somewhere else, though, you will need to add it to your iTunes library. First, open iTunes if its not already open. Then in the File menu, choose “Add File to Library.” This will open up a dialog box that will let you browse through your computer’s file system so that you can locate that video file. Once you find it, select it and hit the Open button, and the file should then appear in your iTunes library.

There are a couple ways to look at your videos. One is via the “Videos” area in the “source” menu on the upper right:

If you don’t see such a menu item, than you may have it turned off in iTunes. To make it visible, Choose Preferences from the Edit menu, click on the “General” tab, which is the first, leftmost tab on the window that comes up, and make sure there’s a checkmark next to “Videos”:

Clicking on the “Videos” in the Source menu brings up a special page with a black background and thumbnail images representing the first second in each of the video clips, their title, and their duration (see screen capture above). Unfortunately, when iTunes displays this page, it needs to look inside each video clip to grab that thumbnail, and so it can take some time, especially if your computer isn’t the fastest and/or you have more than a handful of videos. Personally, I like to use the regular iTunes Library listing. You can see a lot more information, like when the video was added to your library, a rating if you’ve made one for it, comments, etc. However, if you have a ton of music on your iPod, you may not see the video file that you’ve just added right away in your library, let alone others that you’ve added before. A good way to filter your library to only show videos is by activating the search bar in iTunes. You do this by selecting “Show Search Bar” in the edit menu. If you only see the option “Hide Search Bar” that means the search bar is already visible. Here’s what it looks like:

Just click on the “Videos” and you will only see the videos in your library – this is a good way to keep track of these files if you have hundreds or thousands of music or audio book files on your iPod and don’t want to keep scrolling through these to find your videos.

Once these files are listed in your iTunes library, they will be transferred the next time you plug in your iPod. However, if the video isn’t compatible, you will get a warning from iTunes when it’s transferring to the iPod, which brings us to our next subject:

Video Compatibility

The iPod can’t simply play any old video file. Just as you can’t play a tape in a CD player, there are different file “formats” for video, and not all are compatible with the iPod. The iPod will only play a couple of different types of video file formats. They are both types of the file format known as MPEG4. One is called H.264 (also known as “AVC” or “Part 10″), and the other is sometimes just called “MPEG4,” but to be more exact should be called “MPEG4 Simple Profile” or just “MPEG4 SP.” If you look at the actual file, you might see a file extension (a few letters/numbers after the main file name) of “.AVI” or “WMV” or “.MP4″ or “.M4V” or “.MOV.” Only the last three are possibly (but not always) compatible with the iPod. Even if the file is in H.264 or MPEG4 SP, it won’t necessarily play on the iPod. There are some other settings within the video file that may not allow for this.

So how do you deal with this issue of compatibility? First of all, you can avoid it completely by using video content that has been made specifically for the iPod, downloaded from the iPod Music Store, and other places online. If you can’t find video that is already in iPod Format, however, you can actually convert it, which can be easy or hard depending on the tool you use, and perhaps a bit of luck. In order to convert video into an iPod-compatible format from a non-compatible one, you need to use at least one of a number of different programs:

Converting Video

Video clips are a bit more straightforward than convernting DVD’s, so lets go over these first. There are a few free options as well as many that will cost you, but usually not a very large sum.

Free Options
iTunes	This is a very new option as of this writing. Just last week, Apple came out with a new version of the free iTunes program (version 6.0.2), that I believe uses the same conversion engine that’s in their $30 QuickTime Pro application.Pros: it’s free, it’s integrated into iTunes so you don’t have to run a separate program, and it’s very simple – you just add the video file to your iTunes library, then choose “Convert Selection For iPod” in the Advanced menu.Cons: it takes a very long time compared to other methods and it’s not as flexible. For a 14-minute video I tried, it took about an hour and a half. If you extrapolate this out, converting one 2-hour movie would take around 12 hours! It also doesn’t let you control how your video is converted. *
Videora	Videora iPod Converter is the other free application that until last week was the only option for Windows PC users if you didn’t want to pay to convert.Pros: it’s very flexible, and it’s free. You can tell it how to convert your files in many ways – by the screen dimensions, the frame rate, the quality/size (bit rate), even what kind of audio quality you want along with the video. In addition, you can queue up a series of files you want to convert without having to come back to your computer after each is done. It also can convert files in a much shorter time than iTunes or Quicktime Pro – as low as around 15 minutes or so for a 14-minute video.Cons: the major downside to Videora is that it is not particularly easy to use. It’s free and the people who created it haven’t come out with a new version for over two months. It’s beta software, which means not all the bugs or user interface design issues have been worked out, and while they have a very useful discussion forum, it’s the fellow users who provide the answers, not the programmers, so they can only guess at some things, and of course can’t make fixes to the actual software. There is no real official support. If you are not afraid of spending some time trying to figure things out, it’s perfectly usable, but you will probably have to look through the discussion forums a lot as you run into inevitable problems. I’ve also posted a couple of entries (here and here) myself that go into a fair amount of detail about converting using Videora that might be helpful.
ffmpegX	ffmpegX is a UNIX application that was ported to Mac OSX (which is a varant of UNIX). While it may be more streightforward than the typical UNIX command-line application, it may not be as simple as many other programs made for the Mac. Since I don’t own a Mac, I can’t really speak to how simple this is to use or how well it works, but the engine it uses is used by many of these other converters Windows. If you are a Mac user and have used this, some feedback would be great!
iSquint	Another free Mac converter, iSquint looks like it will give you a lot of recommendations and hand-holding, but still let you tweak settings if you need to. Since I don’t have a Mac, I couldn’t evaluate it directly, but it seems to be the preferred converter out there for Macs. If anyone has used it, feedback would be great
3gp Converter	3gp Converter is a free Windows program that I don’t think tons of people use or even know about. It apparently is developed by a developer or group of developers in Japan. They don’t have an English language site, but here’s a Google-translated site which you might be able to at least glean a little from. Fortunately the program itself does have different language versions and there’s a simple but good tutuorial on how to use it here. The program itself is very simple. You just drag your video file onto it, and it converts it. It lets you pick a few different options in terms of bit rate settings, that yield a H.264 variations, and one high-quality, high resolution MPEG4 SP version suitable for outputting to TV. It converted all the video files I through at it, but I didn’t test every conceivable file, so their could be ones that it still has problems with. Still, for a free program, there’s no reason not to use this one until (or if) you run into problems.The one problem I did encounter was that it doesn’t seem to be able to format widescreen videos properly. There are no options for dealing with different aspect ratios, so it just stuffs everything into the same standard dimensions, so widescreen movies get squeezed and so look wrong.Maybe a new version will deal with this (the developer seems to come out with a new version somewhat regularly, although the last version was almost two months ago), and looking at their configuration files, one might just be able to change the resolutions there, but that would mean some extra work that detracts from the simplicity of this program.I would say, though, that for programs that are not widescreen, this is by far the easiest program I’ve used, albeit with few ways to customize the output. But if you’re looking for something that requires no learning curve and still gives you more output options than iTunes and does it several times faster, this is probably your best bet. It also happens to be one of only two programs (the other being iTunes) out of all of these (shareware and commercial ones included), that automatically adds the video to your iTunes library.
Nero Recode	I know that a number of people have gotten this Windows application to work, but I could not. Nero Recode is one of the many products within the collection of products branded as Nero. Initially I was confused about this and thought you could only use it if you bought the commercial product called Nero Ultra. That includes Nero Recode, but you can also download Nero Recode for free.In any case, I was able to convert files that would play through iTunes, but no matter how careful I was to customize these according to the settings that I knew would work on the iPod, these videos would not transfer. So, while you might be able to get this to work for you if you work at it, it’s probably not going to be easy for the beginner. It lets you see a lot of information and particularly for DVD conversions (you still need a seperate program to remove a copy-protected DVD’s encryption - see below), it looks like it would be very useful as far as picking a given audio track, subtitles, etc.

* What does this mean and why would you care? When converting a video file, just like when converting an audio file, you can make the end product smaller (so that you can fit more on your iPod). This size goes hand in hand with the quality of the video and is expressed as a measurement of “bit rate.” The higher the bit rate, the higher the quality and the bigger the file (and the longer the conversion will take to some extent). In addition to how small you make the file itself, you can also change the actual dimensions of the video as seen on the screen. ITunes just converts everything to the exact dimensions of the iPod’s screen, which is 320×240 pixels. In most cases, that’s fine, but if you ever want to be able to show these videos on a TV (or your computer), the small dimensions blown up to a 19″ Monitor or 27″ TV will not look good at all! More ondisplaying your video from your iPod to your TV below.

Of course, you don’t have to go with the free options at all. Even if you are on a budget, most of the options that cost money are only around $30, and hey, you spent $300-400 for that iPod and probably a bunch more for a case and/or some other accessories, right? So what’s another $30 for a program that will do all your video conversion chores? These are all Windows programs - I’ve yet to see any for the Mac that aren’t free except for Quicktime Pro which is now somewhat irrelevant now that iTunes can do the same conversions it can

[googmonify]5749375034:center:728:15[/googmonify]

The problem really is in choosing the right one of these programs for you. There are a growing number of these programs and probably a lot of similarity between them. I’ve tried out a bunch of these to test them, but haven’t spent nearly the time on them that I have with Videora, so my personal recommendation would actually be to read these micro reviews and then download and try out the ones that sound good to you (or all of them for that matter), since they all have trial versions for free download. Those trial versions have limitations that make them unusable or at least very impractical for anything but testing purposes, but they will give you a good idea about how easy they are to use and how well they work..

