Archive for the ‘Music & Video’ Category

Oh how I love to watch an episode of Friends before bed, but oh how hard it is to transfer the thing on to my iPhone! Well, not any more, transferring videos to my iPhone has become a cinch with iPodMe, a minimalist application which converts videos into a format appropriate for Apple products.

Until a few days ago, I always wanted to watch some movies on my iPhone in bed, it’s just easier than to lug my laptop around with me, but I was hindered by the fact that it took me 30 minutes to convert a 40 minute long video. Since I am no codec master I am sure this was my own problem, but with iPodMe I drag and drop my video, press a button, and it spits my finished file out in about 6 minutes.

The codecs and whatnot come with the app which is a single executable, no install required. Once started, just drag and drop your vids in, select a resolution and convert. I’ve been looking for an app like this for a while, so let’s all thank Freewaregenius for finding it for me! (They also have a way better review, so take a look!)

Last.fm is a great music streaming service, enabling you to create your own radios based on keywords, genre or artists, making it a perfect tool for creating playlists to fit your mood. I tend to listen to a lot of different kinds of music, but when I’m working I usually go for ambient/soothing music. This in itself contains so many sub-genres, that sometimes it’s not the best just to start “Enigma radio”. Here’s how I manage, and listen to my music collection on Last.fm.

First of all, you’ll need an account, and since a year or so back it’s sadly not free. You can get all the Last.fm goodness for $3 a month though, not a huge setback for this service I think. Once logged in, you can start listening to music by starting a Last.fm radio which can be based on artists, tags, or a user. The great thing about the player is that you can opt for a multi-artist, or multi-tag radio, which allows you to enter up to three items. This is great if you want to listen to ambient music with female vocals and piano dominance. You could just input “ambient”, “piano”, “female vocals” as the three tags.

The real fun is creating playlists from your radios. Last.fm will allow you to play a playlist of songs if the playlist has 45 playable tracks from 15 different artists. This means that you do have to do some work to create your lists, but the positive side is that the more work you put in, the better your playlist gets.

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