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Provides: Expanded iPod capabilities
Developer: Roxio
Requirements: Mac OS X v10.3.9
Retail Price: $49.95

OK, you have your iPod, you've downloaded 167 songs from iTunes, you've brought over every CD you own into your iTunes and have added those songs to your iPod, and you are still not satisfied. What do you do? Well, if you have The Boom Box, you can bring in your phonograph albums, record stuff off the net, bring in podcasts, listen to self-created audio books, and enjoy new shuffle combinations you might not else wise have thought to mix.

While The Boom Box (TBB) is probably not the best descriptive name that Roxio could have selected, what TBB is is actually five separate programs bundled together and sold as a collection. One payment, one serial number, and you've got five different ways to enhance your iPod experience.

To install The Boom Box, you drag the icon shown above to your Application folder, enter in your serial number and you are done. (Here's a "gotcha:" The product is called "The Boom Box," not "Boom Box." So, if you start looking for your new software in the "B" section of your Application folder, you will find nothing. Look in the "T" section, there it is. I mention this only because it had me going there for a few minutes.)

Once inside The Boom Box folder, you see the new applications as shown below. The products include iPodderX (normally $24.95), Audio Hijack (normally $16), iSpeak It (normally $14.95), MusicMagic (normally $29.95), and CD Spin Doctor (normally bundled with Toast, currently $79.95 on Roxio's web site).

Here is more detail on each product:

iPodderX

There is a gamble that every company has on their products. The gamble is that their product will be first out, best and most desired version of the product. These companies are also betting that someone much bigger than they are will not get in the customers way with an equivalent product.

Alas, about two weeks after Roxio came out with The Boom Box, Apple released iTunes 4.9 that comes with its own PodCast downloading capabilities. I had already done much of the work on this review when I updated my own copy of iTunes. At this point I'm not ready to do a feature-by-feature comparison of these two products; suffice it to say if you get The Boom Box, you will receive iPodderX as part of the bundle. And, if you download iTunes 4.9, you will have their PodCast downloaded as well. My initial observations are that there are some good and bad for both products; your milage may vary. If you get them both, play with them both. Enjoy. Meanwhile below is what I wrote before receiving iTunes 4.9.]

Perhaps you've heard of Podcasts, maybe not. These are various radio-like shows that are never broadcast over any airwaves (or at least originally they were not). Rather, they sit on the web waiting to be downloaded into your computer and then sucked into your iPod so you can listen at your convenience. These started out by individuals recording movie reviews, political viewpoints, etc. More recently, some radio stations are saving their broadcasts in an MP3 format for Podcasts. The catch is, how do you know when a new PodCast is available? On weekly shows that's easy; once a week. But how about the irregular Podcasts where there might be one this week, one the next week, and then nothing for several weeks. That's where programs like iPodderX come in. What you do is log into the various Podcasts you want to monitor. Then, whenever a new PodCast shows up in one of the assigned URLs, iPodderX downloads the material to wherever you've told it to save the file. Then, you move it into your iPod and you are off to the gym to listen to a PodCast instead of music.

When you first open iPodderX, you are presented with a collection of Top Picks of Podcasts in the Directory. I'm not sure who picks these top picks, but there are 12 of them.

But, if you mouse-down on the drop-down menu, there are an incredible quantity of preselected PodCast selections for you to choose from as shown below in the screen shot of only part of a list.

Within each of these selections can be several to many, many individual Podcasts to which you can subscribe.

If you learn of a new Podcast source not listed, you can manually add it at any time by clicking on the icon just below the "close window" red dot in the main iPodderX window shown above the PodCast selections.

Because it's likely there will be past items you've already downloaded, as seen below, you have choice sets as to what/which ones to download. Also note you can make the file "Bookmarkable," meaning that if you stop a selection before you've finished hearing the whole piece, when you return to that item you can continue from where you last stopped listening.