Options at an Added Price
PQDVD	PQ DVD to iPod Video Converter is the application that I seem to hear mentioned about most online, probably because it also lets you record DVD’s (see below). You can convert many different types of video files with it and specify quality/size (bit rate) settings, dimensions of the screen, whether you want to crop or stretch the image to fill more/less of the iPod’s (or your TV’s) screen, etc. It makes many of these options fairly easy to understand in a graphical, uncluttered way, and the conversion (as with most of these non-free programs), is pretty quick. However, PQDVD doesn’t have quite the flexibility of some of the others. Basically you sacrifice some flexibility for ease-of-use.	$35
Cucusoft	Cucusoft iPod Video Converter is more flexible in some ways than PQDVD, as it lets you specify the type of encoding you want to use (similar to Videora). But unlike Videora, it also gives you recommendations for the best choice of settings and also gives you more information about how various settings will affect your final video. Cucusoft also, like Videora, has a batch feature so that you can give it multiple files and then let it run for a long time without the need to come back and tell it to convert each and every one. Unfortunately Cucusoft was the only program of the ones here that I got to work in the first place which didn’t automatically determine the correct dimensions for the widescreen video I fed it, so this means a bit more work in figuring that out for different videos.	$29
Xilisoft	Xilisoft iPod Video Converter lets you customize settings, but doesn’t give you much help in this area. There are pull-down lists of possible settings, but many of these have just one option, and so if you don’t like it, you have to type in your own. If you don’t know what you’re doing, this could very easily create files that aren’t compatible in some way with the iPod. So it seems that it doesn’t provide much in the way of ease-of-use. To me, this seems the closest program in some ways to the free Videora, except that it doesn’t allow the user to set up different profiles for different types of convesions, and it costs $30.I attempted to convert a test .avi file (which converted fine on all the other products), but the end result couldn’t even be added to my iTunes library, let alone to the iPod. This was using the default settings for the program. Perhaps I needed to change them, but the point is here that this is not a program for beginners so I’m not sure why anyone would pay $30 for it when a similarly difficult program is available for free.	$29
ImTOO	I’m not sure which of these programs came first, but it appears that ImTOO is just a rebranding of Xilisoft or visa versa. The prices for each of the conversion programs, the dvd-ripping programs, and the bundles are identical. And if you look at the screenshots of Xilisoft and of ImTOO, and you will see they are also virtually identical!	$29
WinAVI	WinAVI 3GB/MP4/PSP/iPod Video Converter (maybe they need to come up with a catchier name?) has some interesting features which I’m not sure I’d use, like being able to flip the image upside down and soften it. (What I’d really like to see is something that would increase the brightness of an image since some darker videos are difficult to see if you have a protective screen that produces glare and you’re not in a dark room.)WinAVI lets you control the dimensions of the video and the bit rate settings, although the numbers they use seem not to coincide with what the standard bit rate options are. It will also let you split the output file into multiple files, or merge multiple input files into one output file. I’m not sure what I would use those for, but I know some people have uses for these features. A batch mode also adds to the functionality.	$25
AVOne	AVOne iPod Video Converter seems the least polished of any of these programs. First of all, it took much longer to convert the file. It’s batch feature doesn’t seem to work. It has only a few built-in profile setups, and while it lets you create your own profiles with many settings options, it gives you absolutely no help in figuring out what those settings should be. Finally, after a couple of tries of specifying exactly where I wanted my output file to be saved, after converting (which took a lot longer than the other programs), I simply could not locate any output file on my computer.	$25
Total Video Recorder	Total Video Recorder is the most expensive converter. It is fairly easy to use and understand, and has a lot of customization features if you want to tweak things. Unfortunately, while it was able to convert some video files, it was unable to convert one that I had downloaded from a digital camcorder. The other programs didn’t have such a problem, except for Videora which also couldn’t convert it. The resulting file when played in iTunes was covered with green and red blocks constantly moving. At first I thought this was feature that prevented one from using a trial version for real use, but after converting another file that wasn’t from my video camera, it played fine in iTunes. I was able to transfer both files to my iPod. So far so good, except when I tried to play either one, not only did the iPod not play the files, but playing them actually caused the iPod to reset! I did not use any special settings for these conversions, so while there may be some ways to avoid these problems, it’s another case of a program that takes a lot of extra work. While I didn’t mind this extra work for a free program like Videora, it seems a bit too much when paying $45! Some people have no problem with this program, so, as I stated at the beginning, you might want to try it out - even though I didn’t get it working doesn’t mean you might not have great luck with it.	$45

Once you convert your video to an iPod-compatible format, you still need to add them to your iTunes library in order to have them transferred to your iPod, so check out the section about doing this above.

ITunes to iPod

As I mentioned above, if your video isn’t compatible with the iPod, it won’t transfer to it even if you’ve been able to add it to iTunes and even if iTunes can play your video. iTunes can play many kinds of video files, but as I’ve detailed above, the iPod has a lot more limitations. However, there does appear to be a problem that some people have run into when trying to transfer video to their iPod even when it is compatible. That problem is in a setting in iTunes that turns off automatic transfers of videos. Some people have suggested that this is actually the default setting, so I would recommend also double-checking that you have this set correctly. You will need to first plug your iPod into your computer, and when your computer recognizes the iPod, choose Preferences from the Edit menu. Then go to the iPod tab, which is the second from the left. Here make sure that the topmost “Automatically update all videos” is selected:

Note that this only applies to those who have their iTunes set to automatically synch their files. If you have it set for manual transfer, then this tab will be disabled. In this case, like with music files, you just have to drag the video file from your iTunes library onto the iPod icon in iTunes in order to transfer a video to it.

DVD’s

For DVD’s, it can be a little more complicated than converting a video clip that you download off the Internet from one of the free sources I’ve mentioned, or via the iTunes Music Store. DVD’s were never meant to be converted or copied. They contain an encryption scheme called CSS (Content Scrambling System) that is supposed to prevent this. Within just a couple of years after DVD’s hit the market, though, CSS was cracked and this crack, known as DeCSS, became widely available on the net both as pure code, as well as parts of numerous programs designed to allow the average user to “decrypt” their DVD’s. Depending on which country you live in, these programs may or may not be legal to use. The whole issue of legality is very confusing. On the one hand, in the U.S., “fair use” seems to dictate that one should be able to freely make backup copies of a DVD you own for personal use. On the other hand, part of the Digital Milenium Copyright Act specifically forbids compromising the copy-protection for a DVD. There are numerous court cases that are trying to determine exactly what is legal and what isn’t, but in the mean time, such programs are available and being used ubiquitously, making things that much more uncertain.

In any case, in order to put your DVD’s into an iPod compatible format, you will need to transfer the file to your hard drive, remove the encryption, and then finally convert it to a format that’s compatible with the iPod. This can require one or two different programs depending on what kind of functional is included. Again, there are both free ones and ones that have a price tag:

Free Options
DVD Decryptor	The developers of this Windows application were forced to remove it and they were eventually bought by Macrovision. One can find the application on the net, but it’s legality is in question. It will allow you to break the encoding of a DVD and transfer it to your hard drive, after which various conversion applications can be used to make it iPod-compatible. Videora has a tutorial on their site on how to use it to create the inital file. Be forwarned, though, this is not a program designed with ease-of-use in mind.	$0
DVDFab Decryptor	DVDFab Decrypter is another program that’s similar to DVD DecrypterThis is another program similar to DVD Decryptor but with a simpler infterface. It copies the files from the DVD to one’s hard drive and removes the encryption in the process. Just note that it, like DVD Decrypter, will not create a file that is iPod compatible. You will still need to convert it using one of the programs listed above.	$0
Fair Use Wizard LE	This Windows application takes a slightly more user-friendly approach than DVD Decrypter, guding you through the process of converting your DVD a little more. But it’s also different in that it doesn’t just decrypt, but decrypts and converts to an xVid format video file. This process itseld could take a couple of hours, and then on top of this you will have to reconvert it to an iPod-compatible format. The same site has a $20 program that will supposedly convert to iPod-compatible formats (see below).	$0
HandBrake	HandBrake is the one free Mac option that will remove the encryption on a DVD and save the resulting file to your hard drive. Since I don’t own a Mac, I couldn’t evaluate this myself, but if anyone does own this, feedback would be great.	$0
Options at an Added Price
AnyDVD	This Windows Application will remove the encryption from a DVD, after which you will need another program to convert it to an iPod-compatible format. At first I thought it might be more of a wizard than DVD Decrypter, but really what it’s meant to do is to do the decryption transparently. That way you can tell a conversion program to look at one of the files on the DVD itself, or maybe you still need to copy it to your hard drive, but the decryption happens as you copy. The problem is that there’s no good way of figuring out what files are for what on the DVD. Sure some may be simple if there’s only one file or a few with similar names, but that’s not always the case. For some movies, you have many files each representing a different chapter. On DVD’s of TV episodes, you can have one or more files representing each episode	$39
PQDVD	Yes, I already mentioned PQDVD above, but it also will let you convert DVD’s. However, I’m not sure if it actually removes the encryption from DVD’s like some of these other programs, but rather streams the dvd video at faster than normal speed and somehow “captures” it and converts it on the fly. You will actually see the DVD playing while it’s converting. I’m not sure if I was simply doing something wrong or if my system did not have enough free memory or processor speed, but while it did convert a small clip for me successfully, when I played it back both in iTunes as well as on my iPod, the audio was badly distorted.	$35
Cucusoft	Cucusoft also makes a DVD to iPod Converter for Windows which seems to work very similarly to PQDVD, but gives the advanced user more access to custom settings. Of course many of these settings will be meaningless if you are at all a beginner at this stuff. I also experienced the same audio distorions with this product as with PQDVD, so chances are it’s a problem with audio on my computer. The other thing I could not figure out with this program was how to limit the program to just a specified length of time. This would be helpful for recording a bunch of TV episodes on a DVD into seperate files (especially if these are not seperated into seperate files on the DVD), but it doesn’t seem like there’s any easy way to do this here, whereas in PQDVD, one can scroll through to find exactly where one episode ends and another begins, and then you can specify when you want the start of the recording and the end to be.	$30
Xilisoft	Xilisoft makes a DVD to iPod Converter for Windows as well, and it seems to work in a similar way as the previous two. Unfortunately I could not get it to work at all. Others I know have been able to get it to work, and I know there have been some complaints concerning audio syncing. But without even being able to record anything myself, it’s impossible for me to say much about this tool.	$29
Fair Use Wizard	Fair Use Wizard also offers a “Full Edition” that provides some additional features. Whether those features are worth it, I’m not sure, and there’s no way to try them out, since the Lite edition is the only one you can download from their site without actually paying. However, from what I can tell from the Lite Edition, it has some option for iPod Video, so it might be useful as an all-in-one DVD conversion tool.	$20
Total Video Recorder	Total Video Recorder also has a DVD recording facility that works somewhat like PQDVD and CUCUSoft, except that it doesn’t actually play the DVD while recording, at least not in a way that’s visible to you. It offers a good deal of flexibility and it’s pretty easy and straightforward. Unlike PQDVD and CUCUSoft, when I played the sample I had recorded in iTunes, there were no problems with the audio. This could have just been a fluke, but it was still very promising. Then I transferred the video over to my iPod and started to play it. The same thing happened as with the non-DVD video clips I had converted with this same program - when starting to play the file, my iPod would reset itself. Not good! Again, maybe I was doing something wrong, or I wasn’t setting something in the right way, but for a $45 program, I really don’t think it should be reseting my iPod unless I really screw with the settings in a very creative way!	$45
DVDFab Express, Gold, Platinum	DVDFab Decryptor is a free program, but the same developer has made several other versions that have various other capabilities which may be useful for some people, but aren’t necessary to get one’s DVD video onto an iPod. Still, if these extra features appeal to you and you can afford the price, than it might be a good option. I chose not to try these out myself since I successfully tested the free version and can’t imagine these would be that different.	$40-60

