After years of knowledge absorption and months of development, our team at RawVoice launched PodcastFAQ.com today. Finally one site that has everything you need to know about podcasting. At least that’s the plan. We know that we couldn’t think of everything, that’s why we left the site open for community/user contribution. Simply click the “submit content” button and let us know what’s missing or inaccurate. Two weeks ago we opened the site up to our community at Blubrry, Podcasternews and TechPodcasts and they have helped us a ton getting it ready for today. So… if your looking to learn a bit about podcasting, get refreshed or just want to see what its all about. Check out PodcastFAQ.com. [http://www.podcastfaq.com/]
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I can’t believe it took this long but someone may have finally gotten it right. SanDisk is partnering up with yahoo music and producing an mp3 player with Wifi that does what it’s suppose to do. If you have a Y! Unlimited account (which I do) and open wifi network you will be able to connect to Y! Music download songs and listen to the Launchcast streaming radio stations. This is an extremely exciting announcement. Unfortunatly 250.00 (4gb model) is a bit high for me so I will have to wait a bit until I get one of these things but, I think I have found my next MP3 Player. I have two questions. based on the EMI decision to offer drm free music if and when Yahoo offers drm free EMI stuff will this device download it? Also will you be able to download podcasts on this thing? If so this device will be paving the road for what Apple, Microsoft and others should do. Hmm I bet the iphone will be able to do all this too. I hope so the more the better. [link to story] [link to Sandisk Sansa Connect]
Now that I had subsribed to Y! Music Unlimited, I had to get myself something other than my iPod to take my music with me. Luckily I was able to get a hold of 1 yr old Creative Zen 5gb digital audio player. I must admit it was great I pulled the of the box plugged it in, and the Yahoo music engine instantly recognized it and asked me if I should start moving music over. Well that was easy. I wondered if this would work as easily when I plug it into another computer.. With my iPod this is a big No No! In PC world (I’ve heard it’s different in Apple world) your iPod is only aloud to sync with one computer. This totally sucks especially if I have stuff at work that I’d like to move to my iPod. Luckily with the Zen, this wasn’t the case. I plugged it into another computer and its was completely recognized!
Weirdly enough a little bit later in the day My destop informed me that one of my hard drives was almost full. So I decided to move the contents of Itunes to another another hard drive on my system. If you havent done this… Have fun. Apple is not a big gfan of moving music despite keeping the itunes setup install etc etc all in the same place. I litereally had to copy over all my playlists over and then re connect my iPod where iTunes then informed me that the ipod was associated with a different computer and if I wanted to connect it to this one (which is the exact same computer the music was just moved to a different Hard drive) I would have to re move all the music over. This was a good two hour process. Certainly not convienient yet i was prepared and set it to move as I headed to sleep.
It’s certainly interesting to see how companys are handling all this DRM stuff. It certainly looks as if the user is not the winner. We’ll just have to learn how to suck up and deal with all this, choose to listen to completely rights free music or steal it and hope not to get caught.
As far as the actual devices. I do like the design of the Zen yet its interface is certanly not as efficient as an iPod and the lag was a bit more than the iPod as well. If only someone could get it ALL right.
My quest for more music in an ease of use experience has steered me through several solutions. All have done the job in no more than a mediocre way. Launchcast, Launchcast plus, Pandora, Itunes, Emusic, AllofMP3, I have tried them all. So I guess it was only a matter of time, before I finally explored a subscrition based model. I started looking into Y music Unlimited late last week by dowloading their Yahoo Music Engine. Despite having a limited launchcast account at the time the application was really cool, It was sort of set up like iTunes where you can manage your current music collection but also alows for interefacing with their subscrtion streaming service (launchcast) as well as their sunscritption download service (Y Music Unlimited) I started toying around and quickly saw the possibilities. Not only do these services interact fairly flawlessly but you also have the ability to intereact with friends also enlisted in the service my sending songs albums playlists etc via im and email. None the less I signed up (yahoo prorated my price based on my exsisting launchcast subscription) for Y Unlimited To Go. The “ToGo” was an additional cost (of course) but allows me to move all of this music to an mp3 device. Unfortunatly iPods do not work but I have an old Creative Zen Micro that should be arriving in the mail anyday. All this cost about 10 bucks a month, Will this be my permanent solution? Who knows but its been pretty cool so far… Just the ability to pull up any song anytime is crazy… I love it.
