When rumors began surfacing of Apple getting ready to release an iTunes phone I was pretty excited because it would mean one less device I’d have to carry but the song limitation (among other factors) kept me from picking the ROKR up. Fortunately, you no longer need to get a ROKR in order to carry your music collection on your phone thanks to a new application called the Mass Storage Synchronizer.

Hot on the trail of my post on universities who make lectures available via podcasts, it seems that iPREPpress and SparkNotes have teamed up to make study guides available as podcasts. I’m sure many of you who have attended private high schools or universities have at some point used SparkNotes to get ahead on a course, so I think this is a great idea. All the content usually available on the print guides will be available on the podcasts as well, including book and plot summaries, list of characters, and more. Each guide will sell for USD4.95 and can be downloaded directly from iPREPpress. Currently available titles including study guides for literature classics like Hamlet, The Great Gatsby, Catcher in the Rye, and The Odyssey among others. My question is, why are all these great productivity tools coming out AFTER I graduate college!?

One prettty nice feature of iTunes is the ability to share your music library with other people by setting up a share name and giving it a password. This is especially useful in college campuses or around the office so you don’t have to burn CDs for everyone (not that you would anyways since it’s legally questionable, right?). It’s also a good way to have a neverending supply of music for your next party. The one thing that iTunes doesn’t allow is the ability to download the shares to another computer (for obvious reasons), but there is a pretty neat application called myTunes which lets you do it easily.

Those of you who do weekly (or sparse for us lately) podcasts, know how much of a toll audio or video content can take on your bandwidth for your site. Fortunately, there is now a tool which will automatically check your RSS feeds and create a torrent for any media content you add to your site. All you have to do then, is give your readers the new link and they can download a torrent of the content, saving you precious bandwidth and probably money.

I like listening to podcasts because they allow me to catch up on tech news while being productive doing other things like working out, or updating TipMonkies. While more and more sites are starting to do podcasts, not everyone does. Fortunately, there are applications which will convert an RSS feed into audio for you and then let you sync that to your portable MP3 player. One such application is Odiogo.

Jake Ludington’s Medialab has a very nice article on creating Windows Media enhanced podcasts in WMA format (right, they won’t play on your iPod) which is great for all the people out there who have MP3 players other than an Apple device but still want to get some of the cool features available in enhanced podcasts like links, images, etc. It seems a little more complicated to me than doing an AAC enhanced podcast, but if you’re a podcaster looking to get your shows out to more people, this is a good way to offer an alternative. This is all done by creating “a script enhanced WMA file, These WMA files with embedded scripts play just like a normal WMA anywhere scripting isn’t supported.” The one catch is that when playing the podcast in Windows Media Player, scripting support must be enabled.

I’ve mentioned a few applications before which let you download album art for your music collection if you use iTunes. I love album art, so these kind of applications are a must for me. Today, I came upon a really cool widget for Konfabulator (free, Windows and Mac) called iTunes Companion which “searches for album cover art for your current iTunes track at Amazon.com and downloads it to your hard drive. The image is only downloaded once. The next time you play that track it finds the image on your hard drive, It searches for artwork in your iTunes Library before going to Amazon.com.” If an image isn’t found, then you can always drag and drop your own album art onto the widget. iTunes Companion also shows artist, album, and track names.