9 posts tagged “itunes”
For this couple of weeks I've been trying to get the best out of my iTunes library with as many devices as possible. So far I ended up installing and having things like these:
- Mac mini
- iTunes
- JewelCase
- iScrobbler
- Simplify Media
- Remote buddy (with Ajax Remote)
- PSP
- coverBuddy (unregistered yet)
- chumby
- SqueezeCenter (formerly known as Slim Server)
- iTunes-LAME
- iPod nano (want to upgrade to iPhone or Touch)
- Airport Express
I guess I want to draw a picture diagram of how these work together, but basically I can do things like:
- Turn my TV and home audio into a complete jukebox, displaying the cover art full-screen (Remote Buddy, JewelCase)
- ... and skip, rate and control that jukebox with Apple Remote (Remote Budy), iPhone (Remote Buddy Ajax ... yet to come) or PSP (coverBuddy)
- Listen to my home library from work (SimplifyMedia or SqueezeCenter)
- Listen to my iTunes library from my bedroom or bathroom (chumby + squeezeCenter)
- ... and control the playlist with PSP (squeezeCenter Handheld skin + PSP)
- Scrobble all of these play history to Last.fm (iScrobbler and SqueezeCenter Scrobble plugin)
Some of these "I can do this!" are just plain useless beside it's a nice hack. But having an unified library on my home computer and being able to listen to all of them everywhere and control via any tools is, AWESOME.
Simplify Media to share music
So, the previous blog post started a huge discussion of what's the best way to synchronize your data, especially music, between your work laptop, home laptop and home media center. For me they're MacBook at work, ThinkPad X40 for home laptop and Mac mini for the media center.
I knew there's a solution like VPN using Hamachi but i guessed there's a better technology for it since it's 2008, and viola, SImplify Media allows you to share your music at home from remotely, as well as sharing music upto 30 friends. No router config is necessary and it's free, works on both Mac and PC. I installed the software both on my work MacBook and home Mac mini. Just does what I want. Well done.
Copying iTunes Library from PC to Mac
So the only problem remaining is that I still own the other library (relatively new songs) on ThinkPad X40 drive. I usually listen to these songs using iTunes + Airport at home, and also syncing these to my iPod nano (which is pretty much short of the disk space), but it'd be much better if I can just copy those files to Mac mini.
Copying iTunes library on one computer to another, seems to be a hard problem to solve and it's a shame for Apple. Of course the obvious solution for that is just copy the folder containing mp3s, m4as and m4p (iTunes DRMed files) to the new machine and import these files. But that way song metadata like rating will be lost.
The apparently-easiest solution is to use iTunes's built-in "Export Library" menu, but again shame Apple, this doesn't do anything more than just dumping file information to a giant XML file. Files are still located in "My Music" folder and there's no way to copy those files while keeping associations to them. LAME.
So quick googling shows that there's a software to solve this problem: iTunes Library Mover. This does what I want: munge Library.xml to change the <Location> property to new portable drive and actually copy over the files. The video on the site is very easy to understand if my explanation doesn't make any sense to you. I tested it, but unfortunately, the software doesn't handle Unicode filenames very well. Alas Windows.
So ... I ended up writing my own tiny perl script itunes-mover.pl to do the same thing, but with special care on Japanese filename mp3s. It needs some tweaks and only runs on Windows with ActivePerl, but it's not that difficult to change it to run on Mac, if you want to copy iTunes library from Mac to PC or Mac to Mac.
iTunes slowness and Unicode woes
That way I could dump all music files on my PC iTunes and imported all of them to my Mac mini iTunes, while keeping the album artwork and ratings. Apparently there's a playcount metadata in library.xml but it was not preserved. But anyway, now I can listen to my entire music library from work. Great thing, but still two other issues.
The default iTunes has a problem with non-ASCII (Japanese Shift_JIS especially) MP3 ID tags and i've got lots of corrupted tags like you can see. So if you have non-English artists or songs in your library, better patch your iTunes with Tune-up iTunes before importing the entire library. I should've done that.
The other thing is now that the iTunes has 5000 songs, 25GB on extra hard drive via USB 2.0 (HFS formatted), I'm finding the app constantly being slow, with that spinner thing in the center of the screen. I guess it's just USB connection is the source of the problem, but Library.xml should have all the data necessary to list the songs view and it's on its primary disk. Hmm.
Software hate still goes on... but anyway, it's getting a little better. Next thing: Free my music from iTunes store DRM protection. I did that using QTFairUse before dumping files on X40, but my Mac has 1000+ of those files already. I could copy these files back to Windows and run QTFU to decrypt and then sync back, but there seems to be Mac version of it: ffh. Might wanna write a frontend perl script to automate that process again...
