MousePotatoPower

We are going to do a number of things:

• Enable disk use
  • To store files besides music on the iPod, just like a BIG flash drive
• Disable synchronization
  • This allows us to choose what songs to put on the iPod
• Make sure that iTunes imports music as MP3s at an appropriate quality level
  • MP3s are easier to deal with than AAC, or other formats
  • For the average person, encoding quality does not make a very big difference in sound quality

The first and most important thing to do is set Enable Disk Use. This turns your iPod into a HUGE USB drive. Notice that I have over 9GB of non-music files on my iPod.

Next, Manually manage music and videos. I find it much easier to drag and drop the albums and audiobooks that I want onto my iPod, my music collection is too large to fit on my iPod anyway.

Confirm that your Music is NOT sync-ed.

Next: Edit > Preferences

Advanced > Importing

Unless you are an audiophile, stick with

Import Using: MP3 Encoder

Setting: High Quality (160 kbps)

iPod Basics Tutorial

You’ve seen how easy it is to find your music on your iPod, and even without any extra software, you can simply drag and drop it back onto your computer.

The next problem is finding a particular track on your iPod without having to sort through all 50 of your F-directories. And again, it can be done easily, this time with a free program.

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Getting music off of our Ipod is easier than I thought. Getting 1 specific song off of your Ipod is a little harder, but it can still be done for free.

• Plug in your Ipod
• In iTunes, enable disk use. This will turn your iPod into a USB drive
• Open up My Computer
• By default, the music on your iPod is hidden, let’s reveal all of the hidden files.
• Select Tools > Folder Options
• switch to the View tab
• select Show hidden files and folders
• click on the Apply button, then click on OK

• Open your iPod (mine is L:)
• go to the ipod_Control\Music directory
• Here you will find subfolders that contain your music

Although the file names are coded, if you have labeled your music, the ID3 tags will contain all of the necessary information (artist, album, song name, etc).

If you mouse over any of the files, you will see the ID3 tag information

If you want to, you can copy all of the music to your computer.

Of you can grab another piece of software to view all of the track information (tutorial to follow this weekend).

Get Music Off Your Ipod

There are a few articles that I want to post that deal with ripping DVDs and transferring them to an Ipod. Copying music and movies to your Ipod should be easy and completely legal. Although it is relatively simple, it is also what I consider to be a gateway drug into more serious software/music/video piracy.

Knowledge is power. Be informed. Don’t use ignorance of the law as an excuse to copy music and movies. And don’t believe for a minute that borrowing a friend’s CD collection and transferring it to your Ipod is legal in any way. Wikipedia has a good list of things that you are usually NOT allowed to do with copyright material.

Piracy may not be a good thing, but for most mouse potatoes, it does NOT cause the financial losses that the record and movie industry would have you believe.

If you already have music and movies that you have not paid for, swing by this Piracy Calculator page to get an estimate of the retail value of your hoard. Be sure to read the MORAL OF THIS STORY at the bottom of the page.

I have seen a hoard that had a calculated value of about $31,000. The owner only made $30k/year. Even if this pirate had $30k in cash, I seriously doubt it would have been spent purchasing legitimate versions of all the movies, TV series, games, and music in their collection.

As an example: Because of a software leak in October 2004, I was able to play Halo 2 on the Xbox a full 4 weeks before it’s official release. The dozen or so people that I knew that played this leaked version ALL went out and bought a legitimate retail copy of Halo 2 on release day. Whether or not they pirated the game, they would still have purchased Halo 2.

At least once a month, I come across a friend who has a burned copy of a movie that is still in theaters. But none of these friends go to the movie theaters anyway. At almost $10 per ticket, it’s cheaper for a couple to buy the DVD. These friends do not have the desire to start large DVD collections either. Although they indulge in an occasional act of piracy, they are simply NOT in the market for a movie theater ticket or a DVD.

Piracy is theft in the sense of breaking the law and sin. It does not cause billions of dollars of loss to the music and movie industry.

Windows XP can do a lot, but there are a lot of things that it can’t do. Stay tuned for weekly posts about cheap and free software that will make you more productive.

The first piece of essential software is WinRAR. Currently at version 3.70, WinRAR can create and read compressed files (archives) of just about any file format that you can find on the web including: zip, rar, lzh, tar, gz, tar.gz, bz2, iso, and handful of others that I have yet to encounter.

The integrated ZIP-file utility that Windows comes with is alright, but for free, there’s really no reason not to use WinRAR.

Head to the RARLab’s download page and grab the most recent version of WinRAR.