How to make your iPod a great study tool!

Students listen up! Here is another use for your iPod and possibly a great way to get your parents to upgrade you to a new iPod with more capacity. My significant other is taking a graduate level university course and records all the lectures due to a hearing impairment. In this case I'll walk you through the quick and easy steps to record your lectures and transfer them to your iPod for on-the-go studying.

In our case we purchase the model that preceded the Panasonic RR-US500 which provides a number of recording options (dictation mode, meeting mode) to date the recordings have been done in dictation mode which seems to somewhat cut down on the ambient noise levels.

Step 1. Go to class and record the lecture (I know this can be the toughest part sometimes :-) )

Step 2. Connect to your Mac or PC and download the lecture. Once the lecture is completed bring home your voice recorder and hook it up via the USB cable that came with the recorder and download it. Most of the voice recorders seem to offer a proprietary software package (unfortunately not Mac compatible) for downloading the recordings in this case they come in a format known as .VM1.
Step 3. Convert lecture file to MP3. Once you've captured the file you should convert the file to WAVE (.wav) format to enable you to transfer the file for use outside the voice editing software (depending on your recorder you may be able to consolidate the number of file conversions - check the web before you buy). The next step is to convert the .wav file to .MP3 to compress the size of the file - for this purpose I use Switch on the Mac. Switch is a great easy to use piece of software. If you want to know why I move the files across platforms in our case its because my Mac is far more powerful and speeds up the conversion process.

Step 4. Import the MP3 file into iTunes. Now that you have an MP3 file its time to import it into iTunes. Launch iTunes and from the File menu and select Import navigate to your file and you're in business.

For ease in terms of finding your lectures in the event that you have a large music library do the following label the file the name of the course and the date of the lecture. For example, Economics201_Oct01.mp3

In iTunes setup a Smart Playlist from the File menu and have it filter on file name (e.g., Economics*) and presto you have a Smart Playlist containing all your lectures for your specific course. This will make it much easier to quickly find your lectures and listen to them on your iPod.

Step 5. Sync your iPod. That's it - now sit back and enjoy the latest lecture as you prepare for your exam.

By the way if you're lucky your university or college may be posting the lectures to iTunesU and you won't have to manage the above process.

Note - in our case my SO seeks out permission of each professor prior to recording the course and has supporting documentation from the University's special needs department. People can be touchy about someone recording the content of their lectures with concerns about reuse - always best to check first then end up with problems. To date there have been no issues and since the recordings aren't being redistributed its not an issue.