iTunes + iPod

Tips, tricks, news, problems & advice for better use of iTunes and iPod

Free short film at iTunes Store: Good Morning Baby

Note: The offer from iTunes has expired.

If you’ve been searching for a reason to try out the iTunes’ much-promoted movie service, here’s one that might just persuade you.

Free film: Good Morning Babyoffer expired.

Description from the store:

A confused woman struggles between two loves-a love for her so-called future husband and a love for a new found home. Falling off her envisioned map of life, she tries to find her true self and her true love.

It’s gotten mixed reviews from iTunes users. Some people seem to love it, most don’t though (avg 3 stars). Oh, and it’s copyright Glamour Magazine, if that’s any indictation of what you might be getting into.

The flick doesn’t really seem like my typical fare. But, it’s only 13 minutes long, and free, so maybe I’ll try it out, just to see how the movie store works.

Films from the iTunes Store require Quicktime 7.1.3. The download is free, and don’t be fooled; the email address is optional.

Cue hard drive failure… Now

Like clockwork, each January means the end of Christmas decorations, the onset of the full desolation of winter, learning the motor-memory of writing a new year and, of course, a sudden, massive hard drive failure. Every year since 2001 it has happened to me, always to my external music drive and always in January.

It’s quite comical, if you have the right sense of humor.

Then it should not have been a surprise to me that, once again, right on schedule, my music drive crashed last night. I was politely updating my iPod, having devised a new experimental listening scheme for the new year. As it would take several minutes to copy the several thousand songs, I decided to have a quick shower.

When I returned, I found my desktop in an unusual state. iTunes was no longer running. Mail and Safari were quit as well. The three FireWire volumes that I normally have mounted (including the music one) were missing and LaunchBar’s command area was active, as if the computer had been restarted.

I had no idea what caused that state of affairs, and still don’t. But I sensed danger, so I decided to do my own restart, which went smoothly enough. Until it was time for the external drives to mount. Two of them did; one of them didn’t and I’ll let you guess which one.

Disk Utility was of no help, failing immediately. It could see the drive, but attempting repair resulted in a message similar to “The underlying task failed on exit.” Whatever the problem was, the drive’s directory looked like it was in bad shape. Fortunately there is a god whose name is DiskWarrior. This diagnostic deity has raised many drives from the dead and after a few minutes, he had raised one more, rescuing my music from binary oblivion.

From there, the iPod update went well, other than about 40 songs that did not make it back from Hades. However, having gotten accustomed to these failures, I’ve become the king of backups. Twice nightly, Synk, the handiest little backup program I know, copies my music volume and other important data to a dedicated backup disk. Some quick drags-and-drops and even those handfuls of missing files were replaced.

Though I still don’t have a clue what caused the malfunction, I gotta say that the experience really wasn’t that bad. Much better than past years. However, despite all my preparations, this is one New Year’s tradition I would rather not repeat.

And even though I didn’t have to make full use of mine, remember that lesson kids: Backup Backup Backup.

Mac OS 9 mp3 Abandonware: MusicVac

Something odd happened to me the other day while listening to my iPod. I was enjoying a bootlegged version of Jerry Goldsmith’s magnum opus, the score to the first Star Trek motion picture. One of the tracks is raw recording session featuring two takes of the now-famous main title.

The theme was just getting going when, at the 1:26 mark, it just stopped playing. The music went silent and the time counter stopped moving. The iPod itself wasn’t frozen. I could still skip to the next track, navigate menus, play other songs, etc, but this one file would not play all the way through.

The song played fine in iTunes and Quicktime Player, but for some reason, my iPod didn’t like it.

Using my troubleshooting “shinn” I surmised that the problem was with the file itself. In the past when I encountered problem mp3 files, usually the result of trying to play Windows-created files on my Mac, I turned to a little utility called MusicVac. The program cleared all the gunk out of the file, bad headers, corrupted ID3 tags, resource forks, etc, leaving behind a fresh mpeg stream. 99% of the time, MusicVac made the unplayable playable, succeeding where countless other apps failed.

