Apple has a new iPod song featuring U2 doing the song “Vertigo” from their album to be released this week. They said there was no way they could do a $20 million ad campaign promoting their album, but Apple didn’t mind so much apparently.
Category: iPod
Super Geeky iPod Stuff
One problem with the iPod is that it doesn’t store mp3 files by name anywhere. All the mp3’s are stored in hidden directories by numbers. So I was at work and wanted a way I could move songs onto my hard drive there and listen to them. I found a neat piece of open source freeware called SharePod that lets you do just this as well as export playlists or just play songs from your computer that are on your iPod. It does this by running a program that you store on the iPod itself so you don’t have to install anything on the host computer.
iPod Battery Pack tests
I ran a test on my home-made iPod battery pack. Just running the iPod at 50% volume through a playlist and otherwise not touching it, it will last 7.8 hours. By using the battery pack to recharge the iPod when its battery meter goes down to 1 bar out of 4 and charging for an hour I was able to 4 charges plus part of a 5th charge. This gave me a total of 27.7 hours including the 4.5 hours of charging when I was playing it too.
Read all about the test and the battery pack
Geeky iPod stuff
I found a program called tunes2html that creates a neat listing of all your iPod’s albums (for some reason, however, my singles show up under G as does my partial Led Zeppelin album). You can dowload it from http://www.joescafe.com/tunes2html/
So I ran it and you can see the results
Also this weekend I wrote up a page describing iPod battery backups, but I don’t have pictures of the cool one that I made.
Sony Car Stereo and iPod
I’ve put together a web page about how to connect an iPod to a Sony car stereo. I had bought a Sony head unit in 1998 with cassette and a CD changer in the trunk. I had been using a cassette adapter but had some problems. So I wound up getting a Sony XA-300 auxilliary input adapter. This is a successor to the XA-107. The web page has other work-arounds that might be useful and it seemed more appropriate for that information to appear on its own web page instead of a blog entry.