It was all very easy when you had one iPod and one computer. But what do you do when you have an iPhone, 4 iPods, and three computers in the same household? Can you sync multiple computers to one iPod or vice versa?

There are various third-party applications to allow an iPod to sync with two different computers or to sink the library of two different computers together, but I’m going to talk about how to do it the Apple way…

If you have one computer, you can synchronise any number of iPhone’s or iPods to that computer. Just plug them in and when prompted say yes, I’d like to sync this ipod to this computer. If you select your iPod in iTunes, and select the Music tab, and then under settings select the “Entire music library” option, all the songs on your computer will be available on all your iPod or iPhones. Also, any songs that you purchase from iTunes on your iPhone will be synced back to your computer, and then passed on to the other iPod or iPhones. If for some reason this does not work, if you control click (left button click) on your iPhone in iTunes and then you will find a special menu item to manually transfer the purchased items across.

In other words syncing between multiple iPods and iPhones to a single computer works really well.

Going from one iPod/iPhone to multiple computers is more of a problem. If you have the “Entire music library” sync option checked, you can only sync your iPod or iPhone to one computer. This seems to be Apple’s way of stopping you pirating songs from one computer to another one.

So the Apple way of doing things is to choose which computer each iPhone or iPod will be synced with and just sync it to that one computer.

If you have two computers in your house, and you want to share your music between them, you simply have to go to your iTunes preferences and turn on library sharing as follows (this is with Snow Leopard) :

This will share all the music from one computer to any other computers on the same network – but both computers need to be turned on WITH ITUNES OPEN! This can be a bit of a downer if one computer is happens to be out in your study and it is your main one, so Apple have an option for you to transfer purchases from one computer to the other.

On your second computer, go into iTunes, turn on sharing, and your iTunes library should appear on your second computer like this:

There will be now two new buttons on the bottom right hand side of your iTunes library that control the copying of songs from your first computer to your second computer. The buttons look like this:

You can manually import songs by selecting the song and clicking on import, or you can automatically import purchased songs by clicking the settings button and selecting them:

Once you have this syncing working, you don’t need to have your first computer on to access the songs that were purchased on it. Of course you will have to make a decision as to whether you want all the songs from your first computer transferred across to your second one and taking up valuable hard drive space, or whether you want to manually transfer just some of the songs across.

SUMMARY: You can sync multiple iPods and iPhones to one computer and all the purchased songs will transfer across automatically. You can share libraries between different Macintosh computers. What you can’t do is synchronise one iPod or iPhone to different computers. If you don’t have snow leopard, you can do everything mentioned above except for the sinking of iTunes purchases between computers. The import and settings button were only added to iTunes in snow leopard.

1. Open iTunes.
2. Go to the ‘store’ page.
3. If you are signed in, sign out of itunes store (Click sign out on the menu above the top right of the iTunes store window in iTunes)
4. Select the country.
5. Go to app store.
6. Buy any FREE ipod application.
7. Click on create new account.
8. Under payment method select none as follows:

That’s it.
You can continue the signup process and you will have an account without a Credit Card linked to it.

SUMMARY:To get an iTunes account without a credit card you need to be logged out on my tunes, purchase a free iPhone app, and select none under payment options.

It’s a two step process..

Firstly you rip the file from the DVD player and convert it to a small MP4 movie.

Then you copy the movie into itunes. Here’s how to do it step by step.

1. RIP THE MOVIE FROM THE CD:

Download a free program called handbrake from here.

Then:
1. Put in a DVD in your drive.
2. Run handbrake.
3. Select the DVD.
4. Select then the iPod preset on the right column. (You need to do this as the ipod will only recognise certain formats of movies.)
5. Press the start button.
6. Wait a few hours for it to finish!

( For more detailed instructions on handbrake see here)
There should now be a file on your desktop which is an ipod version of the movie.

2. COPY IT TO ITUNES 

1. Run itunes.
2. From the ‘File’ Menu select ‘Import’.

3. Browse to the file you created in the step above (see the picture below) and ‘Choose’.

It will now import the movie into itunes, and should copy to your ipod automatically next time you sync with your ipod.