TV Playing

One other issue that I alluded to above is that you can actually take your iPod to a friend’s house (or on vacation, or on a business trip, etc., etc.) and play a video for them not just on the iPod’s screen, but on a TV that you hook your iPod to in the same way that you would hook your DVD player to your TV. Unfortunately the iPod can’t do this “out of the box” but instead requires the purchase of an additional cable. Apple sells one for $30, although you can get it for a lot cheaper at Amazon.com or even cheaper at Handhelditems.com and a retractable one to boot.

Because the iPod screen is so small, the standard iPod-compatible video is pretty small in resolution – 320×240 pixels. When this tiny image is then blown up to fit a much larger screen, everything gets that much fuzzier. In order to avoid this, you can convert the video in such a way that the resolution is higher, and some of the applications I’ve listed will actually guide you with the words “TV.” However, not all programs let you do this, even if you do it yourself with customized settings. If you convert something to a higher resolution for this type of usage, it will come at the price of added conversion time and storage space, and you won’t be able to convert to just any resolution - at some point you also bump up against a limitation of what the iPod can handle, so you will never get, for example, a DVD-quality video image played from your iPod to a TV. It may look very good, and you might not even be able to tell the difference on a small TV (19″ or smaller) between a video played through your iPod and one from a DVD player. Still, for anything bigger than a 19″ set, the picture will be inferior. And compared to a true high definition picture, forget it! If you do want to convert to higher resolutions, I would recommend taking a look at the two entries (here and here) I posted about converting with Videora. Whether you use Videora or not, these will at least give you some ideas about what issues to look for.

Final Notes

When Apple came out with the Video iPod back in late September of last year, they did it very tentatively – at least as far as video was concerned. They provided only a handful of TV series in their iTunes Music Store, and in order to make other sources of video play on the iPod, Apple would only tell you that you needed to purchase their QuickTime Pro at $30 additional charge. As you can see, in the proceeding three and a half months, a slew of new content has come out both within the iTunes Music Store and on the net in free form. In addition, many companies have been developing programs that make getting your videos onto your iPod. It’s still a little confusing for the average consumer, though, but if the progress during these first few months is any indication, things should get easier and easier, sooner rather than later. In the mean time, I hope this guide has helped some of you get your mind around the various tasks, options, and concepts concerning getting video onto your iPod.

Pocket Tunes is one of if not THE premier audio application for the PalmOS, and I’ve been using it since I bought my Treo 600 over a year ago. Normsoft, the company that makes it, comes out regularly with new releases with new features, all of which have so far been free of charge for me. Most of the updates I’ve seen have been more tweaking of features to make them work better. However, this morning, they have released a huge new feature that will enhance the utility of the Treo (and many other PalmOS devices) for many of us music fans.

According to their site:

I’ve written before about my experiences with Yahoo! Music. Just a couple of months ago, Yahoo! released a new subscription based service similar to Napster To Go and Rhapsody which allows users to listen to any of the 1 million albums in their library on demand on a PC and optionally download tracks onto a compatible portable device all for under $60 for an entire year – a price that seriously undercut the competition.”

While I signed up right away and have enjoyed listening to a lot of music on my home and work computer, I did not have a compatible device. I have an iPod, but because Apple has it’s own iTunes Music Store, it’s unlikely that they would ever make their iPod compatible with a competing download service. It’s much more likely that Apple will simply start up their own similar subscription-based service that will only be iPod-compatible. It’s unfortunate that an open standard can’t be developed so that all devices will work with all services. Already licensing issues mean that certain countries get access to certain albums while others don’t, and of course certain services get access to labels that others don’t. Why do you need to have two seperate devices and subscribe to three different services so that you can listen to three albums that are on different labels? Each label might as well start selling their own proprietary format, each of which you need a different player to listen to. It’s ridiculous.

In any case, I have been looking at each new audio player that’s been announced recently to see whether it would be compatible with Yahoo! Music. But for me the other requirement is that it will play audio books from Audible.com. Unfortunately up until now, the only other device that seemed to play both Audible files as well as Yahoo! Music files was the AudioVox SMT5600 SmartPhone. Since I already have a Treo, this wasn’t a good choice. But my Treo will now allow me to listen to both of these types audio formats, as well as other MP3, WMA, and Ogg Vorbis files, and internet radio (streaming MP3) through PocketTunes, and Apple’s preferred AAC (but not it’s iTunes Music Store DRM Files) files via a different program (Aeroplayer), and RealAudio files with the Real’s player that’s included with the Treo 650. In other words, the Treo 650 (and other PalmOS devices) is, in large part due to companies like Normsoft, becoming more and more a convergence device for Audio (along with the many other areas of convergence).

Now that Audio is becoming is becoming such a major feature of this phone, it’s really key to start beefing up the storage. I have a 1GB card, of which 300MB is already filled up with maps, images, etc. I know one can find 2GB cards, but compared to my 40GB iPod, even 2GB seems paltry, not to mention these cards come at a big premium. I am hoping that at least the next version of the Treo includes an internal 4GB hard drive like the LifeDrive, or better yet, one of the larger 6GB ones that are making it into many of the mini audio players these days.

Yahoo! Just came out with their new internet music offerings and it appears they’ve upped the anti over their competitors. Last year I belatedly found Yahoo’s Launchcast internet radio, and after playing with it for a week or two decided it was an amazing deal at $3.99 a month. Not only was this significantly less than the XM Sattelite Radio I was listening to, but you could set it up so that everything you heard was catered to your tastes based on your own ratings of genres, artists, albums, even individual songs. By doing this, Launchcast learns what kind of music you like based on other people who share your tastes and can offer up artists you may have not even heard of, but who are very much in tune with you.

With Launchcast, though, there were have been a couple of inherent problems, at least the way I saw it. First is the idea that you cannot tell Launchcast exactly what to play. It is, like a regular radio station, going to play songs in a somewhat random manner. If one is in the mood for a particular album or song, you’re out of luck. About the best you can do is create a custom mood, but all this does is let you specify a target genre to play, something you can do by just listening to one of the many non-customized Launchcast genre stations (or a standard radio station for that matter). In other words, Launchcast is not an “on-demand” service.

The other problem has been portability. One can listen to Launchcast anywhere that you have access to a high speed internet connection (and a computer that can listen to streaming Windows Media). While that may be great for home and office, even internet cafes, and hotels, it still doesn’t come close to the ubiquitous reach of Satellite Radio, which can be received anywhere in the U.S. at least if you are outside, and in many metropolitan areas when inside as well.

Yahoo!’s new offerings seem to solve both of these previous shortfalls, although perhaps not 100%. The new offerings are divided into two parts, Yahoo! Music Engine and Yahoo! Music Unlimited:

Yahoo! Music Engine gives you access to your own Launchcast station, but not the premium Launchcast Plus, so the songs are lower quality. The Engine is also the application itself which lets you play your own CD’s and MP3’s that are on your computer, burn music to CD, etc. You can search through the catalog and play 30 seconds of any song on demand and alternately buy it for $.99, similar to the way iTunes Music Store works. All of this is free.

Yahoo! Music Unlimited is the premium offering but includes everything that the Music Engine has. In addition, your Launchcast station is the premium Launchcast Plus with CD-quality songs. Secondly, one isn’t limited to 30 seconds of songs when doing the on-demand search and play - you hear the entire song, or entire album if you like. You can also purchase these songs for offline playing on a computer or device capable of playing Windows Media with copyright protection (DRM), and for a slightly cheaper $.79. Unfortunately neither my iPod nor my Treo 650 will play these files, but many other devices do have this capability.

