Category: Mac

Almost forgot to mourn iTunes 5, which suffers the indignity of having the shortest major version number life in Apple History. I’m installing iTunes 6 right now, which comes 35 days after the launch of iTunes 5. It still features Scary Installer Pr0n—in fact, the only big change so far appears to be the addition of the Video category in the source list.

Well, the rumors were true: Apple’s new iPod includes video support. Now that it’s here, it’s hard to see how it could have taken so long. After all, all full sized iPods now sport color screens and more hard drive capacity than my PowerBook G3 had, and it could play video.

The evolution, though, is still impressive: thinner than the original iPod, a claimed 20 hours of battery life (thought they would have learned not to boast about that), and up to 150 hours of video. Plus an included S-Video cable to play it back on the big screen.

The interesting part of the announcement is the sale of video through the iTunes Store (guess we can’t just call it the iTunes Music Store any more). Episodes of Desperate Housewives are available at $1.99 a pop, as are episodes of Lost (and supposedly others, though the landing page for TV shows doesn’t appear to be there yet).

Music videos will also be available for download, and in yet another example of the music industry’s craniorectal tendencies, they’ll also cost $1.99 a pop. Hmm, let me think: for my $1.99, I could get two songs, one four-minute music video, or 45 minutes of a TV program that I could theoretically Tivo and download to my iPod anyway. Hmm.

Update: Best blow by blow so far is Paul Boutin for Engadget. And how uncool is it that Front Row and the Apple Remote are only available (apparently) with an iMac, and otherwise only work with the iPod? I want that “ten-foot experience” with a Mini. Or for my PowerBook.

I’m here to tell you that my brain should have been screaming at me earlier when I wrote the following passage:

…this morning I bit the bullet and deleted the remaining 32 GB of files.

Because, of course, when I deleted the contents of my Music folder, I also blew away the special iTunes folder. Which, of course, iTunes wants to have in the Music folder rather than in the Library like everything else that matters about your account. And which, of course, contains the iTunes Library and iTunes Music Library.xml files, which contain pointers to all the songs (trivial to recreate), all my playlist definitions (not trivial to recreate), and all the playcounts.

Aaaaaaaaaaaa.

Last time I lost the playcounts in the library it took me almost eight months to listen to every track again. One eMusic subscription and 200+ CDs of The Project later, that’s looking more like a year and a half. Not to mention recreating all the playlists.

So, I thought desperately, what to do? I know: in the olden days, I would have run Norton Utilities and undeleted the files. Simple, right?

Unfortunately, with HFS+ or Mac OS X or something, file recovery is a lot more difficult, as I discovered when I auditioned two recovery packages (and when I say “auditioned,” I mean bought, as that’s really the only way to test them out.

First up: FileSalvage, which has some really nice features, including a list that gets dynamically updated as new files are discovered, in-application preview (or at least text listing) of discovered files and … well, that’s it. Here‘s the trouble with file recovery in the Brave New World: there are no residual directory entries left to show what the file names once were. Somehow the type data is identifiable, but you don’t know the names. FileSalvage resolves this problem by presenting a list sorted by file type (good), where all the files of a single type have the same name (bad). If you are trying to find a single JPEG out of a list of 20000 items marked “file.jpg”, you’re really going to need that in-application preview.

Unfortunately there was a worse problem: it didn’t find either my binary iTunes Library or the XML based iTunes Music Library.xml. And of course at this point I discovered that not only did I not have the out of date backup I thought I had, I actually had no backup, thanks to a series of misadventures with Apple’s .Mac Backup software and the old 250 MB limit on iDisks.

Oy.

So I turned again to Google and found a recommendation for another backup program, DataRescue from ProSoft Engineering. Another chunk of change and another disk scan later, I had progress—in the form of 89 little fragments of either the XML file or the main binary database. And of course, all of them are incomplete and all of them have corrupting interpolations in them somewhere. So while I may be able to rescue the data from the XML file, I will be hand-editing a bunch of them to try to pull back as much as I can.

