The Americana and roots music authority

A wee bit of tech support, anybody?

The story so far...a year or so back my kind brother-in-law passed down an iPod Touch, which I've slowly learned to use, and employ principally (a) to torture the nice kids who work at the coffee shop in the Baptist Student Union where I am the titular manager and (b) to listen through and sequence the prerecorded radio show I should be prerecording instead of typing.

Turns out my wife still likes to listen to music, some nights, and the iPod is a handy way to do that, easier than me dragging CDs from the back office to the front of the house, and forgetting to put them away. Or letting Maggie loose with them. Or whatever.

But the sound quality on the little portable docking station the same brother-in-law gave me for Christmas is, well, not really much different from the AM radio my brother took apart and stapled to a piece of plywood back in 1963, I guess, when I heard "I Wanna Hold Your Hand" played back through his 1.5-inch speaker. Or was it "8 Days A Week." Oh, well. I digress. The sound quality's pretty marginal. Adequate for folding clothes, and that's about it.

Now...I'm not really into spending more money on stereo equipment. We have two full component systems here -- good, but not high end stuff -- and I have still not figured out what to do with the set of Advent loudspeakers back in the storage room underneath all the back issues of ND, though I keep threatening to hook them up here in the office and really get loud. When nobody's home, of course. I'm a kind man, willing to inflict my musical tastes only on strangers.

So I'm not really keen on buying a high-end docking station. Nor do I have the money. But I have read online that there are simple plugs which can run from my iPod into the auxiliary slot on the stereo. Only the reviews are a little mixed, and I have a sense that there's not enough power in the iPod to drive the stereo? Or is the signal too degraded? Or are the cables just not very good quality? Or...what.

So that's one problem.

Then the other one, a more long-range issue, is that I am no longer current on what kind of hard drive storage is now in the marketplace, nor, exactly, how to move songs and albums and what not from my main hard drive onto a secondary disc. (We're talking Mac here, and I'm one operating system behind at the moment.) And, really, how do I move it without taking stuff OUT of iTunes? Or do I drop all of iTunes onto a second drive?

So I'm looking for counsel, since about everybody here is vastly more technologically adept than I am, or choose to admit in public.

Signed...your faithful luddite, descendant of illiterate Irish weavers, none of whom can carry a tune. More's the pity. But I began digressing again. Sorry.

Tags: alden, luddite

Comment by Jon Itkin on January 12, 2010 at 8:23pm: go to radio shack and get the cable. it's not a bad solution for 10 bucks. ask for a 1/8 inch male to rca cable. rca is the little red and white two-headed monster that you've been plugging into your stereo receiver for decades. plug the rca cables into 'aux' and put the stereo reciver on 'aux'. mess w/volume on the ipod and the stereo until it's right. then you're good. i'm not an itunes guy...somebody'll get you there.

Comment by Kyle Petersen on January 12, 2010 at 8:49pm: I second what Jon said about the cable--it's a simple little cord that I've used for quite a while--you are going to get a slightly degraded signal, but since you presumably already listening to lossy mp3 on an iPod you shouldn't care too much. As for backing up music in iTunes, its quite easy. You can actually copy and paste any file listed in iTunes into another folder or drive, just like you would do with text in word or on the Net.

Comment by T Hanssen on January 12, 2010 at 10:11pm: If you go with a 1/8" to RCA, then you still have volume control at the iPod, which can lead to distortion or bad signal to noise ratio. Better option is to go with a cable like this. There should be no power issues if the iPod is charged.

If by saying you are an operating system behind, you mean you haven't upgraded to Snow Leopard - don't bother - it is a pain in the ass. If you mean you are OS 9, I marvel at your ability to function.

On a lower version of OSX, I easily moved my iTunes library to an external fire wire hard drive. As I recall, I just copied the library across, then pointed iTunes at it.

If you don't need too much storage space, I got 100MB available for free - it's Firewire, so should be OK for your Mac.