Apparently Yahoo!’s competition (Napster and Rhapsody come the closest to offering the type of services Yahoo! does) costs $15/month, or at least $13.32 if purchased for a year. Yahoo! has priced their service to blow their competition out of the water. They are offering Yahoo! Music Unlimited for $6.99 per month, or $4.99 if you pay for a year at once. This is of course an increase above the Launchcast plus price of $3.99/$2.99 annually, but it is still a bargain compared to the higher priced services like Napster and Rhapsody.

My main use for these services is just to listen to music when I’m in the mood, but there are lots of other features that will be useful to others. One example is the integration with Yahoo! Messenger, so you can invite friends to listen to what you’re listening to, you can play what your friend is listening to, etc. You can also bookmark artists, albums, and songs for easy access (instead of having to search for them every time you want to play them), and even create an unlimited number of playlists from these bookmarks to play back at any time.

In addition to the built-in functionality, there is a growing community of plug-in developers that will allow all manner of additional features. These developers must have been using an early beta of Yahoo! Music Engine and Yahoo! Music Unlimited because they started submitting these months ago and there’s already a nice collection of them. One I downloaded was a minimal version of the player application so that it’s less obvious that I’m listening to music if someone happens to walk by and see my desktop screen at work. The mini version that comes with the application is not very good for this purpose! But there are tons of other plug ins that I want to play with and this is just a couple of days after the initial public release!

So, I said that Yahoo! has solved most of the “problems” of its earlier Launchcast service. But in my mind there is another issue remaining within the portability category. While you can download and transfer songs onto an MP3 player or a CD, this, in my mind, is still a somewhat clunky solution. It can also be a costly even at $.79 per song. In my mind, the whole idea of paying a subscription for content means that you shouldn’t have to shell out even more for whatever reason. I know, the idea is that you are charging people more so that they can listen to that content in whatever way they want, giving them more “rights” over it. But isn’t that what “fair use” is to begin with? I don’t know. I just can’t pay twice even if I’m getting something “more” for the added money. But that’s just me. Personally, I still thing the ultimate in killer music applications would be to have a portable Yahoo! Music Universal that would stream to your portable device over a wifi or even cellular network. Wifi is now available in many locations throughout the world, and is even being implemented as a municipal utility in some cities that will have blanket coverage over the entire city. Still this isn’t nearly the range that cellular phones carry. But now that higher speed EDGE and EV-DO networks are truly being rolled out here in the U.S and even faster networks in some parts of Asia, the issues of bandwidth is starting to go away. I really think this could be a possibility in the near future. Yahoo! representatives have said that they are looking at mobile options like the ones I mention, but of course there’s no timeframe or specifics they can offer those of us who are chomping at the bit.

Yahoo!’s competitor’s (even including Apple’s) stock prices have all fallen since the announcement indicating that Yahoo! really has something that could trounce the likes of Napster and Rhapsody, at least in the stock market’s assessment. I personally have not tried these other two services, so I can’t speak to how they compare, but I don’t believe that they have the customizable station based on ratings that Yahoo! has had for years, and of course they are signicantly more expensive – although that can be alleviated very quickly by them simply dropping their price in response to Yahoo!

In any case, I would highly recommend this option to you if you spend most of your time listening to music in a location where you have high-speed internet. The ability to call up any of over a million songs by a simple search is truly amazing. It’s kind of like having a 3 Terabyte iPod that you can instantly call up whatever you’re in the mood for. Also great and as far as I know not available in any of the other major internet music offerings is the ability to customize a random playlist of music (your Launchcast channel) that is created as you listen to and rate music. Yahoo! also makes all of this stuff very simple and straightforward. Their Yahoo! Music engine application is easy to operate and makes sense, and if you still are confused about features and functionality, you can always access their extensive and well-written help documentation. Definitely a great service!

Update: As you can see, I’ve crossed out the paragraph above where I talk about portability. Thanks to Matt New of Yahoo!, I’ve now gotten the correct info about portability and Yahoo!’s new music services, so I’ll try to explain them here:

Normally when you listen to songs via Yahoo! Music Unlimited, they are streamed to your computer. Alternately you can download individual files for playing on portable players or for burning onto CD. If you want to burn them onto CD, they are considered a “permanent download” and you have to pay - $.99 if you don’t have the premium Yahoo! Music Unlimited, or $.79 if you do.

If you only want to listen to them on a portable device (and not burn them to CD), you can indeed download them for free, given that the device is one of those that is “subscription-music compatible.” While these devices are still not very numerous, hopefully this will change soon. I can’t tell you how delighted and surprised I was to learn about this free downloading option. This does, in my mind solve the one remaining “problems” that YMU had in my mind. While it would be great to have a fully portable device (meaning being able to download or stream music from Yahoo! anywhere over the air via cell phone protocols like EDGE, EV-DO, or the upcoming HSDPA), this is really the next best thing, and perhaps even better in some ways because one doesn’t have to rely on having a good signal, but can just offload your music and have access to it wherever you go with your device.

While I think this portability truly makes YMU shine, for me it still isn’t an option unless I want to carry around a third gadget, and even for me that’s a bit much! I still will listen to YMU at home and work, but I already have two devices that I use to listen to audio, my Treo 650 Smartphone and my iPod. The main reason I have the iPod is the capacity, but also its ability to play Audio Books from Audible.com. Unfortunately the only device that is compatible with YMU that is also compatible with Audible is the Audiovox SMT5600 Pocket PC Phone, and the Dell Axim X50 and I already have a Treo 650 and I’m perfectly happy with it. Besides these devices will only give you enough room as what you can fit on their external SD memory, and right now 2GB is the largest capacity being sold. I really hope that Dell decides to make the Digital Jukebox Audible Compatible as it has done with it’s Axim, since I know that Apple is probably not going to introduce a feature that makes the iPod compatible with any other service or software that ones that Apple owns!

In the mean time, I just wanted to point everyone to a quick interview with Ian Rogers on Make Magazine’s Podcast. Ian talks about all the great plug-ins that can be and are being coded for use with the Yahoo! Music Engine. That reminds me I have to start downloading more to play around with! I see that Ian also left a comment below, so thanks, Ian, as you read, Matt cleared everything up for me.

Back a few years ago when I was watching very little TV, so-called “Reality-TV” made its appearance and I was glad that I had gotten away from the habit. Since then I’ve slowly inhaled more and more and while I still only watch an average of 7 or 8 hours a week, a chunk of that is on the Reality TV that on the one hand I think is just dumb, but on the other hand I have some morbid fascination with. The two such programs I currently watch are The Apprentice and American Idol.

The Apprentice is interesting because it is at least vaguely similar to life-like situations where you have a project to run and a team of coworkers. Of course it’s also very unrealistic because you are given lots of support on the one hand and on the other you may have no background in a given task (nor anyone on your team). Also, you don’t normally get what might be called an impossibly brief timeframe to get a project done, and then when your sales are a whopping $10 less then your competitor, you are deemed the “loser” and one of your teammates must be let go! But still, it is about making business decisions that I think most people can kind of understand based on common sense and it’s interesting to come up with what you would have done differently in order to make the project work better. Unfortunately, as with most of these shows, you only get to see what the producers want you to. They shoot dozens of hours of footage and have to bring this down to about 40 minutes. It needs to make sense, but also be entertaining, and finally it needs to not anger viewers too much when it seems obvious that Trump is making a horrible decision. Yahoo provides some extended scenes and some unaired scenes which each week probably add an additional 10-20% of footage! So you know there’s a lot of stuff we just don’t see. You can make someone look very bad or very good by selectively including or excluding a given scene, and I’m positive that the producers are very strategic about how they do this in order to portray who they want to win (or who they expect to win).

American Idol is another show that, like The Apprentice, I picked up last year just to find out what all the fuss was about. It is a nominally fun talent-show type of program, but the format has gotten pretty stale. Last year at least the contestants got to meet with some music giants like Elton John but this year it seems the venues for most weeks are just based on date ranges that the songs came out. The contestant performs, then the first judge, Randy, says “Hey Dawg, how’s it going?” and then gives what is arguably the most “real” impression of the performance. The Paula Abdul gushes about how the performance was great and in the rare cases she doesn’t like the performance she instead praises the individual instead of giving constructive criticism, although this does happen once in a blue moon. The Simon plays the evil foil and berates the performer for singing like a lounge singer, or someone at a karaoke bar, or one of the half dozen other analogies that he picks from a hat, and often complains about what the performer is dressed in. Occasionally he does praise performances, but 80-90% of the time his comments are negative and mean.

What is interesting is to see some of the discussion of people on the net that follow these two shows. I don’t get a group of friends together to watch these, being a 30-something most of whose friends are too busy with kids to bother with such trifles. My coworkers don’t seem to watch these shows either. In order to see whether others have similar impressions of the shows, I visit a couple of sites that discuss each episode. It’s interesting to get the impressions of some who are exactly what mine are, yet others who seem the diametrical opposite.

American Idol is a bit different from others in that the audience actually has a roll in the show in that they vote and their votes effect the outcome – namely who gets to leave the show each week. You can vote multiple times for as many candidates as you want and so there are some very motivated people who vote dozens if not hundreds of times for their favorites. One of the things I noticed early on in the competition which I felt wasn’t particularly fair was that back stories of certain contestants were aired while those of others weren’t. That means the audience became familiar with certain people whereas others seemed a lot less familiar and thus the familiar ones had a big edge in developing fan bases. It’s not a guarantee that someone with more initial exposure won’t make it that far and those with a lot will, but it does make these scenarios more likely. As I said, it gives an edge. If the person doesn’t take advantage of it, then it doesn’t mean much.

