tunequest

(or, Initial Thoughts on the iPod Touch) Weeeee... new toys from Apple! iPods iPods iPods, including shuffles in drab new colors (gimme orange), a new iPod NanoVideo (aka iPod Squat), an all-metal iPod Classic (the form we all know and love––now up to 160GB!) and a phoneless iPhone (aka iPod Touch). Upon the availing of the line up this afternoon, I was immediately torn. In my mind, the ...

Read the rest of this post.

Apple has really screwed up with the new sorting behaviors introduced in iTunes 7.3 and it's making a lot of people seriously unhappy. And, honestly, I've NEVER been mad at Apple for anything in my 25+ years of history with the company (annoyed at times, but never mad), but the more I think about this the more pissed I get. For those just joining the story, ...

Read the rest of this post.

...and managed to sully my iPod too. And the more I think about it, the more pissed off I get. What Apple has done defies all standard convention, is completely arbitrary and makes ab-so-lute-ly zero sense whatsoever. Allow me to go on. I had put off updating my iTunes to 7.3.2 until a couple days ago. With all the time and energy I invest into pruning and ...

Read the rest of this post.

Not all audiobooks, mind you, just homemade ones; downloads from the iTunes Store and Audible seem to work fine. The story goes like this... My carpool ended a couple weeks ago, as my riding buddy resigned to take another job. I'm going to miss the amity, conversation and, of course, the gas and mileage savings, but my solo commute will now give me the opportunity to invest ...

Read the rest of this post.

Note: The behaviors described below are from Mac OS X 10.4.10. Previous versions of the OS might not behave as described. YMMV. Keyboard shortcuts are the life-blood of the power user. Casual users know of the basic ones: Command-Q to quit, Command-W to close a window, Command-F to find, etc, but the power users have them all memorized for every program they use. For them, actions that ...

Read the rest of this post.

I've spent the past couple days playing around with Alex King's iTunes Stats program. It's written in PHP/MYSQL and requires a web server to run. With the MAMP one-click server running on my PowerBook, I had little trouble installing the program (though I did have to substantially increase the PHP timeout setting so it could handle my large library). iTunes Stats reads XML files, one can load ...

Read the rest of this post.

Recently, I've taken to re-encoding some of my favorite CDs, mostly ones that I originally encoded long ago, some as far back as 1999. Hard drive space was at a premium at the time, so I traded acceptable losses in quality for a smaller storage footprint. When the music is coming from a beige G3's internal speaker, 112 kbps and 320 kbps mp3s sound basically the ...

Read the rest of this post.

The iPod is supposed to be "iTunes to go" but as the little music player has advanced over the years, it still lags behind in some relatively basic features, features that have been a part of the desktop program for some time. iTunes' capabilities seem to be constantly improved and refined; its portable counterpart's behavior has remained relative unchanged, even as it has gained photo and ...

Read the rest of this post.

One of the lesser-used features of iTunes is its visualizer, the colorful animated display that accompanies any music that's playing. The visuals are a fun little distraction, but once the novelty wears off, the usefulness of the function tends to be limited. Though, in college, a PowerBook and an LCD projector made for a pretty rockin portable party system. Ol' trusty G-Force iTunes, from version 1.0, has shipped ...

Read the rest of this post.