So ripping CDs is temporarily on hold, as is syncing the iPod, or doing just about anything else fun. I think this is going to take a while.

Oh: Definitely today DataRescue gets the big thumbs up for actually finding the damned files, even if they were in a zillion pieces.

As I alluded in the previous post, my Mac is a little unhappy right now. It’s been much unhappier on the software side—launch times of some applications are measured in minutes, the SBOD appears when doing even trivial actions in iTunes—and I’m going to try to find some measures today to fix the problem.

My first step was to bite the bullet and free some disk space. Since my iTunes library and all my music now reside on an external FireWire disk, I could theoretically have removed all the music files from the TiBook some months ago. I was reluctant, for no reason other than it meant I would have no access to music without the external drive (or my iPod). Realistically, though, I wouldn’t want to play music files in another location and mess up playcounts and library paths, so this morning I bit the bullet and deleted the remaining 32 GB of files. My disk free space is now up to 39 GB.

We’ll see how much difference that makes. My next step is to take a step back and do a clean Mac OS X install, archiving the previous installation, and see if there was something dragged along from an older system that was slowing things down. After that, I need to find an argument to spend the money to upgrade to 1GB of RAM, which I suspect will make the real difference. Since sadly both RAM slots are currently occupied on this machine, I can’t get away for less than $100. Around here, that constitutes Approval by Change Advisory Board required. We’ll see.

Update: the archive and install didn’t fix the problem.

The rumors were true: NewsGator is acquiring NetNewsWire from Brent Simmons’ Ranchero Software—and hiring Brent as a product architect. Big congrats to Brent. I look forward to the day when my NNW subscriptions sync seamlessly with every aggregator under the sun—though I want to see support for Bloglines continue in something more robust than “bug fix” mode.

Like some of the commenters on Brent’s post, I’m also concerned about the future of some of the other Ranchero work, particularly MarsEdit. You can’t let that one go, Brent!!! I still haven’t seen a blog editor on either platform that compares for usability and actual operation. Most of the ones I’ve tried on Windows can’t even connect to my Manila server (with the obvious exception of Radio). Hopefully Brent is able to find a good “other home” for it.

CNet: Apple takes on Yahoo with .Mac makeover. When I hit the login page at .Mac today I noticed a different look and feel. The mail client hasn’t been updated, but there’s now a gig of storage by default and there are new group offerings as well (hence the CNet article title).

Will the group offerings dethrone Yahoo? No, but the UI is cleaner than Yahoo Groups, even if the offering isn’t as robust. I’d like to see browsable group listings, for instance, and there’s no way to add a picture to the group from a member’s .Mac Pictures folder. Then again, there’s no integration yet between Yahoo Groups and Flickr, either.

A new version number for an old friend, amidst news of nano iPods and iTunes capable phones: iTunes 5.0 is out. UI changes, major: you can now have playlists in folders (what a relief). UI changes, minor: the volume slider no longer sits under the forward/back/play/pause buttons. (For the latter: why? Perhaps people were hitting the big buttons by mistake when adjusting the volume, or vice versa.) UI changes, gratuitous: on Windows, the window now blends seamlessly into the title bar, which is good, but actually looks a lot less cool. Probably it will just take some getting used to.

Scary installer moment: this ad, which I first saw at an Apple store. I don’t really think the young woman looks happy to be sharing her tunes with her friend:

More scary installer moment: the installer crapped out during the QuickTime install when it told me I needed to close Firefox—somehow it got trapped in an endless loop. I had to force quit the installer and reboot, and rerun the installation, at which point everything was fine.

Other impressions: parental controls ok, shuffle calibrator should put conspiracy theories of “is it really random” to rest, or at least confuse them, search bar looks useful, lyrics in tags looks good. Look forward to playing with the search bar on my home library.

It hasn’t been all hi-fi fun here, unfortunately. Esta’s PowerBook, which used to be my old faithful G3, has bitten the dust. It won’t boot any more. I made an appointment for her at the Cambridge Apple Store, and they indicated that (a) it needed some internal power circuitry replaced, which would set her back a few Franklins, and (b) they could have the fix done in seven business days. Oy.

