I’ve recently been working on creating what we’re calling a “docking station” for iPods in the galleries. The idea is that people who bring their iPods to the Walker can dock it at this station and download various audio tours from Art On Call to it. Then they can cruise through the galleries and listen to artists and curators talk about said work on their own iPod. It’s really an alternative means to receiving the same info that AOC has. Plus it saves on your cell phone minutes and the recordings sound much better. Choice is good!
I was able to wrangle an old iMac from the IT dept to create a prototype of the station. It’s just one of those old, slow, first gen iMacs with the CRT monitors. Unlike the speedy new G5 iMacs we have in our lobby for web surfing, there’s no “kiosk” verion of iTunes. On the lobby kiosks we use wKiosk, which basically locks the entire system down for us, and, other than a few bugs in the program, works pretty well in this regard. But for an iPod docking station, we need to use iTunes, and as I’ve found out, what we’re attempting to do is not what iTunes, or the iPod for that matter, were built to do.
In essence I had to start from scratch when building this kiosk, as I couldn’t use any of the tricks I did on the lobby kiosks. I’ve got a lot of things covered at this point. I’ve created a user who has permission only to run iTunes. This means they can’t screw up the system or start launching other programs. That’s good! I’ve also been able to turn off things like the music store or music sharing with the “parental” prefs in iTunes. Double good! However, the bad news is they still have most of the control over iTunes as any normal user would. They can edit most of the prefs, quit the app, or even delete all the tracks in iTunes. Not good.
I somewhat have a solution to this. Quitting the app is ok, because iTunes will relaunch automatically when a user connects their iPod. For the other two, I think the solution is to have a master prefs and library file backed up on the machine. If for some reason someone is sneaking around and changes something (which will happen), all you need to do is revert to the master prefs or library. This requires a bit of baby sitting, to check up on the machine every once and a while to make sure it’s running properly, but this would be the case regardless of the tech or how bulletproof it is.
The thing that actually concerns me more than this though is how iPods dock with iTunes when the machine isn’t the user’s own. I need to test this out more, but so far the results seem to be sporadic. It looks like there are a couple of options as to what happens when an iPod is connected. Either there’s an automatic update of content, meaning the iPod will just download whatever is in the library and fill itself up, or it will be set to manual transfer, where you can drag and drop tracks to the iPod manually.
Automatic downloading is perhaps the most concerning for a few reasons. One is that it doesn’t give people the option to select which audio tour they want, and it just gives them everything, something I’d like to avoid. Again, choice is good! However, perhaps worse, each iPod is tethered to a specific libary (usually the users library on their home machine), and when you connect an iPod to a rogue machine, it gives you an alert saying as much, and asks if you want to delete the contents of the iPod and marry the iPod to the new machine.
That’s not exactly a great idea, especially for a user who’s on a trip from out of town and brought their iPod for things other than museum audio tours. There is however the option to cancel this overwrite, in which case, you can then set the iPod up for manual transfer, but it’s not totally clear how to do this to the user (it’s in the iTunes prefs), and you must unmount and then remount your iPod for this change to take place before you can actually begin the manual transfer (too complicated!).
The best thing that could happen is to somehow force the connection to be manual transfer when people connect their iPods. If it is, people can add whatever they want to the iPod without the worry of overwriting whatever they already have on it (assuming the iPod is not full already). The key is going to be testing this out with many iPods to see what sorts of things work and what do not with this set up. Right now it’s the main thing that’s worrisome.
I suppose that’s to be expected. I doubt anyone has really ever thought about using iTunes with Podcasts as a physical delivery method for audio tours to the public, and it’s obvious they were not created to be used in this way. Thus the quest continues on how to make this work in the most seemless way possible.
If anyone has any comments, questions, or ideas (!), please pass them along, I would love to hear about them.
That’s a tough one - your next problem will be that iPods work with either a Mac or Windows machine, depending on how you’ve set them up. I haven’t been able to get one to work with both.