Unfortunately for me, I couldn’t find the program in any of my software archives. It must have been lost in a hard drive crash or during the move from one computer to another over the years. So off to Google I went, but I wasn’t hopeful. This program was written for Mac OS 9 and I’d not heard of any updates since 1999 or so. Indeed the first few links pointed to a dead dhs.org site and everything else pointed to pages that looked like they hadn’t been updated since 1998.

It took a better part of the evening and more search strings than I can remember, but I finally found a downloadable copy, link intact, on an Italian ftp server. After moving the program and the troublesome mp3 to my G4 PowerBook (had to run in Classic and Classic doesn’t work on Intel Macs), I proceeded to “vacuum” the file.

A few seconds later, I had a brand new mp3, that I’m happy to report works just fine on my iPod.

Because MusicVac was so hard to track down and development seems to have ceased, I’ve decided to host a copy of it here. As I noted above, Classic or a booted version of OS 9 is required to use it. Sorry, Intel Mac users. The feature set from the Read Me is below.

Download MusicVac b9.

MusicVac currently offers these features:

Removal of info window comments (saved automatically to "Saved Comments" file, just in case you need them again)

Removal of the resource fork (saves some space by getting rid of unnecessary information)

Removal of a specified PC file extension if it exists (Blah.mp3 becomes Blah)

Removal of leading and ending spaces in file names.

Automatic repair of invalid file information bits. (invalid bundle bits, custom icon bits, etc. are fixed automatically)

Automatic repair of invalid file creation/modification dates

Find and replace in file names

Removal of Finder label for a file

Removal of non-standard headers

Save information about your MPEG files to a text file for easy viewing.

Creation/modification of ID3 and ID3v2 tags.

Change file type and creator. (Hold down the option key when dragging files to MusicVac to bring up the "Quick Change" dialog to temporarily switch file types.)

Other Notes:

Under VERY rare circumstances MusicVac can damage a file when removing a header – usually if the header is corrupt. If this happens, you can try to recover the file by dragging it to MusicVac while holding the command and control keys. You will most likely never need to do this.

ID3 editing works like this – MusicVac assumes the filename for the song title. If an ID3 tag already exists, it’s values are inserted into the fields automatically. If you click the "Recall Previous Entries" button (command-R), it will insert the artist and album you last entered. If you click "Skip", no ID3 information will be changed/added to this file. If you option-click "Skip", no ID3 information will be asked the rest of the current MusicVac session.

Five Things you might not have known about me

So Webomatica tagged me and I guess I’m now “it” for the five things chain blog that’s been making the rounds. The idea is for a blogger to post five items of potentially new information about themselves. I guess it’s to help readers gain more insight into the writer. So, I’m game.

Number One

I back-date my songs in iTunes’ Date Added field. If I’m encoding a CD I originally got as a birthday present in 1994, I set my Mac’s date to my birthday 1994 when importing it into my library. This is an awesome technique for creating Smart Playlists based on the various eras of my life. So if I want to relive my college days, I just have to set the playlist criteria to Date Added is between May 1997 and August 2000. It’s pretty rad.

Number Two

Of the 4 members of my nuclear family growing up, only my mom was born in the United States, yet we are all American citizens by birth. In fact, it’s about time to renew my passport.

One of my grandmothers however, is a citizen of France.

Number Three

I graduated from an International Baccalaureate high school, ninth in my class, and finished college in 3 years, with high honors. I’ve been wasting potential every day since.

Number Four

I’m currently sporting a shaved head and a kick-ass 10-week-old beard, real son-of-the-south style. But in high school, I had long thick hair. I was notorious on campus for it. Friends would joke that it was home to wild, scalp-dwelling beasts and that it had its own gravity well.

Near the end of chemistry class one day, I got into a “Fro Contest” with a friend. We both whipped out our combs and started to fling our coiffures up and around.

Since my hair was longer, gravity kept pulling it down. He won on height; I won on volume.

Number Five

And finally…

Famous People!

We all know the Six Degrees game, where you count how many people it takes to connect one person to another. The philosophy holds that every person in the world is separated at most by relationships to six other persons.