Anyway, this last episode of American Idol put Scott Savol, one of the contestants who have been in the “bottom 3″ for most of the competition, into the top group, despite any big improvement in his performance. This was surprising and then I heard of VoteForTheWorst.com. This is a site which is encouraging people to vote for the worst contestant (in their minds this is Scott Savol) in order to teach the American Idol producers a “lesson.” In other words, don’t try to steer or manipulate the audience into voting a certain way. So far I’ve never actually voted myself for one of these contests, but this site really does motivate me to do so. As the site says, all of these contestants are getting great exposure and will get record deals very quickly after the show ends, why must our “favorite” (if we even have one) win? Why not just make it more entertaining by voting for someone that most people think is a poor singer and performer? I have nothing against Mr. Savol. He had an arrest for domestic disturbance several years ago when he threw a phone at the mother of his son, but apparently this is something they’ve worked out and he’s expressed remorse. I don’t like judging people on stuff like this anyway, but I can judge his singing and performance at least as I experience it and my honest opinion is that he is the least charismatic, the worst performer, the worst singer and the worst communicator of the current group. As he and his parents have indicated, he’s not had the easiest haul growing up, so voting for him gives the added benefit of giving him some extra success that will hopefully allow him the freedom to do what he loves best – sing. Just as long as I don’t have to listen to his songs!

Back to Content ConsumptionI’ve been struggling recently with keeping up with audio content. In general I prefer audio to text because, as I mentioned, I’m a slow reader and I can listen when I otherwise wouldn’t be able to read – such as exercising, driving, cooking, doing housework, etc. I can also speed up much of what I listen to via a feature on my Ipod. I can divide my listening into two main categories – talk and music. Within Music, I can listen to my collection of CD’s I’ve burned to MP3, or I can listen to a much larger collection of tracks from my Launchcast internet radio account. Within talk, I listen to podcasts, to audio books, and to traditional radio shows, primarily NPR. The biggest technical problem is that there are too many different formats which may or may not work on a single device or program. My burned music is in MP3, Launchcast streams Windows Media, and my Audio books are in a proprietary format that Audible.com uses. While podcasts are usually initially in MP3’s, I convert them to AAC in order to take advantage of the ability to have them play at faster speeds on my iPod.

All these different formats cause headaches, but are not insurmountable, at least on a computer. iTunes will play most of these, although it won’t do the Launchcast radio and I can’t install it at work. If I want portability, I can play MP3’s and Audio Books on my Treo 650, but no AAC files nor streaming Windows Media or Realmedia which would allow me to listen to Launchcast and NPR segments of my choosing – which I’ll elaborate a bit on below.

When it comes to NPR, or any radio show for that matter, there are ways of making it more portable than you initially would think, but it is not elegant or easy. I can listen to NPR shows on my Treo, but they are just streams from live broadcasts, not specific selections that I make from the archives. So what? Well, for one, why even bother with a Treo and just use a radio? Exactly my point! A radio is for live broadcasts, but the whole power behind digital devices like the Treo, the TiVo, the iPod, etc., is that they enable you to have a much greater say in the matter of when and how you watch or listen to something.

I did find a program for my PC that allows me to “timeshift” radio like a TiVo does TV and used it for a while to record numerous NPR shows which I then synced with my iPod. This software, called Replay Radio, does really seem to be useful, but it just wasn’t fleshed out enough for me. Maybe part of this had to do with the fact that I was telling it to record 9 hours of content a day! Ok, so maybe I was overdoing it a bit. But still, all this writing files to the hard drive and then optionally converting them to AAC was making my computer sluggish as well as taking up lots of storage space. Sure I could have archived some of this to CD or DVD, but that means yet more time spent managing files! Speaking of which, just managing the process could take a while. It’s not nearly as easy as recording and managing shows on TiVo. While there are a few hundred channels on TV, there are thousands upon thousands of potential radio stations, so actually compiling an accurate programming list of even a fraction of these is a monumental task! Still, if you need to timeshift radio programming, this is definitely a way to do it, just realize that depending on how much you record, the process of keeping everything straight (not to mention actually listening to the stuff!), may take up a considerable amout of time.

Not long ago, I discovered that at least some of the shows I was listening to from NPR have RSS feeds. The feeds present each report within a show like Morning Edition as a separate entry in the feed, so that you don’t have to listen to the entire program to find what you are interested in. You simply pick the ones in your newsreader that are of interest, and link to a page on NPR’s site which has a button to listen to a streaming version of just that segment. I can’t do this when I’m away from a computer as my Treo cannot download these streams or play these streams, but at least it cuts way down on the amount of time that I would have had to spend listening because… I can filter! Ideally I would like to see a way to listen to these on my Treo and/or the iPod, but this would either entail NPR producing streaming MP3’s in addition to the other formats, or to provide actual files to download ala podcasting (they do this already for On The Media, Future Tense, and Morning Stories, but that’s it), neither of which I think they will be doing any time soon. But hey, you never know!

Speaking of podcasting, there isn’t much of an issue here. I can transfer podcasts at home onto my iPod (or theoretically by Treo) and listen to them anywhere. If I haven’t been able to do this for a while, I can still listen to them by just downloading and playing them on any computer connected to the internet, or even theoretically doing this with my Treo, although personally I haven’t tried yet because the GPRS download speeds I can currently via T-Mobile are too slow.

The other main issue that I was grappling with recently was how to make all this audio accessible to me at home without a) having to be right next to the computer, or b) having constantly be walking around with headphones on. I’d seen these streaming media servers at some computer stores that intrigued me. These allow you to transmit audio files on your computer, or even internet radio to this device that you hook to the audio input jacks of your stereo. The communication between the device and your computer is via Wifi. Voila, you have an instant serious listening station to play your music and/or spoken word audio no matter where your computer is in the house related to your stereo.

So I went out and bought the SMC EZ-Stream Wireless Audio Adapter (SMCWAA-B). I was unable to determine prior to buying it whether it would play Launchcast radio, but I thought I’d give it a shot. The description on the box says that it’s compatible with Rhapsody, but I don’t use that. So, I bought it, brought it home and started struggling first with simply connecting it to my wifi network. I use WEP security to encrypt my network, and the user interface on the device was not very straightforward, so all this took a while to get working. The software that comes with the unit makes you install Musicmatch Jukebox in order to play MP3’s or WMA’s. Despite doing this, the unit couldn’t find some sample tracks I added to the Musicmatch library. Luckily, I found that one can download third-party server software, most notably TwonkyVision, which can greatly expland the initial capabilities of the software your device comes with. Initially TwonkyVision didn’t work either, so I had the idea to turn off my TiVo Home Networking Option, and all of a sudden success! Perhaps this was my problem with the original software not working as well. More importantly, though, TwonkyVision gave me access to my preferred audio software on my PC: iTunes. It was able to use my iTunes library to create basically a mirror of the same hierarchical menus that are on my iPod to navigate through tracks based on album, artist, genre, etc.. The only problem was that it would still only play MP3’s and WMA’s. No AAC’s, and no Audible files. Researching this further I found that the only media server that can currently play AAC’s is Airport Express with AirTunes. This would have been the perfect solution for me, except that of course this doesn’t play Launchcast radio! Argh!

And there’s the rub. It seems like no streaming media server out there is perfect in that it will let you stream any type of file or internet stream to your stereo. Certainly I don’t understand the intricate technical details in back of these technologies, but to me it seemed a fairly obvious product would be one that simply took the analog output of your computer’s sound card, converted it to digital bits, transmitted over a wifi connection to a device that could decode this into analog again to be output to the stereo. The media servers that exist allow for actual browsing through your music collection with a remote control and a visual textual display. This of course requires the device understand file types, directory structures, etc. What about simply a type of audio “modem,” if you will, that converts an analog stream into digital and then back into analog? It wouldn’t have the interactive ability to control things through the stereo – you would have to do that controlling on the PC side - but as far as I’m concerned, that’s icing.

I posited this question to the TwonkyVision forums over media-server.com as they seemed to have a lot of knowledgeable users and the main relevant suggestion I got was for a product that’s pretty different, but one that I decided to try out anyway.

The Radio Shack 2.4GHz Audio/Video Signal Sender/Receiver is something that looks like it was designed to share the signal coming from a dvd player, CD player, VCR, satellite receiver, etc., among stereos and/or TV’s in different rooms in a house. Its 2.4 GHz range seems to indicate some Wifi compatibility, but really it has nothing to do with Wifi, which is completely digital. Instead it is just an FM modulation transmitter/receiver that works on the same frequency as Wifi signals. You can only do so much research on the web, although it really depends on the device and who sells it. Radio Shack does not offer a way to review products on their site. The cost of it was low enough ($100) that I could just go buy it myself and if it didn’t meet my requirements, I could return it. So that’s what I did. Here are my impressions so far:

The device is actually two devices, a sender part and a receiver part. Both of these not only have to be plugged into a power outlet, but also have to be plugged into your computer and/or stereo. So what is in one way a “wireless” solution becomes one which also adds a lot more wires! The instructions are pretty sparse, as you can see (Radio Shack no longer has the manual available online), but there’s really not a whole lot to these things. You can operate them on four different “channels” and they not only have RCA stereo audio jacks, but also an RCA and coax video jack. I suppose with the video I could transmit stuff from my PC monitor if I had a video out on it. Alas, it is a non-multimedia laptop, so no such video out is available.

I was initially concerned that there would be interference between these and the Wifi I have in my house, but that seems to not be an issue. Whether this has to do with the different channels, I don’t know, but I just used the default channels for the device and there’s no interference like when I used to have a portable phone that worked on the 2.4 GHz frequency that would always toss all the computers off the network whenever we used it!

