Edit: I accidentally posted this to the game room. Can anyone notify a mod to put it in IMHO? Thanks.
After deciding I needed a music player with more capacity than my 1gb Creative MuVo (which is really cool for what it does), I decided to look into a new mp3 player. A few weeks ago someone showed me their iphone and although I generally hate Apple, I had to admit it was a really cool gadget. I’m locked into a T-mobile contract though and I wasn’t sure I wanted to get an old gen unlocked one and increase my phone bill by $20-30 a month so I went with the Ipod Touch, which can run iphone software and has most of the same features.
I got a crazy good deal ($200 for the 16gb model with a case and fm transmitter) off craigslist. The original owner jailbroke it and put in the installer app. So it’s jailbroken, but I’m not very familiar with third party apps and tweaking yet.
I want to buy the update package (mail, google maps, etc) but I can’t figure out where in itunes go go about doing that.
I grabbed videora - a free mp4/h264 converter - and started converting some videos. I just used the easy/wizard method, but I notice it didn’t change the resolution of the video, which in this case was 624x352. Should I use something else to re-encode the videos at a lower resolution since the screen is only 480x320? What resolution should I use to preserve the correct aspect ratio?
Is there any third party way to avoid using I-tunes and preferably load the player with some sort of drag-drop method? While the ipod itself only has one thing that irritates me so far, Itunes has about 20.
That thing, by the way, is the need to slider unlock it every time you turn the screen off. Is there any way to shut that off? I tend to need to pause and unpause music frequently. I don’t want to leave the screen running all the time draining power, but now every time I want to pause it I need to hit the home button, drag the slider, then hit pause.
If I start buying music on Itunes, am I locked into using Apple mp3 players and Itunes as a music player on my PC?
Are there any national chains or otherwise common stores that generally have free wifi hotspots?
Are the apps available through the “installer” program all the third party apps available, or are there other sources?
I notice some programs - an offline wikipedia reader for example - tell you to stick data files in certain directories. How do you go about directly transferring data from the PC to the ipod like that?
What are the cool third party programs you recommend?
What podcasts do you guys like? Especially video podcasts. I like educational stuff - discovery channel, national geographic, etc. News is good. And I listen/read NFL news/discussion all year round.
I’ve heard complaints about the sound quality, especially that the Apple EQ will distort music severely if your music doesn’t have any dynamic range headroom. Has anyone done any sort of audio level normalization to be able to use the EQ?
Any general advice about getting the most out of the new gadget would be appreciated.
