Hacking iPod + iTunes

Creative declares war

The CEO of Creative Technology said "the MP3 war has started and I am the one who has declared war".

iTunes and Keyspan remote

Bill Bumgarner has a cool post about how he controls his iTunes with a Keyspan remote. He also describes his playlist and ratings strategy.

My main playlist-- the one I listen to most often-- is Pretty Good Stuff. It is a randomly selected set of 25 songs that includes only songs with no rating or that have been rated with a 3, 4, or 5. It also excludes all songs that have been played in the last three weeks and all songs over 8 hours (which excludes internet streams). It is set to automatically update. In other words, it always contains 25 tracks that I haven't heard in a while that either do not suck or I have not yet formed an opinion. Radio BBum, if you will.

Check it out!
(Thanks to the staff at Borklog, western Pennsylvania office.)

PodLock

PodLock is a new application from Micromat that provides some interesting messing-around features for your iPod. There's a disk defragger, custom backup tool, the ability to create an "invisible" partition, and more. You can download a demo version here.

iPods Around the World

Have you seen the incredible iPods Around the World gallery over at iPodlounge? It's now up to more than 2800 photos.

iPod Photo

I got to play with an iPod Photo for a little while at the O'Reilly Conference. I'm not much of a photo guy, but it's pretty cool to be able to buzz through all those pictures that fast. We even hooked it up to the projector and watched a slide show on the big screen. Folks were buzzing with ideas for low-rate animation hacks -- I bet you'll see some of that soon.

Even though I don't care that much about photos, I loved the color screen and the little album art display while music is playing. And Solitaire in color -- a killer feature!