While there was no interference from Wifi, there was a lot of interference from other radio frequency sources. For example any time my cell phone rang, there was tons of crackling and other distortion, although of course the degree depended on how close the phone was to the transmitter or receiver. When the microwave was on there was some as well. As far as sound quality is concerned, it’s not bad, but with FM-Modulation, you are only getting FM-quality sound. This probably will not matter when it comes to spoken word, but for music, you can definitely tell the difference. The dynamic range is truncated so that you aren’t hearing the sounds that are on the extreme ends of bass and treble. Probably mostly bass because when I play music through these it sounds a bit tinny. I have to really play with equalization, but I know that even when I set loudness on and add additional bass and/or treble, that I’m simply stretching the information, not adding back in sound that’s been chopped off due to the smaller dynamic range. And I’m not an audiophile by any means. I can only imagine how horrible FM sounds to all those with more sensitive ears than mine!

Still, having a set of these sender/receivers is still the main option that fits at this point. I suppose if I got over my love of Launchcast, I could move on to the Airport Express, but as I’ve explained in the past, there is something inherently great about Launchcast that I so far have not found on any other internet radio platform – the ability for it to learn exactly what you like based on your own ratings and those of people who rate music similar to you – a kind of big social network based on music ratings that allows you to keep hearing new music that fits your taste even though you may have never known such music existed!

Another usage that the Radio Shack units allow for that I would not be able to get with a media server is something like Atmosphere, a background sound generator which I’ve talked about before which I really like. Of course I could record Atmosphere to an MP3 file and just play that over and over, but that would do away with some of the inherent randomness that Atmosphere has built into it.

As you can see, there are lots of options out there for those who want to listen to music and spoken word audio, and for many people one of those options will provide everything they want or need. Being somewhat picky about this stuff, of course, hurts the chances of this happening. We’re obviously still in the infancy of digital music when it comes to distribution mechanisms, portability, and compatibility. It may not seem like that with the iPod being around for close to five years and Internet Radio close to ten, but eventually there will need to be some consolidation in terms of formats and technologies or else many of us will have to continue to trudge along with multiple devices, multiple programs, tweaks and workarounds in order to enable us to play everything we want in every way we want, and any place we want.

Update: I’ve recently learned that Launchcast IS partnering with an equipment manufacturer to stream their content to stereos wirelessly. Philips Stremium brand devices apparently will do this. They are, however, very pricey compared to other media servers and I’m not quite sure why. The other problem is that currently Launchcast support is only for its genre stations and not for a user’s custom station. This really defeats the whole purpose. Apparently there are plans to get the custom station support working but I could not get any kind of timeline out of Launchcast folks. Without this support, I can’t see considering such a device, and even with this support I’m hard-pressed to spend such a huge premium just to get somewhat better quality over my current solutions. Of course these devices let you stream video as well, so if you have lots of digital video that you download off the net or create with your camcorder, this will allow you to transmit this stuff to your TV, but then you can do this with devices that cost a fraction of the price…

I’ve never been the most organized person in the world. I’m not the least organized either. Sometimes I think I am an anal-retentive-wannabe. I feel a vague uneasiness when things are out of order, which is most of the time. Not that “out of order” means that things need to be perfect by any stretch. For example, here’s a picture of cubicle at work, which I haven’t actually cleaned for weeks:

(trust me it looks worse in real life!)

When I do clean up around the house, I feel like I can think more clearly. In this way I’m a little schizophrenic, or maybe just stupid. I know I feel better when things are clean and orderly, but I’m just too lazy or distracted to do anything about it! Maybe it’s a chicken and egg sort of thing.

With the age of the personal computer, we have a whole new non-physical realm to deal with in terms of organization. We need to organize information, whether that’s in the way of files, email, bookmarks, whatever. In this area, which I’m admittedly sometimes more familiar with than the physical world, as disturbing as that is to contemplate, I’m not that better. Often it gets to the point where I’m getting warnings of only having 100MB of free space before I think, hmmm, I better clean things up. Certainly having done this for a couple of decades now, I may be a little better than the average person, but it is still a struggle, and one that seems increasingly challenging as my roles in the physical world becomes more substantive.

My main organizational issues right now center around two key parts of my digital life – email and bookmarks. Thankfully when it comes to RSS feeds, Bloglines has allowed me to get pretty organized, although of course I’m woefully behind at actually keeping up with all of the blog entries that I should be reading.

I first started collecting email back in ‘92 when I got my first email account in grad school. Somehow I decided that I wanted to hold onto these emails and because not a whole lot of people had email back then, my correspondence probably amounted to a hundred or so messages per year, maybe less. So every six months or a year I’d spend a half hour saving these to text files with a specific naming format including the name of the recipient, sender, and the date, plus a, b, c, d, etc. for multiple messages for a single day from/to the same person.

This continued until the Internet Bubble of the late 90’s made the flow of email so great that the time needed to do this expanded from 30 minutes to a whole day. So, the last archive of this kind happened sometime in 2000. By that time I had also started using Outlook as my email client and while it was probably just as easy (or difficult) to archive messages than it had been with Pine or Eudora, my laziness had gotten the better of me. Then in 2001 I started dating my now wife, and since then my time for such tasks has decreased even more!

In 2002 I started using a portable device to read email while away from the computer - The Danger Sidekick. Because of T-Mobile’s nonsensical resistance to allowing users to sync their Outlook data on the device, I was at a bit of a disadvantage.

Luckily, last summer, this changed dramatically when I bought my friend’s Treo 600. Around this same time I found a company (1and1)that among other things hosts outlook data so that you can access it remotely either via “Outlook Web Access” (a web interface to Outlook), or via an actual Outlook client or via a regular IMAP email client. 1and1 had by far the cheapest plan at only $6.99 per month and so far I’ve been pretty satisfied. After doing some searching, I finally settled on an excellent IMAP client for the Treo called ChatterEmail that let me synch whatever folders I wanted to. It’s still not practical to keep thousands of full messages from years of correspondence, it isn’t impossible. But ChatterEmail doesn’t use external cards the way some others do (Snappermail comes to mind). Still, for my needs, I felt ChatterEmail’s advantages outweighed this disadvantage, especially since it’s rare that I go searching for email that’s older than a year.

So, now that everything was more or less set up, what did I do? Not much. I know many people use an extensive folder system, even directing their email into various folders when they are received. I was never that big a user of folders, although I did use them in a minor way. So, recently, this lack of using such a powerful email organizational feature was gnawing at me and I figured I needed to come up with some strategic ways of using folders. What I came up with, ironically, involves more manual work. But at least it promotes organization. Basically I let things lie in the inbox for a while – sometimes it could be for an hour, sometimes for days or even weeks – but eventually sooner or later I have to go through and “clean house” which involves just going through the last umpteen messages and deleting stuff I know I don’t want to keep and taking other stuff and putting them in the appropriate folder. Luckily, I keep most personal mail from friends and family in my inbox, so don’t need to anything with these. This folder is synched with my Treo. I keep the last 3-6 months of messages in my inbox, and archive the rest going back a year or so to a separate folder which is still accessible on my hosted exchange account (but not the Treo). Last night I went through all the messages in my inbox and this archived inbox and created three or four folders for additional subjects that I figure I might need to go back and look at some time in the future: blog-related stuff, registration information, online purchases, posts with links to various references that I eventually want to read relating to photography, the Treo, etc. Currently I’m not synching these, but I figure eventually I can download these to the Treo very easily as needed.

Aside from all this on my hosted exchange account, I have some earlier Outlook data that I didn’t transfer because I was worried about using up the 500MB that the account gave me when I signed up. Even though they increased it to 1GB, I’m still a little reticent if for no other reason then having to go through an additional three or four years worth of email in that file. I guess eventually I should go ahead and put the stuff up there…

I’m surprised that there aren’t more tools out there to help people archive old email, and even keep it around for searching purposes. There’s a lot of information contained in years of email messages that could be useful to people. Old addresses, phone numbers, names, etc. It’s very easy to look up my name on the Internet and find up-to-date information about me because I have this blog and post messages online in various places. But most of my friends don’t have this kind of net-visibility, and so if I lose track of someone and they change their contact info, it’s sometimes next to impossible to find them again sometimes, unless of course they find me from something I’ve written and send me a line, as has happened a few times in the last year or so. The ability to create an archival structured document or set of documents, like a bulletin board with threads (something maybe along the lines that Gmail does?), could be really powerful. The main challenge in my mind would be not chaining it to a single program. Maybe creating something in xml or a similar standardized protocol so that developers could create many different viewers for it.

As I mentioned above, bookmarks (or “favorites” in MS parlance) are my next target area for organization. Again, I used to be better about these when there didn’t seem to be as much useful stuff to link to. I still have the remnants of a decent system bookmarks categorized into folders. However, I’m sure many of these are outdated – either long gone or simply out of date or not of interest to me anymore.

For a while now, I’ve been using My Yahoo! as a way to have an online store of bookmarks that I could access from wherever I am, and also to synch my bookmarks from home to work. It also got around what had become a separation of different bookmarking systems between MS and Netscape, although luckily these systems never got incompatible enough to really hamper the transfer of data from one system to the other.

Since becoming more involved with RSS feeds and using Bloglines as a way to manage the feeds I read, I have been yearning for a similar system for bookmark management. I have lots of feeds where there is some article that has so much detail that I either want to keep it for later reference, or simply to read it at a later date (because it’s too long for my slow reading speed, making it necessary to set aside a good chunk of time to read it). Bloglines allows you to clip individual entries and put them into hierarchical folders. This is great for managing such stuff, but unfortunately its interface is not all that friendly to mobile devices (even though it has a specifically mobile version of its site, some functionality is missing and they haven’t made any improvements for at least 6 months, despite clamoring from many users), and besides, you can’t insert your own links. For example, there may be a great entry by a blogger that links to something of interest, but also contains many other links. In Bloglines you can only save that entire entry, not just the link of interest.