The Hirshhorn recently had Shuffles available to check out for a Janey Cardiff work - the audio wasn’t available as a podcast.
Comment by richard — 12/27/2005 @ 9:08 am
Check Apple’s ipod FAQ, specifically the questions starting here:
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=60920#faq5
I think (as mentioned above), your biggest problem is if you use a Mac, PCs can’t do it and vice-versa.
As for auto updating, the iPod has one ‘master,’ but will allow users to manually update. But that might be asking a lot of users. You also risk users selecting your setup as the master and then having problems at home.
Personally, let me subscribe at home and download all I need before I come to the Walker.
As for preferences getting messed up, rather than babysitting the computer, I bet you could write a cron to somehow confirm that prefs are correct and if they aren’t, move in a correct set and restart itunes. You could use Applescript to put a warning up in case anyone is using itunes at the time. Since prefs are xml, a simple diff should be able to flag differences. (I love thinking of this stuff conceptually and not having to do it myself.)
Keep us posted on your progress.
Comment by Peter — 12/27/2005 @ 6:23 pm
I wouldn’t use iTunes. Check VersionTracker or MacUpdate for some applications that can let users choose from a set lsit of programs to downlaod onto their iPod. iTunes is essentially propietary software that is designed to be for one thing, and is very easy to operate, for that one thing: music, from computer to iPod. I know some free apps like Audion can manually transfer tracks from a computer to an iPod without iTunes, but still not muck up the file structure. Check panic.com/audion. But if for some reason you must, must use iTunes, just change the ownership permissions on the preferences file in User/Library/System/Preferences/, for the file iTunes.pref, I believe, so people can’t modify the preferences.
But as I said, I think your best solution is not iTunes, because of its intriniscally feature-limited and consumer-minded design.
Comment by Joe T. — 12/28/2005 @ 1:55 pm
I would also worry about people uploading information to your system, either to crash your system or to corrupt other’s iPods.
Comment by CaptEnaj — 12/29/2005 @ 2:29 pm
You also need a way to erase an email once typed into the form above. Anyone could see my email when they access this page again.
Comment by Silly you — 12/29/2005 @ 2:31 pm
Have you hit the problem yet where you plug in an ipod formatted with a PC to a mac (or a Mac formatted ipod into a PC) and itunes can’t read the device and wants you to reformat? I talked to a couple of developers about this problem (along with the idea of developing a ipod download kiosk app) — it can be worked aroumd, but it is a real problem because of the way Apple implemented this. We may still do this for Brooklyn, so I will be watching this page and let me know if you are interested in splitting the cost of developed solution that we would open source and give to other institutions.
BTW, if you are looking for some really great kiosk software, check this out. We developed this as open source and it will let you do practically anything you need to do on a kiosk:
http://mozdevgroup.com/clients/bm/
Comment by Shelley Bernstein — 2/9/2006 @ 5:14 pm
Shelley, yes, we have run into it, and the project is on standby for now because of it (I really should write another blog post about this). Long story short it’s an issue that we couldn’t seem to come up with a solution for. At least not one that wouldn’t require more R&D than we could sink into it. Our first quick idea was to put both a PC and a Mac station in and let users pick the system they have, but given that typical users don’t understand the limitations of the iPod, this would be confusing to them. And even if it did work without reformatting, we still have the overwriting of the MP3s on the users iPod (and in my tests even that was hit or miss, sometimes it wanted to erase the MP3s on the iPod, sometimes it just put extra ones on).
It’s clear Apple produced the iPod as a single user, single machine device to thwart piracy. What we’re going to do in the meantime is buy some iPods that are preinstalled with audio tours and lend them out to visitors. We’r also talking about letting people bring in their own, and having our vistor service people do the audio tour transfers, but that’s still in discussion because there are various logistical problems with that as well.
I’d be curious to know more on how you’re thinking of solving the issues here. I had heard on NPR recently that Starbucks is going to allow visitors to download songs to their iPods in some of their stores. I haven’t been able to find any more info on this, but if that’s true, they may have worked around the problem already (or not, it was unclear how the service would actually work).
