Computer Beginner Guide

The terms streaming media and webcasting often are used synonymously. In this blog I refer to webcasting as the equivalent of television broadcasting, but delivered over the Web. Live or prerecorded content is streamed to a schedule and pushed out to the viewer. The alternative is on-demand delivery, where the user pulls down the content, often interactively. Webcasting embraces both streaming and file download. Streamed media is delivered direct from the source to the player in real-time. This is a continuous process, with no intermediate storage of the media clip. In many ways this is much like conventional television. Similarly, if the content has been stored for on-demand delivery, it is delivered at a controlled rate to the display in real-time as if it were live. Contrast this with much of the MP3 music delivery, where the file is downloaded in its entirety to the local disk drive before playback, a process called download-and-play. True streaming could be considered...

The iPod Photo Flip Book A couple of turns through a photo album using the click wheel will remind people of a certain age of an old-fashioned "flip book." For those who are unfamiliar with the term, a flip book is a do-it-yourself animation technique in which you draw a figure on the first page of a book, slightly change the figure on the next page, and on and on until you have multiple varied copies of the figure. Then, if you flip rapidly from one page to the next (using a motion like shuffling a deck of playing cards), the figure will appear to move. After wheeling his way through a couple of photo albums on an iPod Photo, Dan Frakes, my partner in crime at Playlistmag.com and Macworld magazine, had a flash of inspiration: What if you segmented a movie into still frames, loaded those frames onto an iPod Photo as a photo album, and then scrolled through them at the proper speed? Who says the iPod Photo can't do video (albeit really cheesy video)? Here...

In one hand, you've got a passel of pictures; in the other, your iPod Photo. How do you marry the two? No shotgun necessary; just follow along. Just as iTunes delivers music to your iPod, so does it handle the transaction between the pictures stored on your Mac or Windows PC and the iPod Photo. Those without an iPod Photo attached to their computer won't see this added functionality as it makes itself known only when you've made that connection between computer and iPod. With that in mind, make such a connection and whistle in admiration when you choose Preferences from the iTunes menu, click the iPod tab, and notice that a Photos tab has magically appeared within the resulting window. This tab is the key to moving pictures from your computer to the iPod. It works this way: 1. Enable the Synchronize Photos From option. When you do, you'll see an alert that asks if you're really sure you want to enable photo support. If this is your first time adding pho...

Following the October 26, 2004, announcement of the iPod Photo, many people were confused about what wonders the iPod Photo held. Before I dip into the small details of the device, let me make a few points clear. Some of the Same In regard to its form and its music- and data-handling capabilities, the iPod Photo is virtually indistinguishable from a fourth-generation iPod. It bears the same controls as this iPod; it transfers data the same way over the same FireWire and USB 2.0 connections; its menu structure is very similar; it handles contacts, calendars, and notes just like its fourth-generation sibling; and until you switch the thing on, it looks exactly like a fourth-generation iPod. Unlike earlier iPods, however, it does require iTunes 4.7 or later. Expectations vs. Reality When Steve Jobs unveiled the iPod Photo, he quickly dispelled the notion that Apple had any interest in developing a video iPod (at least in developing one at that time). Though he felt that few...

What other changes can you make in iTunes that will make a difference to your iPod? Show Duplicate Songs. Prior to the release of iTunes 4.7, iTunes and iPod users were routinely vexed by an iTunes library that contained duplicate songs. Not only did these things clutter up the iTunes library, but they took up valuable space on the iPod. Apple decided to make tracking down duplicates a bit easier by adding a Show Duplicate Songs command to iTunes. The command works pretty much as advertised. Just select your iTunes library in iTunes' Source list and choose Show Duplicate Songs from the Edit menu. iTunes' main window will list all the duplicates it finds. Once these songs have been listed, you're welcome to delete any that you don't want. Before doing so, note that iTunes isn't terribly discerning about what is and isn't a duplicate. It filters tracks by only title and artist. This is fine if you've accidentally ripped the same CD twice, but you...

