back to our regular geek'o'rama: Paul Mison noticed that iTunes 4.7 is advertising a _dacp._tcp service. It looks like they are preparing to support a remote control type thing. Ed Despard is guessing it's a "digital audio control protocol.". (This is from the daap-dev mailinglist, which doesn't have a proper archive -- daap-dev-subscribe at develooper.com to subscribe)
In related completely inconsequential news I've had great success using the rating feature in iTunes and with the iPod mini. With auto-syncing it transfers the ratings, last played and play counts between the powermac and the ipod. I've then made a bunch of smart lists like "25 random 4 or 5 star rated songs that I haven't listened to for a month" to rotate some of the 4GB space I have on the mini. It's awesome. I only wish I could still add stuff to the iPod from the powerbook, but I can't as that'll disable the autosync to the powermac. It's because they don't allow copying from the iPod to keep the record companies happy. So stupid. (Or maybe not stupid; I appreciate the fact that my AAPL stock has done quite well the last year or so).
From the things that feels like they matter department: Joshua Marshall recommends this column The Red Zone in the new york times.
I made a playlist of "Regular Music" that's anything that is not genre "musical" or "classical" or "audiobook" or a few others. Having gotten about six or seven thousand songs rated, I then made "good stuff" which is "Regular Music" and "at least four stars" and then "Not Heard Lately" which is "good stuff" limited to 16 hours, chosen by least recently heard. All I do most days is listen to that. Then, the next day (after I've synced) it's all new good music. At the gym I listen to "The Queue" which is "regular music" with "rating of 0" and rate things. The iPod is Just Great.
You can copy to the iPod from multiple computers. You just can't do it with syncing enabled because if you synced from one computer, while manually managed from another computer, the syncing algorithm wouldn't know what to do with the songs you added from the other computer. It's not a digital rights issue, just a technological one.
BTW, this AppleScript lets you copy songs from your iPod to your computer from within iTunes. Cheers :)
Here is a program for Windows/Zaurus (or any PDA with Personal Java 1.2) that allows you to use your PDA as a remote control for iTunes.
http://itremote.sourceforge.net/