kstruct

Perhaps it’s old news, but I had no idea that when you deleted some music which came from the iTunes Music Store from your iTunes library, you’d get the chance to restore it from your iPod.

Nice touch , though not actually what I wanted in this case (I originally bought an album on iTMS which was corrupt, got a refund then bought the CD instead, and have now finally got to deleting the old corrupted songs).

There are a few question - If I check the ‘Don’t ask me again’ box, can I enable the feature again somehow later? Wouldn’t it be great if iTunes could somehow do this for all music (not unreasonable if both the iPod and iTunes have been authorised)? Why is iTunes using the word purchased only for iTunes Music Store music (the music from my CDs being just as purchased)?

Anyway, one way or another, it seemed like a cute feature.

Technorati Tags: itms, mac, itunes, ipod, drm

A while back, I was given a spoken word MP3 CD (by my girlfriend) as a present, and over Christmas I was lucky enough to be given an iPod nano (by my parents). I hadn’t put any serious effort into the iTunes audiobook thing into the past, but figured I should try to get everything in there so I could listen to it on the iPod. Surprisingly, it’s not obvious how to do, since when you import mp3s into iTunes, it assumes they are music, not audiobooks.

Anyway, after a bit of research, it turns out there is a not-too-painful way to pull it all together.

1. The MP3s need to be translated into ACCs, ideally at a sensible spoken word bitrate, so jump into iTunes prefs -> Advanced -> Importing, and switch to ‘ACC Encoder’ and ‘Spoken Podcast’.
2. Import all the MP3s (dragging them to iTunes), then select them all, and choose ‘Convert selection to ACC’ from the Advanced menu.
3. Once they’re all converted, delete the MP3 versions.
4. Install the ‘Make Bookmarkable’ script from Doug’s AppleScripts for iTunes.
5. Select the converted ACC files, then pick ‘Make Bookmarkable’ from the scripts menu, which will change the file types so that iTunes thinks they are audiobooks.

(Unfortunatly the AppleScript part won’t work under Windows, but I believe changing the filename extensions from .m4a to .m4b and then removing and re-adding the file to iTunes should do the trick there).

I missed out on lots of good video games being a Mac/Sega guy, but I really should have played ‘The Secret of Monkey Island‘ long before now. Comedy really doesn’t seem to be done in new games too much now days, which is a pity (though understandable given that it’s pretty difficult to pull off without making a game seem too linear).

Anyway, some friends are having a pirate theme party tomorrow in honour of International Talk Like a Pirate Day (later in the week - September 19th). As part of my costume, I made up a “I found the treasure of Mêlée Island™ and all I got was this stupid T-Shirt” T-Shirt, which I thought I’d mention here, since I doubt anyone at the part will actually remember/get it.

Technorati Tags: games, pirate, the secret of monkey island

Has anyone else noticed a bug where, if you add the same song to a playlist on an iPod shuffle, it only plays at the first location in the list? I swear this used to work as expected, but I guess some firmware update broke it and I didn’t notice at the time.

It’s not that it’s causing me any major problems, but it’s a little odd.

Technorati Tags: iPod, bug

I previously mentioned noticing that Anaid is Diana spelt backwards, and hence probably isn’t her real name…

…It is apparently actually Diana Gosper.

And as an aside, how the hell did I get to the front page on MSN search for Diana Anaid (not that I’m complaining, but it seems a little off).

I actually went through and backed everything on my Mac up yesterday so I could install the latest batch of Apple updates. Silly though it may be, I was actually quite keen to try the iTunes mini store. There seems to have been quite a lot of stress over the privacy aspects lately, but I guess I’m just not overly stressed about it.

What does bother me, however, it that it’s apparently completely unusable.

That error dialog is modal (i.e. it won’t let me do anything until I dismiss it), and came up as a result of double clicking to start a song. Thankfully it doesn’t come up if a problem song plays automatically (i.e. as the next song in the playlist), but the problem does seem to be consistently caused by all songs with the same artist. Oh, and for those who are wondering, no, it doesn’t come up if the mini store is closed.

Now maybe this is a somewhat Australia specific problem, given that our store is still quite new and still gives these error messages in normal usage occasionally. But even if it only occurred one time in a thousand, it’s totally unacceptable for an action like playing a song to bring up some modal dialog which is, at best, peripherally related to the action. There’s a really obvious place for this error message to go in this case - into the mini store pane, which is what I hope to see happening in the next update.

I guess in the end, this reinforces the point some of the privacy guys have been making. You don’t expect playing a song in iTunes to have anything to do with the network, let alone give you back some sort of server error.

Anyway, that’s my rant for today. I’ll be turning it off and forgetting about it now.

Technorati Tags: mac, itunes, macword, mini store, itms, ui, design, music, privacy

I went to see Diana Anaid who was playing at the Greenroom last night here in Canberra. A very nice set, even though she seemed to have a bunch of trouble with her guitar’s pick-up.

I was actually a little surprised the place wasn’t packed out. I guess she’s not quite as well known as I imagined. Pity really, because she’s got a great voice, is really good looking (her face is somehow like a more attractive version of Sarah Jessica Parker) and has some great songs to go with it all. I’ve no idea really how I even first heard of her. The songs I know best are ‘Perfect Family’ and ‘Don’t believe in love’ and though I’m familiar with her best known song, ‘I go off’, I’ve never had a copy of it. It’s a shame her web-site doesn’t sell any of the back catalogue, and the iTunes music store link seems to be broken.

On a final note, I have to admit, I had never noticed until tonight that Anaid is just Diana backwards, which I guess means it’s only a stage name. One of those in jokes the music world always seems to be holding over those of us who don’t pay much attention to anything beyond the music itself I guess.

Does it bug anyone else when cover versions have different lyrics to the original?

I’ve been listening to the ‘She Will Have Her Way: The Songs of Tim & Neil Finn’ album which came out a little while back. Basically, it’s a bunch of Australian female singers doing cover versions of Tim and Neil Finn songs. On the whole, very nice stuff. The one which is bugging me, however, is ‘Persuasion’ which is sung here by Stellar (quite a nice voice, but I can’t say I’ve ever heard of her before).

(more…)

I just finished watching the awesome Evening at Adler video (I wish these sorts of things weren’t always on the opposite side of the world). Somewhere in the middle there is a discussion of digital rights management and one of the guys (I think it was the shape shifter guy) says he doesn’t mind weak DRM (i.e. as long as he can circumvent it), and then in further discussion that’s determined to be a slippery slope.

I remember reading quite a while back (though I can’t find where now) a discussion of DRM from a legal perspective as an inflexible implementation of legal principles (which are intended to be flexible). I guess it sort of goes back to what I said previously about “Intention, technology and the law“; much as people like me might like hard and fast rules which can be implemented, neither real life nor copyright law are supposed to work like that.

(more…)

So, it finally launched. Watch me not buy anything from Sony BMG until they’re on board.

Looks like there might be a kink or two still to be worked out however…