To connect your iPhone, iPad or iPod to your home stereo you just need a 3.5mm to RCA cable like this cable above. The two RCA connectors plug into the back of your stereo and the 3.5mm plugs into the headphone jack of your iPhone. Pretty much every stereo available has RCA inputs as the standard inputs on the back. If you want the best possible audio quality, then an Apple iPod dock will make it sound even better, but we’ll get to that in a moment.
I still like to run with my old iPod Shuffle. Recently I tried to listen to an Audible book and it wouldn’t work. Apple Music and Audible do not play nicely together. But I didn’t give up easily… here’s how to listen to that audible book on an iPod!
To download the audible file to your computer, you will need to go to your audible.com account, find your library, and ‘download’ your audio book. This will save it on your computer as a file ending in aax. (e.g. mybook.aax)
Older iPods cannot play .aax files, they can only play MP3 files. So you need to convert the Audible file (aax) to an MP3 file. There are lots of programs out there to do this. Epubor Audible Converter, Open Audible, and Audible Converter. There were all in the $20 to $50 price. Eventually I found one called ‘Inaudible’ which was free.
You can find it here: https://github.com/rmcrackan/inAudible
Or the direct download is here: https://github.com/rmcrackan/inAudible/blob/master/_installers/mac_inAudible009.zip
When you try to install it you’ll get a warning like this:
You need to go to System Preferences, Security, General and tell your OS X to allow this app.
Open the Inaudible app and you’ll see a screen like this:
Drag your audible file into the top text box, and press ‘Begin Conversion.’
It will save your Audible file as an MP3 file which you can drag onto your iPod using iTunes or Apple Music.
We have an iPhone 4 that we love. It is running iOS 7. But there are some apps that you cannot download to iOS7. If you try to download them from the App store you get this message:
To get around this, you need an older version of the app. But Apple don’t give you the option of installing older versions. To get around this and find an older version, you firstly need to download the newer version of App into iTunes on your computer.
Then when you go to your iPhone and find the app in the App Store, you will get the option to download the older version:
SUMMARY: You cannot download older versions of Apps directly to your iPhone, but if you download a newer version to iTunes first, then you can access an older version from your iPhone.
NOTE: You need iTunes 12.6 to access the App store to do this. It won’t work in iTunes 12.7.
See this article for how to downgrade to iTunes 12.6.
I keep one laptop with 12.6 for this purpose. The rest are running iTunes 12.7.
As part of their iPhone 6 launch Apple are giving away 500 million copies of the latest U2 album ‘Songs of Innocence.’ The album is available for free on iTunes for the next 5 weeks. I downloaded it yesterday and I’m loving it!
To find it you need to go to your ‘purchased music’ section on the iTunes store and click download.
This link will take you straight to your ‘purchased music’ in iTunes. Otherwise, here’s how to get there manually.
This little beauty is called an airport express. You can buy it from Apple for $99 (USA) or $119 (Australia). It plugs into your home ethernet network (or straight into your ADSL modem) via that little Ethernet connection on the left next to the power cord. Then it shares your internet connection with all your iOS devices via wi-fi. But it has a few tricks up it’s sleeve. Continue reading ⟩
Importing songs into iTunes is easy – you just INSERT the CD, SELECT it in iTunes, and press the ‘Import’ button!
But… the default setting on iTunes is not the best setting to use when importing songs. It’s far better to use the ‘Apple Lossless’ setting which will keep your music at CD quality. If you must compress the music (e.g. you want to fit it on your iPod or a laptop) then use the bit rate of 320kbps rather than the default 128kbps of iTunes.
This article describes how to import songs into iTunes with the better quality bit rate.
Continue reading ⟩
Introducing LAME!
Lame is an mp3 encoder that is open source, which means rather than being developed commercially, it was developed by unpaid programmers sharing together. It was originally not as good as the commercial mp3 encoders. Slowly as many people worked on LAME it actually overtook the original mp3 encoder. Some people now claim it is the best mp3 encoder available. They have a pretty lame logo (see above) probably because they are unpaid programmers not graphic artists. Continue reading ⟩
In this article I talked about the best import settings for iTunes. Since then with the increase in Hard Disk space I now think it’s best to import all your songs using the apple lossless encoder. This still compresses the files by about 1/3 but there is no loss of audio quality at all. With AAC and MP3 files, not matter how high you set the quality, there is ALWAYS some loss of quality. Apple Lossless audio is exactly the same quality as what’s on your CD. Here’s how to import into iTunes using the Apple lossless encoder.
Continue reading ⟩
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