I'm not a big Podcast listener, but there are some shows I do like listening to. iPodderX provides a good range of features and seems to (mostly) work fine. I mention this because there have been several times where the program would lock up on me or crash. If you go to the iPodderX forums, you will find that the recent version (v3) has been having a number of problems. I was using version 3.0.1 for this review, and some of the problems seem to have been resolved, but iPodderX is still not without issues. The good news is that with The Boom Box, you have a fully licensed version that, as updates of any of the component programs are presented, you can download and install them with no problems.

Audio Hijack

I'm one of those people who is known to say things like "I heard on NPR this morning...," or "on such-and-such show (heard on an NPR station) they said that..." but my problem is that I can't always listen to a particular NPR show when I want to listen. Also, when I'm "listening" to Wait Wait Don't Tell Me, I want to listen. That is, I can't write reviews and listen to shows that require listening at the same time. And sadly, there are no Podcasts of Wait Wait...

That's where a program like Audio Hijack comes into play. At a bare minimum, you can go to a website that archives programs you like to hear, click on the specific program you wish to record and then, in Audio Hijack, you, well, hijack it. That is, as the program is played, it's being recorded onto your hard drive. There are several freeware applications that do this, but AH has several advantages. Foremost, you can select which application for AH to listen to. Thus, if your show is being played by Real Solution's RealPlayer, you can tell AH to listen only to RealPlayer sounds and all other applications are ignored. Thus, system beeps, iTunes, whatever can be concurrently going on at the same time and they are not recorded. But wait you say, wouldn't you be listening to the shows while they are being recorded? No, because there is a "Mute" button canceling out the noise from that program. Thus, you can continue to listen to your system sounds, iTunes and whatever while your show is being recorded for later listening on your iPod.

Below, you see the basic Audio Hijack screen with its Inspector. Here's how I find it easiest to work: Provided on the main screen are a collection of possible programs that you might want to record. You can add more at any time as well as select any application that plays sound.

Since Wait Wait... is played using RealPlayer, I select that and duplicate the session. Then, I double-click the item which brings up the Inspector (alternatively, you can click once on the duplicate to make it active and then click on the blue "i" button).

In the Inspector, you can give the session an individual name. I usually supply the name of the program and the date it was aired.

At that point, I can close the inspector, click the "Hijack" button, click the "Record" button, and then start downloading the show. It will start as soon as it's downloaded and has buffered enough to start playing. Since AH will only record RealPlayer sounds, it will sit around and wait patiently until a RealPlayer program sound source starts. After I've heard the sound start, I click on the "Mute" button so I can listen to the show at my convenience, start up some iTunes songs, and get back to work.

The obvious negative here is that you do have to record the songs in real time. But here's another benefit with AH; when the show's over, the recording pauses. That is, if you start recording and get distracted, you will not be recording 10 hours of dead air.

When the recording is done, you re-click the "Record" button to stop the recording. The Hijack button turned into a "Release" button once you started recording, and now you much click the "Release" button so you can stop this RealPlayer session. It's done. Now, in your Music folder is the Audio Hijack folder that contains the show you just recorded.

Unfortunately, the recording is done in aiff format. So get ready for big, really big files. For example, a 47 minute, 46 second recording of Wait Wait was 482.2MB. Once this was brought into iTunes and then converted to Apple's AAC format, it came in at a more svelte 44.2MB. The length of time required to make a conversion such as this is entirely dependent upon the speed of your processor. Any file this big is going to take a few minutes at best.

One of the other limitations of Audio Hijack's recording aiff format is that you need to have files in either AAC or ALAC formats so that the file is "Bookmarkable." That is, if you are playing a one hour show and after 32 minutes get interrupted and can't return for a day. When it's Bookmarkable, you can click on the same file and continue to listen to it from where you last left off. (Don't let your batteries run down to full dead or you will lose your bookmarks.)

