You Help Me I Help You

Complete an offer in the Mac Mini refferal on the right, and I will give you working iTunes codes for 18 songs.

When your offer goes green I'll email you the codes to the address you sign up with.


The best place to find the new hotness in offers is RateTheOffers.com.

UPDATE: I've decided to up the song count to 30. So once you go green you now get 30 songs.
UPDATE: This offer is over, I don't have any more iTunes songs to give away. If you still want to do MacMinis4Free through me be my guest.

28 Jun 05 | +Permalink+ | Comments (21)

iTunes 4.8 manages movies?

iTunes 4.8 was released today. Get it at the usual place.

Apple's "What's new in iTunes 4.8" simply says: "Includes new Music Store features and support for transferring contacts and calendars from your computer to your iPod (requires Mac OS X version 10.4 on your computer)."

At first, it seems like Windows users are left out in the cold on this release. But drag any .MOV or .MP4 file into your iTunes library, and you'll see that you can finally play them from within iTunes. By default, they will play in the album artwork section.

You can click on the movie to have to have it pop up in a new window...

...or click on the fullscreen button to have it play fullscreeen.

For more on the Academy Award nominated "MORE" playing in the screenshots, head on over to Stompio.

9 May 05 | +Permalink+ | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

iPod Shuffle first week observations

The iPod Shuffle may have been born a barebones budget item, but in life it stands at the top of it's game. I'm finding that I favor it over my full sized iPod(2G, 10gb), and I have seen the same thing happen with friends who own both. Here are a few observations that make the iPod Shuffle a little bit more fun.

-The iPod Shuffle brings back the thrill of the mix tape. You have one playlist to carefully craft into a stream of consciousness. (Of course if this isn't your style, you can always have it Auto-fill and set it to shuffle.)

-It is so light you can ditch the lanyard and dangle it from your headphones comfortably if you really want to.

-It fits perfectly in that little pocket in your jeans that is too small for anything else, making you want to carry it everywhere.

-iTunes lets you keep the iPod Shuffle in your Source list even when it is unplugged so that you can build your playlist when its not plugged in.

-Running with a full sized iPod is no comparison to running with the light light iPod Shuffle. It's as if it's not even there.

-The simplistic controls are more practical than the iPod. Press a button to turn up the volume. Flip a switch to turn it off. Never take it out of your pocket.

12 Apr 05 | +Permalink+ | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

iTunes shares cap at 60

After a bit of experimenting today, I found out that iTunes shares max out at sixty. Beyond this number of people, crazy stuff happens. New people that try to join the Rendezvous network will not see any shares, as if they have sharing turned off. The overcrowding of people will cause funky behavior for people who didn't get in before the sixty mark. Once enough people leave, it will usually take 5-10 minutes for things to function normally again for new people. This is probably why the default behavior of iTunes is to only display shares in a very tight subnet. They didn't build in handling for more.

But a limit of sixty total active shares is nothing compared to the new five-users-per-day limit that iTunes recently added in 4.7.1, allowing only five different users to connect to a given share in a day. There are always open source DAAP clients like Get It Together that don't carry this annoying limit, but its about time someone from the community develops a hack for the real iTunes that doesn't include the phrase "restart the program"[restarting iTunes resets the 5 user limit].

My top requests for iTunes hacks:
1. Five user limit removal
2. A windows implementation of NoTTL

3 Apr 05 | +Permalink+ | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)

Small is the Key: MacWorld Expo Keynote coverage

1:00pm CST - Apple.com new product sites launch, and are brought to their knees within seconds.
Here is a little peek:

12:50pm CST - New iPod, iPod Shuffle shown at Keynote.
- 512MB($99) and 1GB($149)

12:30pm CST - Mac mini shown at Keynote.

- 1.25 Ghz G4($499), another model at 1.4 Ghz($599)
- Available January 22nd.

11:30am CST - Keynote:
- Up to the minute updates on MacRumors.com.
- Up to the second updates on IRC at irc://irc.tecknohost.com #macrumors. Also check out #macrumorschat for people from the conference chatting, as well as other insane fans speculating and commenting, all flying at you at 100mph.
- Gizmodo has Keynote notes.
11:00am CST - Steve Jobs' keynote begins. Apple Store is temporarily taken down, displaying a post-it note "We'll be back soon." As of yet, no press releases about new products have been posted, and aren't expected until the keynote ends at 1:00pm CST.

10:00am CST - Site still down. So far nothing from the expo has trickled in on other sites. Steve Jobs' keynote speech will begin in one hour (12:00pm EST).
9:00am CST - The Macworld Expo site is down from all of us eager fans trying to get the scoop! According to Netcraft, their site had been running on Windows Server 2003 up until now. As far as I know that doesn't run on Xserves.

Dudsednik.

11 Jan 05 | +Permalink+ | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Old iPods Still Rock

A guy I know just sold the iPod he got from freeiPods (referral points to me) on eBay. That got me thinking- since this freeiPod phenomenon became so popular, there have probably been a lot of people selling these things on eBay for really cheap. Upon checking, 4Gs (the 20GB model available through freeiPods) are going for nearly full price: ~$285 (lists at $299)
But the older models?
15GB 3G, which came out less than six months ago: ~$100 (factory sealed)

And used 3G, 2G, and 1G models can be found for even less.

For a great history of iPod models through 3G, check out iPodlounge's 'Instant Expert: A Brief History of iPod'. And then for 3G vs 4G, check out iPodlounge's Apple 4G iPod: Power Users' Review

27 Oct 04 | +Permalink+ | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

iTunes 4.7

Well it looks like the iTunes 4.7 release just slipped by. In recent updates we saw the addition of such features as the Party Shuffle and Apple Lossless Encoding. Surely this will bring us some nifty new features. Unfortunately Apple doesn't post an extensive "changelog", noting the things that are new since the last version. So I'll attempt to post one here:

- Copy photos and view them on an iPod Photo
- Find duplicate songs - very cool, especially if you have a huge library. Now if only there was a way to create a sym-link of a song that exists on multiple albums. Right now that would save me 2.88 GB.
- Minimize iTunes into your Windows task bar, and keep the Mini Player on top (these features previously available in a plugin). Before this, you didn't even have the option to have iTunes' icon in the system tray without a plugin.
- Preferences now has a dedicated tab for iPod related options, further rubbing it in your face if you didn't get a free iPod.
- Get notified when material from your favorite artist is added to iTMS through Artist Alerts
- Search for iMixes by title in iTMS

26 Oct 04 | +Permalink+ | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)