do you have some advanced electronics skills, 50 bucks, a spare altoids tin, and the need to out-cool your ipod toting friends? if so, check out limor’s instructions for building an mp3 player from scratch. it uses compact flash, has a built-in fm transmitter, and smells real nice. awesome!
apple cripples recording on an ipod so belkin and griffin then have to sell us add-on devices for over $50 that can only record at 8khz, which is all pretty shitty. apparently (the rumor is) apple does this so people don’t use their ipods to record stuff they think we shouldn’t, like concerts, whatever.
but don’t worry, there’s a way around it and you can record at high quality, all for free.
1. Install Podzilla on your iPod (not all models are supported).
2. Boot in to Linux on your iPod.
3. Go to Extras > Recordings, choose 8,32,44.1,88.2 or 96kHz the higher, the better quality.
4. Record via Line In a microphone or even use your headphones.
5. Boot back in to the normal iPod OS plug in to the doc, grab your files from the iPod in the “Recordings” folder.
i suspect the next version of the ipod won’t allow booting in to linux and/or this type of recording. enjoy it while you can.
with all the podcasting people out there apple should consider not crippling our ipods so we can all use ipods to record, apple could do this now with a simple software update… or i guess i can keep booting in to linux and never update this ipod or just buy a cheap recorder, bah.
jeez, a ton of people must have received ipods over the last month, everyone keeps sending in ipod hacks. here’s one that /. covered earlier, putting linux on your ipod. i had played with this before, but this version is pretty solid, new games, sound, recording, image viewing (see picture above) on 3g ipods, and you can dual boot. it’s kinda cool to dual boot and geek out with some penguin flavored ipod, i suspect all the features not in our ipods now might eventually show up on custom builds like this later.
i’ve posted up the how-to i cooked up on changing the graphics in our ipod hacks sections, but now with the latest version of ipodwizard you can also change all the text (also called strings). for example, in the picture above the legal section was changed. click the read link to see a good step-by-step on this.
since a ton of you have likely received or bought an ipod for the holidays–don’t forget, when you buy music from itunes, it’s sometimes a dead end and you music is trapped. i have a lot of non-ipod music players and computers i can’t “authorize” to play my purchased music on, so jhymn solves a lot of those issues and it still keeps your info inside the song(s).
there’s an update to ipodwizard which allows you to change the images on your ipod, like the do not dissconnect screen, battery images, etc. in this update you can view the strings and edit character metrics, the next update that will come out soon will allow the editing of the strings, and that’s when it gets really interesting.
here’s a follow up…poster “zsk009” on the engadget comments says…
the ipods firmware can be updated without restoring the entire ipod, before running the updater follow these steps:
go on your ipod to ipod_control>device>sysinfo
and open the file in wordpad.
find this line of code:
buildID: 0x03028000 (3.0.2)
visibleBuildID: 0x03028000 (3.0.2)
change a number with a lower number
buildID: 0x03018000 (3.0.1)
visibleBuildID: 0x03018000 (3.0.1)
now the updater will think you have firmware version 3.0.1 and will let you update without restoring the entire thing.
this has been tested with 3g and 4g, the example above is 4g, the 3g uses different numbers but its virtually the some thing, just decrease the number. it should also work with other ipods but i’m not sure
(the ipod_control folder is a hidden folder)
thanks!
