Software continued...

Well the Horns won but just barely and I can't say that it was a very impressive win.

Back to the software. Well with iTunes set up I needed some music in there. I was dreading the idea of moving the 13gig music library off the eMac over the network, or dicking with burning it to CDs. Serendipitiously(sp?) I read on, I believe it was engadget, maybe gizmodo, about 'iPod Downloader'. I'm not entirely sure about the story on this software so I'm not going to post a link, but a sufficient google search should find it. What 'iPod Downloader' does is allow you access to the songs on your iPod is such a fashion that you can move them off of the iPod and anywhere you would like, as well as the ability to do this from an iPod that is not married up to the current machine you are connecting to. What you see after installing and upon the connection of your iPod is another item in the left sidebar entitled cleverly enough as 'iPod Download'. Click on it and you see your iPod's music library, from there you can drag songs from the iPod to the iTunes library. So if I remember correctly I just selected all my songs from the 'iPod Download' and drug it to the PodBox's iTunes Library. A few minutes later I had my library intact on the new machine; must faster than the previously mentioned methods and easier than dragging the eMac over to the iMac to act as a Firewire drive.

Couple of drawbacks that I found to 'iPod Downloader', one, it doesn't bring across your playlists. Two, Apple broke the software with one of the recent patches, but some conniving individuals found a work around. But to get it going you have to hex edit iTunes. As part of my whole finding of 'iPod Downloader' was a page with step by step instructions on how to do this. This in turn led to another piece of software being installed. Hexedit, recommended in the article, is just that, a hex editor. Install was easy and it worked well. It did come with one annoyance however. It hijacked the PodBox's .dmg association. Everytime I dbl-clicked a disk image it wanted to open it in Hexedit. I would have to right click/cntrl+click to get select 'Open with' and select 'DiskImageMounter' until I found that in the file info dialog I could change what application opened a particular file and the option to globally change the association for all files of that type. Just do a 'Get Info' on the file and make the change under the 'Open with:' section. Once iTunes has been edited 'iPod Downloader' showed up in the sidebar each time I connected my iPod. Word on the street is that there is a 1.1 version of 'iPod Downloader' which gets around the Apple breakage.

Let's see what else, oh, the bittorrent stuff. I have become a big fan of bittorrent and for a variety of reasons I'm not going to go into right now. I installed the default bittorrent client from bittorrent.org and then and went and snagged Azureus. Azureus works well and being Java based it works on both OS X and Windoze with a very similar interface, a benefit when I sometimes am on the PC.

Then for my podcatcher I am trying out iPodderX. If you are unfamiliar with podcasting a good overview and all the software you need as well as a podcast directory can all be found at ipodder.org. In short though, think Tivo for your iPod.
iPodderX keeps crashing on me when I go to add a new feed (after having selected a bunch of feeds during the initial setup). It still appears to be pulling in content on the schedule I chose, but would like to add some more feeds. I haven't spent too much time with it, and will have to check back at their website and see if there is mention of the issue there. iPodder the Lemon version is supposed to have a new version out or very soon and I might check it out. I am a big advocate of this new medium and will be discussing it and the software associated with it in more detail.

Lastly, you might have noticed in the last post in the Whiteout screenshot that I had Gimp open. Gimp is my graphical editor of choice. To get it to work on OS X I first had to install the X11 user client, as Gimp is not a native OS X app.

Whew, think I'm just about all caught up. Now I should be able to make more daily posts of just what I've done that day, a single piece of software installed, interesting news blurb found, &c.