Live 365 subscriber

I signed up for a couple years of Live365.com, finally.

I have been thinking about it for a year or more. I enjoy the free membership but there are some things it does not let me do. Plus, the free version has commercials. The paid one does not.

The paid subscription deal I got also works with my TiVo, which is in my bedroom. So I can just punch a few buttons on my TiVo remote, put my head back on the pillow, and listen to some french soft rock song from the 60s - or whatever strikes my mood.

The two year subscription deal was pretty sweet.

If you like music a lot and are comfortable with technology, you should check it out. Of course, you will need a broadband connection to really enjoy it. These days, most people do have one. Broadband costs not much more than dial-up service in a lot of parts of the US.

iPod tutorial and controlling which songs go on your iPod

Apple has a nice tutorial for iPod owners entitled Getting Started with iPod. Probably worth a look & listen to if you have an iPod and want to get really comfortable using it.

You can also learn more about syncing your iPod with your Mac (or PC) over on the fill her up page that describes the process and the different options you have. Lots of people have more songs on their computer than their iPod can hold, believe it or not.

So, Apple gives you easy ways of selecting the songs you would prefer to put on the iPod.

If you have been collecting CDs since they came out twenty or so year ago, like me, you have a lot. If you are a real audiophile - which I am not, by a long shot - you might have a thousand albums worth of songs.

Add on top of that all the good podcasts, and for folks with video iPods - video podcasts and vlogs, and suddenly, you just have too much good information to fit on your iPod.

Apple lets you tell iTunes to only copy songs with checkmarks to your iPod. Or, you can tell it which playlists (smart and regular) that you want to have on your iPod. Given the incredible power packed into the smart playlist feature, this is all the flexibility and convenience you need. It is neither laborious nor complicated to get control over just what songs go onto your iPod.

Thanks to Apple's easy-to-user user interface and their easy-to-understand instructions and tutorials, you can be an iPod wizard in no time!

Then, you can show someone else how to do it...

pretty amazing variety of visualizations come with iTunes

I was playing some synthpop (Berlin) with iTunes on my Macintosh today. It goes really well with the computer generated visualizations that iTunes can display.

It is all abstract art but some of it looks pretty cool.

Typing C will show you the current config. Typeing H or ? will give you some help. Typing that key again will give you the other tiny little page of help.

Anyway, everyone has iTunes but have you checked out this particular feature?

Judging from the purrs that just started behind me, my cat likes anything that smacks of DNA and fire.

I am a little concerned about that.

But what you really should do is go read the iTunes Cheat Sheet. Then you can get a much more complete picture of what is going on.

Call me crazy, but I would like to have an iTunes display that showed me news, status displays, visualizations of what was going on with the world/Internet/art and so forth - than purely abstract, albeit highly creative, art.