Now I'm back home in USA and tested the Amazon MP3 256kbps VBR files over AirTunes.
It's choppy. Boo.
My understanding of the AirTunes protocol is that the iTunes decodes mp3 files to WAV (or whatever raw data) and encodes them to Apple Lossless and sends it over the wireless network to AirTunes in an encrypted format. Fix me if I'm wrong.
So the fact that it's choppy with 256kbps MP3 but not with 128kbps MP3 indicates that it's a client problem? I'm running iTunes 7.4.2.4 on Windows XP and stream the music over AirTunes. The wireless connection is 802.11g directly connected to the Airport express.
I'll shut down bunch of apps on Windows to see if it fixes the problem, if iTunes needs more CPU to decode the higher bitrate files. Otherwise I'll copy the mp3 files to Mac and plays locally (without AirTunes).
Amazon MP3 is so much better than iTunes store because
- They have DRM-free 256kbps MP3, not damn DRM-ed 128kbps AAC
- Amazon MP3 downloader "just works" with my Windows XP and iTunes
- Albums are cheaper!
- Individual albums have permanent links that work on browsers, like Direction by The Starting Line (still -1 for Amazon's wacky URLs)
- Sharing my music library is that easy. Another social network music taste, besides last.fm :)
Today I tested out with KT Tunstall and ended up buying lots of recent punk/alternative albums that I missed on iTunes store for some reason:
- Sum 41 - Underclass Hero
- The Starting Line - Direction
- Mae - Singularity
- New Found Glory - From the screen to the stereo Pt.2
The only downside of having 256kbps mp3 is that my nano can contain half # of songs in its 2GB storage. Re-encoding them to 128kbps is definitely possible but sounds so lame and I guess I would end up upgrading my nano to 8GB (or to iPhone or iPod touch) if I really want to store lots of songs. That's a bit ironic if switching to Amazon MP3 potentially recommends me to upgrade my other Apple product :)
Oh, and I experienced choppy AirTunes with higher bit-rate mp3s the other day. Do I need to upgrade my Airport Express to Extreme as well? :p
Now I'd like to know if Amazon associate links and ECS web APIs still "just work" with Amazon MP3 items. Would be lovely if I can add these digital music to my Vox "Audio" library (with VoxThis)!
I installed Democracy, the decent Videocast client program on Mac mini and am enjoying the High-Def content from the Web, like Rocketboom, Ask a Ninja and Diggnation. (Some of them might not be technically HD but the quality is good enough).
One of my fave sites to find trailers is Dave's Trailers Page, which collects links to mostly HD movie trailers on Yahoo! movies or Apple trailers page every week. But the site doesn't have an RSS feed and there's no way to track or automatically download the new trailers, etc.
So I made the feed. You can subscribe to the feed using Democracy or just default iTunes, and hook the computer to the TV. Every day you can get the High-Def (the feed is linking to 720p quality one) trailers automatically, which is very nice.
For those who are interested, It's done by 20 lines of Web::Scraper script and the latest plagger on SVN. You can change to 1080p if you want, and run it yourself to host the rss feed file. I guess you might be able to do this with Y! Pipes but scraping data is dead easy if you use Web::Scraper module, which I'll talk about in YAPC::Europe in Vienna.
I went down to the Apple store and purchased $50 iTMS gift card. I need to buy this until I get a credit card that has U.S. billing address.
Anyway I purchased Foo Fighters' new accoustic live album which is really good, and Copeland new one too. Copeland is going to play in Slim's on Monday. I wonder if I should go see there...
Ellegarden has been on my antenna for a while, whenever I listen to their song on cable TV stations like MTV Japan. They're a Japanese alternative rock band (kind of emo + punk) and does really great tunes. I just downloaded their (probably first) major album "Riot on the Grill" from iTMS Japan and it surely rocks.
If you like New Found Glory, the Ataris or Blink-182, you'll definitely like ELLEGARDEN as well. Check out Last.fm artist page for more.
Just downloaded Dashboard Confessional's new one "Dusk and Summer" from iTunes Music Store. So far, this album really rocks. Chris Carrabba's emotional vox (Oh, vox!) still impresses me and the melody is so good.
Note to myself: Don't forget to buy the iTunes Music Store gift card when you get to San Francisco next time.
The smash hit song "Bad Day" and the first song in the album "Song 6" really rocks me out. I love them.