One thing that’s never been clear to me though, is how one counts the first connection. My inclination is that if you have a direct relationship with someone, then your degree of separation is “zero.” Thus, that person’s relationships with other people are the ones that are separated. Using this formula, your degrees of separating are equal to the number of people between yourself and someone else.

However, others might consider your relationship with yourself as “zero” and that the first connection is the one that’s separated from you. In that scenario, your direct relationships are the first degree of separation.

I like my idea, because it brings people closer together. It also sounds more impressive if are you’re able to connect yourself to notable people, which brings me to my fifth and final…

Five Things You Didn’t Know About Me: Number Five

I can count the chain, and I’m two degrees of separation away from Jon Stewart of Death to Smoochy and The Daily Show fame. I’m also only one degree of separation away from Avery Brooks, aka Captain Ben Sisko or as others may remember him, the baddass Hawk.

There you have it, my “five things.” Part of the game is that I’m now supposed to tag five other people to now complete this same task. Well, I don’t normally pass on chain letter, but this one is kinda fun. I don’t know five other bloggers though, so I’ll be limited to my co-resident, themodernista.

iPod security note: Owner Info.txt

owner info on ipod

Hopefully your day-that-happened-to-be-Christmas was full of family togetherness, holiday cheer, and of course, lucrative acquisitions. And once again Apple’s iPod dominated the retail scene. While sales figures aren’t out yet, I think there’s a strong possiblity that a new iPod was among those acquisitions ilounge claims more ipods sold in 2006 than 2001-2005 combined.

So, in the interest to providing security for all those iPods newly given and received, as well as those that have been hanging around, here’s a quick tip that will help to ensure the safety of your mp3 player in the event it becomes separated from you. It makes use of the iPod’s Notes feature and is something I’ve done with each iPod I’ve owned since I got my first one nearly five years ago has it really been five years?.

This procedure works for all iPods with a screen and the principle is simple. Drop a text file with the name Owner Info.txt into the Notes folder on your iPod. To do this, the iPod must be mounted as a drive on your desktop, which you can do by selecting Enable Disk Use from iTunes.

On Windows, use Notepad to create the file. By default, it saves a text file format, which is required for the note to work. On Mac OS X, use TextEdit, but make sure you must select Make Plain Text from the Format menu before saving.

Inside this text file, type a short message about to whom the iPod belongs and ways to contact you: email, phone, website, instant messenger, etc. You can even include a physical address in hopes that some kind soul will mail it back to you or drop it off in person. In this case, it may be wiser to use a work address or P.O. box if you have one; you probably don’t want any nefarious types knowing where you live.

click to see full size.

When you’re finished with your message, save it with the filename Owner Info.txt into the Notes folder. On your iPod, browse to Extra > Notes > Owner Info.txt and you’ll see your message displayed on screen. Should you lose your iPod, the person who finds it can read your message and contact you to return it.

If you ever sell or give your iPod away, make sure you change or remove the file.

Weaknesses

Of course, this isn’t a fool-proof suggestion. It’s primarily designed to help honest people return a lost iPod and, to a certain extent, help buyers of second-hand iPods identify stolen property. If any would-be thieves are savvy enough, they can easily delete or change the Owner Info.txt. Though, once you save your file, you can always turn off Enable Disk Use to set up a roadblock. Even if someone resets the iPod by linking it to a new iTunes library, your owner message will remain intact.

Additionally, if you use a case with your iPod, drop a small slip of paper behind it with the same contact info. Then you’ll have one more avenue of protection in the event of loss or theft.

Hopefully though, the more people who do this, the more standard it will become. If this practice reaches a critical mass, like luggage tags on a suitcase, people will automatically know where to look to contact an iPod that’s lost its owner.

Find iTunes Album Art with this AppleScript

iTunes 7’s built-in artwork finder is a great little enhancement to the program. But it does have it’s limitations. It seems to require exacting ID3 tags or it won’t return a requested cover. And if a particular song/album isn’t sold by the iTunes Music Store, well, you can just forget it. Likewise if you’re not running iTunes 7.

Cue SlothRadio.

SlothRadio.com is a streaming radio site and music blog who’s self-described mission to “just play great music.” I can’t vouch for that claim, but, in addition to that, the site does offer a nice cover finder. You can find high-quality art for music, movies, games and books just by typing into the search fields.

