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 [...]

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 [...]

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. [...]

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 [...]

Cleaning iTunes Pt. 4: Artist Names

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 [...]

Fixing iTunes 9′s Appearance

(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. [...]

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 [...]

Cleaning iTunes Pt. 3: Album Names

OK, the trickiest part of cleaning ones iTunes library is looking up missing album information. There are a few applications that do this by mathematically analyzing the song’s music itself against a library. The problem is that this isn’t that accurate. There was an old app that did this (no longer available) called iEatzBrains or [...]

Cleaning iTunes Pt. 2: Title Case

This is the second in a series of posts on cleaning up my library in iTunes. Last time we discussed using Dupin to find duplicates. This week I want to focus on the problem of capitalization of song names. If you are like me you have a few songs in your library where the case [...]

Cleaning iTunes Pt. 1

OK, off and on, I’m going to be working at cleaning up my iTunes library. Over the years it’s had a few disasters that I never fully recovered from. The first was my attempt to sync my home and work iTunes via rsync. Unfortunately I forgot that as I modify files by changing names or [...]

Fix iTunes Names

There are some amazing Python programmers out there who can do some pretty impressive and abstract stuff. However most of what I use Python for is as a quick and dirty scripting system. I’m rarely writing full elegant programs. Rather I just want to get something done and done quickly. Most of the time I’m [...]

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