Comment by Daniel T on January 12, 2010 at 10:14pm: Can't help you here, sorry. I still don't own an I-pod or MP3 or Droid or anything like them because I've found the sound quality to be " not really much different from the AM radio my brother took apart and stapled to a piece of plywood". That's the best description I'v ever heard of the sound quality coming from those things. Thanks for that.

Comment by Jake London on January 13, 2010 at 1:29am: Just go buy the cord with the 1/8 male jack to rca that everyone is talking about above. It works fine. Start with the volume on the ipod at about half and see how it sounds. If it's distorting turn it down (it probably won't be). Then try turning it up a little bit from there. If it starts distorting, it's too loud. Turn the stereo volume up a bit to see what happens when you do that. If it's distorting, turn it down a little bit.

The docking station can be nice because you can charge the ipod at the same time, but if you buy the right cord, there should be room to plug it and and put the charging cable on it (if you have one of those ac to usb adapter things like this: http://www.eforcity.com/dothusbtcad5.html

I also have a pair of old powered computer speaker I bought at RePC for $5. They came with a two sided 1/8 inch stereo cable. One side goes into the speakers. The other sides going into the ipod. Great for the kitchen. I also have simplify media loaded on my touch and on the home computers. With this, you can stream your entire itunes library to the touch (if you have wifi in your house). So you can listen to it wherever you are.

In terms of moving the itunes stuff to a bigger drive, you just want to make sure you know where the iTunes library/database files are first. Make a copy of these. Then move the music files to the new hard drive. If you think you might want to use this music with more than one computer, then move the itunes library files to the external drive too. From there, when you start I believe on the mac if you hold down option o while starting it will prompt you for the location of your library. Point it to the right place. Here is a more detailed discussion of this: http://www.ilounge.com/index.php/articles/comments/moving-your-itun...

You ought to be able to get a 500mb external hard drive for around $100. (see e.g., http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136394). Do you have an intel mac with USB2 or just a firewire? Firewire will be more expensive.

Assuming you can get a usb 2 drive, it sounds crazy, but you might want to buy two and use one as a back up drive. Hate to lose all you mp3 in a hard drive crash (I guess I should probably take my own advice on that front.)

Comment by Grant Alden on January 13, 2010 at 4:15am: Thanks, all. I'm on OSX 10.4, though I still use PageMaker back in 9 because I have only barely adapted to InDesign (the last bookazine -- you all bought one, right? -- is the only issue I've done in InDesign), and even at that I'm on CS2. Had I enough work to justify the expense, I suppose I'd buy CS4. But there's not a lot of work for publication designers anymore, much less in eastern Kentucky. And so I shall go pour coffee.
Oh, one more question if anybody's following...I haven't "bought" an MP3 yet. Is it possible to buy .wav files from the same vendors, assuming that the .wav files I've gotten as advances are actually real high-rez sound protocols and not just a more refined sort of garbage? And, then, I need to figure out how to pour those into iTunes, because I'm pretty sure that burning a CD and then putting that back in is the luddite's work-around...

Comment by denton fabrics on January 13, 2010 at 5:08am: I'm shocked that a church group would have a titular manager.

Comment by hyperbolium.com on January 13, 2010 at 10:22am: I'm not aware of any vendors selling uncompressed WAV files yet. Some indie labels/artists vend FLAC, which is a lossless compressed format; I often see FLAC on bandcamp.com offerings. If you have existing WAV files, you can drag them into iTunes directly - iTunes will play them without any conversion needed.

For external disk storage, as Jake London mentioned, Firewire drives will be more expensive. If you can use USB2, you can get a desktop 1TB for just a touch over $100.

Comment by Jeff Gilbert on January 13, 2010 at 1:35pm: If you decide to back up your music files onto an external hard drive, you might also consider purchasing back-up software. I use Second Copy. You can use it to copy all of your MP3s onto the hard drive and then program it to copy new and changed files at whatever time intervals you choose. I also use an online back-up service (Mozy) because I'm totally paranoid about losing my music.