Pepsi & iTunes

As I said in the last post, I spent some time at the iTunes Music Store over the past Christmas break searching for songs for my son's new iPod Nano. Luckily, he also received for Christmas, a gift card for the online store. As I entered in his card # to redeem the $15 on it, I was take back to 2004 when Apple and Pepsi teamed together to give away one million songs at the iTunes Music Store after the Super Bowl. During this promotion, codes for one free song were printed at the under the bottle caps of one in three Pepsi bottles. I thought back to how after entering in each code, your credit to your account would increase by one song, or $1.00. I wondered whether they were gearing up to do the same promotion by any chance since the Super Bowl is coming up relatively soon.

I did another little Google search (makes me wonder what I ever did without Google) and discovered that Pepsi has dropped Apple in favor of Amazon MP3. Now I had no idea whatsoever that Amazon was in the .MP3 business, but apparently they are. So, I did a little more research and playing around. I created an Amazon MP3 account for myself, downloaded and installed the Downloader software, and tried downloading a song for the first time.

There were a few cool things about doing this: One, the song was completely compatible with iTunes, so as soon as it downloaded, it played in iTunes. It even downloads the album artwork! Two, just like the iTunes Music Store you can preview the song prior to purchasing it. Three, it seems that the prices for these songs (especially if you a buying entire albums) are cheaper than iTunes.

Now it seems that I have yet another reason to look forward to the Super Bowl. (If the New England Patriots being in it wasn't enough of a reason.)

Trying Out Some New Things / Ringtones

I have been spending some time trying out some new technology related things lately. I hope to share some of them in the next several posts. Some of these new tools are items I found in issues of Macworld (subscription~priceless) and others I just sort of looked into because a need or curiosity arose. I will start with the latter.

During this past Christmas break I found myself spending a lot of time waiting around in my truck, usually for one or both of my boys to get out of or return from some sort of sporting or social event. I took this as an opportunity to spend some quality time with my cell phone. I downloaded an application so that I could find, preview, and download different ring-tones. I was pleasantly surprised to find out that my cell phone (which I picked up at a yard sale for $5) would play ring-tones that were pieces of actual music, not just the MIDI variety. I soon discovered that these cool ring-tone would run about $3 each to download. That just seemed like too high a price to pay, so I kind of let the topic slip to backburner of my mind.

Another way that I spent some of my precious Christmas vacation time was downloading songs and videos to my oldest son's new 3G iPod Nano which he purchased using Christmas $. While at the iTunes Music Store searching for songs, I noticed that some of them had little bell icons next to them. My son told me that they were songs that could also be used as ring-tones. "Ahh Haa!" I thought. "Maybe I could use one of these as my ringtone?" I wondered. A little research into this idea came up fruitless for two reasons, one, it costs $2 for the ring-tone from the iTunes Store ($1 for the Song and $1 for the ability to edit it into a ring-tone) and two, they only work on iPhones. So, that option was out.

I finally decided to search for an easy, yet free, way to get actual music ring-tones on to my cell phone. A quick Google Search lead me to Mobile17. Once you register you are able to create ring-tones using .mp3 files you have on your computer. It will ask you to browse for the file. Next, it will ask how many seconds/minutes into the song you want to start the ring-tone. Then, it asks how long you want the ringtone to last. Finally, after hit SEND, it sends the ringtone (in my case as a PICT) to your cell phone. You open the PICT message, save it, and then select it to be your ring-tone. I tried this out twice for myself and it WORKS! I love finding ways to do things for FREE.

In my next posting I will share another cool thing that I found just from need or curiosity.