metaViper

Apple are you listening? Pulling out popular songs by number of times played on the iPod is good. Giving me a list of my own top rated songs is great too. But I want even more.

First, I’d like you to equalize the volume of all the tracks I add to my iPod on the fly so I’m not wildly adjusting volume from track to track. That’s hard to do when I’m in the middle of a pull-up!

Second, after you do that I’d like you to keep track of which songs I turn up regularly because there’s probably a good chance I like the song if I’m pumping up the volume.

One of the many ways I prowl for good content on the web is by listening to podcasts. Often though, good information is dispersed across several brief broadcasts from a variety of authors. Sometimes I’m in the gym running, sliding around the iPod’s clickwheel to select the next podcast; all while dodging other runners. An accident-prone endeavor to say the least.

Then I ran across smart playlists on Apple’s web site and realized that they could easily solved my problem. I set up two playlists named PodShort and PodLong.

In iTunes 7, smart playlists appear under File>>New Smart Playlist … For my PodShort smart playlist I configured it to pull up only podcasts with time less than ten minutes and a play count of zero, ordered randomly. For each additional rule click on the plus sign at the right-hand side. That playlist enabled me to hear commentary from six different podcasts (each around five minutes long) rapid fire without the need to pick and choose during my workout. And you guessed it, I use my PodLong list when I have a larger chunk of time available for research, it pulls up podcasts over ten minutes long.

My only gripe at this point is with volumes. Each podcast has a different loudness which means I had to pull out my iPod, turn off the lock, and adjust volume a couple of times. That should be something iTunes takes care of programmatically or through a set of enforced volume standards.

Cuddling up at home with a rented video is a classic weekend hobby for many of us. This year we’ve seen several companies begin to distribute those same videos via the inter-web directly to the home computer. In this commentary I’ll be focusing on two of them: Amazon’s Unbox and iTunes.

Amazon’s Unbox sports a few unique features. The first that caught my attention is that any video you buy they’ll store indefinitely on their servers and allow you to re-download as needed. Second, they’ve moved forward with delivery to Tivo boxes, which connects them directly to home entertainment systems. But their rental offering is where things get a little sticky. Lots of rentals are available from $.99 to $3.99, but they insist that once the video is started it must be finished in a 24 hour period. That’s ridiculous. Didn’t they learn from Blockbuster’s battle with Netflix that late fees don’t work anymore? Let alone going a step further by disabling the consumer’s ability to watch a video at all (after 24 hours from the first push of the play button).

Beyond that, DVDs typically offer bonus footage and featurettes along with the movie. This is an area Amazon Unbox and iTunes struggle with.

iTunes handles the whole rental situation by not offering a rental scheme at all. Their stance is buy a video or go without. The problem here is that buying a video online often is more expensive than buying the DVD, and it doesn’t include any additional features. Also if your hard drive is wiped for some reason you’ll have to re-purchase those videos to download them again.

Until online video renters discover how to distribute their content in a way that makes their suppliers and consumers happy the industry will see lackluster growth.