Apple iPod Touch - The new generation of iPods

iPod Touch = iPhone - phone

Yeah, thats the first impression you get if you have a look at it for the first time! Its an all new gadget thats released by Apple. It is not just a music player but comes very close to be called a PDA. The main features of iPod Touch with a Video Tour can can be seen at Apple's site.

• Multi-touch interface - The revolutionary technology that made iPhone a hit is now on one amazing iPod.
• Gorgeous 3.5-inch widescreen display - Touch your music in Cover Flow and watch video on a stunning, widescreen display
• Wi-Fi web browsing - Browse the web with Safari and watch YouTube videos on the first-ever Wi-Fi iPod.
• Music downloads from iTunes - Search, preview, and buy songs from the iTunes Wi-Fi Music Store on iPod

Multi-touch

iPod touch features the same revolutionary interface as iPhone. Built to take full advantage of the large 3.5-inch display, the multi-touch interface lets you control everything using only your fingers. So you can glide through albums with Cover Flow, flick through photos and enlarge them with a pinch, or zoom in and out on a section of a web page. And iPod touch features a touchscreen QWERTY keyboard perfect for browsing the web in Safari, searching for videos on YouTube, finding music on the iTunes Wi-Fi Music Store, entering calendar events, or adding new contacts.


Ambient Light Sensor

The iPod touch display has an ambient light sensor that automatically adjusts brightness to suit the ambient light in your surroundings. The result? A better experience for you and battery-saving efficiency for iPod touch.


Accelerometer

An accelerometer detects when you rotate iPod touch from portrait to landscape, then automatically changes the contents of the display, so you immediately see the entire width of a web page, your music in Cover Flow, or a photo in its proper aspect ratio.



Starbucks Music

You walk into a Starbucks. Order your latté. While you wait, you hear a song wafting from the loudspeakers. You love it. So you get out your iPod touch and buy it over Wi-Fi. Just like that. The iTunes Wi-Fi Music Store on iPod touch tells you what’s playing in select Starbucks and lets you buy it along with other featured Starbucks content. So you can sip, shop, and listen.

Specs

It comes in two versions 8GB($299) or 16GB($399) flash drive. With its rechargeable Lithium ion battery it gives up to 22 hours of music playback and up to 5 hours of video playback! It has a 3.5-inch (diagonal) widescreen multi-touch display with very good resolution (480-by-320-pixel resolution at 163 pixels per inch). All in all it weighs 4.2 ounces (120 grams). For a complete list of specs click here.

Organizing your Music for iPod

I used to consider myself a cleanliness freak (like Monica Geller of F.R.I.E.N.D.S fame) ; atleast when it comes to keeping MP3s and JPGs in my laptop. But after I bought an Apple iPod, I realized how messed up my music collection was. Songs were poorly named as SUMME~69.mp3 or even worse Track1.mp3. Nirvana's song All Apologies was tagged under the genre Blues while a gazillion others had no artist whatsoever.

All these attributes (meta-data) that is stored in these MP3 songs are called ID3 tags. There's a whole Wiki page explaining what it is. To a lay-man, these are the attributes that your iPod uses to arrange music, based upon the Genre, Artist or Album. Even if you are a music buff, it'd be a herculean task to update all your music manually. I gave up after Googling attributes for just 2 or 3 songs and manually editing its tags. It was such a pain !!

So instead of googling the attributes for the songs, I decided to search tools on the net that'd make my life easier. Here in this post, I'll explain how you can organize as well as enhance your giga-bytes of assorted MP3s.

I found tools such as MusicBrainz Picard and TagRunner which when used in combination, makes a lot of work easier for you. Picard is a free-ware while TagRunner is a share-ware and needs to be bought after a brief period. However this useful social-service site helped me 'crack' a way out. Search for 'TagRunner v2.0.0.16' and download what they have to offer. Replace the exe file with the one already installed in TagRunner directory, and you are done!

Firstly, I suggest you to keep a separate place-holder for your 'tagged' music, so that you don't end up having duplicate MP3s. For this change the settings in Picard (File -> Options -> Directories) by selecting the shown check-box and entering the new place-holder path.

There are various other options that you can set like the naming conventions, ID3 Tag versions, etc. Select your entire assorted music collection and leave it upto Picard to take care of it. This can be done by selecting the directory (File -> Add Directory). Leave it to run for as long time as it needs (probably overnight). It will look up various sources in the internet and arrange your songs based upon the Artist and the Album. Some of the MP3s may remain untagged, so don't worry about them. Once everything is done, select all the Albums and click 'Save track/album' as shown below. You will also get to know the missing songs of the albums by clicking on the expandable 'Albums' button here.

Now since your music collection is getting sorted out, its time to add correct tags like Artist, Genre, Year of Release as well as Lyrics and the Album Art. To do this you need to use the other software I mentioned - TagRunner. Open it and add the newly sorted directory in it (Add -> Add Folder (Recursive)) and click 'Next'.

This will search for various necessary Tags, Lyrics and Album Arts. Once all the songs are done, save it and exit.

Now you can import all these songs into iTunes and put it in your iPod. You will see a clean and organized music world now !! Enjoy !!