An interesting article on how iTunes affected podcasting and podcasters in its first week of podcast support. It’s funny because until this release of iTunes there wasn’t much podcasting coming from the major media networks, but now they are plastered all over the Itunes podcasting Site. What idiots! Oh well. Oh and according to Itunes, The top Podcast of the week is the “iTunes New Music Tuesday,” Gotta love it! Sigh.
Was released for download today with the much anticipated “Podcast” feature. I checked it out… Pretty cool. You can now browse and subscribe to thousands of podcast right in Itunes. Unfortunatly i don’t see much of a need for the Ipodder clients anymore. I think it’s going to bring podcasting to a whole new audience! Watch out!
Ohh and yeah Interstate 1002 is in their directory 
I remember some years back, Winamp was my desktop audio player of choice. We made custom playlists for parties etc. The app was great. I had even made my own skin for it using a Mondrian Painting. At some point i just stopped using it. I’m not really sure why but newer version of Windows Media Player and now Itunes for my Ipod have taken over. Well, It was mentioned to me yesterday that the latest version of Winamp had alot of cool new features and associated plugins. One in particular that made the Ipod a readable device on Winamp. Hmmm Could I know longer be tied to one Computer with my Ipod? For any of you Ipod Users out there you know what I mean. Apple has your Ipod pretty locked down only allowing you to connect and move music to your pod from on computer. My big dilema with that is that i’d love to have my music on my home computer as well as my work computer. There are other apps that say you can do this but from what I have heard the success is not 100% For some reason this winamp solution seemed promising to me. SO I decided to give it a shot. And Damn! It worked. After Installing Winamp and the Ml_iPOD Plugin I was able to connect my Ipod to my work computer Play songs through winamp from my Ipod and move music from the Ipod to My computer. I am totally Stoaked about this. Some additional features with this new Winamp include the ability to watch Internet Tv and Of course the skins available for download and the colorschemes that already come with it. Tons of new features make this an awesome app. I will definatly use it at work primarily for moving stuff from my Ipod to my work computer. Will it once again become my default media player for my desktop? Who knows…
Well my true quality Ipod listening time just happens to occur on my daily walks to and from work. That usually works out to about 30 min each way. Like many people who listen to the radio on their daily commute they prefer talk. For me it just makes the time go by much faster. A key reason I was interested in Podcasting. After downloading Ipodder I was looking through the hundreds of podcasts and could have picked several of them but since my time was limited to about an Hour and I didn’t want a huge back log of podcasts sitting on my harddrive i decided on two. The first was suggested by my brother. It was the Chris Pirillo Show He was some guy that used to be on tech Tv and now does a weekly podcast from his home and from various tech related conferences he attends. If your a dork you might like and most of the time I don’t mind it though his voice does get on my nerves sometimes. You may see two podcasts a week from him so it certainly doesnt fill all of my time. The other one I decided to check out was The Daily Source Code. This was from the guy that pretty much pioneered this whol podcasting thing. I wrote about him a few weeks back. Anyway I’m hooked on his show. I can’t remmber the last time I was so excited to listen to something like this. Like they say about podcasting, it’s real and his show is, He’s done a show from an airplane and while cleaning the kitchen being Mr. Mom. But there is more to it that just that. For one, He talks alot about the whole podcasting thing. which I had mentioned before, I’m really interested in. Every show he plays a clip from another podcast to give you a feel for what’s out there., and he keeps it interesting with musical “podsafe” contributions such as the “Hit test” and the “mashups” So to wrap it up Reading Rainbow style. If your looking for something to listen to that’s new, exciting and real and your interesting in the podcasting world, The Daily Source Code will be Top Notch!”
Now so far (it’s been but a week) but I must say I dig my iPod alot. though I’m not 100% excited with the “random” option. I’ve read and heard about whether or not the songs are truly being selected at random and honestly I believe that they are. What bothers me is that in a 30 min walk to work I may hear 6-7 tracks and many times I’ll hear one artist two sometimes three times! The software does not look at the artist and or album just the song and if I have 5 or 6 albums by one artist on my device I have a higher chance at hearing songs by that artist more often. I was introduced to the smartplaylist in iTunes the other day and was hoping to come up with one that would solve this issue but have not seemed to figure that out yet. if anyone has developed a smartplaylist that does something like “don’t play a song by artist if artist was recently played” etc please let me know. In the quest to solve this issue I did find Smart playlists.com It’s a cool little resource where poeple post diffent types of smart playlists that they have come up with. For example Some one created a list that only played songs with baody parts in the song title. There are much more simplified ones and of course more detailed lists, Kinda cool though.
