Apple

I’ve been a Mac user since 1991, so it’s inevitable that I’d have this as a category.

Almost perfect

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My current workspace here at home has been a bit cramped for a while. I’ve got two computers under my desk (one Mac and one PC), and three 17\” monitors on my desk (two for the Mac, one for the PC). It’s a nice workspace, but when you factor in two keyboards and two trackballs, it leaves very little actual deskspace left over.

This weekend, I picked up a new trackball for my Mac (a Microsoft Office Keyboard that I got free from work), my trackball, and my printer all plugged into the USB hub, switchable between both of my computers. Far more manageable, and I’ve got a lot more desk space available (of course, that means I’ll just have that many more soda cans strewn across my desk, but that’s beside the point…).

The only oddball glitch is that, for some odd reason, the Mac will occasionally forget about all the devices after I switch over to the PC and then switch back to the Mac. I’m not sure why this is, and was afraid I was going to have to go back to two sets of keyboards and trackballs. Then I discovered that as long as I leave the old Mac keyboard plugged in (sitting vertically on the floor, leaning against the Mac’s case), then when the Mac doesn’t respond to the keyboard or trackball that are on the switch, all I have to do it tap a key on the old keyboard with my toe, and suddenly everything on the switch starts responding again. It’s a little odd — and not quite a perfect solution, but hey, it works.

This babble brought to you courtesy of the fact that as I’ve been posting rather sporadically for the past week, I need some filler posts on the main page so that my site doesn’t look too tweaky. ;)

iTunes Man

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(by Scott Taylor, with apologies to Billy Joel, sung to the tune of ‘Piano Man’)

It’s nine o’ clock at the iTunes store,
A phenomenal crowd’s logging on,
There’s an old man on AOL
Finding music from ages bygone.

He says, “Steve can you play me a memory?
“I’m not really sure how it goes,
“But I typed in a track and got album names back!
“And I’m not even wearing my clothes!”

Oh la da da diddy da da, la da diddy da da da.
Sell us a song, you’re the iTunes man,
Sell us a song tonight.
Well, we’re all in the mood for a melody,
And you’ve got the pricing just right.

Now Claude at Vivendi’s a friend of mine
And his business is selling CDs.
And knows the solution for store distribution,
But he’s worried about MP3s.
He says “Steve I believe this is killing us!
“All these pirates don’t pay us a dime.
“Well I’m sure that you could be a billionaire,
“If you could sell music online.”

Oh la da da diddy da da, la da diddy da da da.
Sell us a song, you’re the iTunes man,
Sell us a song tonight.
Well, we’re all in the mood for a melody,
And you’ve got the pricing just right.

Now Paul is an iPod enthusiast
Who listens to Jazz with his wife
And he’s chatting with Maxine, who’s still in the rap scene
And probably will be for life.
And the waitress is downloading Dixie Chicks
As the dial-up man slowly gets Stones
Yes they’re sharing the bandwidth from Akamai
But it’s better than P2P clones.

Sell us a song, you’re the iTunes man,
Sell us a song tonight.
Well, we’re all in the mood for a melody,
And you’ve got the pricing just right.

Its a pretty good crowd for just Macintosh
And the PC guys give me a smile
Cause they know that iTunes will be Windows-bound soon
If they just can hold out for a while.

And the AAC sounds like originals
And rights management isn’t a pain,
And they sit at the screens of their iTunes machines
And say “Man, this is worse than cocaine!”

Sell us a song, you’re the iTunes man,
Sell us a song tonight.
Well, we’re all in the mood for a melody,
And you’ve got the pricing just right.

(found on /.)

'Recent Tunes' update

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Utilizing the iTunes Music Store linking hint I found earlier, I’ve updated the ‘Recent Tunes’ section of my sidebar. Before each artist, track, and album listing you’ll now see icons for Amazon and the iTunes Music Store — clicking on those will perform a search on the respective service for whichever line you clicked on. Nifty!

Some of the Amazon links are being a bit tweaky, and I’m not sure why, though. Sometimes they work fine, other times they get passed through with ‘"’ on either end of the search term, which confuses Amazon. I don’t know where that’s coming from, either — I can’t find that entity in any of the code on my side of things.

All the iTunes links work fine, however. The only caveat there is that they’re still building their selection, so the majority of my music probably isn’t listed yet. All good things in time, however.

Linking to the iTunes Music Store

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Excellent tip that I’m saving here for future use: how to create a website link that performs a search on the iTunes Music Store.

Link format (as a single line, broken here for clarity): itms://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZSearch.woa/wa/ com.apple.jingle.search.DirectAction/advancedSearchResults?

Immediately following the ending ? are any of four search terms, or a global search term:

  • songTerm= (song title)
  • artistTerm= (artist name)
  • albumTerm= (album title)
  • composerTerm= (composer name)
  • term= (global, search all fields)

Use & between query items if you are using more than one of the first four (non-global) querys, and replace any whitespace with %20.

Example: building a link to search for U2:

itms://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZSearch.woa/wa/ com.apple.jingle.search.DirectAction/advancedSearchResults?artistTerm=U2

Example: building a link to search for U2’s ‘The Joshua Tree’:

itms://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZSearch.woa/wa/ com.apple.jingle.search.DirectAction/ advancedSearchResults?artistTerm=U2&albumTerm=the%20joshua%20tree

Many thanks to Jim, Fuse, Erik, and Bill!

iTunes/www.applemusic.com

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Just some initial thoughts after playing around with iTunes 4.0 and the iTunes Music Store for a bit.