They were pretty nice about suggesting some alternatives, though, including a recommendation for an alternative local repair shop and (most surprisingly) an Apple Store near Richmond that she didn’t know existed. (Who knew that Short Pump was Apple Store material?) She’ll end up going with the latter, based on the time factor.

In the meantime, we have discovered what Fast User Switching is made for—allowing guests to surf the web, check email, iChat, and upload digital photos without changing all their host’s settings.

ArsTechnica: Dissecting Mighty Mouse, a thorough disemboweling of Apple’s multi-button wonder. There are circuit board closeups for those who are into that sort of thing. No telling chip manufacturer names this time, though.

Me, I would settle for seeing my Mighty Mouse sometime this week. This is my sickness: I always choose free shipping then kvetch until the thing shows up.

I am edging closer to the point where I will start ripping my 1,000+ CD library to hard disk, and I’ve been collecting gear notes as I go. An interesting TidBITS discussion on the use of the AirPort Express with AirTunes to stream music has raised some interesting thoughts and ideas:

• Stereophile says that the optical out on the AirPort Express “allows the AirPort Express to assume a respectable role in a true high-end audio system.” Of course, to take advantage of this, I’d have to have an amplifier with more than one optical input…so that might have to wait.
• A reader mentioned that noise was a factor for listening, and recommended a hard drive enclosure from AMSElectronics for low noise and good price. I had previously decided I needed an external drive even if I used a Mac mini as the focus for my digital audio system, based on the small capacity of the 2.5″ drives that can be used in the mini.
• Also, it appears that 400 GB hard drives are becoming affordable, which is good news.

I also have an advantage of watching Fury’s process and brave blogging of the odder corners of a massive CD collection.

Other notes on having music on both a laptop and an external drive, courtesy of Playlist Magazine: How to shift iTunes libraries.

Steve Jobs must be getting a kickback from air conditioning manufacturers, because someone is making a lot of money off hell freezing over: First Mac on Intel, now a multi-button Apple mouse. The Mighty Mouse, as it is known (and for once, Apple has apparently fully licensed the name), doesn’t actually have physical buttons on the top, but you can click the left and right sides of the top to get a left and right click. There’s an embedded trackball for scrolling and left and right side buttons, and everything is customizable.

It’s totally unnecessary, but I ordered one anyway. 🙂

The Mac version of Dave Winer’s OPML Editor got released over the weekend. So far it’s avoiding the main problem that Radio Userland had, the inability to edit a weblog from multiple locations. I logged into the editor with my existing account information and it didn’t create a new blog. It wasn’t obvious, however, that the blog was the same—it’s hard to figure out how to get to previous blog information, such as the outline for the first day of the blog.

CNet: Konfabulous. Looks like Yahoo went shopping and bought themselves some widgets. Very very cool. Congrats to Arlo and his team, and congrats to Yahoo, who now arguably have a hand in the game for the post-browser, post-operating system desktop.

In the “following up old threads” department, I went back to Apple’s site to check if there was any news regarding the “insufficient bandwidth” issues that have kept us from using video chat features since I upgraded to Tiger. And sure enough, Support Article 301641 has been updated. Where it used to discuss QoS related issues with ISPs, it now suggests upgrading to 10.4.2 (which contains iChat AV 3.0.1) to fix the problem.

I’m looking forward to trying this out tonight. It will be nice to be able to chat with my inlaws again. The update apparently doesn’t fix all the issues, though this thread on the Apple forums is a pretty good rundown of troubleshooting methods to address remaining problems.

It isn’t the rumored iTunes Phone, but it’ll do: RSS enclosure support (aka podcasting support) is now available in iTunes 4.9. More after I get a chance to play with it.

By the way, is this the fastest adoption of a community developed technology by the bigs? It took much longer for RSS to gain enough traction that it was adopted in a major browser.