We have an old stereo receiver in the living room, tuned to our favorite local radio station. We turn it on almost every day.

And in the car, as much as I enjoy listening to my own music collection and podcasts, there’s nothing more convenient than using the vehicle’s radio. Just set it to your favorite station and leave it — you don’t have to choose what to listen to, navigate menus, manually start playback, or anything. It just works.

➝ Source: donthave2sting.bearblog.dev

Apple’s EarPods had been my go to for video calls at work because they sound pretty decent, fit my ears well, and I never have to worry about battery life or weird Bluetooth pairing issues.

But I recently started tinkering with a fifth-generation iPod again, which naturally doesn’t support Bluetooth. I ended going down a bit of a rabbit hole because of this and thought I’d share my random thoughts about headphones.

• I like not having to deal with Bluetooth pairing and yet another battery to charge.
• One of the few things I miss about AirPods is connecting them to the Apple TV while I’m cleaning. I often have to move toys into other rooms, go to the kitchen to throw something in the garbage, or move folded clothes into bedrooms. Being able to turn something on and listen to it across the whole house with a simple pair of headphones was nice. But that’s not enough to bring me back because I can easily just play the same media on my phone and listen through wired headphones instead.
• I don’t like the idea of in-ear monitors because I don’t want to stick anything into my ears.
• I still want headphones that are compact enough to stick in my pocket and have with me for spontaneous listening.
• It seems like flat-head style earbuds are the best option for me because they are compact, but just sit outside of your ear, not in it.
• I’ve purchased a couple of flatheads — Fiio ff1 and Faaeal Iris 2.0 — but the earbud shell is larger than EarPods and they fall out too easily. I can put foams on them, which actually improves sound quality, but it doesn’t help them stay put. The ff1 also came with silicon rings and silicon rings with a hook. The hook ones help keep them in my ears, but it’s not the most comfortable thing in the world. And the silicon ring somehow makes them sound worse.
• I’m using Apple EarPods at the moment, which do stay put for me — the earbud shell is smaller — but the sound quality isn’t to my liking and the cable is awful. The cable gets tangled like crazy and never wants to go straight. It retains the shape from when it’s rolled up, which is annoying as heck.
• I’ve looked for headphones with a similar shape to Apple EarPods, but they’re all from junk brands with bad reviews.
• Are there any flat-head or similar headphones that are sized/shaped more like EarPods, but have a nicer cable and sound better? I’ve seen recommendations for the NiceHCK YDX, which appear to be smaller than the ff1 and Iris 2.0, but still have a larger shell than the EarPods.
• On the other end of the spectrum, I have the Sony WH-1000XM5 that I occasionally use with a wire, but they’re heavier than I want for longer listening sessions and, when I use them wired, there’s a lot of noise in the ear cups when I bump or rub up against the cable. There are also a lot of times when I don’t want to be so isolated and want to hear more room noise than these allow for.
• I just received the Moondrop Old Fashioned. I don’t know if on ear headphones are going to be a good fit for me, but the Old Fashioned looks super cool and I like the idea of that retro vibe. I’m still putting them through their paces, but they aren’t compact enough to carry around with me like the EarPods are. Listening at my desk is really the only place where I can see the Old Fashioned fitting into my life.
• I’m finding myself wishing that the iPhone still had a headphone jack. I didn’t get it when people complained during that transition period, but I get it now.
• I have Apple’s USB-C headphone adapter (DAC) ordered because, based on my research, it seems to be the absolute best inexpensive option on the market.
• I’m using a cheap DAC that came as a freebie with the Fiio ff1 now. It sounds fine, but it runs loud and the volume steps don’t afford a lot of options. In Prism, I’ve actually enabled the equalizer just so I can use the preamp option to reduce the volume output. But that doesn’t help when listening in other apps.
• The world of DACs seems nearly as deep as the headphone market. There are fancy ones with high powered outputs for headphones that require it, there are gimmicky DACs with retro aesthetics, there are more simple dongle DACs, and everything in between.
• I might end up ordering the Fiio Snowsky Tiny DAC. I like that it’s compact, allows you to charge while listening, and doesn’t extend the length of the headphone cable at all, which can make them a bit unwieldy when using dongle DACs.

At the moment, I’m looking at upgrading the cables and ear pads on the Moondrop Old Fashioned and am still on the look out for EarPod-style earbuds that have a better cable and good audio quality, but aren’t an in-ear monitor.

Audio gear seems like an infinite well at the moment and I’m excited to have an entire category of gadgets and accessories to explore.

I’ve been, inexplicably, on a bit of a radio kick lately. Not using an actual radio, though. Instead, I’ve been manually adding streams from local radio stations to Broadcasts so I can listen from my iPhone, iPad, and MacBook.

I have it setup with about a dozen music and talk radio stations and it’s currently my go-to way to fill in the gaps when I run out of podcast episodes. That’s something that I was previously turning to YouTube for. But I’ve been more actively trying to reduce my time on YouTube and Broadcasts has been doing a great job to help with that.

