Rhapsody Music Service and You

Rhapsody is the music service to use! You can download the Rhapsody music program from http://www.listen.com and immedietly stream over 500,000 tracks. The great thing is that you can listen to full CD's. They have brand new music and lots of older stuff too. It's weird, sometimes they have dozens of albums by an artist and sometimes they have none. But they usually have what you are looking for and its easy to find new music. It's just amazing to be able to think of an artist, almost any artist, and be able to immedietly start listening to it. If you pay quarterly, you can get rhapsody for about $8 a month.

Recording from Rhapsody
Rhapsody will allow yoiu to burn CD's for 99 cents a track onto a music CD. But for some strange reason you can't download the song's as mp3's. What do you do if you want the album as an mp3? What do you do if you want the albums for free? Listen up, folks. What you want to do is play the cd that you want through rhapsody, and at the same time, record it on a virtual tape deck, or mp3 recorder.

1.In order to do this, you MUST have a quality sound card. 16-bit with low noise ratio minimum ie sound blaster live or 24 bit sound card ie sound blaster audigy. Or any other quality pro sound card. Laptop users, its going to be a little more expensive becuase no laptop on the market has a built in sound card that can record decently that I know of, you need to get an external sound card like the sound blaster audigy or better yet, a pro sound card from places like RobotSpeak in the lower haight.

2. Now you need the software to record streaming audio. Currently I use AAA Real Recorder. which first records as a wav file as full cd quality, then when the recording is finished will convert it to an mp3 automatically as long as you choose that option before you record the track. And annoyingly, you have to select this again every time you reopen the program, it cant be set as default. Also, the first time you run the program, make sure it is set to record at least in 44.1 16 bit stereo or higher. That option will stay for life. Then type the name of the cd into the file output menu, start the rhapsody cd and press record. You are now recording in real time from the Internet. Real time means if the cd is 70 minutes, your recording takes 70 minutes. And if you want to work on your computer while recording, remove all system sounds from playing in windows control panel or you will hear dings and clicks in your recording. When it is done, you will have a wav file and a converted mp3 file. But for some stupid reason, the mp3 file name is truncated from the full name of the wave file. just cut and paste the name from the wav version to the mp3 version in windows explorer and change the extension from .wav to .mp3 in the filename and the delete the wave file. Now your album is complete as an mp3 track. But its now a long mp3 track instead of broken into individual tracks. Which is fine if you have an mp3 player that scans fast, but not for burning cd's. Learn later how to use a second program to automatically create tracks from one long mp3.

3. Update: Split Tracks Automatically
Now that you have a full length MP3 CD, you want to split it into tracks. Download this free software http://mp3split.sourceforge.net and you can automatically split the tracks and name them by searching for the name of the CD on the CDDB (CD Database) on the Internet through the software shell (In Italian but still usable). Simply select the file you want to convert, type in the author and album in the search windows in the lower left corner, and select "FreeDB Split" In less then a minute you will have all the tracks split into individual mp3 tracks with titles! Note: The original recording has to be the full CD with no significant space at the end of the CD. Sometimes you record a cd and forget to stop the recording until 20 minutes after the actual CD stops streaming.

Bluetooth GPS on Tapwave (Or any other Palm 5 PDA): Never get lost again!

Hardware: I just purchased a bluetooth GPS reciever for my pda from Teletype, the Mini-Bluetooth GPS system you can find at http://www.teletype.com for $179. This is the cheapest bluetooth receiver you can get and it reaquires its location once every 1/10th of a second, where other older GPS take up to 5 seconds. Bluetooth GPS has only been out there for about a year now, so its pretty new to the market. But teletype has won awards from cnet and others so I went with them. You can get non-bluetooth GPS recievers that connect to your pda with a wire for as little as $60 but the Zodiac is not a standard palm so I didn't have that option.

Software: Mapopolis http://www.mapopolis.com It turns out there aren't as many GPS mapping software packages for Palm as PocketPC, but it turns out that Mapopolis is the one to use. The program is free, the maps cost money. About $10 a map, or $99 for a CD of all the maps in the united states, it is definitely the cheapest GPS software out there. I took it for a test drive yesterday and it works like a charm. Here are some tips

* If you want to use several coenciding maps together ie San Mateo, San Francisco, and Marine, click the "Load Contiguous Maps"
* You can load all the maps you want to your SD card, but when you are viewing them they must be transferred to your PDA's internal memory. Since I only have 32MB of internal and maps are 1.5MB to 6MB in size each, I can load the ones I need from the SD card to memory and then Mapopolis will ask if you want to delete them from memory when you exit the program
*Under the menu GPS->GPS Settings I would check "Keep device power on for 1hr" so that your PDA does not turn off in the middle of your road trip
*Navigating: You can navigate easily from your current GPS location to an Address by type in the address. Also to a place! You simply type the name of the resturaunt or gas station or whatever you are trying to get to and you are on your way. Be sure to check the "show landmarks" option to be able to use this feature. I typed in my bank WaMu and on the map it showed my location and ALL the WaMu locations in San Francisco. I then simply clicked on the location closest to me on the map, and directions were generated and I was on my way! Finally, you can enter in an address from your address book. So if you need to get to a friends house, just type in there name and off you go!

Tapwave Zodiac: My Organinzing, Gaming, GPS'n, Nintend Emulating, MP3/Video Playin' PDA

What can I say, I absolutely love this thing! Get it at http://www.tapwave.com

Yo, welcome to my blogger site. I dont know what I am going to be talking about, but I think I will most probably be talking about technology. But you never know, it could lead to something else, anything that is on my mind really. Thanx for visiting.