Well, I’m on a bit of a run here with my new samsung D900 mobile phone, the latest being what are the best settings to compress a movie to watch on my phone. The phones resolution is 320×240, which I think is similar to an ipod. I use Handbrake to encode DVD’s, you can also use these settings to export from Quicktime pro, but Handbrake is free.

FILE FORMAT: MP4
CODECS: MPEG-4/AAC Audio

VIDEO:
OUTPUT: 320×240 You may need to CROP to get the aspect ratio right, for example, 150 or so pixels off each side, depending on the original. Just play with the crop settings till the picture looks OK and not stretched.
FRAMERATE: 15 frames per seconds (fps) (Normal framerate is 25fps, but it’s hard to notice this slower framerate except for panning which is a bit staggered.)
AVERAGE VIDEO BITRATE: 200kbps (Any lower and you start to notice a decrease in quality. I tested 850, 500, 300, 250, 150 and 100kbps.)
2-pass encoding
AUDIO:
FORMAT: AAC
BITRATE: 128kbps.  (At 96 I could notice a discernable decrease in audio quality.)

I saved this under a profile called ‘phone’ and it works well. A 2 hour movie takes about 12 hours to encode, but comes out at about 500MB and is almost perfect quality on the small screen.

Well you can do a google image search for your album and then drag the resulting image onto your empty ‘playing now’ artwork.

Or you might try these sites:

http://www.rateyourmusic.com (you will need to register)

http://www.slothradio.com/covers/

http://www.cdcovers.cc/

As soon as you plug your ipod shuffle into your mac for the first time, itunes will automatically open, and you will get a message that itunes has found your ipod, and what name do you want to give your ipod.

If this does not happen make sure you have itunes 7 installed.

A podcast is simply a small file called an ‘RSS feed’ that points to the audio (mp3) file that you want to podcast. This little ‘RSS feed’ file is then registered with a podcast site, like the apple itunes podcast site.

How it works
When someone clicks on the podcast icon in itunes, it takes them to the apple itunes podcast site, where they can search for the podcast they want. The apple site then points their itunes software to the little RSS file, which then points their itunes to the mp3 file that contains the audio. It sounds complicated, but it’s really just a series of little signposts that eventually point to the mp3 file.

So as you can see, we need to put the mp3 file up, then create an RSS feed that points to the mp3 file, and then we register this RSS feed with itunes. We can then access the podcast from itunes.

So really the audio file alone is not the podcast, the rss file is not the podcast, the itunes store is not the podcast. The podcast is really the whole set of signposts.
The advantage of a podcast is that all the audio files are easy to find because they are centralised into the itunes store, and the process of downloading them once you are subscribed is automatic.

Let’s look at how to do it step by step.

1. Put up the mp3 file

The first set is to make an mp3 file (eg via ‘itunes’) and then place it on the internet somewhere using an ftp program (‘cyberduck’ is a good ftp program). You will need an account on a webserver to do this. This is dealt with elsewhere on ‘How to put a file on the internet’). The file will be called something like ‘talk1.mp3′ and it will be at a location somethign like ‘http://mywebsite.com.au/talks/talk1.mp3′. For our example we used the real file called ’20060212.mp3′ which we put on the web at at http://sermons.dpc.org.au/1john/20060212.mp3

2. Make an RSS file that points to the mp3 file

Now we need to make an RSS file that will point the the mp3 file to tell the podcast directory (in this case, the apple itunes podcast directory) where to find the mp3 file. There are hundreds of programs to make an RSS feed (eg ‘feedforall’) , but it’s hard finding a free one! Vodcaster looks good but it’s only for tiger. One good free one is at http://www.phelios.net/rss-writer.html it’s easy to use. The program will ask for information like the name of the mp3 file, artist, title of webcast etc, and it will put all this information into a file called an RSS file, which it will save to your hard drive. The program will give the file an extension of .xml So we called ours dpc and it was saved as ‘dpc.xml’

