OK If I am going to get one of your awesome MP3 playing in dash car stereos, where do I get the music?

#1 Obviously the best place to get mp3s is your own CD collection, rip them all to MP3 or WMA and off you go.

#2 iTunes and The Zune pass. iTunes has good points and bad points but it is the largest, most popular and arguably fastest. Zune pass has a financial advantage, Instead of spending a few $ each time you want to listen to a new song, spend $15/month and have unlimited access to all the music in the world. It is not much money and you can load up all your favorites in the first few months, and even after that $15 isn't much to have free music anytime you want it. Try new artists and songs you heard once on the radio without worrying about the cost. Nothing is more frustrating than hearing a song you like then dropping $20 on the album only to find not only does the artists suck, but the radio version you sort of liked isn't even on the album you bought. ARGH!

#3 Illicit downloading. Not that I would ever condone this sort of thing, but some people use torrents or file sharing sites to share music with others. Google the process or go to wikipedia to learn more.

#4 Direct sharing. Ask friends to throw some playlists or files onto a drive and share the old fashion way. It's a good way to expand your horizons and then you can go back and get the music the legal way using your Zune pass.

Now if only they would come out with one for Zune! When is someone going to create an adapter that lets Zune owners take advatage of all of these cool iPod accessories? Zune is way cooler but iPod has cornered the market on cheap and innovative accessories!

How hard is it? a simple crossover cable or dock adapter that lets me plug my Zune into an iPod stereo or charging station or whatever!!

Get to work engineers! free us from the enslavement of Apple's ACC reich! Ihk bein ein Apple hater for a reason! Don't get me wrong the iPod is the coolest thing on the planet but if Apple had had Microsoft's success the Internet would be run by Police and file sharing would be something that only happened on the Sci-Fi channel.

Apple has done everything the DOJ has accused Microsoft of in terms of anti-competition practices the only difference is that when Apple did it no one noticed because no one was buying Apple products.

I like the Zune because it has a bigger screen and a better interface but that's only because Apple showed them how it could be done and in true Microsoft fashion they copied and improved the idea.

The iPod is the only player onthe market that doesn't support WMA. Why is that Department of Justice?
iPod doesn't have an FM radio. How hard is that?
iPod makes you choose between a large screen (Touch) and the storage capacity to watch movies on it. Why?

Turn away from the dark side people! Put your iPod on eBay where they are happiest and get a Zune! You will never look back!

$15/month for all the music you want! Are you serious? That's better than free because it is stealing without guilt! Do you know how much music you can download in a month?

ALL OF IT!

I have to run, I am going to watch Rise of the Lycans on my Zune.

An economics professor at Texas Tech said he had never failed a single student before but had, once, failed an entire class. That class had insisted that socialism worked and that no one would be poor and no one would be rich, a great equalizer. The professor then said ok, we will have an experiment in this class on socialism. All grades would be averaged and everyone would receive the same grade so no one would fail and no one would receive an A. After the first test the grades were averaged and everyone got a B. The students who studied hard were upset and the students who studied little were happy. But, as the second test rolled around, the students who studied little had studied even less and the ones who studied hard decided they wanted a free ride too; so they studied little..  The second test average was a D! No one was happy. When the 3rd test rolled around the average was an F.  The scores never increased as bickering, blame, name calling all resulted in hard feelings and no one would study for the benefit of anyone else. All failed, to their great surprise, and the professor told them that socialism would also ultimately fail because when the reward is great, the effort to succeed is great; but when government takes all the reward away; no one will try or want to succeed. Could it not be any simpler than that?

One of the biggest struggles in the world of the Internet is properly ranking sites. Google does it but how well do they do it? Not that well when you consider how often you have to scroll or refine your search or ignore their results altogether. It's not their fault, the don't know what's on all of those pages, they can't. All they can do is index those pages using little computer programs some people call ‘spiders'. Spiders try to do it but they can only do so much because let's face it, who cares what a computer thinks? PC Magazine tries to do it all the time but what they think are the top ten sites in the world rarely agree with anyone, even themselves issue to issue.

We need people like us to rank which sites are cool and which are not. But how can we do this? What if we stopped looking at the entire Internet and limited our research to the sites actually used? Then we take those sites and categorize them based on simple keywords. Then we simply determine how many people liked each site in each category enough to save it to their favorites. Then we need to sort those users out be preference so we only looked at people who's preferred sites and categories matched ours.

Now we have a list of people who share our interests, and they all rank sites and we can browse through what they like and see if we like them too!

Wouldn't that be great? It is great! It's called Social bookmarking!

Social bookmarking

Social bookmarking is not new. It has been the flavor of the month in Internet marketing for almost a year now with more than a hundred sites focusing on providing that service alone. But the benefits of social bookmarking are still as relevant as ever in making your site successful.

What is social bookmarking?