As for your kiosk, it’s very nice! We did something similar for a show (How Latitudes Become Forms) a while back using Firefox (then called Phoenix). However, we switched all of our kiosks to iMacs and on OS X Mozilla and it’s variants won’t do true full screen, so we had to go with a different app (based on Safari). Unfortunately the same issues occured when I tested your kiosk browser out. True fullscreen has always been an issue on Macs because of how they implimented the menu bar in the OS.
Thanks for your comments.
Comment by Brent Gustafson — 2/10/2006 @ 10:02 am
If you are looking for truly great, full function kiosk software I would suggest SiteKiosk. I was resistant to use it since I am a big Mac nerd and it is PC only. But I have been shown again and again that this is a super full function kiosk software leaps and bounds above the hacked browser soft. and even wKiosk.
We are running into the same problems with iPods and kiosks over here in Saint Paul at the Science Museum. It does look like you would have to just use a PC and a Mac and set it up so that users who know what they are doing can get at the audio. We are really having to think about who this content is for and how we want to get it to them.
One weirdo thing we are hoping for….Nintendo DS is supposed to start coming with a web browser soon. So maybe the game nerd kids who end up here can browse our web and audio content via their Nintendo DS. This is a hard nut to crack.
Comment by bryan kennedy — 2/27/2006 @ 10:19 am
For what it’s worth the DS browser will be a stand alone app you buy at the store, not bundled in. I also know it won’t play Flash or view PDF’s so I’d venture to guess it won’t play audio either. However there may be some cool uses for it in other ways (or for anyone else with a PDA or phone w/ a web browser).
Comment by Brent Gustafson — 2/27/2006 @ 10:27 am
WOW, that is exactly what I'm trying to do. I'm trying to setup a kiosk at my church so people can download an audio introduction to the church and the podcast of the church right after the service. This article was a great help! and I'm glad to see someone doing interesting things like this. I love the audio tours stuff also. I am also the person behind http://www.soundseeingpodcasts.com so i know how cool this stuff is when it works. The Sony PSP now also does true podcasting and has a web browser built in. People could use that to connect and get more info. Hopefully a solution will come up soon. Thanks for the help and ill try to keep in contact if I find a solution.
Thanks,
-dave
Comment by dave — 4/28/2006 @ 5:22 pm
I wouldn't use iTunes. Check VersionTracker or MacUpdate for some applications that can let users choose from a set lsit of programs to downlaod onto their iPod. iTunes is essentially propietary software that is designed to be for one thing, and is very easy to operate, for that one thing: music, from computer to iPod. I know some free apps like Audion can manually transfer tracks from a computer to an iPod without iTunes, but still not muck up the file structure.
Comment by David — 5/25/2007 @ 1:36 am
Same here…got it for my wifes desk. It sounds surprisingly good, but even on dim the blue light is pretty damned bright. We have 2 iHomes, and this sounds at least as good as they do.
Comment by Ben parker — 8/27/2007 @ 4:25 am
This is a great blog!! I was talking to my sister about iPods and when she discovered through our conversation you have to teather the iPod to a computer she basically abandoned the thought of getting one. I think a lot more people would buy iPods and music from iTunes if there was a way to get music, movies, podcast, and walking tours without the requirement of owning a computer. So I started thinking about the kiosk idea and actually setting these up in the Best Buy’s, Walmart’s, ……
I figured it would be somewhat complicated both for the would be purchaser of the music at the retail store and for the technical issues related to teathering. It seems like some kind of gateway product could be designed. The gateway product would have the driver’s, memory, and intelligence to determine if the iPod is teathered to a Mac or PC. The “gateway” product would be between the kiosk computer and the iPod port.
The complication with this could be when the iPod gets plugged into the master computer (If the user has one). What happens when iTunes synch’s and there is new information on the iPod. I don’t know how iTunes works in this case.
Comment by Russ Homans — 12/27/2007 @ 9:29 pm