Tag Archives: iTunes

Brandi Carlile – Turpentine – Music Video

Posted on September 19, 2007 | 1 comment

Brandi Carlile’s new video for Turpentine is out.

If you can’t see it embedded above click here to play Turpentine or to see the lyrics. This song always makes me a little sad, I’m not sure if it’s the music, the words or both…

Less than a month to see her at St. Andrews Hall in Detroit, MI (Oct. 14, 2007). Opening is A Fine Frenzy and I’ve been playing One Cell In the Sea over & over so I’m more than ready. If you’re going to be at the concert (and tickets are available) let me know…

Is it proper to say “their CD” when I just purchased the tracks from the iTunes store and listen on my iPod or Treo?

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Mom at the Apple Store

Posted on September 12, 2007 | Leave a comment

So my Mom went to get me a Gift Card from the Apple Store and she was talking about her experience there. I’ll paraphrase –

I had never been to an Apple Store, it’s kind of a strange store. It was 10:30 am on a weekday and they were packed, there weren’t any cash registers and it was just kind of odd. The store was very small but there were a lot of staff and they were all busy. It was a different shopping experience.

It was just an interesting experience listening to her talk about it, trying to comprehend the Mac fascination of the Mac users.

I kinda wished I had talked her into getting a MacBook, I just wasn’t sure if she’d use it and wasn’t sure if it was worth the extra expense (in case she didn’t use it). Now I know that it would have been…

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Free NBC Fall Previews

Posted on September 10, 2007 | 3 comments

ChuckjourneymanYou can see Journeyman, Chuck, Life and Bionic Woman for Free with Amazon UnBox. This means you can download them straight to your TiVo and watch them on the big screen (or you can download them to a PC, but I’ve never done that) for a limited time. I haven’t seen Life yet, but I’ve seen the other three: Chuck is awesome, Journeyman is excellent, Bionic Woman is luke-warm but I’ll give it a chance (and you can see for yourself!).

On a side note, this ties to NBC cutting ties or getting pissed at the iTunes music store (I can’t remember why) and are now partnering with Amazon. I have no idea how long this offer might last or if the link will last but this is a permanent (I think) link to Amazon Unbox.Lifebionic

Amazon Unbox is an interesting service, more so for your TiVo than your PC (IMHO). You can rent high-quality movies for about $3.99 each, but each weekend they offer a half-dozen 99 cent ones (some are new and some are old), so keep your eyes open for those. Rentals are on your machine for 30 days but once you start to watch you only have 24 hours to finish (or re-watch it). Personally, I think 24 hours is too short, it needs to be about 36 hours; if I start to watch a movie Sunday afternoon at 4 and don’t finish it, I’m probably not going to be home from work in time the next day to finish it. I really think they need to extend the 24 hours (which is starting to be an industry standard) to about 36 hours (48?) or figure out some way to get another $1 out of me so that I can keep it for another day). It’s just more consumer friendly, it’s not like I’ve got the media and they need it to rent to another person. Continue reading →

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New iPods!!!!

Posted on September 6, 2007 | Leave a comment

So Apple redid the iPod line-up yesterday:

  • iPod touch – Basically an iPhone without the phone. It’s got the WiFi browser and you’ll now be able to buy directly from the iTunes store from the phone.
  • iPod Nano – Totally new shape to accommodate a new larger screen so you can watch movies and video! Available in 4 or 8 GB sizes.
  • Classic iPod – The same but up to 160 GB of music a video (also in 80 GB).
  • iPhone – Price dropped $200 and only the 8 GB model is available now. And you can buy ringtones and songs via WiFi. I’d expect at 16 GB model soon…

    You can use the WiFi free at Starbucks, but I’m not sure if that’s for surfing or just buying music. You can also see a “now Playing” list at Starbucks and easily purchase any of the last ten songs. If it’d update my podcasts via WiFi or if the had a 160 GB iTouch I’d really be tempted…

    Please note – Some of the features and items aren’t ready yet, but I think all are supposed to be by the end of the month.

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    .Mac Just got WAY bigger !

    Posted on August 19, 2007 | 1 comment

    10Gb.MacI’ve mentioned Apple’s .Mac service before and I really like it. Apple has expanded their .Mac on-line backup/syncing to 10GB (from 1 GB). Apple has always been behind the curve in how much storage space for the cost ($99 a year) but they’ve made up for it. With the increased storage it really makes the family plan more practical and affordable too.

    .macIf you have a Macintosh, you’ll love this (especially if you have a laptop or more than one Mac). It’s a remote backup / synchronization / file sharing / training / web publishing software service rolled all-in-one! The biggest feature to me is that if you use your iDisk for all your documents, the next time you connect to the internet it seamlessly synchronizes this document to the server & all your other Macs and you can access the files from any web browser on any platform (it also keeps a copy of all your documents on your hard drive so you can see them if you aren’t on-line). It also synchronizes your bookmarks, e-mail, calendar, contacts data/settings across all your Macs. So if I drop my laptop (or have it stolen), I don’t lose any of my data (as long I’ve been on the internet recently).

