greenthinks » iTunes

Silliness and Partisanship

nate — Fri, 10 Mar 2006 15:25:22 +0000

David Pogue’s New York Times review of the new Samgsung iPod nano-challenger, the Z5, is actually pretty spot on (though why for the love of God can he NOT do his own battery tests?!). Towards the end though, there is this bit of inanity:

MUSIC STORE INTEGRATION No. At Samsung’s suggestion, I tested the Z5 with Rhapsody’s store, which is available directly from the copy of Windows Media Player provided by the Z5’s installer. After banging my head on the keyboard for an hour, unable to get it to work, a Rhapsody rep finally let me know that, in fact, Rhapsody’s subscription store doesn’t work in Media Player â€” only with Rhapsody’s own software jukebox. (So much for the Microsoft “Plays for Sure” logo. Try “Plays for Some People.”)

Now, perhaps I should be blaming Samsung for sending this particularly clueless customer of theirs to WiMP instead of Rhapsody’s own client, but for the technology reporter of the New York Times to be clueless enough about Rhapsody to try to run it from inside WiMP is just absurd. While I generally like Pogue, this example just feeds the flames of the “David Pogue is an Apple shill!” slurs—and given his clear lack of knowledge or understanding about iTunes alternatives (and a complete lack of a sense that he should be embarrassed by that?!), I guess I would just have to agree.

The iTunes Gulf

nate — Tue, 14 Feb 2006 21:50:50 +0000

So I was going to comment on the lack of Applescriptability in iTunes for Windows (not that I would expect it to be included since its underlying structure, the System Events system, is a pretty low level part of the Mac OS). This was in response to some blogger’s list of 5 improvements he’d like to see in the next version of iTunes. He was clearly talking about the Windows version, because multiple items on his list have been solved for me for a long time with scripts (he also said he was running it on Windows). Unfortunately, try as I might, I cannot for the life of me locate said article.

Oh well, I just wanted to recognize the fact that the grass is still a little greener for us Mac users here in terms of iTunes functionality.

More than iPods Tomorrow

nate — Wed, 12 Oct 2005 05:33:00 +0000

The conventional wisdom about Apple’s announcements tomorrow says that Apple will be introducing some new iPods. Maybe a new set of higher end iPods and perhaps a pink Madonna iPod nano.

Some people have been talking about a video iPod, but most experts have poo-pooed that idea, saying that Apple would need to re-engineer its online store for movies and that bandwidth, and the deals with movie studios necessary for such an undertaking, are not in place.

However, today another piece of the puzzle fell into place. Every week on Tuesday Apple updates the Music Store with new music. This week Tuesday came and went with no new music, no newly released albums, no new additions from older catalogs.

So even if the more conservative prognostications are accurate, it seems that Apple is at least updating the iTunes Music Store as well tomorrow. It may in fact be more than that, however.

MacRumors reports that a new iTunes version may be released sometime soon. They guess it is 5.0.2, but I would put more money on 5.1. iTunes 5 was a typically underwhelming x.0 release (remember v4.0?) and now Apple probably plans to add all sorts of more interesting functionality in point releases over the next year or so.

It might even turn out to be more significant than that. Think Secret is now speculating that Apple will indeed release video iPods tomorrow and that the iTunes video store will debut. My take is that Apple will announce such devices without the vital functionality (vital according to Apple executives) of ripping DVD’s to one’s HD, but with big collaborations (e.g. BBC) and with a big push towards music videos and vlogging. The company will then attempt to use its iPod cache to exert pressure on the government and the industry to make ripping one’s own DVD’s for use on one’s video iPod a legal and feasible reality.

Well, here’s hoping…

iPod slows down iTunes and other mini problems

nate — Mon, 01 Aug 2005 22:09:34 +0000

Is it just me, or does leaving your iPod (I’ve got a 6GB mini) plugged into your mac cause quite the slowdown in iTunes? I feel like anytime I’ve got the iPod loaded in there, iTunes hangs every time I click on something. Even scrolling through my library doesn’t work well – but only when the iPod is plugged in!

I’ve got my mini set to not use disk access, so it mounts just to sync, then unmounts in the Finder, but stays in iTunes until unplugged. This actually brings up two other problems I have with the way iTunes (at least until 4.9) works with the iPod mini.

First, the lack of autosync. Yes, if you have a large-HD iPod or a small music library, then iTunes and iPod do autosyncing quite nicely, but if like many of us, you have an almost 30GB music library and you carry around a subset of that on an iPod mini, then it only syncs your selected playlists upon connecting. After that, if you make changes to those playlists, import or download new music, even rate a song, the only way the iPod will see those changes is if you manually click “Update,” which is hidden in the File menu. At least, the “Browse” (which gets grayed out for autosyncing iPods) should change to “Update” when you’re on the iPod, like it does for Podcasts. But really, why can’t any change to the selected playlists cause the iPod to resync?

Second, since we mini users need to configure what is going to end up on our iPods, we would also benefit from the iPod shuffle feature of leaving the iPod (really a ghost version) in the Source list for editing, even when the device itself is not plugged in. This way I could make the decision to pull a playlist or album off the iPod, and then only plug in and sync when I’m ready to leave. The way it works now, setting up my iPod is not a natural iTunes activity, but something that requires pulling out the iPod, getting and untangling the cable, and waiting while the mac figures out that the mini is plugged in, then locks up while it connects iTunes with the mini. Really not optimal.

Apple, the iPod is clearly the best out there, but we can do better.

iTunes New Music Wednesdays!?

nate — Thu, 14 Jul 2005 08:41:35 +0000

It was only a few months ago—Steve stood onstage at D:All Things Digital, and showed off podcasting in iTunes. One of the podcasts he showed, in fact the last one he highlighted, was a “test” that Apple was doing. It was a podcast version of the New Music Tuesdays email newsletters that Apple has been sending out since the Music Store launched.

Steve totally blew it off at the time, but only a few months later iTunes 4.9 with podcasting is here and what?

It’s #1! Guess this wasn’t just the mild-mannered test Steve said it was…

All this would be fine, since the podcast is actually quite good, if only it would be available on Tuesdays! For the last few Tuesdays, the podcast listing does not even update until late Tuesday night or early Wednesday morning, and even then it gets an error when it tries to download. By the time it’s actually available, it’s Wednesday afternoon. So much for New Music Tuesdays…