11 posts tagged “itunes”
- Are you a fan of audiobooks?
- Do you find humor in stuff like The Daily Show?
If you answered “Hell yes!” to questions 1 and 2, go get this free audiobook on iTunes. It’s written by John Hodgman, the PC guy from Apple’s “I’m a Mac, I’m a PC” commercials. More generally, he’s a humorist/writer and contributor to The Daily Show.
This ultra-low-cost offer probably won’t last forever, so I’d recommend you swing on down there and pick it up sooner rather than later.
I like Dio as much as the next guy, but I think the iTunes Music Store is taking it too far.
(Read the Album Review.)
I was out of the office last week and all sorts of fun stuff happened when I wasn’t looking. If you’re looking for a nice, neat synthesis of the Apple announcements last week, check out this New York Times article. Totally new iPod nano and shuffle, better battery life all around, movies on iTunes…hot damn.
Let’s say it’s New Music Tuesday and you’re treating yourself to something from the iTunes Music Store. You poke around a while, finally decide, and click Buy Song. You then notice this e-mail sitting in your inbox:
To: 4th Floor employees From: SYSADMIN Date: 5 mins ago Subject: Reboot needed Due to a software update, the Internet firewall/router will be rebooted soon. Internet connectivity will be down briefly. Your Overworked, Haggard System Administrator
Dude! My iTunes! What’s gonna happen to my download?!
Chill, yo. Apple’s got your back. If you lose connectivity in the middle of an iTunes Music Store download, iTunes displays a nice little error message, prompting you to use the Check for Purchases option under the Advanced menu.
Hit that bad boy and watch your download pick up where it left off. Once it’s done, commence with the rockulation.
Let’s crank the wayback machine to September, when I posted some AppleScripts to remove artwork en masse from tracks in iTunes. (Why would you do this? To save space.)
Well, you don’t need AppleScript to do this anymore. Highlight multiple tracks, right-click, and choose Get Info. You’ll see this screen.
Notice that the Artwork is blank…if you check the checkbox and click OK that will wipe out the artwork for the selected tracks. I tested this a few different times, and I think if you’re highlighting tracks from multiple different albums, you get prompted with a message saying “Are you sure you want to change the artwork for multiple items?”
Of course I’m proud of my AppleScripts, but this tip works on Windows. You may still find a use for the script I posted that finds tracks with artwork, but that’s another story.
Recently, I received a regular e-newsletter from one of my favorite bands and noticed that a band I was unfamiliar with named Rose Hill Drive would be opening for them on several dates. “Hmm,” I said to myself. “I wonder what these guys sound like.”
So, I flipped open iTunes and went to the Music Store. I used the search term rose hill drive and this is the one and only result I got back:
Yes, it’s The Maddox Brothers & Rose’s 1976 release, America’s Most Colorful Hillbilly Band: Their Original Recordings 1946-1951, Vol. 1. When I was first presented with this “result,” I was speechless.
After taking a moment to collect my thoughts, I’m gonna go out on a limb and say that Apple needs to raise the threshold for what constitutes a match in the search results. I see that Rose Hill Drive and The Maddox Brothers & Rose have a little something in common, but…come on. I would rather see the “no results found” message.
Furthermore…Their Original Recordings? Did The Maddox Brothers & Rose find a need to re-record these gems? Are we to believe that some other artist laid to tape their own interpretations of these classics? And don’t even get me started with Vol. 1 and the Vol. 2 that it minimally implies.
BTW, thanks to MP3.com for allowing me to copy/paste this obnoxious band name and album name. Or, said another way, shame on iTunes for not allowing me to do so from the iTunes Music Store.
I really wanted to pick up where I left off yesterday talking about Google Search History, but the new iPod caused a slight change in plan.
The new iPod does look nice, and if you were thinking about getting a “regular” iPod (vs. an iPod nano or shuffle) you will want to get the new one instead. I probably won’t get this new iPod, at least not until my 20GB 3rd gen iPod dies or someone figures out a way for me to hack my TiVo and watch my saved shows on the iPod.
What I really want to get out there is that you might want to watch out for the upgrade to iTunes 6. If you’re not planning on using the new features right away you may be able to save some headaches by waiting until iTunes 6.0.1. Other people had complained about the upgrade to iTunes 5 causing a variety of problems and it’s not entirely unreasonable to assume there may be some of the same issues.
I had a little trouble myself…I have a printer hooked up to my wireless network via an AirPort Express and after installing iTunes 5 on my Dell laptop it could no longer print to that printer. The Dell was printing to the laptop via Apple’s nifty Rendezvous protocol, which allows connections between devices without static IP addresses. Apple actually released some “technology preview” software for Windows to allow this kind of functionality, which is very cool of them.
After that software was released, Apple got into a legal spat with some other company that has a trademark on the term Rendezvous, so they changed the name to Bonjour and also got around to releasing the “1.0” version of this software for Windows. (Bonjour is built into the Mac OS, so no extra downloading is needed there.)
iTunes 5 installed some part of Bonjour so that it can do the nifty music sharing thang, but unfortunately this somehow disagreed with the Rendezvous technology preview stuff I had installed, so no printing for me. Luckily, installing the 1.0 version of Bonjour for Windows cleared the problem right up, and the install neatly replaced the old Rendezvous stuff.
But, if I hadn’t been paying such close attention to the iTunes 5 install, and noticing that it was installing Bonjour, I’m not sure if I would have known what to do. Plus, you have to be a pretty big geek to know what all this stuff is in the first place. So, this leaves me feeling like Apple dropped the ball a bit.
