I retired from personal blogging in July 2008 but you can find me over at blog.xero.com
Follow @roddrury
Had time to watch Steve’s Showtime Presentation last night.
When a killer feature of the new iPod’s is ‘gapless playback’ you know that not much was happening.
So the iPods got a new rev. You could almost taste the disappointment that the real video iPod wasn’t announced. Steve trying to pimp up air was a bit embarrassing.
Apple knew it, so they had to announce some sex. iTV. A dedicated box that has your stereo and TV outputs and can stream. Nice. Expensive though as it has no moving bits. It was good they didn’t oversell it. It’s just another input, like a DVD player or cable TV.
There were some big gaps. 640×480 might be great on your iPod, OK on your laptop but awful on your 50″ HDTV. But we should be able to stream hiRes stuff pulled down by Democracy and BitTorrent anyway. I’ll take one.
iTunes now makes it easy to pull down cover art, which is key to the TV experience. CoverFlow is a big part of the eye candy. Getting cover art is free if you have an iTunes account.
Still no word when/if we’ll have iTunes in NZ. This is really starting to suck. Now I’ve embraced the Mac I want a full experience. I spent $80 on CD’s a week ago but I only really wanted 5 songs.
An iTunes account is dependent on your Credit Card billing address. So my energy now is on finding out how to get a US Credit Card. Any suggestions welcome.
blog
Someone on the .NET mailing list mentioned this service http://www.myus.com/ that provides you with your own U.S. Mailing Address. I think this would be a good first step towards getting a US credit card.
On the site they mention the following:
“Once you receive your Access USA address, contact your credit card company and add it as a secondary ship-to or secondary billing address. Now, when you make purchases from U.S. retailers, your shipping address will match your records on file with the credit card company.”
Also found this one, but looks a bit dodgy.
http://www.us-bank-non-residents.com
While iTunes should be supported in NZ the reality is that you’d be nuts to buy your music off it. You end-up stuck with Apple DRM, lack of portability, low quality… Buy CD’s burn ‘em and live with the pain. It’s worth it. And try Sonos - it is fantastic.
A bit manual, but it’s easy to add Album Art. On Album View, Right click the image. Get Info, Artwork Tab.
Find the Album on Amazon. Sarfari makes it easy to drag and drop it in.
I have been using iTunes from here in NZ for the last year and it works brilliantly. So I can’t agree with Andy on that one. The best thing about it is exactly what you said, being able to buy whatever you want song by song (tv show by tv show) whenever you want. Since you can authorize up to five computers it is pretty portable as well. I would think that once you have the mailing address in the US then the hard part is refusing all the credit cards…
I know this is no good for the Mac users, but digiRAMA has fast become a very resonable local offering, satisfies my music needs anyway.
The Album View in iTunes seems a bit screwy. Especially for compilations I’m getting multiple albums.
I buy prepaid cards - you can buy them either in OZ or the US. Haven’t tried amazon for this but assume that would work
Good idea Miki. I wonder if I can get a buddy to buy say $200 of credits? Wonder what the sign in process is.