Ultimate iPod

I just acquired a 20gb iPod and decided to set it up in style. That meant I wanted to get my favorite 180 cd's onto it and be able to use it with my car stereo.

I've been keeping up with the latest news about the iPod so I knew I could use Winamp to manage all the songs and an iTrip to connect to the stereo. Here's what I did:

1: Setup Winamp with the ml_ipod plugin. This plugin allowed me to fill up the iPod using Winamp thereby saving myself some headaches that come with using iTunes. I already had Winamp so I just downloaded and installed ml_ipod and was good to go.

Once this plugin was installed, the iPod showed up as a device in the Winamp music library and Winamp could send music to and otherwise manage the iPod. Like butter.

2: Setup Audiograbber with LAME. Audiograbber automated the CD to mp3 process while keeping my music out of some proprietary database like in Musicmatch, Windows Media Player or iTunes...Anyways, once it was setup I only had to click 3 times and wait 20 minutes to rip each CD.

LAME(Lame Ain't an MP3 Encoder) takes the huge wav files and turns them into tiny, yet high-quality mp3 files. I chose to rip at 160kbps to achieve a nice balance between mp3 size and sound quality. To speed up the process, I actually set this up on 4 computers and got up to a rate of about 12 CD's per hour.

3: Move the mp3's to the iPod. With my iPod fully charged, I plugged it in to my laptop, used Winamp to format it and transferred the 3000+ songs I just ripped. Using a USB 2.0 card with my laptop going from an external hard drive to the iPod, this process took about 45 minutes. Not bad.

4: Plug in the iTrip. This little device takes the headphone jack and uses an FM transmitter so the car stereo can pick it up wirelessly. This is the simplest part...just plug it in the top of the iPod, tune the stereo to 87.9 FM and rock out.

One caveat: the Griffin iTrip I was using turned out not give the best quality(frequency response and static) so I'm using a stereo-mini-to-tape adapter with my car stereo until I get an iPod dock installed.

The most time consuming process in all this is the ripping. You're basically baby sitting the computer(s) during that time but once it's done, you never have to do it again. Plus having all your music in mp3s will enable all kinds of iPod and music sharing fun. Which is nice.