I have played a bit with sites like del.icio.us, and furl, but it seems to me that they are either just inelegant compared to Bloglines and/or your browser’s bookmark system, or their interface is more about “social bookmarking” (sharing links with others), than it is about managing your own. There does seem to be some developers using the del.icio.us API to allow one to import and export your bookmarks, so I will need to look into this. It does seem a little odd that this isn’t a feature of del.icio.us to begin with, but whatever. I think this is just one of those areas thats just going to be a constant work in progress.

But then again, isn’t organization constant work? You can set systems up so that future work is minimized, but there’s always some work to do, and due to all the new kinds of information out there, people will always need to do the work to figure out what the best ways to organize things will be. For example, in the last five years or so, people have been able to rip their music to MP3, and this requires organization both within the ID3 tags and possibly also within a folder structure. But MP3’s are just the beginning. Photo collections are yet another big organizational task now that digital cameras have become affordable to most. Now that digital video has become more accessible to the masses with the proliferation of processors and hard drives that can handle the much more demanding content, this stuff will need to be organized as well. The next jump up to high-definition digital video will be even more demanding but eventually will be available to anyone with $500 to spare.

I think all of this begs a separate but related question: do we continue to manage all this ourselves on our local systems? Obviously the push has been more and more towards storing these things online, at least as an important option. This is being done not only so that one can share the content and information, but simply to access it no matter where you are, as long as you can connect to the Internet – a feat that is becoming almost ubiquitously easy, although you might need some hard currency to do it in third world countries. Having all your data online is of concern to privacy advocates and to simply to those who are paranoid about losing that data. Privacy is a valid concern for many, especially considering recent events around the T-Mobile Hacker’s breaking in to the Danger servers and getting access to Paris Hilton’s personal info on her Sidekick. And as always, it’s important to make copies of your data for local archiving in case of connections or servers going down, as they will do from time to time. It may be wise for such companies as hosting companies and the like to establish not only their own backup systems but backups that allow their own customers to maintain an up-to-date copy of what’s on the server. Perhaps offering this as special software would actually decrease their backup storage resources required, although it would at the same time increase their bandwidth usage costs.

Right now we are still at the beginning of the information age when it comes to information management. Those who are tech-savvy can manage their information with a good deal of effort and planning. Those who aren’t tech-savvy have much more of a challenge. Companies have by and large not seized the opportunity to cater to both sets of users to provide them with a much more seamless way to manage all this stuff both locally and online. Certainly we are moving in this direction, but I think we still have a long way to go before the average non-techy can simply have all their data organized and managed, backed up, and synched to whatever computer (or portable device) they happen to want to use, view, share, change, etc. at any given time.

Yesterday I wrote about my last week in radio-synchronicity-nirvana-Zen-whatever. The whole thing was really prompted by Meredith’s post about Yahoo’s Launchcast Radio, which I’ve become quite fond of. Being new to internet radio, its capabilities could be matched or even exceeded by others, but from the little reading I’ve done, the only entities that get close are not big fish and the fact that Yahoo! is a major player on the Internet means that it’s not going to go away any time soon, which is always a concern of mine for net-based services. Here’s a relatively recent article about some other major players in the field.

Yahoo! bought Launchcast from Launch Media in 2001. Launch had debuted the service in 1999 and soon after, quite predictably, was being sued by some of the big record companies and the RIAA. Yahoo inherited at least one of those suits and settled it so that it now has to dole out compensation to these companies for use of the music, and that’s probably where a big percentage of my money is going! It doesn’t make me feel all that great that I’m still supporting those guys, but I’d rather be doing it in a progressive way like this than through having to listen to stupid ads on commercial FM radio or by buying overpriced CD’s for the one or two songs I want to hear. What I would love to see are bands going to Yahoo! directly and bypassing these big record companies altogether. If individual bands could get even a fraction of the cut that I’m sure these companies and the RIAA are getting, I’m sure most of them would be thrilled to cut out the middlemen. Maybe if enough artists switched over to this method - even those currently tied to a company but whose contract runs out relatively soon - these companies would wither to nothing. Sure they’d still be keeping their fat cats rich off of the royalties, but those would start declining as the popularity of a lot of the oldies would as a matter of course… Well, one can dream…

Part of the power of Launchcast is in how you are able to customize it to your tastes. The way this is done is by allowing the user to rate all the numerous genres (and many sub-genres) with either a 1-5 star rating or an even more exact 0 to 100 scale. Within each genre or sub-genre, Launchcast also offers a group of a dozen or so artists which you can rate as well, or, you can simply do searches on artists, songs, or album titles, and then rate each of these individually. As well, each time a song comes up on your “player” you can rate the song, artist, and album. Launchcast uses all these ratings to produce a “station” for you. This artificial intelligence then looks at each person who rates a given artist with a high rating, and tries to figure out among all of these “fans,” which other artists are also highly rated so that it can suggest additional music, some of which you might not have had any idea existed. This is all very impressive to me, but perhaps it’s old hat to many of you. It’s one thing to get better quality sound, fewer (or no) commercials, or more choice in terms of genres, but really customizing radio based on a user’s particular tastes and others who share some of those tastes, to me really is taking radio to the next level. That is why I’m currently paying money for this service. It’s a lot less than satellite radio at $4 (or $3 if you commit for year) per month.

There are only a couple of issues that I have with Launchcast that make it less than perfect for me. One is the fact that so far it doesn’t work in different browsers. It’s a little bit shortsighted to only cater to one browser, Internet Explorer in this case, but I’m hopeful that Yahoo! will fix this problem and will be supporting other browsers, Firefox in particular, in the not-too-distant future. Maybe I’m being a little harsh here, since Firefox has only just gotten out of beta. Doing a little more digging, I discovered a stand-alone application that one can use as your “player” instead of IE. While this is a step backwards in some ways – since you will have to download this onto the PC you are using, which sometimes is not possible – it enables me to do away with IE for my listening. Sure it may be using part of IE’s engine for the application, and you can’t launch it from link on the Launchcast site the way you can with the standard player, but it any time I can avoid using IE proper, I will. This app is called LAUNCHcast Desktop Player Application and was created by Mark Edington. As far as I can tell, it’s only available on the Launchcast Yahoo! Group, but it’s freely distributable, so I’ve uploaded it and provide it here for your use.

The other problem for me is that right now Launchcast is not really portable. Ok, so you can listen to it wherever you have a reasonably fast Internet connection, but really you are still chained to a computer, even if it’s just a laptop. Actually, now that I think about it, I’m wondering if Launhcast will work on a portable PocketPC device running IE? With a wifi card in it, one could theoretically take it around and listen to it at a Starbucks or public wifi hotspots, or even over a 3G cellular network on a PocketPC-based smartphone. For the present I’m not sure what can really be done about it. Wifi is becoming more popular with the consumer and more devices and computers are coming equipped with wifi capability. Some city and town governments are looking at providing it for free (Phili has just approved such a plan), but the point is that it’s still very localized. Most hotspots are still only 802.11B, whose range is only a hundred or so feet. 802.11G is a little better but not much, and besides it’s not nearly as popular as B even though G has been out now for a couple of years. 802.11N is the next standard and the first one where we are starting to see really significant range (in the many hundreds of feet) and speed increases. It hasn’t been approved yet, and although there are “pre-N” devices already being sold, there’s no guarantee these will work with the final standard, so most are holding off for now. Still, it’s taken years for a relatively small (considering the overall geography) number of 802.11B hotspots to become available in the U.S. There are even the more advanced wireless protocols “Wimax” and “Mobile-Fi” that offer the promise of considerably larger ranges and speeds even than 802.11N. The range might allow for repeaters to be spaced out as much as current cell towers are to provide a smiliarly complete coverage area. But there are many obstacles to this kind of universal service, including technical, economical, regulatory, etc. For the foreseeable future, we’re stuck. Or are we?

In addition to what I’ve mentioned, Launchcast has some other nifty features like allowing you to view a history of everything you’ve heard on your station. Didn’t get around to rating something you really liked 3 songs ago, just go into your history and get the information about it. You can’t actually play it again on demand, but that is part of what makes Launchcast “radio” as opposed to a just a virtual collection of music that you play at will. That sort of on-demand capability, while desirable in one way, doesn’t get to the heart of one of the key advantages I see with how radio works. When you let someone else choose for you, you are, it’s true, giving up some control of what you listen to at any given time. The amount of control of course depends on what you are listening to, with standard FM radio being at the lower end of the spectrum (although you can at least theoretically choose the genre you want to hear), and a service like Launchcast at the other end. But when you give up some of that control, you can actually gain by being “forced” to listen to music you’ve never heard before. Some assuredly you will never want to listen to again, but others will be great new finds. I’m no longer in high school where classmates would hand me their personally recorded mix tapes, or in a dorm where lots of different people with different musical tastes would introduce me to all kinds of stuff I’d never heard before. And since I don’t listen to much music on the regular radio anymore, this has provided me for the first time in years a way to expand my playlist. In that vein, if you know someone else’s Yahoo! ID that uses Launchcast, you can listen to their station too, and if you share their tastes, you can name them as an “influencer.” Doing so will cause Launchcast to start to introduce into your station some of the music that plays on your influencer(s) stations. I haven’t yet chosen any influencers because I don’t know anyone else personally who uses Launchcast, and I feel like I’m still building my own station with doing all the rating, but I’m sure I will get around to adding some eventually.

With that in mind, I thought I’d provide a link (which will henceforth be in the left column of my Blog if you view it in a web page by its url – twelveblackcodemonkeys.com) to my station. I’m sure it will differ considerably from many of the people reading this, but that’s the fun – you get to listen to things you might not even know existed, or at least get to know someone else’s tastes in a more tangible way. To give you some fair warning, my station combines some alternative rock, jazz, classical, movie soundtracks, and a smidgeon of folk, Latin, world, and classic rock. I would say the bulk is alternative rock, jazz, and classical though.