If you have Audio Hijack Pro, the fancier version of Audio Hijack, you can record directly into a variety of formats, including AAC or ALAC. Owners of AH, via The Boom Box, can upgrade for $16. While there's nothing wrong with Audio Hijack, the range of extra features with the Pro version might make some want to upgrade. To see the full range of differences, look at the comparison chart. On a side note, I must comment on how efficient Rogue Amoeba (the company behind Audio Hijack) is; they promise to get back to any e-mail question within 24 hours, and they do, seven days a week. They are very good.

CD Spin Doctor

For those like myself, you probably have dozens, hundreds, or maybe thousands of records. If you are in the latter camp, I do hope your turntable is still working. But also, if you are like myself, you (a) probably have a number of records that no company will ever turn them into CDs, and/or (b) are too cheap to purchase the CD of an album you already own.

Either way, I have to admit the advantage of the CD, and MP3 players over the turntable. [Coincidentally, today, my 16-year-old son asked me if there ever was a turntable for playing in cars. (The answer is "no.")] If you want to play your albums in your car now, at least you can turn your albums into what can be played on your CD player or iPod. To facilitate this, there is the CD Spin Doctor. While you can record your records played into your computer with Audio Hijack, to eliminate the hissing and popping noises, you need Spin Doctor.

I did a tutorial on CD Spin Doctor and Toast for Applelinks called 12 to 12 in 12. To save space, I'm just going to refer readers to that article. The version of Spin Doctor bundled with with The Boom Box is just a tad newer than was supplied with Toast and has no new features. (A new version of both would be timely.)

Suffice it to say, while CD Spin Doctor is not the fanciest, feature-laden product to help you convert your albums to CDs, it will more than suffice for the average user.

I Speak It

Audio books have been around for years. My mother used to get audio books after she went blind from a stroke. As she had previously been an avid reader, this was an absolutely wonderful thing to her (although in her day, audio books were very flexible phonograph records that played at very very slow speeds on special phonograph players). Audio books are great if you can't physically read or do not have the time to sit with a book in your hands. The big limitation is that to create an audio book, someone has to sit down and read the book into a microphone. There are tremendous quantities of books available at such sites as audible.com and audiobooks.com.

The catch is that audio books are more likely to be made for current books and not for books that have been out for several years, let alone books that have been out for over a hundred years. Now for those of you who like books, some of you may have heard of a site called Project Gutenberg. This site contains perhaps 1000s of books (I've never counted and I don't see how it's possible to count them) that have gone beyond copyright and now can be disseminated for free. These include books such as those from Mark Twain, Dickens, Jules Verne, etc. They range from The Art of War (Sun Zi) to War of the Worlds (Wells) to English Satires (various authors). They are all in text format. The catch is, although you can, not too many people want to use their iPods as text readers.

But wait, why not have your Mac read the book to you? Really.

If you go to your System Preferences and go to the System group, one of the options is "Speech." Click on that and select the second tab "Default Voice." From here you have a wide variety of "voices" from which to choose. While some are cute, but silly (e.g., "cellos," "pipe organ," and "hysterical" come to mind), others are clearly functional. Voices such as Bruce, Fred, Ralph (if sped up), Agnes, or Victoria are not all that bad. After you have listened to them for some time, and you've become more comfortable listening to the voices, it is very easy to understand them.

In the conversion process, you can transfer the text directly into iTunes in AAC format that is "Bookmarkable," or, if you stop at any point, you can start the book from where you last listened. If you want to to place the book on CDs, you can also save it into aiff format. You can also split the book into "chapters" by telling I Speak It to break every "x" number of paragraphs into a new track.

Here's where things can become amusing: I transferred Two Years Before the Mast into an audio book using the default every 10 paragraphs become a track. When I looked at the results, I was wondering why one of the tracks was only 34 seconds long. I double-clicked on this chapter and listened to "Bar bar bar slash slash bar bar ..."

