We sure hope your kidneys weren't planning to slack off this year, because they're about to get the workout of their entire renal career: faithful viewer neopod tipped us off to the fact that Apple has officially posted a teaser page for the return of the Pepsi iTunes Music Promotion, which, according to the posted rules, officially kicks off at the end of this month. That isn't exactly news-- at least, not to AtAT viewers, since we already told you a month ago that Pepsi was touting the return of the Yellow Cap promo at a trade show last November. But there are some actual details available now that Apple's talking about it, and so far we like what we hear.

For one thing, we were right when we guessed that this time around there'd be 200 million winning caps floating around out there-- although, when you think about it, even a doubling of the original 100 million song giveaway might not be enough. (The number of iPod users alone has ballooned eightfold in the past year, but we suppose we'll take what we can get.) The odds haven't changed; you still have a one-in-three chance of winning a song, unless Pepsi hasn't changed the cap design and you know how to tilt a bottle, in which case your odds improve considerably. Oh, and in order to encourage people to redeem their songs immediately instead of hoarding them until the last minute and overloading Apple's servers, the company will apparently be giving out one free iPod mini to a random promo song-downloader every hour throughout most of the contest period. According to iPodlounge, Apple plans to give away about 1,700 miniPods, "all of which will be silver with an engraved Pepsi logo on the back."

You're still limited to redeeming ten codes per day and 200 codes total, so the good news for your kidneys is that you shouldn't have to drink more than about 94 gallons of soda to max out your free song count, assuming The Tilt is no longer in effect. The bad news for those lil' guys back there is that Pepsi has responded to one of the biggest complaints about last year's promo: the exclusion of Mountain Dew from the Yellow Cap Club. This year, both regular and diet versions of the caffeine-rich chartreuse nectar (and even the Code Red variant) are included, right alongside Pepsi, Diet Pepsi, Pepsi Wild Cherry, and Sierra Mist. True, hardcore caffeine hounds will find much more efficient ways to get wired over at ThinkGeek Caffeine, but only the Dew will get you free iTunes downloads.

Of course, the single thing that really torpedoed the giveaway last year was Pepsi's inexplicable incompetence when it came to getting yellow-capped bottles onto shelves more than, say, four or five minutes before the promo ended. Here's hoping they've got that problem licked and we'll see more than a pathetic 5 percent redemption rate this time around. Truth be told, we're actually a little surprised that Pepsi's trying again, considering the low response rate they got last year-- but hey, if they want to shoot us a free song or two in the course of our sugar-water quaffings, who are we to argue?