PRODUCT REVIEW
Ripping Tunes With the iLoad iPod CD Loader

It seems as if everywhere you turn these days someone is talking about getting rid of the middle man. It shouldn't be surprising, then, that someone has cooked up a gadget to ditching the middle man when it comes to moving music from CDs to the iPod.

The "middle man" in this case is iTunes and a PC. The gadget is called the iLoad (US$299) from Wingspan Investment Partners, of Wilmington, Del.

Compared to the svelte iPod, the iLoad is on the bulky side. It measures about 2.8-by-7.4-by-6.7 inches, which is slightly bigger than a Mac Mini.

It has a slot-loading CD drive on the front of it and on top of it, some membrane controls and a small monochrome LCD.

Mystery Ports

The back of the unit is loaded with inputs, some of them unidentified in the device's documentation.

There's a headphone jack, two USB ports and an Ethernet connection.

There's also what appears to be a monitor connector, serial port, mouse port and jacks for line-in, mic and video. Why the iLoad's makers decided to shroud these inputs with mystery is, well, a mystery.

Before you start using the iLoad, it's recommended that you configure iTunes to manually manage your iPod's music. If you don't, any music sent to your iPod from iLoad will be zapped by iTunes the next time it connects with the music player.

Also, you need to have an up-to-date version of iTunes running on computer -- version 7 or better.

Noisy Fan

To get started, you plug the iLoad into a power source. Then you connect the iPod to it and turn on the power.

You may be initially startled. The unit has what appears to be a very noisy fan.

It also takes nearly a minute to boot up. That seems like a long time for a device with such a simple application.

Next, you need to install the iLoad software on your iPod so it can talk to the iLoad. That's a simple matter of putting a CD with the software on it into the iLoad and pressing the unit's Go button.

Simple Ripping

To copy a CD, slip it into the unit and press Go again.

The title of the CD will appear on the unit's LCD. You can choose to copy the entire CD to your iPod or pick individual tracks for copying.

As tracks are copied to your iPod, you can see the progress of the operation on the iLoad's display.

Ripping a CD and transferring the music to an iPod took a tad over 14 minutes.

Music Database

The iLoad has a database built into it for identifying music that it uploads to your iPod. If information about a CD isn't in that database, the iLoad will give tracks from the CD generic names when it sends them to the iPod.

Since names like Track 1, Track 2, etc., aren't very informative when browsing a music library, iLoad provides a method of identifying mystery music via the Internet.

That method is fairly painless -- if you have a wireless router.

You can connect the iLoad to your router through its Ethernet port. You have to supply your own Ethernet cable. The iLoad doesn't come with one.

Once connected to the Net, the iLoad uses an online database to name unknown tracks on your iPod.

The Ethernet connection is also used to update the iLoad's embedded software.

Gets Job Done

When copying songs from a CD with the iLoad, you can control the bit-rate for the files being written to the iPod. The higher the bit-rate, the better the sound quality and the larger the size of the file. The default bit-rate is 128, which is the rate for a typical track purchased at the iTunes store.

You can also backup and restore your iPod through the iLoad to a USB hard drive or thumb drive.

Elegance and style are not the iLoad's forte, but as a practical appliance for removing the "middle man" when ripping music for the iPod, it gets the job done.