The conduit for moving music to the iPod is iTuneswhich, fortunately, is fairly flexible in the way it goes about the process. The key to determining how you move your tunes is the iPod Preferences dialog box. With the advent of iTunes 4.7, there are two ways to access iTunes' iPod Preferences window. To start, plug your iPod into your computer and launch iTunes. (By default, iTunes launches on its own when you connect the iPod.) The iPod will appear in iTunes Source list. In earlier versions of iTunes, you clicked on the iPod in the Source list to view a new icon that appeared next to the EQ icon in the bottom-right corner of the iTunes window. Clicking this iPod icon opened the iPod Preferences dialog box. This option remains in iTunes 4.7. However, you can also reach this dialog box by opening iTunes' Preferences window and clicking the iPod tab. Doing so produces the dialog box you desire. Using this latter method offers the singular advantage of not requiring...

iTunes 3 introduced such helpful features as ratings, the ability to pass judgment on a song by assigning it a rating of one to five stars; play count, a feature that keeps track of the number of times you've played a song in iTunes and on your iPod; and recently played, a feature that keeps track of when you last played a song. Here's a quick look at how these features enhance your iPoding experience: Ratings. Although employing ratings is a fine way to vent your critical spleen ("I don't care how hefty a royalty it brought the composer, 'Brandy [You're a Fine Girl]' was a dreadful waste of vinyl!"), it's also quite useful. After you rate your songs, you can use those ratings as a playlist criterion. You can, for example, create a Smart Playlist that contains nothing but songs with a rating of four stars or more, thus guaranteeing that you hear nothing but your personal favorites. Or if an ill-favored cousin has planted himself on th...

Stuck for ideas on how to create smarter Smart Playlists? Sample some of these recipes: The New Music All the Time playlist Select New Smart Playlist from iTunes' File menu, and configure the top row of pop-up menus to read Play Count is 0. If you like, enable the Limit To option, and limit the songs in your playlist by number of songs, duration of playlist, or cumulative size of the songs in the playlist (10 GB, for example). Enable the Live Updating option so that when a song has been played once, it's removed from the playlist. The iPod mini playlist When you plug an iPod (that's configured to update automatically) into your computer and your iTunes library contains more music than your iPod can hold, iTunes creates a playlist of music that will fit on your iPod. iTunes is the tiniest bit discerning about this playlist, in that it includes all songs on an album rather than giving you a taste of each album in your iTunes library. It's not terribly sma...

If the iPod were like lesser music players, you'd have to select all the songs on the device from one enormously long list. Thank heaven Apple's engineers had more sense than to provide you such a limited interface. Among other options, you can navigate your iPod via the playlists you create in iTunes. Here's how to create a variety of playlists. Standard Playlists You can create standard playlists in iTunes 2, 3, and 4. Follow these steps: 1. Click the large plus-sign (+) button in the bottom-left corner of the iTunes window, or choose the New Playlist command from the File menu (Command-N on the Mac, Ctrl-N in Windows). 2. Enter a name for your new playlist in the highlighted field that appears next to the new playlist in the Source list. 3. Click the Library entry in the Source list, and select the titles you want to place in the playlist you created. You can select multiple titles in a row by holding down the Shift key and clicking the first and last titl...

After you've downloaded and, if necessary, converted the files you want, you have three ways to move them into iTunes: 1. Choose an Add to Library command from iTunes' File menu. In the Macintosh version of iTunes, there's only the single Add to Library command. When you choose this command, the Add to Library dialog box appears (called Choose Object in iTunes 2). Navigate to the file, folder, or volume you want to add to iTunes, and click Open. iTunes decides which files it thinks it can play and adds them to the Library. iTunes for Windows includes two commands: Add File to Library and Add Folder to Library. When you choose Add File to Library, up pops the Add to Library dialog box; you can navigate to individual music files and add them by clicking the Open button. When you choose Add Folder to Library, the Browse for Folder window opens, allowing you to browse the directories of My Documents, My Computer, and My Network Places. Select a directory and cli...

Once upon a time, streaming songs across a network from one computer to another was a cumbersome process. Now, thanks to built-in iTunes 4 support for OpenTalk (once called Rendezvous)a networking technology that lets computers find one another effortlessly on a local networkstreaming songs couldn't be easier. Here's how: 1. Launch iTunes 4. 2. Choose Preferences from the iTunes menu on a Macintosh and from the Edit menu in the Windows version of iTunes. 3. Click the Sharing button. 4. In the resulting window, enable the Share My Music check box. Below this check box, you'll see the option to share your entire library or just selected playlists. You'll also see options for naming your shared music and requiring a password to share your music. 5. If you want other users' shared music libraries to be available to you, enable the Look for Shared Music check box. 6. Click OK to close the window. Now when another computer is connected to your networkeithe...

MP3, AAC, AIFF, WAV…is the computer industry incapable of speaking plain English!? It may seem so, given the plethora of acronyms floating through modern-day Technotopia. But the lingo and the basics behind it aren't terribly difficult to understand. MP3, AAC, AIFF, and WAV are audio file formats. The acronyms stand, respectively, for MPEG-1, audio layer 3 (if you must know, MPEG is an acronym for Moving Picture Experts Group); Advanced Audio Coding; Audio Interchange File Format; and Windows Audio Volume. The compression methods used to create MP3 and AAC files are termed lossy because the encoder removes information from the original sound file to create these smaller files. Fortunately, these encoders are designed to remove the information you're least likely to missaudio frequencies that you can't hear easily, for example. AIFF and WAV files are uncompressed, containing all the data from the original. When a Macintosh pulls audio from an audio CD, it does...