I Must admit I’m intrigued and confused about this whole “podcast” phenomenon. I heard about it months ago but the concept really didnt make much sense to me. Essentially people record some sort of audio based show (news, talk music etc) then create an mp3 andupload it to a server for people to download (usually to their iPod or similar device) At this point these people can listen to it at their own will. Now who is going to want wait for for such a (I’m assuming) fairly large audio file to download. Usually with mp3s we’re talking roughly a meg a min so 30minutes = 30mb
Anyway, 4-5 months later I’m reading this article and it turns out Adam Curry you know that old MTV personality from the late 80’s early 90’s c’mon the one that looked like Bon Jovi?!? well, he pretty much started this whole podcasting thing. In fact he taught him self the apple scripting language to write the ipodder software that helps you move podcasts to your device. I really like the concept I would just expect a smaller file format or something. But now that I have a high capicity digital audio player, I may explore this down the road. Hell, if I find a cast I dig I could see the worth.
The One thing they don’t tell you is when you unsubscribe you lose all your music. Napster Unveils Portable Service, Anti-iPod Campaign
Additional details here
I had spent quite some time in the past few years researching and just trying to figure out which device would work best for me. I had figured that I would probably end up with something in the 20gb range. 4-5 was too small and 40+ was out of my price range. I had pretty much made a decison by xmas but was going to wait till Feb to purchase. I wanted to see if anything was going to come out of the CES. unfortunatly nothing did. so the top three products for me were The Creative Zen Touch, The Apple Ipod and The Jet Audio iAudio M3 They all had ups and down, and I know I’d probably have been happy with any of them. The jet Audio was by far the best bang for the buck. with several supported formats such as a line in, an FM recorder and it was the smallest in size. Perfect for the true Audio geek. My last Player (the 64mb Samsung Yepp) like the M3 had no display on the device it too was on the remote and it was the one feature that I hated. Like all the user reviews for the M3 said “if you can deal without haveing a disply on the Unit then this is it. ” unfortunatly I have been dealing with that for some time and was not going to again. The Zen touch for me was the first True competitor to the ipod. With similar looks and an attempt at their own single control interface, I thought it was going to win me out… but, the thing was larger than I really wanted. The smaller the more portable the better. So just like the other millions of people out there I ended up with an ipod. I cringed several times but I kept coming back to this device. But It was the all around best device. There are several reasons why the thing has sold as many as they have. For one it is still one of the cooler looking devices out there. Not only has apple devoted them selves to this thing (support upgrades etc) but so has the rest of the world spawning this “Ipod economy” With hundreds of add-ons and and accessories I could truly customize my Ipod and have exactly what I want. And as girly as it may sound, I love to customize and accesorize to give a more personal touch to things. How could I not pass up the oppertunity for the free engraving!
Saw this on the frontpage Today as i was walking to the post office… Kind of interesting.In iPod America, legions in tune
MP3 player buying guide CNET Has a good summery perfect for anyone looking to buy an mp3 player and doesn’t know where to start. BTW after years of research and waiting The Old Samsung Yepp will now be replaced. I’ve finally made my purchase…. It was shipped today and I hope to see it soon.
Looks promising…too bad i don’t have an IpodiPod Access - Findley Designs
These Guys Make some pretty cool protective gear for your Various Media Devices. They Have already got a cover for the Ipod Shuffle. The thing hasn’t even been out a week!
I like the fact that it takes AAs Always can have a spare back up. Us Nickel metals!Player Blog: iPod PowerStick Auxillary Charger
I’ve decided to start using this word as a generic term for digital music player. Just Like The walkman 20 years ago I think in the near future the ipod will become the generic term for such a device. Just getting a head of the game.
Hmm I have plenty of sticky notes if anyone is interested. HOWTO: Hack iPod into iPod Shuffle
Dont forget to erase all but 240 songs