Results default from Amazon’s extensive catalog, but if that doesn’t turn up any results, you can do a Google Image Search with only one additional click.

The beautiful part, for Mac OS X users at least, comes in the form of an AppleScript from dougscripts.com called, appropriately, Search SlothRadio for Artwork. Drop that sucker into your Library > iTunes > Scripts folder and whenever you need to search for an album cover, just select the songs in your iTunes Library then run the script from the Scripts menu.

Voila: Instant artwork to drag & drop, copy & paste or do whatever you want to with it.

There’s a slight bug though. The script uses Safari to perform the query. It will give you an error if there’s not already a browser window open. But other than that, it presents a nearly flawless way to retrieve album covers.

Clean up your Composer tags already!

Update: The revised sorting feature/problem in iTunes 7.3 and later renders portions of this advice useless. Some of it still applies for Smart Playlist building, but the segregated sorting no longer works. If you’re using a version prior to 7.3, go nuts. If you’re using 7.3 or later, be warned.

In striving for zen-like simplicity while maintaining and extending the usability of iTunes, please follow me as I introduce you to the technique I use to keep my Composer tags orderly and navigable particularly when using an iPod. The idea is to streamline the presentation of the tags while adding meaning to them.

In my library there are three types of songs that require use of the composer tag:

Classical and other so-called “serious music”
Principally includes all works by traditionally-recognized composers and performed by orchestras, quartets, etc. Also includes film and television recordings that are not the originals, such as when the Royal Philharmonic plays Star Trek or Trotter Trio’s jazz CD Sketches on Star Wars.
Cover songs
Whether live or in studio, remakes or performances of songs that were originally recorded and released by another artist or group.
Remix Albums
Collections of remixes of other artists’ songs released under the marquee of the remixer. For example: Fila Brazillia’s Brazilification.

If a song in my library doesn’t belong to one of those categories, the composer tag is left empty, completely blank. There’s no need to use the tag in the pop/rock idiom; all the relevant info is contained in the song-artist-album structure.

The same goes for movie scores and other “Original Motion Picture Soundtracks.” It’s redundant to put “John Williams” in both the artist and composer when it’s his recording of the original release of the album that you’re tagging.

Some people are tempted to put the songwriter in the Composer space and CDDB/Gracenote often includes it when retrieving a CD.

Well, don’t. And if you already have, delete it.

How likely are you to go to the Composer field and select “Cobain, Kurt” when you want to hear Heart-shaped Box? Not very, I’m sure. You are much more likely to select “Nirvana” from the Artist field. If you must obsessively keep that info, put it in the Comments field. That way you can still find it in your Encyclopedia iTunica if you need it, but it won’t get in the way of using your iPod.

So how do we keep these styles from intermingling, so that you don’t end up with Guns n’ Roses next to Gustav Mahler?

It’s rather easy; just add leading character to the beginning of your composer text based on the type of file it is, particularly if a song does not fall into the Classical category.

In my scheme, classical music takes priority, as it is the format that best benefits from using the field. In these cases, the composer is, well, the composer. Syntax is up to you: Mahler; Gustav Mahler; Mahler, Gustav; however you see fit to do it.

Likewise for film and tv music that’s not from the original release. I treat those recordings the same as classical. The Artist tag goes to the ensemble performing the work while the original composer gets credit in the Composer tag.

Cover Tunes

With cover tunes, the original performer’s name is surrounded by brackets [ ]. So when The Cardigans play a Black Sabbath song Iron Man, the Composer tag looks like this [Black Sabbath]. Now all the cover songs are sorted alphabetically together on the iPod. Plus, I can create a Smart Playlist with condition Composer starts with [ and have all of them gathered in a single spot. If new cover tunes get added in the future, they’re automatically included in the Smart Playlist.

Cover tunes smart playlist. Click to see larger version.

Finally, there’s remix albums. There’s a long discussion to be had about how to treat those with iTunes.

Hopefully, these suggestions are helpful and will assist in taking full advantage of iTunes’/iPod’s power.