➝ Source: apps.apple.com

Spatial audio, sweat and water resistant, longer battery life, and a new design that takes cues from AirPods Pro.

I ordered a pair immediately. I might use my AirPods more than any other individual Apple device. They get about 5–10 hours of use on an average day — talking on Zoom calls, listening to music while I work, listening to podcasts before bed.

The battery life on my current pair isn’t quite what it used to be and I’m digging the shorter stems on the new model.

➝ Source: apple.com

Marius Masalar, an actual audiophile, revising the AirPods Max:

They frustrate me because you can tell that these could have been disruptively perfect. If Apple had made them lighter, chosen better materials, made them fold properly, given them a useable case, included the damn 3.5mm audio cable—even if they’d kept the price—the AirPods Max would be an easy recommendation.

As it is though, I have no idea who I would recommend these to. I think anyone—even audiophiles—should find a way to audition them just for fun. But actually dropping this much money to own a pair? I don’t know.

In short, the headphones sound great, much better than Marius was expecting. But they have some downsides that very well could be a deal breaker for some.

➝ Source: mariusmasalar.me

These were announced a couple days ago, but I’ve just now had a chance to dig into the news. I’m not much of an over-ear headphone user and these are pretty expensive, but I sort-of want a pair.

I spend a lot of time with my standard AirPods in. I love them and all their integration with my devices — the automatic switching, quick switching within Control Center, and whatnot. But I feel like it would be beneficial for me to spend a little less time with something in my ears.

The AirPods Max seem like a great pair of desk headphones — the bulky pair that you use when you’re at home because of their audio quality, comfort, and noise cancelation. They would essentially be my work headphones, keeping the standard AirPods for the times when portability is more important.

➝ Source: apple.com

An update to my YouTube To Overcast shortcut, thanks to Xipeng Li on Twitter. He updated the shortcut adding a “Get Name” action to pull the title of the video and use it to automatically populate the file name prompt. I made a minor adjustment to his version — changing the file name formatting — and you can find my latest version of the shortcut here.

➝ Source: initialcharge.net

Having a little one at home means that I’ve found myself more frequently listening to YouTube videos. Throughout the day, I’ll check my subscriptions and my recommended videos, save them to my watch later list, and then listen to them with my AirPods as I rock Josh to sleep for his nap. I pay for YouTube Premium, so I’m able to play videos in the background, but I thought I could do better.

There’s just so many videos on YouTube that don’t really need the video component. Whether they be information videos or talk shows, often times you can get by without the visuals. For those videos, the YouTube app is a bit heavier than what is necessary for listening. Something like Overcast with its Smart Speed feature, is a much better solution. Smart Speed strips silences from the audio, essentially skipping the pauses within a conversation. This allows you to listen to a podcast episode or uploaded audio file in less time, without having the distortion that comes from increasing the speed in the traditional sense.

So I put together a shortcut — Push To Overcast — that lets me download a video from YouTube, convert it to an audio file, and then easily upload it to Overcast.

This does require an Overcast Premium account, which gives you the ability to upload audio files through the website and then listen to the file through the app. It’s not the most elegant solution in the world — just a bit more work moving the file around than I’d prefer. Other podcast clients have the ability to sideload audio files from the Files app or import YouTube videos from Safari. But Overcast is a much better podcast client overall, so I’m willing to put up with this little annoyance.

The shortcut utilizes UPull.me to download the YouTube videos. I don’t know too much about the site or who built it, but it’s the best method I’ve found for downloading videos from YouTube. Every other method I’ve tried has failed with some videos and I’ve never really understood why. UPull.me has worked with everything I’ve thrown at it, though.

Before using the shortcut, you’ll need to add a folder named “Overcast” to the Shortcuts folder of your iCloud Drive. That folder will be used to temporarily store the audio file while uploading.

After initiating the shortcut from the share sheet, the video is downloaded, it’s converted to an audio file, Shortcuts asks you to rename it, and it’s saved to /Shortcuts/Overcast/ — the folder you created above. From there, the shortcut opens the Overcast webpage where you can initiate the upload. After it completes, you tap the “Done” button and the shortcut will automatically delete the file for you.

Here’s a quick little video demo showing how it works:

You can add Push To Overcast to Shortcuts and use it as is or you can make your own modifications and make it work exactly how you want it to. And if you have any ideas for how to improve it, I’d love to hear about them — you can reach out to me with any thoughts you have.

Update 2/20/20: Xipeng Li reached out on Twitter with an updated version of the shortcut. His version grabs the name from the YouTube video and automatically populates it in the file name prompt. I didn’t realize that you could use the “Get Name” action on the contents of a URL. I made a slight change to the formatting of the name prompt that he added — I preferred to omit the “YouTube -“ that he added. If you’d like to use his version, you can find it at the link above or you can download my latest version from here.

Update 7/15/20: Upull.me has made some changes to their APIs that broke the previous version of the shortcut. So I’ve updated the link to a new version that should function again.