As you probably know by now, I’m a big fan of “gadgets.” When I picture a “gadget” I get the image of some kind of portable device that utilizes technology. I think the first “gadget” that was commonly used was the portable transistor radio, although it was a bit before my time. However, I was present for the revolution of the Walkman, and remember my first one from 1980 that was bulky and heavy. Maybe that’s what initiated my future love for this type of device.

Having been involved with the Internet in one form or another for about 12 years now, I feel a little ashamed about certain parts of it that I have simply not gotten to play with much. IRC is one of those things. Although I did try it out a few times, it just never appealed to me, whereas I took to instant messaging immediately. The other biggie is Internet radio. The one or two times in the past that I listened to it, I was not at all impressed. Historically the problem was poor quality due to lack of bandwidth. Why listen to something that to me sounded like AM quality when I had a perfectly good FM radio to play, let alone my own collection of CD’s?

All of this changed this week. Somehow everything came together this week and it became for me a seminal Week of the Radio! First I read a piece by Meredith about Launchcast Radio, an internet radio service that’s owned by Yahoo! Then I get an early Christmas present of a Grundig shortwave radio. Finally, Treonaughts posted a great article about how to stream Internet radio broadcasts through the Treo using Pocket Tunes.

My radio-listening habits have changed a lot over the years. I didn’t listen to radio that much growing up, preferring the records and cassettes of my parents and then later of my own. Then when I was 16, a classmate gave me a Pink Floyd album and I suddenly became obsessed with classic rock. I became a big listener of “AOR” (Album Oriented Radio) at the time, which in New York City meant 92.3 K-Rock, a station that had just gone on the air – just in time to broadcast the first Bandaid concert live.

When I got to college a couple of years later, my tastes for whatever reason started swinging more towards alternative rock and New Age. In Boston at that time there was a great alternative station called WFNX 101.7, which apparently is still around, and another older station, 104.1 WBCN, that was doing lots of experimenting with different genres including alternative rock, classic rock, and even some rap and R&B. There were also some college stations and MIT had one (88.1 WMBR) that played some really bizarre stuff on Friday and/or Saturday nights. At Boston University, where I was attending college, there was a communications school where I took a few classes (actually I transferred into it for a year when I thought I was going to become a journalist), and their main building also housed the public radio station 90.9 WBUR – where the Click and Clack actually broadcasted from before they moved to Harvard Square. By my senior year, I was listening to a lot of NPR. I thoroughly enjoyed their in-depth coverage over the sensationalized or “dumbed down” reporting that has historically existed in much of commercial mainstream media. While some have accused NPR for being a bit snobby, I still find it to have much better reporting than the alternatives. If the choice is between in-debth and snobby on the one hand and shallow, sensationalistic and dumbed down on the other, I’ll have to go with the former…

During college I also listened to a lot of shortwave radio. For those unfamiliar with it, it is a set of frequencies above the normal FM band which are used to communicate programs internationally – you need a specially equipped radio in order to receive these. Stations were primarily state-owned and geared towards those outside of the country. Kind of a PR tool or propaganda if you will. They have pretty horrible sound quality as well, something on par with AM. The U.S. has it’s own shortwave network called Voice Of America. What I listened to during college was primarily Radio Moscow, the Soviet state shortwave radio station. It was fascinating to me because I was generally interested in Russia at the time (I majored in Russia) and the Soviet Union was in the midst of Mikhail Gorbachev’s Perestroika and Glasnost’. You could listen to the talk shows and round tables where journalists debated social problems, which was unheard of just a few years earlier. When I first started listening they were still vehement in their stance against the west, but during those years you could tell they were beginning to question even foreign policy issues (particularly their disastrous foray into Afghanistan) and some of the defensiveness was being replaced by honest talk.

After college, I don’t really remember listening to much. I vaguely remember being on a jazz kick briefly when I was working in New York in between college and grad school, but a bad breakup with a girlfriend at the time made me turn towards less soothing stuff and more towards some of the angry alternative stuff from earlier like Throwing Muses. In Grad School (Charlottesville, VA) during the early 1990’s there was a real dearth of good stations. Most of them seemed to be top-40 or Country in genre. When I moved to DC in ‘95 after two and a half years in Charlottesville, I was amazed that my “alternative” radio had become the mainstream. Top-40 stations were now playing Nirvana! I settled on a 99.1 WHFS, which had a rich history in DC as being alternative for something like 20 years, way more than anyone else in the area. But even back then people were saying that it had lost a lot of its character, and I was soon realizing that it too was beginning to sound more like a top-40 channel with tons of commercials and songs that you would hear sometimes half a dozen times per day!

Again I started listening to NPR, and the DC area has a couple of great NPR stations. 88.5 WAMU is a station that is now only talk, although when I was first listening part of the day was taken up with hours of bluegrass music. 90.9 WETA is a combination talk and classical music channel, like a lot of stations that host public radio. I’d always enjoyed classical music. WBUR in Boston played it in addition to its NPR broadcasts. But I was by no means an aficionado. Slowly, listening to WETA, I’ve become more familiar with it over the years and it’s gotten a larger and larger share of my listening time.

Then Satellite Radio came to town. I remember hearing about it on NPR of all places back in 2000 I think and I was really looking forward to it, since I had had some experience with the music channels on Satellite TV. Those Satellite TV channels were a cool idea – I loved the lack of commercials, the great sound quality, and the fact that you could very quickly decide exactly what genre you wanted. Oh, also the fact that each song name and the album it was on and the artist performing it were all on the screen while it played, allowing you to note it down if you really liked the song. At the same time, though, I felt really silly using the TV as a radio. The TV was something to watch, and at the time I shared a TV with two or three other guys in our group house and in general we WERE watching something most of the time. About two years ago, I finally took the plunge and bought an XM radio – a Delphi Skifi - which I could listen to in the car, then bring to the office and listen to it there via a boombox that the module fit into. Having Satellite radio in the car was great for long trips when you don’t know which stations you’re going to be near or can’t quite pick them up. You can always have access to your favorite music or news. Like the Satellite TV music channels, you got the names of the artist and song, although there’s a point at which these would cut off if they were too long. My main problem was that being an NPR junky, the news stations on XM (just audio feeds mainly of various cable news channels like CNN, Fox, etc.), really didn’t do it for me. I felt not having NPR was a huge oversight, but while the competing satellite company has a couple of NPR shows, they are pretty minimal compared to the large collection available on a regular station. When I contacted XM about this, they said that NPR felt if they allowed XM to broadcast their programs, local public stations wouldn’t continue to get the same revenue in donations. So I found that except for the occasional long trip, I really wasn’t using it much in the car. At work I was using it primarily to listen to classical music because that was the least disruptive to those around me – or to myself when trying to do work that required a lot of concentration. So I was paying $11 per month to listen to classical music, which I could have done for free by bringing in a standard radio. So after about a year I finally sold my radio to a friend.

While I generally don’t listen to that much recorded music on CD, MP3, etc. these days, the main thing that HAS taken me away from radio is the audio book. I’ve written about Audible.com a bunch of times here. I subscribed to this service almost five years ago. Being a slow reader makes it all the more attractive – suddenly you are able to use the time which would ordinarily be very difficult if not impossible to read a book (driving, exercising, etc.) With the large number of unabridged books available, you can easily spend huge amounts of time listening. I don’t know what the average book length is, but the ones in my queue run between 4 hours to over 20. I’ve read a good 60 books at least over the years and have at least that number still unread but purchased and waiting in my queue.

So, getting back to the present, as I mentioned, last week Meredith posted about Launchcast Radio and I decided to give it a shot. After playing with it for a few days, I became so enamored with it that I signed up for their paying service called Launchcast Plus. Launchcast combines some of the same ideas that satellite radio does by offering a large number of stations based on genre. However, the way they distinguish themselves is by customizing the music you hear to the individual’s preferences. This entry is becoming extremely long, so I’m going to post some more detailed thoughts about Launchcast in a future entry. Treonaughts posted as well about another type of “broadcasting” technology similar to how Launchcast works. However, Shoutcast streams are streams of MP3 files, and it’s been around for at least 5 years. Because MP3’s can be compressed at different rates, one can provide different streams that vary so that someone on a T1 connection down to someone on a 33.6 modem or even GPRS connection can receive the stream.

The trend towards ubiquitous wireless connectivity will mean more portable devices that can receive this kind of streaming, and so the last remaining problem with this technology will be solved and will eventually supplant the standard FM broadcast, which has gotten increasingly outdated. Delphi’s new MiFi portable XM receiver, while not internet streaming, shows another hint at the future of radio. It contains a small onboard hard drive that allows you to “timeshift” your radio programming, finally bringing a technology that was introduced for TV five years ago via TiVo and ReplayTV. When all these technologies will merge is somewhat unpredictable. While wireless networs were rare 5 years ago, they still have a long way to go to get close to the universal coverage of cell phones, and the fact that you can use them to make telephone calls without subscribing to a phone company means that mobile phone companies in particular will not be making it easy for these networks to take off. At the same time, so many people see the incredible power that this would provide that its inevitable. Already cities like Philidelphia are agreeing to make wifi a freely available public utility, and New York has been asking for proposals from various companies to do set up a high-speed ubiquitous network for some time. At this rate it seems likely that the internet will supplant radio as the main method of communication for audio broadcasting, and probably eventually video as well. Unfortunately the FCC will still be involved, but I’m hoping it will only be to regulate the technical aspect of things so that one wireless network, technology, or hotspot can’t interfere with others. But according to recent statements it sounds like the FCC wants to remake itself into an arbiter for all things that get communicated via the Internet as well. No doubt it sees where things are headed and doesn’t want to lose all the power it currently has to individuals or various technology companies.