Friday May 18, 2012
While playing the songs in your Windows Media Player (WMP) library, do some of them sound way louder than others? Almost all digital music libraries can suffer loudness variations between songs -- especially if you have sourced your music from different places like: multiple online download services, audio CDs, analog sources, etc.
These differences can be so large sometimes that you'll have no option but to play around with the volume controls on your computer or portable device; this obviously isn't the ideal way to relax and enjoy your digital music collection. To solve this problem, you can use WMP 12's audio enhancement feature called, Volume Leveling. It's similar to Sound Check in iTunes and is a non-destructive way of ensuring that all your songs play at the same volume.
Volume Leveling in WMP isn't as smart as how iTunes normalizes audio files, but if you've got big variations in your music library that you just can't ignore, then this facility is worth using in order to enhance your listening pleasure when playing custom playlists, etc.
For more information, our Windows Media Player tutorial on Volume Leveling goes into a lot more detail on this useful feature and how to fully use it.
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Tuesday May 15, 2012
Most car stereos and home Hi-Fi systems have modern facilities for playing digital music in some way. You may find that you've got auxiliary inputs such as phono sockets, a stereo mini-jack (3.5mm) line-in, or more cutting edge features like:
- A USB port -- for storage devices that contain your MP3s like flash drives and hard drives.
- A card reader -- for memory cards such as SD and MicroSD.
- Bluetooth.
At the very least, your car stereo will need at least a CD player to be in with a chance to play digital audio -- preferably one that is also
MP3 CD compatible so you can burn your own custom digital music
playlists. However, what if you've only got an old 'tape only' system and need the ability to play your digital music library?
FM transmitters are a good option, but an alternative is to use a cassette adapter. This simple and inexpensive audio accessory fits into your cassette player's mechanism -- just like a real tape! It works by converting the audio signal from your portable (via the 3.5mm headphone jack) into a magnetic signal that the cassette player's heads can read -- the sound is then amplified and relayed to the stereo system's speakers.
If you're still happy with your rusty trusty cassette-based stereo (includes boomboxes of course), you can breathe new life into it by using a cassette adapter. This can be a lot more preferable than the cost of upgrading to a modern stereo if you just want to listen to digital music on a portable -- i.e. iPods, iPhones, MP3 players, PMPs, CD players, Mini Disc players, etc. Considering most cassette adapters can be purchased for less than $20, it also makes them a viable alternative to FM transmitters.
For more information, read our Cassette Adapter Toplist that showcases some of the best.
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Friday May 11, 2012
The great advantage of listening to audiobooks in iTunes (and on your iPod, iPhone, and iPad), is that the playback position is remembered if you stop listening before reaching the end of the recording. This is a very convenient feature which saves you the trouble of having to remember where you got to next time you listen. Unfortunately, this bookmarking feature isn't available for songs by default.
But, why on earth would you want iTunes to treat a song like it was an audiobook?
Most songs only last a few minutes, but what if you have very long songs like remixes, mash-ups, or audio recordings? Rather than using more destructive methods like splitting your audio files up into smaller parts, or converting to a different format, why not just fool iTunes instead?
You can do this by changing the Media Kind option in iTunes -- that's if you know where to look. This under-the-hood feature enables you to change the way iTunes handles songs by instructing it to treat them as though they are audiobooks. In fact, when you change a song to this media type, iTunes automatically puts it into the Books folder! This technique is also useful if you've ripped audiobooks from CD and they have ended up in the Music section of iTunes instead of the Books category.
To see how easy it is to fool iTunes and make any song bookmarkable, read our guide on How to Make iTunes Songs Act Like Audiobooks.
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Wednesday May 9, 2012
ebooks are a great invention that has made it possible to carry around hundreds of books and other types of publications in electronic form. The problem is, you don't always have the luxury (or time) to read them in every situation. Driving a car is a prime example of this -- you can't (for obvious reasons) use your ebook reading device. However, rather than waiting for the opportune moment to use your eyes, why not use your ears instead? On a long commute, this could add up to a lot of study time, or even quite a few novels!
You can of course purchase and download audiobooks from the Internet, but they may not be exactly what you've got in text form. In this case, using a text to speech conversion program is the ideal tool. This type of application uses voice synthesis to convert text into speech. The quality of the generated voice will never to be as good as a real person's, but with a bit of tweaking and the right voice, good results can be obtained. Once you have turned your text-only files into digital audio versions, you'll be able to play them on your MP3 player, PMP, smartphone, or even burn to audio CD / MP3 CD.
To find out more on the advanatages of creating audiobooks from ebooks and a list of free programs you can use, why not read our Free Text to Speech Software guide that lists some of the best.
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