This little beauty is called an airport express. You can buy it from Apple for $99 (USA) or $119 (Australia). It plugs into your home ethernet network (or straight into your ADSL modem) via that little Ethernet connection on the left next to the power cord. Then it shares your internet connection with all your iOS devices via wi-fi. But it has a few tricks up it’s sleeve. Continue reading »
To connect your iPhone, iPad or iPod to your home stereo you just need a 3.5mm to RCA cable like this cable here. The RCA cable plugs into the rear of your stereo and the 3.5mm plugs into your iPhone headphone jack. Continue reading »
Importing songs into iTunes is easy – you just INSERT the CD, SELECT it in iTunes, and press the ‘Import’ button!
But… the default setting on iTunes is not the best setting to use when importing songs. It’s far better to use the ‘Apple Lossless’ setting which will keep your music at CD quality. If you must compress the music (e.g. you want to fit it on your iPod or a laptop) then use the bitrate of 320kbps rather than the default 128kbps of iTunes.
This article describes how to import songs into iTunes with the better quality bitrate.
Continue reading »
Introducing LAME!
Lame is an mp3 encoder that is open source, which means rather than being developed commercially, it was developed by unpaid programmers sharing together. It was originally not as good as the commercial mp3 encoders. Slowly as many people worked on LAME it actually overtook the original mp3 encoder. Some people now claim it is the best mp3 encoder available. They have a pretty lame logo (see above) probably because they are unpaid programmers not graphic artists. Continue reading »
When you have more than one computer and more than one iPhone or iPod there are various ways to sync your iTunes songs across all your devices. This article outlines them all.
For me the number one criteria for buying an iPod is audio quality. Some people will go for looks, size, or battery life, but for me it’s simply a matter of which iPod sounds the best – not just through the headphones but also into my stereo.
This article discusses the reasons for the difference in quality of the sound output of the various models of iPods and iPhones, which iPod sounds the best, and why.
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. Continue reading »
I’ve been playing round with getting good quality compressed speech with LAME. (See here for iTunes.) Here’s what I’ve found.
1. SMALLEST FILE SIZE ACCEPTABLE QUALITY.
For very small file size (3MB for 20 minutes) and acceptable quality, use the LAME encoder with the following arguments in the ‘Encoding options’ Box:
–abr 16 -q 0 -m m (gives very small file size but some artefacts audible)
Here are some better options, note that the higher bitrate does not always sound better! I think a lower bitrate decreases the frequency of the lows pass filter so in some cases lower bitrate sounds better as it takes of the harsh tops, depends on the person and how their voice sounds.
–abr 24 -q 0 -m m (gives small file size but you can only just tell it’s compressed)
–abr 32 -q 0 -m m
–abr 48 -q 0 -m m
abr 16 means a bitrate of 16kbps
-q 0 means best quality available at that bitrate
-m m means mono
You can hear some low pass filtering on the above speech, the highs are missing, but this can make for a better listening experience with spoken word, it can be less harsh.
3. BETTER QUALITY AND ACCEPTABLE FILE SIZE.
For about twice the size files (8MB for 20 minutes of speech) but very very good quality try this in LAME encoder:
–preset voice
OR
-V 8 –vbr-new -h -q 0
4. BEST QUALITY. Use iTunes. Although LAME is better for music, and lower bitrate spoken word, iTunes is great for 40kbps spoken word and above. CLick here to read about the best settings on importing spoken word into iTunes here.
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