As this was an early chapter in the book, I looked at the text file and scrolled down. I soon discovered what the problem was. If you are not familiar with the book, Two Years Before the Mast is an autobiographical account of a Harvard student who, after recovering from measles, decided to take a two year journey around Cape Horn to deliver cargo to California in the years 1834-1836. It is one of the best accounts of life under sail available. In the preface, there is a certain amount of description of nautical terms so the reader is better prepared for reading the book. In the original book, there are some photos of a sailing ship, but in the text book, such photos are not possible. But there always is ascii-text art. Sure enough, whoever converted this book for the Gutenberg Project created ascii-art for ships. See an example below:

I chose to delete these images and redo the transfer of the book. A bit of extra work, but I really didn't want to hear "bar bar slash slash bar..."—it gets old very quickly.

There are some inherent challenges when converting text into a spoken document that are frustrating. These are all based on the problem that a computer doesn't care a whit or understand a whit about what it's doing and/or why. For example, when one is reading and finishes a chapter. There will be a pause to sort of regroup, collect oneself, and prepare for what's coming before starting to read the next chapter. When iSpeakIt is working through your text, it will not add any pause between chapters or the like. Thus, you do need to consciously be aware of what you are listening to and follow a bit more closely than you might otherwise expect to. I would not call it extra hard, but it is different than listening to a person reading.

Now there are some who will listen to the voices that Apple provides and simply scoff at the thought of listening to those voices for any length of time. There are other options: on The Boom Box CD is a folder of "Extras." One of these is a coupon for 50% off of one of the eighteen voices available from Cepstral, a creator of Text-to-Speech Voice Software. I talked to Cepstral and got a copy of both David and Diane to review. While these are still "computer voices," there is a world of differences between the two. You can find the review of these voices here. If you are serious about using I Speak It, and if you are serious about not being able to cope with Fred, you'd be penny wise, pound foolish to not check into the better voices from Cepstral.

MusicMagic Mixer

This last program brings us back to why many of us got iPods: the music. Besides providing a challenge to say (as "she sells sea shells by the sea shore") MusicMagic Mixer (MMM) brings sound analysis by computer to being a DJ.

When you first open MMM, nothing can be done until MMM has had a chance to analyze your music. You can direct it to a folder on your computer or you can tell it to analyze the music in your iTunes. The status window for the analyzing process is seen below. What all is taking place during this process, I'm not fully sure, but it does take a long time for the process to be completed. Fortunately, the process can easily be done in the background to whatever else you are doing on your computer, but when in the background, the process, which is slow to begin with, becomes slower. They suggest that you let it run overnight, which is not a bad idea. Be sure you set your computer to not fall asleep, or the process will stop until you awaken your computer.

The above window shows one of the problems with MusicMagic—you can't tell MMM which songs or types to ignore. Thus, MusicMagic takes as much time as it needs to analyze a Wait Wait Don't Tell Me... show that I certainly do not want to listen to as music.

Once the process is complete, the main MusicMagic window displays across the top three windows the types of songs it has found from your iTunes. I am assuming that the genre presented is taken straight from iTunes.

In the screen shot above, you can see (at least) two problems with MusicMagic: First off, I have no idea why Madeleine Peyroux's "Dreamland" is listed twice in "Albums." Especially important here is that I do have all three of her albums, but "Got You On My Mind" is not shown.

In the bottom window (text in green) is what happens when you click on the "New Mix" button. I have my preferences set to the default 12 songs, and what MusicMagic does is look at all my songs with a similar music structure and provides comparable songs of all the songs in my iTunes. If you click on the "Shuffle" button, the songs presented are mixed to a new order.

If you look at the "Artist" column in the selected songs (green text) (above), you might notice that there are two Madeleine Peyroux songs back to back and three in total for the mix. Sadly, despite the fact I have all three albums, only one "Dreamland" is represented in this mix. I found no preference that tells MusicMagic to not have back-to-back songs by the same artist if at all possible.

