Archive for the 'Tips and Tools' Category
Sunday, June 1, 2008
With more than 16,000 songs to manage, there is no more essential a tool in my library than iTunes' Smart Playlists. From building simple playlists for listening to creating complex queries for examination, Smart Playlists turn what would be a tedious burden into a trivial task. At the moment, I have more than 50 of them slicing, organizing and corralling my expansive collection of tunes into ...
Read the rest of this post.
Filed under Playlist Ideas, Tips and Tools, iTunes + iPod | Discussion »
This post is tagged:
id3, itunes, library, playlist, tag
Thursday, April 17, 2008
The iPod's default behavior is to sort alphabetically.
Here's Daft Punk's albums:
Discovery (2001), Homework (1997) and Human After All (2005).
Not that long ago, I was asked by a commenter if among other things, I had any suggestions for getting the iPod to sort albums chronologically. By default, the iPod's behavior is to sort albums alphabetically by title. In iTunes, there's the option to sort "Album ...
Read the rest of this post.
Filed under Tips and Tools, iTunes + iPod | 4 comments »
This post is tagged:
daft punk, ipod, itunes, nine inch nails, sorting
Tuesday, January 29, 2008
My original High Impact formula had a fundamental flaw, which I think I may have fixed.
I spent the last post talking about the albums that made the biggest "impact" on me during 2007, but what exactly does that mean? Over the summer, I came up with the general concept, which basically defined impact as the average number of times any particular song from an album or ...
Read the rest of this post.
Filed under Tips and Tools | Discussion »
This post is tagged:
analysis, library, statistics
Sunday, October 14, 2007
So........... anyone got ~$1200 to send my way? Why, you ask?
This thing:
TENORI-ON, the new seemingly brilliant and addictively fun musical composition device from Yamaha. TENORI-ON means "sound on your palm" in Japanese. That's a pretty fitting description of how it works.
While pressing LED buttons on the 16 x 16 grid as the loop indicator scrolls, players can create tones and rhythms, with each layer of music ...
Read the rest of this post.
Filed under Tips and Tools | Discussion »
This post is tagged:
jim orourke, tenori on, to rococo rot, yamaha
Sunday, August 12, 2007
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.
Filed under Tips and Tools, iTunes + iPod | Discussion »
This post is tagged:
album art, applescript, itunes, mac os x
Friday, July 13, 2007
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.
Filed under Tips and Tools, iTunes + iPod | 1 comments »
This post is tagged:
analysis, breeders, jerry goldsmith, jet, library, statistics
Wednesday, June 13, 2007
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.
Filed under Digital Library Management, Tips and Tools, iTunes + iPod | 2 comments »
This post is tagged:
aac, apple, itunes, lossless, max, pioneer, storage, velocity girl
Monday, June 4, 2007
The vast array of listening information available at Last.fm probably had a great deal to do with CBS's decision to purchase the company. Though I'm wary of the deal, I've not lost all hope for the site. The Audioscrobbler technology behind it is some pretty fascinating stuff and the data it collects is open and available be analyzed, interpreted, shared and displayed in a lot of ...
Read the rest of this post.
Filed under Tips and Tools | 1 comments »
This post is tagged:
graphs, last.fm, mogwai, radiohead, rankings, six degrees, statistics, the beatles, the strokes, visualizer
Monday, May 7, 2007
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.
Filed under Tips and Tools, iTunes + iPod | Discussion »
This post is tagged:
download, itunes, mac os x, novelty, plugin, ratatat, video, visualizer, windows