3. Put the RSS file somewhere on the web

It doesn’t matter where. We uploaded ours to http://sermons.dpc.org.au/dpc.xml

4. Register the podcast with itunes

The last step is to let itunes know where the rss file is kept. Open up itunes, and click on the ‘podcasts’ icon. Down the bottom click on ‘podcasts directory’. This will take you to apple’s podcast page on the itunes music store. There is a link called ‘Submit a Podcast’ which you can click on. It will ask you for the podcast feed url. This is the address of the rss fiel you just created. (Eg http://sermons.dpc.org.au/dpc.xml) Paste the address and click continue. Unfortunately you need to then enter your apple ID, you’ll need to register with apple to get one, it doesn’t cost anything, it’s not a .mac membership, just an apple id. Apple will send an email telling you when the podcast has been approved. It may take an hour or two.

5. Subscribe to the podcast

You should now be able to find your podcast on the ituens webpage. Go to itunes, podcasts, podcasts directory. There is a box to search for a podcast. Type in part of the name of your podcast (eg I might type in ‘Dubbo’) and click ‘search all podcasts’. It will display all the matches, in our case, 1 match – ‘DPC BibleTalks’. Click on subscribe to subscribe ot the podcast. You are now subscribed to the podcast!

6. Link to the podcast

Now the final step is to link to your new podcast from a webpage. Open itunes podcasts and next to your subscibed podcast title is a little right arrow. Click on this and it wil take you to the itunes homepage for your podcast.

If you right click on the podcast entry down the bottom, there is an option called ‘Copy itunes Music Store URL’. Click this and then it will copy the URL to the clipboard. You can then paste this into your homepage or email it to your friends. Ours was http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=121967957&s=143460&i=2214949

If you click on this it will open itunes and take you to our newly created podcast!

Last year I bought 5 non-working ipods from ebay and fixed up 4 of them. It was not to hard, but there was a couple of tricks. I’ve finally found some time to write up the hard bits, just in case anyone is interested, so here goes. This is not for you to try at home, lest you break your ipod!
The hardest part is opening the case.

I found the best tool was part of a stanley knife blade, the type that you break when it gets blunt. You can see the kind of blade I mean in the picture below. Two segments of the blade are carefuly inserted into the side of the ipod, at the angle seen in this picture.

When they are pushed down a little, the metal case opens a little. Then a third can be inserted in the middle. Then add a fourth fifth and sixth in parallel with the first three to force it a little more, the gap opens a little more with each blade inserted, until it finally pops open on one side like this:

Now you insert the blades into the top, above the hold switch and near the headphone jack symbol, careful not to push in too far and damage any wires with the blade. The case then pops open as follows:

The metal back is now separate to the plastic front, but be careful, the headphone jack and hold switch are part of the metal base – have a look at the pictures below.The white square in the red circle is the connector, it needs to be very cafefully prised apart with the knife blade. I used the long knife blade in the first picture above to do this.

Now the plastic case and metal back will separate apart. From the picture below, you can see the hard drive sits on top of the unit. It pivots on the right, but if you pivot it and try to lift it you will porbably break the connector, so you have to carefully insert part of a hacksaw blade (see left photo) in the gap between the HD connector and the main PCB board. Pivot this hacksaw blade down (right picture) and the HD connector will pop open, allowing you to remove it. The third picture (bottom) shows me pressing the connector together as I re-assemble the ipod. The connector is under my pointer finger, it needs to be moved around till it clicks into place, then firmly pressed.

The battery and main board just pull off and there are some small torx screws. There is a little connector that connects to the front that is tricky and needs to be prised apart with a blade, as seen below.

Happy ipod-ing, and I hope you never need to do this!

DIAGNOSTIC MODE:

If you press down the two middle buttons, menu and play, the ipod will reset. When the apple logo appears hold down the other three buttons (forward, back and the botton in the middle of the wheel). When the screen goes blank, release and you will be in diagnostic mode, with this menu:

A. 5 IN 1

B. RESET

C. KEY

etc

They select with right and left, not the scrollwheel. Some handy ones are:
D tests the audio, handy if the HD is not working but you want to check the audio section,

H tests the power circuits,
I tests the scrollwheel,
J tests the screen,
L tests the RAM, and
O tests the Hard Drive.