If you prefer the smooth sound of tube-amplified music, it's now easier to get this for your iPod with PsiberAudio's new iTube s Amplifiers. iTube SE15: "Utilizing a high quality KT88 in single ended mode to produce 15 watts of fluid musical power." According to Stereophile Magazine, [Andrew] Conley's story is one familiar to audiophiles. He's been manufacturing amplifiers and other electronic

This one is straight from Apple's eNews March 10, 2005 newsletter:

If you’re after the highest quality tunes and regularly import songs at bit rates higher than 128 Kbps, iTunes offers you the best of both worlds, letting you keep your high-quality songs in iTunes while exporting leaner versions of the songs, sized just right for iPod shuffle.

Here’s how: Connect iPod shuffle, open the iPod Preferences dialog, and click the iPod tab. Click the check box next to “Convert higher bit rate songs to 128 kbps AAC for this iPod.” Then click OK.

The next time you Autofill iPod shuffle, iTunes will automatically convert songs to 128 Kbps as it exports them to iPod shuffle. The original versions in your iTunes collection, meanwhile, will remain in your library at their higher encoding rate.

Cross-posted at TechBytes

The latest issue of Wired, with a special section of the future of radio, finally piqued my interest in podcasting enough to give it a go (at least as a listener). One of my favorite sites, BoardGameGeek has been offering an almost-weekly podcast for the last six months, and I decided that my recent aquisition of an iPod shuffle deserved some indie talk radio to fill it.

Unfortunately, in the past few weeks, I've discovered that all of the Mac applications listed at iPodder.org (the definitive starting place for podcasts) require Mac OS X 10.3 to run. Even if they don't list system requirements, all of the freeware and commercial software, including the natural choice of iPodder itself, either crash when you run them or simply fail to install.

The solution? Well, what I've found to be the best RSS aggregator out there, NetNewsWire from Ranchero Software, has released a new beta of version 2.0, which includes support for downloading enclosures, and it runs great on my OS X 10.2.8 system. After subscribing to a few podcast feeds (I chose the above mentioned BoardGameGeek feed, Adam Curry's Daily Source Code, and The Laporte Report), I let NetNewsWire do its thing--it downloaded a few recent mp3s of shows, created playlists in iTunes for them, and transferred them into iTunes (in the NNW preferences, I had all the mp3s put into playlists named after their feeds, and set the genre field on all of them to "Podcast"). I created a Smart Playlist to dig out all files with the Podcast genre with a playcount of 0--that way, I have a list of the ones I haven't yet heard, ready to drag onto the shuffle, and NetNewsWire will happily chug along in the background looking for new episodes. I chose the playcount restriction because the iPod shuffle updates the playcount without updating the Last Played field.

If I had a different iPod, I could choose to have my Smart Playlist automatically synced whenever I plug the sucker in, but not so with the shuffle. As is, I have to add them manually, and then use Autofill to fill up the rest of the space with random songs.

The only problem at the moment is that my iPod shuffle doesn't seem to be updating the playcount field. I'm guessing this is because all I've tested so far are episodes of BoardGameGeek, which average over an hour long each--I can't listen to one in full in one sitting. Perhaps the shuffle isn't updating the playcount because I'm often shutting it off in mid-episode, and resuming later. Do I have to listen to an entire show without turning the shuffle off to get a playcount update? Stay tuned for further testing: the Adam Curry and Leo Laporte episodes are considerably shorter.

Check out this post over at hack a day:

we mentioned earlier that someone posted photos of an ipod shuffle disassembly.  the previous disassembly left a few key questions unanswered, namely:

• do you need to butcher the buttons to take your shuffle apart?


• will the average joe be able to replace the battery?


• what else is under the hood?


• can it be cleanly reassembled?

this howto will attempt to answer these questions while disassembling the shuffle in a non-destructive manner.

Pretty cool and with pictures.

*x-posted on Sample the Web