For years we have been buying CD’s
and we are horrible at keeping them organized and now we have too many to keep
in one place. My 13 and 10 year old daughters are also getting into music which
is great, but they are even worse at keeping CD’s organized and unscratched. So
the move to digital music was something we all wanted to do so we could better
manage them and make them last. So began the trials and
exploration.
First we just tried ripping CD’s
into windows media player which is great to get your CD’s in a manageable form.
Although frankly we didn’t feel comfortable throwing away our CD’s, even tho I
secretly would love too. I guess I won’t until I really have a reliable back-up
and recovery system (an opportunity for pure). So began everyone ripping CD’s
which actually didn’t do much for us since no body wanted to listen to music on
their PC. So I purchased a Turtle Beach Audiotron. It was kind of cool because
it plugged into my network and would automatically access and music files that
you enable to be shared on your PC. Not bad…. but then we gave an iPod(www.apple.com) to my
oldest daughter for xmas along with an iTunes account and so more
confusion.
If you have kids you know that
owning an iPod is a required device in order to be any where remotely cool. So
began my daughter’s purchase of music and then listening to it on her iPod.
Problem is she want’s to listen to it on the home stereo and as it turns out so
do Lisa and I. She got into the older rock music from my youth (Chicago, Queen,
Elton,etc) and we wanted play it at parties and for fun on the home stereo. Our
home stereo is piped in all the rooms on our main floor and is connected to an
amp in our home office. So to accomplish this we purchased an Apple Airport
Express. This device is a home residential router/gateway, access point, and
media adapter for music. It’s very cool. I plugged it in and it showed up on the
network. It looks like it uses a
corporate protocol for management called SNMP and Apple supplies a utility to
configure it with all the same settings you would see on a router management
page. So for identification sake I changed the icon in Network Magic to a music
media adapter and named “wireless iTunes”. You have to buy a separate cable
package to connect it to your stereo, which we did, and plugged it into the
“Tape Deck 1” inputs… kinda funny cause in explaining how to get iTunes in the
home to my daughters I had to go thru a description of why a stereo would use
Tape since they think it’s for wrapping presents. So to start playing iTunes on
the stereo you need to have iTunes running on one of your computers on your
network, then in the bottom of iTunes you will see a button show up that will
allow you to pump the sound to any of the Airports on your network. You could
actually have several if you wanted although I couldn’t get it both play on my
PC speakers and the Home Stereo. The other thing iTunes does is let you access
other iTunes libraries on other PC’s on your home network if they are running.
This is a pretty cool feature for us because we can have my kids PC’s upstairs
and use my office PC to control the stereo but still access music on the
upstairs computers. In setting up iTunes we used Network Magic “My Shared
Folders” to pull all the ripped music from each PC into the iTunes on our office
PC. iTunes let’s go and browse for new music by telling it which folders to look
at. We selected my shared folders and it pulled all the CDs into iTunes and
converted to Apples music format.
We have been using it for a while
and it works very well. We noticed that Network Magic is doing a pretty good job
of highlighting newly purchased music from iTunes although we all wish the Album
Art would show up in Network Magic and we also which it pop toast when a new
subfolder is added and show the Ablum Art in the toast. My daughter and I use
NM to know when we each purchase music it’s a much better alert system that what
iTunes does. iTunes will pull it in from another computer but it’s hard to
discover.
On a final note we also picked up
one of the new Roku Sound Bridges which is an iTunes wireless media adapter and
it also support some of the new rental services; raphsody and naptser. Lisa and
I like to listen to music in our bed room, but we don’t have the household music
speakers on the second floor nor do we want to put a computer up their just to
listen to iTunes or have to find our iPod and remember to bring it to the room.
So the Roku device connects without any configuration to our wireless network
and it has it’s own volume control, two RCA jackts, an optical jack, and comes
with a cord to go from the two RCA jacks to a set of speakers like the kind you
would buy for your PC sound system. We picked up some great creative speakers
from the Apple store and plugged it into the roku and now we have iTunes
upstairs with the ability to select music from any PC running iTunes… it’s
great, with one problem, Roku doesn't play iTunes purchased music because of the proprietary DRM.
So that’s the story… I am sure we
will learn more .....
I am a bag nut along with gadgets. So when my friend Judy Johnston arrived on a recent trip she showed me a great bag made in her home town. The Company is www.sfbags.com. I have the Sony VAIO TX laptop (It's great by the way), and the sfbags team has a custom fitting chart for each laptop manufacturer. They also let you configure your bag. It arrived two days later with a personal note from someone in the company. It was great. 
I am researching switching from my Treo 650 to the Motorola Q Phone, mainly because of the Jog wheel. I loved the jog wheel on my blackberry, but it lacked good phone features and I am finding the Treo 650 Phone quality not to be very good. Verizon is the carrier for the Q. For those of you looking at the Q, I found a good review by Matthew Miller at http://www.geek.com/hwswrev/pda/Q/index.htm. 
Check out the plantronics headset... It works pretty well. It lists for $169.00 on plantronics website. www.plantronics.com
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