Anyhow, once you have your new "mix," you click the "Send to iTunes" button, and that playlist now appears as a new Playlist with the default name "MusicMagix Mixer Playlist." As stated, the default number of songs is 12; this can be changed in the Preferences. (Instead of Tracks, you can also select the number of minutes (handy for a set time of running or bicycling) or Megabytes (handy if you are burning CDs). See the second image below for the Preference screen shot of this.) You can create as many new playlists as you want (you could add numbers to them to make more and more new ones) and send them off to iTunes. Then iTunes can send them off to your iPod (or whatever) for your future use.

If you click on the "Filters & Lists" button shown above, a side drawer pops out showing the drives you have access to and also provides the ability to create filters to help focus your selections. A screen shot of the Filter window is shown below with a display of the two main dropdown menus.

The curious thing in this window is the field where you enter the limiting issue for each of the filter ranges. Sadly, there's not much to go on, and the provided Help file doesn't help much either.

The ultimate control of what's selected in MusicMagic is in the Preferences. Unfortunately, for any "playing around" in MMM, you need to constantly go to the Preferences. For as often as I'm finding I'm going to the Preferences, they should be located in a drawer from the main window. Their access just isn't convenient. The main tool for variation of songs is shown below: the "Mix." As you slide the two sliders to the left or right, you are creating a more or less restrictive mix. Despite that, in the positions below, I had clicked on Blues in the Genre and ended up with a mix of Blues and Folk. So far so good. But it also combined "Campion Jack Dupree" with "The Clancy Brothers." Sorry, but any DJ that did that should be shot, drawn and quartered.

Any limitation on song selection is mostly dependent upon how many songs you have in your library. As you make your selections more and more restrictive, you are likely to get warnings that you do not have enough material to satisfy the number of tracks, minutes, or megabytes, and you'll end up with what MMM could provide, not necessarily the number you would have liked (that is, instead of 12 tracks, you might end up with four or eight tracks).

That mix was fixed by selecting the checkbox in the lower left: "Restrict mix to selected genres." That means if you select Blues for the Genre, you will only hear Blues.

Despite the varied complications and limitations of MusicMagic, I do like the principle/concept. I've heard mixes using MMM that I'd never have mixed elsewise, but despite that, there are some controls I really would appreciate. For example, I'd love to be able to say either: "ignore all spoken word selections," or (even better) ignore the following selections. The reason why this appeals to me is that I have a number of Operas in iTunes and I do not want to hear mixes of "La Traviata" and "Tony Bennet." In reality, it's relatively easy to not have them mixed; you simply do not select "Classical" when selecting music to mix. However, there is no reason for MMM to waste time analyzing text selections and Opera selections if I'm never ever going to mix them.

I'd also like to be able to limit how many repetitions of the same artist in a row could be played in a row...like none. I'd also like to have more control as to how things are presented as demonstrated earlier where one album was presented twice, but the album that should have been presented was ignored. I found no mechanism to correct or prevent this.

Of all the applications in this bundle, I was expecting the most promise from this one, yet had the biggest disappointment with MusicMagic Mixer. It kinda/sorta does what it's supposed to do, but I'd be hard pressed to prove that it's doing anything different from what the Shuffle button in iTunes is already doing.

In short, any time there is a bundle such as this, the question that must be asked is does the bundle provide enough as a whole to make it worth the purchase as opposed to purchasing just the items you really want. That question must be answered by you. Each of these products are good-to-great on their own. If you need/want any and/or all depends on your listening habits and desires. Any number of purchasing combinations of the various items will make this a cost effective bundle. And best of all, it will provide new ways to enjoy your iPod.

___________ Gary Coyne has been a scientific glassblower for over 30 years. He's been using Macs since 1985 (his first was a fat Mac) and has been writing reviews of Mac software and hardware since 1995.