What’s even more sad is that messing with Rendezvous/Bonjour on Windows sorta seems like an “advanced” maneuver and I almost feel like “this is what I get” for pushing the limits. This is what I’ve learned from Windows. How unfortunate.
With that out of the way, tomorrow we will finish the Google story.
Today’s tip is from the request line:
When I close iTunes, sometimes I get a message telling me that other people are listening to my shared music over the network. How do I figure out who they are or what they’re listening to?
This can be done, but only to a certain degree…the network protocol used share music really only has the capability to identify the “sharee” by IP address. That being said, there is a lovely iTunes Connection Monitor Dashboard widget now available. It shows the IP address of the person enjoying your music, and more interestingly, which song they’re playing.
There is a solution for Windows as well, but, like all things Windows, it’s less elegant.
Have a good weekend, everybody.
Here’s a quick follow up on iTunes 5…in this post I lamented the fact that you don’t seem to be able to do anything with the new Lyrics functionality in iTunes 5. Well, today I found out what it’s good for: the new iPod nano can display the lyrics as the song is playing.
I should have known it all along: it’s the iPod, stupid. Everything’s coming up iPod. Not that I’m complaining, really..the iPod nano is definitely drool inducing. My rational mind will be doing its best to beat down the voice saying ”I’m so cool and pretty…yes, that’s it…buy me buy me buy me HA you bought me.”
If they release one that’s maybe 6GB or 8GB than that will be my next iPod. My current iPod is a 4GB mini that I got for free by opening a checking account at CitiBank. (Seriously.) It’s one of the 2nd generation minis with the longer battery life, which is nice. Although, something that’s been making me frown lately is that my mini has developed serious battery meter calibration issues. It looks like I have about 30% battery life left and then all of a sudden it’ll go dead, saying that I need to plug into a power source. (If I was a conspiracy theorist I might point out the “coincidental” timing of my mini all of a sudden having battery problems with the release of the newer, cooler, non-free model.)
Actually, it’s kinda sad that there’s no more iPod mini…I really like mine and it’s the device I use most often to listen to music. But again, I really want more storage space, even if it’s just a little more. Photo capability is kinda cool, but again, storage space has to go up for me to use that in any significant way.
The iTunes phone is a mixed bag…it may be good for some people but I’m just not one of them. Steve Jobs said it best, saying it’s like having an iPod Shuffle right on your phone, which I’m just not interested in. Also, it’s too bad it isn’t a quad band phone. Ah well…I’ve stopped caring already.Anyway, the mystery of the Lyrics feature is solved. Now I just have to stop wanting that nano…
I’ve got some other posts I’ve been working on but I’m balancing the need to be timely, so here we go:
Um, yeah, iTunes 5 is out. It seems fine to me. I’d go get it if I were you.
I may sound underwhelmed but there are a couple nice changes. The search feature is a bit better: when you begin typing in your search term, some buttons appear at the top of the playlist area that let you narrow your search to different types of files (music, audiobooks, etc.) or different types of track info (artist, album, etc.). This may help you zero in on what you’re looking for a bit more quickly, but I feel safe in saying that the search feature worked fine before.
Where this really seems to help is in searching the iTunes Music Store. The search options there have always been kinda weak (particularly for audiobooks) but this improves the situation. Also, the Music Store itself has been changed to display the results differently (i.e. better). The fact that the “narrowing” buttons show up in the Music Store also creates more consistency between that and browsing your own Library.
The new look is pretty good…brushed metal is gone and the Source list looks a bit cleaner. The currently selected Playlist appears in bold, making it a bit easier to spot. On the downside, I could swear that the Preferences screen in the Mac version use to have the standard Mac red-yellow-green buttons in the top left corner. Some people always thought those were kind of cartoonish, and they may be right, but it sucks to move your mouse in that direction to close the dialog box and have to turn around cuz there’s no buttons to be had.
The biggest disappointment is the (apparently) new Lyrics feature. Do a Get Info on one of the tracks and you should see a Lyrics tab that I could swear wasn’t there before. The bummer is that you don’t seem to be able to do hardly anything with this feature. For instance:
- They’re not searched by the Search box. I figured if you had lyrics saved on your tracks, it would be cool to search by them if you asked yourself, “what was that song again that has that line I love?”
- They don’t seem to be printable. iTunes provides some features to print out info about your Library, and lyrics don’t seem to be printable anywhere, any way.
- There’s really not a good way to populate this info. Who’s going to copy-paste the lyrics from a web browser for every track? (It looks like AppleScript can do this but obviously this only works on the Mac.)
- Related to the above point, the lyrics are not automatically filled in when you purchase a song from the iTunes Music Store. I knew that was a longshot, but it would have been cool.
The final bitch point here is that the Advanced tab in the Preferences pane pulls the user interface no-no of “tabs within tabs.” This screen looks OK on the Mac because of how tabs are rendered in the Mac OS but on Windows it’s a definite thumbs down.
Anyway, I’d still recommend the upgrade. If you’re on Windows, after the install remember to uncheck the options to show iTunes and Quicktime in the System Tray…it’s really a stretch to think that would ever be useful.
Oh, and, um, if you’re last name is Becker, try using the Consolidate Library and Show Duplicate Songs features to solve your iTunes disaster recovery situation. (Don’t ask.)
