I have been listening to the podcast Coverville ever since I discovered podcasting about 9 months ago. Brian Ibbot, the creator of Coverville, played a song I requested in his last show and even said my name “on the air”. He started off pronouncing my last name incorrectly but quickly corrected himself. I’m used to having people pronounce my last name with a long I instead of a soft i. I don’t understand why it’s so hard to pronounce my last name.
iTunes 5.0 was released today along with the new iPod nano. The nano replaces the mini but is slimmer and has a color display. It looks like a wider version of the shuffle with a color display. It comes in a 2GB and 4GB version whereas the mini was available in 4GB and 6GB models. The nano is also available in black instead of the stereotypical iPod white. I can honestly see the nano causing the end of the shuffle. The shuffle is $129 for 1GB whereas the nano is $199 for 2GB. I’ll have to go to the Apple store in the mall here to see how light the nano is.
The new version of iTunes isn’t much different from the previous version. They changed the look of iTunes and now podcasts that you’re subscribed to in iTunes show up under Podcasts and in your main library. Other than that, the only reason for iTunes 5.0 is to give the nano and the new iTunes phone, the Motorola ROKR available only through Cingular, something to sync with. The one thing missing from the new iTunes is BitTorrent support. A lot of the lesser known podcasts can’t afford the bandwidth that iTunes may bring them so most turn to BitTorrent to help control bandwidth demand on their sites. All of the other podcatching clients like Doppler, iPodder lemon, and iPodderX support BitTorrent.
I went to log into my Audioscrobbler account today since I haven’t been there for a while and I got redirected to last.fm. Supposedly Audioscrobbler has been part of last.fm for a while but I never noticed. The layout is different from what Audioscrobbler looked like but I don’t care. The Audioscrobbler site didn’t blow me away and neither does last.fm.
I finally decided to get XM Radio over Sirius. I am not a big fan of Howard Stern so I could care less about him going over to Sirius next January. I am a bigger fan of Opie and Anthony and it’s still a little weird hearing them curse on their show when I’m so used to when they were on FM radio. The only reason I had for thinking about getting Sirius was Leslie Gold – The Radio Chick, who used to on the same station as Opie and Anthony. If only some company create a receiver that could work with both satellite radio companies, or they merged into one company.
iTunes 4.9 was released today and one of the new features is podcasting. Apple has finally embraced the idea of podcasts and podcasting. Not only can you subscribe to different podcasts through iTunes, but you can also create your own and submit it to Apple’s directory which is pretty much the same as Adam Curry‘s iPodder.org. I’m going to check it out for about a week or so and decide if I want to use iTunes for my podcasts or stay with iPodder lemon. So far it’s having a hard time with a few of the shows I subscribe to, no matter if I subscribe through the iTunes music store or manually add the URL.
I just got done watching a new show on NBC called H1t Me Baby One More Time. Basically they get 5 old bands/artists to perform one of their hits for the first half hour of the show, and then the same performers cover a current song in the second half hour. Tonight they had Loverboy (Working For The Weekend), A Flock Of Seagulls (I Ran), Arrested Development (Tennessee), CeCe Peniston (Finally), and Tiffany (I Think We’re Alone Now). Next week they’re going to have Tommy Tutone (867-5309 (Jenny)), The Knack (My Sharona), Vanilla Ice (Ice Ice Baby), Haddaway (What Is Love), and The Motels (Only The Lonely). Some of the upcoming artists are Wang Chung (Everybody Wang Chung Tonight), Cameo (Word Up), and Sophie B. Hawkins (Damn, I Wish I Was Your Lover). I’m really going to enjoy watching this show since I love the 80′s and lately I’ve gotten into cover songs, partly because of a podcast I’ve been listening to for a while, Coverville.
I want to get satellite radio for my truck but I’m not sure if I want to go with XM or Sirius. A few years ago, I used to listen to 102.7 WNEW in New York City when they were a talk radio station with Opie & Anthony and Leslie Gold – The RadioChick. But now Opie & Anthony are on XM and Leslie Gold is on Sirius. I haven’t been a fan of Howard Stern since I started listening to Opie & Anthony but haven’t had a chance to listen to them since they got taken off the air a few years ago. Things would be so much easier if XM and Sirius merged.
JHymn is a program that can strip the DRM (Digital Rights Management) from an iTunes purchased song. DRM was designed primarily to prevent music piracy but in exchange made it hard for honest people to have “fair use” of their music. Right now, Pepsi and iTunes are running a “contest” where you can win a free iTunes song which normally costs $0.99. What if you win an iTunes song but your portable mp3 player can’t play the DRM encrypted .m4p file? Apple would expect you to burn that song to CD and then rip it back to the computer as an .mp3. Taking an already compressed audio format, uncompressing it to put it onto a CD, and then recompressing it to another lossy file format not only takes time and wastes a CD in the process; but also degrades the quality of the original song. With JHymn, I can simply tell it to convert the .m4p file into a DRM-free .mp3 without hurting the sound quality.
I found out about JHymn from reading a post over at plastic bugs, which is a blog created by Scott Moschella, who is the line producer for The ScreenSavers. He won a free song from the Pepsi/iTunes contest and downloaded silence. 1 minute and 3 seconds of silence to be exact. And Apple would actually charge somebody $0.99 to listen to silence. So he decided to stick it to the RIAA and to Apple (only for their DRM) by detailing how he went about removing the DRM from the silence. His site wound up getting slashdotted from all the exposure he got. It was mentioned on Slashdot, kevin rose dot com, digg.com, and Alex Albrecht‘s site.
I was checking out The Covers Project and found a link to Coverville. Coverville is a podcast site featuring the best and worst cover songs. It has become the first podcast I download every day.