Roxio Boom Box - Essential Software for your iPod (Mac)

The Boom Box from Roxio, a must-have for the iPod , is the perfect blend of five best-of-class Mac software applications, which will make your iPod sing. The Boom Box contains five ?best-of-class? Macintosh software applications to help you personalize and maximize your iPod experience. Boom Box collection includes MusicMagic Mixer, which helps you build better playlists than iTunes alone. Simply pick a "seed" song, and the utility assesses its mood (by analyzing waveforms) and picks songs in your collection that match it. CD SpinDoctor converts your analog music sources (LPs, cassettes, what have you) into MP3, AAC, or Apple Lossless digital files. The utility includes filters to reduce noise and improve sound fidelity, and can automatically split tracks into individual files. Automatically generate perfect playlists. Turn any text from e-books, Web pages, and news feeds into an audio file and send to iTunes with one click. Requirements - Macintosh computer / iPod (any model) / Stereo cable (for converting audio with CD Spin Doctor) / Mac OS X v10.3.9 or later
Customer Review: Great bunch of apps at the right price
I was pretty excited as soon as I heard about this product and got it right away.

Audio Hijack - works perfectly as advertised. I've been using this to record music from VH1.com to fill my library and I figured out also how to use it to record the soundtrack from music DVDs and from iTunes. It's brain dead easy to use and the quality is good.

MusicMixer - after a pretty lengthy amount of time it had scanned my library. I have about 5000 songs and it took over 4 days. But it was worth the wait - it definitely makes some smart choices and groups songs that sound good together.

Spin Doctor - I haven't tried this one yet - but my father has a bunch of stuff he's hounding me to try it out with. Seems like a good addition.

iPodder - I like this one. Fits really well with iTunes and there's a ton of interesting stuff to fill my commute time now.

Speech software - I don't really have a need for this one and the voices are a bit corny - although there's a coupon on the disc for better voices from another company.

All in all I'm happy with this purchase. Unlike the previous reviewer who seems to have a personal vendetta against the music industry I'll focus on this product. Roxio certainly does not hide that these are products that have been available for a while from other developers - what Roxio brings together is 5 great apps for the right price. The Mixer is $30 by itself. AudioHijack is $16. iPodder is $24. Speech is $16. None of them are free - contrary to what the previous reviewer says. If you bought them all separetly you'd spend alot more - so even if you only use a few of the apps you're coming out ahead.

Ignore the crazies and focus on the software and you won't be disappointed. It really does make your iPod better.
Customer Review: 2.5 stars for 2 1/2 good apps. Cool, but Music Magic Mixer is disabled.
When I heard that Roxio was making this software suite, I was thrilled and the reviews were great. If you actually buy your music from iTunes, though, those songs won't show up in the mix. Music Magic Mixer won't read them because they're in proprietary formats. This app would be much cooler if Apple hadn't caved in to the music industry. If you find a workaround for the copy protection, you're set for a great app that rediscovers your music collection for you. But that's illegal.

Since Podcasts are built into iTunes now, iPodder X is basically pointless, and the speech app isn't any better than TextEdit's speech function. But CD Spin Doctor is a cool app, and Audio Hijack has its obvious uses. I've been transferring music from a minidisc collection I naively built a few years ago to my Mac and Spin Doctor works great. If you only want one of these apps, though, you can just pick them up from one of the original developers for 25 bucks or so, but that's not much of a savings, so you might as well buy this. In fact, you'll likely discover a use for the apps other than the one or two you want. Click Here For More Info