Every few days apple releases a new lineup of iPods that are greater than the last. First they were simple MP3 players, and then they became picture viewing devices, now you can watch movies, and today apple announced that the new iPods will cure cancer and provide girlfriends for losers everywhere.

When people brag to me about how awesome their new umteen billion gigabyte iPod is, I just have to laugh. “Ha!” I exclaim and pull out my phone. You see, in reality my phone is an MP3 player with virtually unlimited capacity. What do you want to hear? Chances are I can listen to it on my phone, and you won’t be able to find it on your iPod.

Read on to find out how it’s done…

HARDWARE

The first thing you need for your unlimited size MP3 player is, of course, a phone. The phone part of it is necessary because we’re not using a local storage medium like a hard drive or flash disk. We are gonna hook the sucker up directly to the Internet. Any phone will do so long as you can browse webpages and stream music.
In my setup I use a Palm Treo 650, but really any phone capable of streaming music from the Internet will do. Okay, I said stream - but don’t get scared - you will have full control over your playlist, choosing artists, songs, etc.
My Treo has a 2.5mm headphone out. Of course, you will want to use normal 3.5mm headphones or hook it up to your car. The thing you don’t want to do is go to radio shack and buy an adapter. This is the greatest piece of advice in this whole article. The adapter suck and put undue stress on your headphone jack, rendering it useless a little down the road. Find a nice elbow connection adapter like the ones available at the Treo Central store or elsewhere (I only know they have ‘em because that’s where I got mine).

SOFTWARE

It’s also a good idea at this point to make sure you have an unlimited data plan. This cost can vary. I’m on Cingular and I use the $20/month Media.NET package which gives me unlimited data. This seems to be the going rate, although you can get high speed access in some places and I don’t know how much it costs.

On palm, the only software I have found that will stream music is called Pocket Tunes. It will set you back a pretty penny, but it’s worth it for having the ultimate MP3 machine. There may be other free software out there and I just don’t know about it. Don’t worry though, the rest of the software you need is free.

At this point you are able to play streaming music radio stations from the net. But what fun is that? You want to listen to YOUR music, not some top 40 college radio station that plays Nickleback every ten minutes. You have two options here:

GLOONET.COM:

Gloonet is an awesome service that allows you complete access to your music collection from anywhere in the world. Best of all, it’s free! You can play by artist, album, or browse through songs. The interface is very minimal, so it runs just fine over cellular connections. When you choose to play something, it is automatically downloaded as a playlist and started in Pocket Tunes.

One thing I love about Gloonet is that you can change the bitrate on the fly. If you have a bad connection, you can adjust it so you don’t get skipping. If you have a great connection you can turn it all the way up and enjoy your music at high quality.

SHOUTCAST:

Shoutcast is Winamp’s streaming music interface. There are thousands of Shoutcast radio stations and it’s quite easy to create your own. The downside to going this route is that you have to create a playlist on your home computer that just runs constantly. When you tune in, you don’t have control to skip forward or choose a song to play. You also cannot change bitrates on the fly, it is done in the server configuration.

Check out this page for help on setting up a shoutcast radio station. This is kind of a cool option because you can let your friends hook up to it and play radio DJ should you want to.

IMPLEMENTATION

I personally use gloonet, hook my treo up to an FM transmitter in my car, and have all of my MP3s from home at my fingertips. This is a great configuration for listening to audio books as well.

I also use my phone as a multi-game machine emulator (Using Little John Palm) and a Movie Player with better resolution than an iPod (Using TCPMP). Both these software package are free, but obviously only work on palm device.

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