Released in January 2001, iTunes was Apple's second "i" application. (The first was the digital video-editing application iMovie.) Like Casady & Greene's SoundJam, iTunes was capable of playing and encoding MP3 files on a Macintosh. It featured a simple interface that allowed users to turn audio CDs into MP3 files easily, drag and drop songs between the Library (a master list of all the songs on your Mac) and user-created playlists, and record (or burn) customized audio CDs from within the application. When Apple unveiled the first iPod, it also took the wraps off iTunes 2: an enhanced version of iTunes that, in addition to providing the means for moving music from the Mac to the iPod, introduced a 10-band graphic equalizer (EQ) with 22 presets, a sound enhancer that brings a livelier sound to tunes played in the application, and the ability to fade tracks played in iTunes into one another. (As we go to press, sound enhancement and fades don't tran...

A graphics controller (also known as a video card or a graphics adapter) transfers the signal supplied by a computer's CPU to a video display unit called a monitor. A graphics controller takes over much of the control of the video signal from the CPU, so it carries its own special-purpose processor and memory. A faster graphics processor with more memory can send the monitor an image with more detail and more colors, and it can refresh the signal more often. If your monitor has a DVI (digital video interface) input connector, look for a controller card that provides a digital signal. Every computer needs at least one graphics controller, but it's easy to choose a card that offers far more speed and performance than you really need. For the usual word processing, number crunching, and Web browsing, an inexpensive graphics controller often provides an entirely satisfactory image. Game players and graphic designers notice improvement with a more expensive card. Unlik...

The first generation of personal computers were all true desktop systems because they were built into horizontal cases made to sit on a table or desk with the widest surface next to the tabletop. But it didn't take long for somebody to turn the case up onto one side and create a tower case with a much smaller footprint. Instead of placing the computer case on the table with the video monitor sitting on top, many users moved their tower cases down onto the floor or to remote corners of their desks. The choice of a desktop or tower case makes no difference to the computer's performance, but it could be a very big deal to some users. Many name-brand computer makers build all their systems in tower cases, but a screwdriver shop can probably accept your order for either type. Note In addition to desktop and tower cases, you might also find some other designs for special uses. For example, a computer for a child's bedroom might have pastel-colored plastic trim ...

Most new computers come with a single hard drive to store programs and data files. You can expect the dealer or manufacturer to format the drive and load Windows and other software before they deliver the computer. The important characteristics of a hard drive are: The amount of data the drive can hold (expressed in gigabytes) The speed at which the magnetic disks rotate inside the drive The buffer that stores copies of recently read data The type of interface between the drive and the motherboard Before you buy your computer, it's a good idea to ask about the hard drive's capacity, speed, buffer, as well as its interface. It's quite possible that the salespeople, especially in a retail store, won't know the answers to your questions, but they should be able to tell you where to find out. Capacity A hard drive with a relatively small capacity costs less than a drive with more space, but when you calculate the cost-per-gigabyte, the larger drive might...

The CPU (central processing unit) is the core of your computer. It's the large integrated circuit mounted in a socket on the motherboard that controls all of the computer's other components. All of the actual computing inside your computer takes place in the CPU, so the choice of a processor dictates the computer's performance level and can have a significant impact on its cost. Both of the major CPU manufacturers, Intel and AMD, offer several families of processors with somewhat different designs and feature sets. Within each family, the price of a CPU chip increases along with its speed and performance. Therefore, it's necessary to choose a particular brand, family, and performance level when you shop for a new computer. Or is it? One of the great secrets of the consumer computer business is that most people buy computers with much more processing power than they really need. For the vast majority of computer users, the real differences between CPUs may n...

In today's marketplace, you can buy a personal computer in almost as many places as you can buy a cup of expensive coffee. The big office-supply chains all offer computers and accessories in the next aisle beyond the paper clips and pencils, and the electronics retailers in every shopping mall are ready to sell you a computer along with your home entertainment system. Or if you prefer, you can go to a smaller computer specialty shop where they assemble each computer to order in the back room. And then there's the Internet, where dozens of manufacturers and thousands of retailers are waiting for your order. Are some of these places better than others? Yes. Or at least maybe. It depends on how much you know before you walk into a store or fire up your Web browser, and whether it's important to take the computer home this afternoon. You can get a fine computer from any of those sources. But you can also end up with a system that is either wildly beyond what you a...