Archive for category iTunes
On iTunes 10
I had a post half written about my thoughts this week and decided everything was enough of a non-story so as to not say much. I mean most of what happened was expected and the (disappointing) AppleTV was at best a slight upgrade (Netflix streaming) along with a better price. I think Apple dropped the ball on this one pretty significantly. I would have written about iTunes 10 but it wasn’t out.
First the big news, Ping seems useless right now. (I find most social media stuff like that though — they tend only to work if you can convince all your friends to use them) The appearance is a mixed bag. I like that they toned down the interface from the Vista like color of iTunes 9. However they went too far into grey. If you want the iTunes 9 icons back there’s a program iTunes 109 that’ll restore the old sidebar and optionally other icons. Me, I wish more of the appearance of iTunes 8 could come back.
What bothers me is that iTunes seems to switch for switching sake. There’s no real concern with usability. In many ways iTunes is the worst of Apple’s software. It’s definitely the worst in terms of UI consistency.
Managing Multiple Sized Copies of Movies in iTunes
OK, I’ll confess upfront I’ve not tried this one yet although I hope to tomorrow. I got this info from Ars.
The basic problem is when you have a movie you’ve ripped but you want to watch it both on your Apple TV and your iPhone. Now ideally you’d want two different sizes. The iPhone doesn’t need the resolution you’d rip for the Apple TV plus you want the size to be as small as possible. Now if you’ve ever bought a show from iTunes you’ll note that Apple gives you both hi-res and low res versions. How do they do this? Well it turns out it’s just a tag on the MPEG-4 file. And there is a shell script to set those tags so you can do it with your own files.
The Future of iTunes?
There was an interesting post today about the future of iTunes. I thought I’d throw my two cents in. First I think a rewrite is inevitable if only because Apple wants everyone to go Cocoa so as to not have two separate development forks. Trying to get Carbon to be exactly the same as Cocoa was a losing battle and many of my most annoying problems with MS Office and Adobe CS can be tied to their use of Carbon libraries that weren’t quite right. (Here thinking of focus and Spaces issues, not to mention modal dialogs)
Beyond that though there is the leveraging of new technology like Grand Central. Also, as many have noted the code base is simply quite old going back to the Sys 9 days. Further iTunes has become bloatware in the sense that it attempts to do too many things.
My predictions?
Hack Your Apple TV Pt 2
OK, last time I talked about getting a hacked Apple TV up and running. As I said, my main reason was to get media files off my Apple TV after a hard drive crash. (They are in /mnt/Media/Media Files if you are curious) This time I want to talk about adding support for other media formats using QuickTime.
Perian is a popular plugin for Quicktime that lets you play a variety of other formats beyond those Quicktime normally supports. Probably you have it installed on your Mac. If you don’t, you should. Download it from Perian.org.
How to Hack Your Apple TV
I’ll leave the question of why hack your Apple TV alone for now. Let me just say I can completely understand those who don’t do it. I personally don’t really have a need for alternative formats like mkv or avi since almost everything on my AppleTV is ripped with Handbrake and then added to iTunes. (Which as I mentioned is a cheap Vista box running as my central server – iTunes 9′s syncing has been handy here) My primary reason for hacking is to get ssh connection to the Apple TV so I can get some movies off it I lost in a hard drive crash the end of July. (Yes, I’m behind in things – but fixing the media server was a big task and one easy to postpone)
So on to hacking.
The first thing you should do is buy a 2G USB flash drive. Don’t get a small one (say 256M) or a big one (say an 8G) because they won’t work. No, I don’t quite understand why they won’t work. But I can say from sad experience they won’t. Fortunately you can get 2G flash drives for about $10 now at Staples. (Which is where I got the one that finally worked for me) What we’ll be doing is installing an updater on the flash drive which the Apple TV will recognize.
A Longish Tale of Hard Drive Crashes, Apple TV Hacks and Woe
OK, this is the set up for my next few posts.
So I had this very nice media setup. I had an old 1st gen 17″ iMac I had got when porting some software over to the Intel Mac. Apple had sent me this hacked Intel machine in a G5 PowerMac case to do the development but I had to return it. After returning it I got the 17″ iMac which I use at home for some development or when dealing with clients who are in India or other distant time zones. Anyway it had become primarily the media server and secondarily a backup machine for development.
I had one drive that I kept various odd stuff on and a second, 1 TB drive, just for movies. Now I kept meaning to get a second drive to mirror that media drive but somehow never had the spare cash laying around to pick one up. (Lots of medical bills due to sick kids) Now I did backup everything else and I’m ultra-paranoid backing up my business machine. (3 rotating full backups and 3 rotating daily backup disks with 6 individual days maintained per disk + infinite backups of source code)
I finally picked up the extra drive about a month ago and was doing a backup when my toddlers came running in and tripped over the cords. Hard drives went flying. I went screaming like someone out of a cheesy 80′s action movie yelling, “NOOOOO!” in slow motion.
Cleaning iTunes Pt. 4: Artist Names
Posted by clark in Applescript, Python, iTunes on 2009/09/10
This is the fourth part of my cleaning iTunes series. I wanted to revisit the question of artist names from a few weeks ago. I had discussed using the titlecase module to standardize capitalization. However an even bigger problem is different spellings for names. To give a couple of examples one might find The Beatles as “The Beatles”, “Beatles, The” or “Beatles” depending upon who put the metadata in. Sometimes it gets a bit more complex such as “Guns ‘n Roses”, “Guns and Roses”, “Guns N’ Roses” and a few more variations. Then there are the tricky ones like “B.B. King”, “B B King”, “B. B. King” and a few others. I never did find a good solution for B.B. King but fortunately I just could look that one up and handle it manually. (It’s supposed to be B.B. King)
What this script does is look up the standardized spelling for artists. As ever I work on a playlist you create. In this case the playlist “__Fix Arists” (without the quotes) I’d suggest adding to this list manually rather than trying to automate it. Both for safety (because it’s easy to undo if you just have a single artist in there) but also it just keeps things simple. If you need you could easily add in a routine to work on a selection. I’ll put that in the script but comment it out.
Fixing iTunes 9′s Appearance
Posted by clark in Uncategorized, iTunes on 2009/09/09
(Updated 9/22/09)
If you read my post on the iTunes event you know I really hate the new appearance of iTunes. I honestly don’t know what they were thinking (nor how Steve allowed it!)
So I’ve been looking around the net for tips on fixing it. I figured I’d put up a thread on it. I found the answer by searching MacThemes. Now let me say in advance that I’m not a themer. I find that typically most themes look horrible, both on OSX and the iPhone. But I occasionally do a minor one. (For instance one of my minor SL tips was about making the iTunes 8 scroll bar and making it universal for all apps) I think the new iTunes is bad enough I’m willing to theme it.
I suspect I’m not alone.
iTunes Event
OK, I promise more scripts are coming as I try and complete my “clean up iTunes” series. I just wasted too much time mucking about with getting Python libraries to work right.
A few comments on today’s iTunes/iPop spectacle.
The 9th
So everyone is wondering what’s up with the big event on the 9th. It’s the same date as a bunch of Beatles announcements, but Apple’s name for the event comes from a Rolling Stones song. Will they announce the Beatles catalog on iTunes? Who cares? I mean really, if you are going to buy full albums buy the CD and rip it. Really. The iTunes store is great for the impulse buy of a single track but really not the wisest if you go beyond that.
So what do I think the big announcements will be? Here are my guesses and my odds for them.
-
You are currently browsing the archives for the iTunes category.
.jpg)
Recent Comments