Tech, Life and Everyday Living
Motorola Droid RAZR Review The past month I’ve had the chance to fully test the Motorola Droid RAZR. This phone is big and thin, and it’s very nice looking. I do have to say that it’s a much better phone than the Bionic, so...
Droid Bionic Review
I recently had a few weeks with the Droid Bionic and some accessories. In the spirit of full disclosure after about 4 days with the first Bionic, the device went dead because of the battery, and after...
Apple's Let's talk iPhone Announcement Apple has it’s iPhone event tomorrow. It says Let’s talk iPhone, but we all expect them to announce iOS 5 and iCloud, as well as a new iPhone of some kind.
The Times to start listening and following...
Droid Charge Review The Droid Charge by Samsung, is a decent Android phone, but it's very underpowered and outdated as far as the Android software.
It has a 4.3-inch, 800x480 display, but inside it only packs a single...
Apple has it’s iPhone event tomorrow. It says Let’s talk iPhone, but we all expect them to announce iOS 5 and iCloud, as well as a new iPhone of some kind.
The Times to start listening and following along are:
7:00AM Hawaii
10:00AM Pacific
11:00AM Mountain
12:00PM Central
1:00PM Eastern
6:00PM London
Here are some places you can follow along.
I started using this app during the first version, and if you don’t know what it is, I’ll explain that now.
AirVideo comes in two flavors, the free version and the $2.99 paid version. The main difference between the two is that the free version limits the number of items displayed in each folder.
AirVideo: 
AirVideo Free:
Here’s the lowdown:
In a move that no one knew was coming, Apple released a press release stating that they themselves would stream the event. There is a catch though, you have to have a Mac running Safari on OS X version 10.6, an iOS device with 3.0 or higher, or an iPad. This is because they will be using the open HTTP live streaming protocol.
In reading the multiple blogs about why Apple is deciding to do this, according to TechCruch, they claim that streaming media will be a key part of the event, I myself think that with the new Apple TV or iTV, that will introduce some sort of iTunes in the cloud option, but there will probably be limitations, as I wish I could put my 1.72TB of iTunes media on the cloud, but it would take a year to get it uploaded somewhere.
This will also cut back on the illegal streams and hopefully Steve won’t have to tell people to shut off their wireless devices.
Anyway, it’s all rumor and speculation, so tune in at 10 AM PST and watch for yourself at Apple.com.
My favorite, and possibly the best streaming radio app Wunder Radio (iTunes Link) is now iOS 4 ready with official background streaming. The app has had background streaming available for a lot of it’s feeds via mobile safari streaming for awhile, but it’s gotten better with official streaming. Wunder Radio offers more radio stations than you can imagine, and they offer Sirius and XM streaming as well as live streams of Air Traffic Control and Police Bands. When TUAW reviewed this app they said that most of the time the signal was actually better on the iPhone then on the car radio, and I agree.
Filed under: iTunes
A little-heralded feature of iTunes 9.1 is the ability to convert higher bitrate songs to 128kpbs AAC files for iPhone or iPod touch sync with iTunes. How do you do it? It’s a simple check box option in the Summary tab when your iPhone appears in the iTunes source list. When the box is checked, on the next sync, all your songs on your iPhone that are not 128kpbs AAC files will be removed and then re-added, being converted on the fly.
The first time I did it, about 400 songs on my iPhone needed to be converted. It took about ten minutes to do the conversion. Once the first large conversion is done, the iPhone syncs your music as fast (or slow) as it ever did (unless you’re refreshing your iPhone’s library every time you sync). If you keep ‘convert higher bitrate songs to 128kpbs AAC files’ checked, any new songs added to your iPhone will automatically be converted.
It’s important to note that this on-the-fly conversion does not alter your original files inside your iTunes library — those will remain at whatever bitrate and in whatever file format you had them in.
How well does this work? I saved a whopping 1.5GBs of space on my 8GB iPhone. Others here at TUAW saved between 2-5GBs. Of course, how much space you save will be dependent on what bitrate and file type your songs are now. The guys here who saved 5GB said their conversions took a few hours initially. As for audio quality. I didn’t notice a bit of difference on my $20 headphones. However, I’m not an audiophile. If you’ve got an ear for music and are using the latest Shures, you might notice some quality degradation.
TUAWiPhone 101: Save space on your iPhone without removing a thing originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Tue, 06 Apr 2010 11:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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I downloaded iTunes 9 as soon as it was released, and am truly enjoying all the changes. I don’t care that it’s not a true cocoa app, or 64 bit, I am enjoying the new syncing options, and the little changes that Apple finally gave us.
I keep my iTunes library on an external drive because of the size, and I have always had iTunes keep it somewhat organized, however, when looking through the folder, it was a mess of artist folders. iTunes 9 solves this problem by keeping your music folder neatly organized with a more logical folder structure. To get this new organization, you have to upgrade to the new style by going to the menu under library and organize.
This makes it much easier to find things, and the best change is that you’ll notice a folder names Automatically add to iTunes, if you drag files into that folder they will get added automatically into your library, and for those of you who torrent, most clients will move completed downloads, so if you move music and video files to that folder, they will then be added to your library as well.
Let me know in the comments what you like or dislike about the new iTunes.
Now that I am a full time mac user, I heavily rely on a couple of programs for getting the job done. If you want to get your personal DVD’s into iTunes and tag them the right way, I recommend the following combination of programs. Handbrake and MetaX. Handbrake is an open source app that takes DVD’s and a variety of other video files and converts them to a host of formats, the main one being MPEG-4 which is iTunes and iPod friendly. MetaX is a meta-data tagging application capable of batch tagging MPEG-4 as well as QuickTime videos.
Both programs will make your ripping and tagging much easier, and handbrake will throw the file into MetaX if you change that in the prefrences.
It’s an easy way to make sure that all your files are properly tagged and so iTunes puts them in the right place.
I have a lot of iPhone apps, and I would have to say that over 3/4 of them I have downloaded I have only used once. My question to you is how do you find the apps you use? I usually keep an eye on several websites and feeds, but take a vote in the poll below and give me your favorite sites for apps in the comments.
The iTunes App Store now has 56,081 different apps available, but how do you find the right one, the search in iTunes is good, but if you type something in, you usually get too many choices that really don’t contain what you want, there are a few sites out there that might help:
This is just a basic list, and if you have a site or tip you like better feel free to let me know in the comments.