  • AAC: I’m sold. Through some very non-scientific, non-mathematical experimenting, I seem to be getting about a 40% reduction in file size with 128kbps AAC .m4a’s as opposed to 160kbps VBR .mp3’s. With a \~14,000 song, 75GB music collection, a 40% reduction in size is beautiful. Plus, they do sound at least the same, if not better.
  • iTunes 4.0: Basic functionality is still the same as previous versions of iTunes, which I was already quite happy with. They’ve obviously done some under-the-hood work, though — where I used to get “spinning beach balls” almost anytime I clicked around in iTunes, now the only time I get a wait cursor is when I’m getting info on multiple tracks at once. Much snappier performance — and on an aging 350Mhz blue-and-white G3, that’s pretty impressive.
  • iTunes Music Store: Again, I’m sold. Very nicely and simply integrated directly into iTunes, finding stuff in the store is a breeze. I’ve already purchased one track to replace a corrupted .mp3 file created from a scratched CD, and once the iTMS is tied to my .mac account, single-click purchasing works flawlessly. Could be dangerous, though — talk about instant gratification! The selection of music available could use a little work, though I suffer a bit in having more esoteric music tastes — the majority of the “big artists” seem to be pretty well represented, and Apple says that they’re constantly working on expanding their library. Can’t complain too much, though — I’ve even found some pleasant surprises that I’m thinking about picking up (lots of Bill Cosby, and even a fair chunk of Spike Jones albums!).

Excellent work, all around. As far as I’m concerned, all of the whiners at MeFi and /. can jump off a cliff — Apple’s got a good thing going here. The only downside I can see is that to take advantage of AAC’s smaller file sizes, I’ve got about 1500 CD’s to rip all over again…

Apple turns up the volume

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Well, today was the day that Apple finally made the announcments that rumor sites had been salivating over for the past few months. Lots of cool goodies…

  • QuickTime upgraded to v6.2, which includes support for AAC (more info on AAC here).
  • An iPod software update to v1.3, adding support for AAC, and longer battery life.
  • Redesigned and updated iPods, now in 10Gb, 15Gb, and 30Gb models, a slimmer design, software updates, and a price drop.
  • iTunes goes to v4.0, adding AAC support, Rendevouz local streaming (so you can stream audio from one Mac to others on the same local network), and support for the new…
  • …the long-rumored iTunes Music Store! Featuring 200,000 songs (and growing) from all the major music lables, previews of songs, one-click downloading, a 99 cent-per-song purchase price, and very reasonable DRM (unlimited listening time, unlimited CD burns, unlimited iPod support, purchased tracks can be copied to up to 3 other Macs), Apple looks to be making a good solid attempt to do the online-music experience well.

The new software just made it to my Mac — time to install and play!

iPod troubles

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Well, this bites. I’m having problems with my iPod. Normally I’m pretty good with getting things fixed, but I think this is beyond my abilities. Bleah.

Problem one: every so often, when plugging in the remote to the jack on the iPod, or just bumping the connector, the iPod will “short out” and reset. It’s more or less a minor annoyance — the iPod will reboot and start right up again, and the only real lasting effect is that the date and time need to be set — but an annoyance nothenless.

Problem two: iTunes doesn’t know that my iPod exists anymore. As far as I can tell, this behavior started after I applied the Security Update 2003-03-03 system patch. The iPod mounts to the Finder just fine, but nothing I can do seems to clue iTunes into the existence of the iPod.

I’ve tried applying the 10.2.4 Combo Update (even though I’d already updated to 10.2.4 using incremental upgrades, rumor has it that using the combo updater will fix a number of issues), completely deleting and then reinstalling iTunes, and completely resetting the iPod as outlined in Apple’s iPod troubleshooting pages. Nothing’s worked.

Luckily, my iPod is still under warranty, so I went ahead and placed a service request through Apple. I’ve never had to do this before, but I’ve read good reports on Apple’s turnaround time for service, but for the moment I’m without music when I’m not at home.

For some people, this might not be that big of a deal. For me? This bites. Hard.

Especially when some of the people at work insist on listening to “smooth jazz” — one of the few genres of music that I would gladly wipe from the face of the planet. Ugh. I want my iPod back!

Catching up, part two

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This time, the focus is on Macintosh goodies. All you PC-using heathens can read on in wistful fantasyland, or just find something else to do — like reinstall Windows again. ;)

  • Enough people linked to PerversionTracker that I finally had to take a look. Looks like I’ve got another regular read! Any site that the Opera webbrowser has “taken the cake, and it is filled with plague and cottage cheese,” and that it is “slower than a squashed waterbear” defintely gets my approval. (Via Brent Simmons, along with many other Mac-based weblogs)

  • I’m probably the last Mac afficionado to find out about this, but it looks like Safari is actually going to get tabs. Nifty! (Via MacSlash, MacRumors and others)

  • This could be a fun toy to play with: VoiceBox, a tiny app that will take text files and convert them to audio files using the Mac’s speech synthesis. It will even ‘read’ RSS feeds, so I could listen to websites on my iPod while going to work! Useful? Dunno yet. Cool, though. (Via Rael Dornfest)

Apple bloggers?

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There’s been much discussion recently regarding Microsoft bloggers, i.e., people who work at Microsoft and blog. I read a few of them (both because they’re good blogs, and because of the whole “know your enemy” philosophy [grin]).

Got me thinking, though — what about ‘Apple bloggers’? The only one I know of off the top of my head is Dave Hyatt, who works on the rendering engine for Safari. Any others out there I should know about?