In a nutshell social bookmarking is two simple concepts combined to form a a powerful information gathering tool. Bookmarking is nothing new, making a list of your favorite things is even older than the Sound of Music. All of us find special resources and communities on the Internet that we scribble down in some fashion so we don't have to remember hundreds of URLs when we want to return. But where we save them is the key. Browsers all let you save them to a favorites list so that whenever you surf the ‘net from home you will have access to your list of fav's, but what about when you are away? Saving them to a web-based service is where Social bookmarking got it's start. Save to an account online means that wherever you are, on any computer your favorites list is always close at hand.

Most services even allow you to categorize your favorites so that you can keep track of them when the number of favorites might otherwise overwhelm you.  This is called ‘tagging' which refers to sticking little tags on each favorite. You could tag your favorite news site with the word "news" that way when you get a lot of sites and you can't find the news sites you just filter news, and all your news sites come to the top.

ACC and WMA are arguably better than MP3 but MP3 is a no hassle universally supported format that just makes my life easier. If you have some odd formats and want to standardize your collection, heres how:

Thanks Jasmine France  for this cool tutorial:

Step 1: Download and install Free MP3 WMA Converter. Open the program.

Step 2: Click the File drop down menu and select Add files (or hit Ctrl+F on your keyboard). Navigate to the folder on your hard drive that contains the files you want to convert, such as My Documents > My Music > iTunes > Kate Bush > The Sensual World.

Step 3: Select the files that you want to convert. You can select more than one file at a time by clicking and dragging your mouse cursor, or by holding down Ctrl as you select each file. (You can repeat steps 2 and 3 if you wish to add files from various folders.)

Step 4: By default, the software will save your newly converted files into the same folder as the original files. If you would like to select a new output directory, uncheck the box next to "Save in the file's directory," then click the ellipses button next to the Output path section and navigate to the location where you would like the new files saved.

Step 5: Make sure the output format is set to MP3--that's the default, but it's always good to double check. This free app can also be used to convert to and from other formats as well, such as WMA or FLAC. 

Step 6 (optional): If you would like to adjust the output settings of your file even further, click the ellipses next to the Format parameter section. Here, you can set the bitrate for the file as well as make other adjustments. Click OK once you have the settings to your liking.

Step 7: Click the Convert button in the lower right corner of the window. You can monitor the progress of the conversion in the top and bottom sections of the screen.

Step 8: Free MP3 WMA converter does not preserve most of the metadata from your files, so you will have to manually input the ID3 tag parameters if you want that info attached to the MP3. Click Options > Tag editor (or Ctrl+T); then, navigate to the newly converted MP3s on your hard drive and update the file information by filling in the fields in the right column of the window .

Ex-Google staff launch rival search engine, Cuil
The new site promises better results by scouring a larger index of web pages than Google, but experts are cautious about its prospects

.....searching for results across 120 billion web pages compared with Google's index of 40 billion pages...

....Last month, Google performed 82 per cent of searches in the UK last month, according to Nielsen Online, compared with 5 per cent for Yahoo!, 4 per cent for Microsoft's Windows Live Search, and 3 per cent for Ask.com....

MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3, more commonly referred to as MP3, is a digital audio encoding format using a form of lossy data compression.

It is a common audio format for consumer audio storage, as well as a de facto standard encoding for the transfer and playback of music on digital audio players.

MP3 is an audio-specific format that was co-designed by several teams of engineers at Fraunhofer IIS in Erlangen, Germany, AT&T-Bell Labs in Murray Hill, NJ, USA, Thomson-Brandt, and CCETT. It was approved as an ISO/IEC standard in 1991.

MP3's use of a lossy compression algorithm is designed to greatly reduce the amount of data required to represent the audio recording and still sound like a faithful reproduction of the original uncompressed audio for most listeners, but is not considered high fidelity audio by most audiophiles. An MP3 file that is created using the mid-range bitrate setting of 128 kbit/s will result in a file that is typically about 1/10th the size of the CD file created from the original audio source. An MP3 file can also be constructed at higher or lower bitrates, with higher or lower resulting quality. The compression works by reducing accuracy of certain parts of sound that are deemed beyond the auditory resolution ability of most people. This method is commonly referred to as Perceptual Coding. [1] It internally provides a representation of sound within a short term time/frequency analysis window, by using psychoacoustic models to discard or reduce precision of components less audible to human hearing, and recording the remaining information in an efficient manner. This is relatively similar to the principles used by JPEG, an image compression format.

Today I started listening to some of the new audio books I downloaded through a google "index of" search. Don't tell anyone about this but you don't even have to install one of those file sharing programs and index searches are way faster than torrents.

just type this into google:

intitle:"index of" (mp3|wma) name of song or book -html -php - asp

and start browsing through the index pages you find for some actual downloadable files.

Woo hoo!