    With the extra storage I can save all my purchased iTunes to to my .Mac Music folder and it’ll be on all my computers and I don’t need to make a copy until I have a DVD’s worth of music. The same goes for my photos, I’m always worried about losing my irreplaceable photos.

    For regular documents, you’ll never notice that it’s biggest downside, it’s slow. But if you drag a bunch of huge files in there it’ll take a while, but since it’s seamless you’ll probably never notice, if it doesn’t have enough time, it’ll just continue the next time you’re on the ‘net! Continue reading →

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    A Fine Frenzy

    Posted on August 14, 2007 | Leave a comment

    AfinefrezyfreeitunesWhen Brandi Carlile is in Detroit (October 14, 2007) she’ll be playing with A Fine Frenzy. I’m not really familiar with them but their You Picked Me is the Free iTunes song of the week this week (until August 20, 2007) so check them out. The free song is and I like it the few times I’ve tried it so give it a free download! And if you turn on iTunes Plus it looks like it comes without DRM copy-protection so (maybe?) you can put it on some other music players. Actually, most of their music at iTunes is DRM-free and inexpensive ($7.99 for a fourteen track album or $1.99 for a three song EP) when you consider the higher quality DRM free versions are $1.29 a song.

    The 10/14 concert is general admission ($20) and it’s a a great venue (my second favorite in the Detroit area). Let me know if you’re going to the Detroit concert so we can say “HI!”

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    The Future of Television is selling me individual custom episodes

    Posted on July 23, 2007 | 2 comments

    So the future of television is certainly changing. The networks haven’t completely caught on yet, but they will. In a day when users can download higher quality video than they currently receive, get shows from parts of the world that aren’t available and have the advantage of having no ads and are free (please note this means stolen). We can also buy many of these videos from the iTunes store or Amazon UnBox for $1.99 an episode (iTunes has some at 99 cents for an episode and sometimes get that cheap if you subscribe for season). I know “legal” is not what people think when they hear the word BitTorrent, but BitTorrent.com even sells shows legally these days.

    If I could subscribe to a lot of the shows I enjoy for 99 cents an episode and have them automatically download to my AppleTV, TiVo, iPod or other device I’d never have anything more than basic cable. I’m sure this goes for a lot of people. Everything needed (except the mentality) to do this currently exists. The networks and producers of these shows need to somehow start embracing this model before it gets even easier for people to get (steal) these shows for free.

    Or charge me significantly less and let me trade the produces some statistical information about myself and let them insert in advertising relevant to me. Give me geeky ads, movie and TV show previews that I like, music that I like. Advertise events and concerts that are taking place where I live. I don’t need diaper ads, tampons, bad credit information, refinancing, ads for cars that cost $50,000+, ways to give up smoking. With the right information instead of advertising a new bed which I may have just purchased, they can advertise new pillows or new sheets (and mark in their files to start giving me new bed advertisements in another 5 years) that I might actually purchase.

    Even better, let me give “them” lots of information about me, which I’ll update a few times a month with information about what I’ve purchased or I’m shopping for (who in my life has a birthday coming up) or where I’m traveling to. And they can actually pay me to watch television! I’m not looking for a lot of money but just something to make it worth giving them info (besides, think of how much you’d save on cable if it was free!). Maybe some hotel discount coupons when I mention a vacation, or a coupon for Best Buy when they know I’m looking for a new video camera.

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    AppleTV is Awesome!!!

    Posted on July 22, 2007 | 2 comments

    My AppleTV is awesome! An “iPod for your TV” is a accurate description. I ran the software update (painless!) and it gave me YouTube videos and fixed “enhanced podcasts”.

    It mirrors one of your computer’s iTunes just like an iPod does (and allows you exceptions) and will stream from any other computers running iTunes (platform independent) and I don’t think there is a limit. I can’t believe how fast it pulls hi-res movie previews from Apple down to the unit, it’s very very fast. It’s actually much faster than pulling down YouTube videos (many which are low-res).

    It really streams full-scren video from other computers really efficiently. Very rarely does it need a moment to catch up. It has no problem with steaming audio. It almost makes no sense to download podcasts, I bet you could stream them live if you had a way to just get the RSS feeds onto the AppleTV.

    With “enhanced podcasts” it now properly advances the embedded images to follow along with the audio. The problem is that it just shows them to the side like the album artwork, some images are much larger so it really cheats you by scaling them down. Since you don’t use the up/down keys on the remote during this process “up” would be a great way to enlarge the images.

    I have the same image size concern when viewing slideshows with the “Ken Burns effect”, sometimes I want to view the whole image. Once again this would be another great use for the up button. The down button could be used for viewing filenames, date, time and other info about the images. Actually, this would be a good use for the down button while viewing videos or audio.

    A few more features (like on the TiVo) like weather, movie listings and maybe Flickr photo viewing and it’d be even better… Continue reading →

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