Product Reviews

Roxio's The Boom Box is a suite of five applications designed to work with your iPod and iTunes. None of the applications are new, but packaging them together in a shrink-wrapped box will expose them to a much wider audience.

The five applications are CD Spin Doctor, Audio Hijack, iPodderX, MusicMagic Mixer and iSpeakIt. CD Spin Doctor will be familiar to anyone who has a copy of Roxio's Toast Titanium, as it has been bundled with Toast for several versions. Essentially, it allows you to import audio files from analogue sources such as a record deck and edit the waveforms to eliminate unwanted noise such as crackles, hissing and pops.

Audio Hijack is one of our favourite audio applications; indeed, the Pro version won a MacUser Award last year. It allows you to 'hijack' the audio from any application and record it in its own audio file. Its most interesting application is in hijacking the Real Player streams from Internet radio broadcasts and recording them to disk. You can set a timer to record a programme and Audio Hijack will open the specified URL, hijack and record the feed, and then stop once the recording is finished. The resultant MP3 file can

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then be added to your iTunes library and synchronised with your iPod.

iPodderX makes it easy to subscribe to and download podcasts. It works very much like an RSS reader for audio, and comes complete with a comprehensive directory of podcasts. By default, it's set to copy downloaded podcasts to your iTunes library, with their genre set to Podcast. By setting up a Smart Playlist with the genre Podcast, you can keep track of everything you download.

Next up is MusicMagic Mixer, which can best be described as iTunes' Party Shuffle with a brain. It creates mixes based on the 'acoustic fingerprints' of the tracks in your library. You select a song or a group of songs and MusicMagic Mixer then finds other songs in your library with similar fingerprints and creates a playlist with them The result is a mix of tracks that all evoke the same mood. It works remarkably well and is a great way of creating mood-based playlists quickly.

Finally, iSpeakIt creates spoken-word audio files from documents. It supports a range of file types including Word, AppleWorks, HTML and RSS feeds, but sadly not PDF. You can set it to load web pages or RSS feeds at launch, and it contains a link to the Project Gutenberg directory of non-copyrighted ebooks. You can correct its text-to-speech conversion when it has trouble, split audio tracks into multiple files, bookmark audio and send files to your iTunes library.

The Boom Box is a good collection of useful and fun tools. Our only complaint is that the five applications are separate: we'd have liked a single interface from which we could launch each application. iPodderX may be rendered redundant by iTunes 4.9 when it appears, but Audio Hijack and MusicMagic Mixer in particular make it worth the money.