Need cookbook for iPod environmental cover task

Question

Folks:
My aim is to have my iPod Nano 1st Gen do this job: Play some "cover" noise as steadily and gaplessly as possible so I can listen and sleep through the night in some noisy hotels, etc.
I'm a computer professional with access to standard Mac tools (GarageBand, Final Cut Express), but I have no idea how to do this, and maybe my terminology isn't very good,either. Can someone point me to a cookbook and/or tell me how to do this in reasonably small steps, please?
Starting with a CD of that contains 1 hour of environmental sounds (rain), I want to isolate the "best" (most steady) rain segment --probably about 15 minutes-- and splice it together as seamlessly as possible. Transfer the result to my iPod and play in "repeat" mode.
I'm told that the "stock" 1st Gen iPod can't do gapless playback. OK, if so, is it possible to adjusting the gap to be minimal? Using fades to minimize the effect of gaps? (Experiments show full-volume to silence to full-volume is NOT good for sleeping!) It's also OK to minimize gaps by recording longer segments. Experiments seem to indicate a practical 30 minutes length limit on segments for Garage Band. That's not enough. I'm willing to devote a significant portion of my iPod storage to this purpose, ideally one 8 hour segment. Even 2 hour segments would be decent.
Variations: If there's an alternative source for high quality rain noise, I'd like to hear about it. As long as I'm wishing out loud, the most restful noise I can imagine is steady, hard rain on a metal or plastic roof. I have a Mac program that will play white or pink noise on the audio output, and that's pretty decent cover noise, but I don't know of a way of piping the output to anything usable to get it to the iPod.
TIA,
Henry

Answer 1

sandt33511 wrote:
ok I'm going to bite the bullet and do the database route. I'm going to attempt this via derby since it's built in to eclipse.JavaDB (Derby) comes with the JDK, so this choice works even w/o Eclipse.
Apparently this is going to be easier, although add work to re-creating the datalayerEasier that flat files? Hmm... YMMV. I suggested a real database because it's super useful to know how to do this. Flat files less so.
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Off the bat I can see how you'd pull the list and put into an arrayOff the bat, you should take the JDBC tutorial:
[http://java.sun.com/docs/books/tutorial/jdbc/index.html]
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now I need to figure out how to update/delete the records and add an image (which should just be a stored field)A couple tips:
1. Always use PreparedStatement over just Statement.
2. get something simpler up and running before adding images. Images are binary data, and to INSERT binary data
you would use method setBinaryStream:
[http://java.sun.com/javase/6/docs/api/java/sql/PreparedStatement.html#setBinaryStream(int,%20java.io.InputStream,%20int)]
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i see something in regards to indexof... is this what I would use to match the records when updating?Huh? String method indexof? I don't understand the context.