iTunes

Borges on iTunes. Sort of.

grant — Thu, 27 Dec 2007 13:21:55 -0500

Quote:

For one of those gnostics, the visible universe was an illusion or, more precisely, a sophism. Mirrors and fatherhood are abominable because they multiply it and extend it.
- Jorge Luis Borges, "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius," 1967.

For Christmas, I was quite pleased to get a Zen Stone Plus in my stocking. I'm one of those people - the ones who exist between platforms. (I lost my true allegiance decades ago, and have been a switch-hitter ever since.) One of the things this means is that I do some things by hand that other people - the loyalists - are used to having done automatically.

So there I was, Christmas afternoon, moving playlists from the iTunes on our Windows machine onto the cute little non-iPod. Grab, drag, copy.

The process immediately reminded me of Jorge Luis Borges' riffs on mirrors. He was simultaneously fascinated and repelled by them because they duplicated the world. There's something obscene about acts of reproduction.

It didn't help that I was, at the time, staring at a particularly large chunk of clutter that wound up in the middle of my dining room. It was a rack large enough to hold all of the family's CDs. We have quite a lot of them. A friend was getting rid of it. The problem is, though the storage would (will?) be vitally useful, we haven't been able to find a place where the rack actually fits.

And I like looking at CDs. The covers contain lots of visual information - each one reminding me of something I liked about that album (or single, or mix) in a way that the plain text of mp3 file names doesn't do. Sometimes, I can't search for that song I need - sometimes, I have to be reminded.

So, there I was, copying files from one drive onto another, portable, drive while looking at, well, another, much larger, kind of drive, and it struck me that I was doomed. Here I was, duplicating duplicates of songs most of which I had on disc, in the middle of trying to de-clutter my life. I was replicating more items. I was filling more space.

Mirrors are monstrous because they duplicate images of things. And iTunes - and any other mp3 ripper/filer/CD burner - is a kind of mirror.

What I need is a protocol for deleting mp3s. Not just minimizing the footprint of the collection (erasing artwork is just the beginning) but actually putting the music back on the discs. Where I can see it.

Oh, I thought. That's it. Instead of thinking of iTunes like a library, maybe if I thought of it more like a mirror - that doesn't display an image after I'm done with it. I'll still use it to burn mixes and load things onto the player. But if it's on a disc that fits on the rack - or if it can be burned onto one - then it's leaving my hard drive.

Now, if only I could find a wall where the rack will fit.

”Borges on iTunes. Sort of.” was written by grant balfour for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on December 27, 2007. Except as noted, it's ©2010 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Jacob Marley vs. Bob Marley: Shutting Out the Ghost of Music Past

wood.tang — Fri, 16 Nov 2007 17:32:10 -0500

In the few weeks since I wrote my first plea to trim the fat from your iTunes library, I've continued purging my own collection. On the first pass, I simply deleted the clearly objectionable stuff, things that I couldn't understand what made me want to keep them in the first place. It was rather easy, and like I said, it slimmed my corpulent media collection by a third.

Now though, it's getting down to brass tacks, and I'm making some hard decisions about what to keep. I don't need to do this for disk space, mind you, but as I've been trying to do a better job of organizing all my music and video with smarter lists and ratings, I've come to a simple conclusion: even if I still think it's good, I just have too much.

"A massive CD collection never felt like such a psychic burden as a massive iTunes library."

Other than the cost of acquiring it and the physical space it consumed, a massive CD collection never felt like such a psychic burden as a massive iTunes library. Because what I listened to on CD was limited to what I consciously pulled off the shelf, years of questionable purchases and bands that didn't age well never crashed my DJ party. They simply stayed on the shelf, collecting dust. But now that the booty bass novelty song that used to be so much fun back in college has just as good a chance of popping up on shuffle as "No Woman No Cry," it comes back to haunt me like the Ghost of Music Past, with gold chains clanking around his neck instead of shackles.

I realize I can avoid this problem with more smart playlists and clever tagging (or simply hitting the skip button), but how many people have the time to give that kind of care and feeding to a 10,000-track library? I'm one of the most obsessive music collectors I know, and I don't do it. The answer isn't so much devising a better needle-retrieval system as it is creating a smaller haystack.

This whole purging process has made me realize how much my tastes have changed. My main test when deciding to keep a song/album/artist now is to ask: would I ever intentionally pick this out to play? If the answer is no, I dump it. It's a much different answer than it was 10 years ago, and even if I used to blast the hell out of a certain song, if I can't see myself reaching for it again, it's time to move on.

This time around, I'm at least making a compromise by archiving the files instead of permanently deleting them (tip: tell iTunes to move them to the trash, then copy the files out of your trash bin before you empty it). It's fun to reminisce sometimes, but it shouldn't be that much work to sort out what your former self enjoyed from what you simply want to hear now.

”Jacob Marley vs. Bob Marley: Shutting Out the Ghost of Music Past” was written by Matt Wood for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on November 16, 2007. Except as noted, it's ©2010 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Put Your iTunes Library on a Diet

wood.tang — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 22:24:42 -0400

My music buying habits have slowed considerably since my college days, when I'd rush down to the music store every Tuesday and spend every penny I hadn’t guzzled through a beer bong the previous weekend, but I still managed to amass a rather prodigious CD collection. When I got a Mac and an iPod, this turned into a rather prodigious iTunes library, and quickly became a major thorn in my side.

Having suffered through a couple hard drive crashes, upgrades, and subsequent backing and re-backing up lately, I've really been feeling the weight of that 100+ GB media millstone around my neck. I felt so great when I ripped that last CD and put all those unsightly jewel cases into storage, thinking it would simplify my life. Instead, it just created bigger headaches.

I know, I know, there are a bazillion ways I can slice and dice my iTunes library, storing it on different drives, shunting the videos off to a server, pimping out my machines with terabyte drives, etc, but it begs the question: do I really need all that crap in my life?

I finally started doing something about it by ordering what I called D-Day II. My D-Day I happened in college when someone swiped a CD wallet full of about 50 discs, the first major casualties to my music collection. The irony is that while my renter's insurance paid me a pretty good settlement, I only repurchased about half of what I lost, and those were the supposed good albums that I was carrying around in my car all the time. It should have taught me the lesson back then that when it comes to buying music, we all suck.

So D-Day II involved combing through my iTunes library, deleting all the music I knew that not only would I never listen to again, but would probably embarrass me if it popped up in a party shuffle. Face it, as we get older, our tastes change. All those middling, B-list albums I bought based off recommendations from Yo! MTV Raps or three-star ratings in Rolling Stone? Gone. The 90% filler tracks on albums I basically bought for one good song? Gone. It was surprising how much junk I was toting around; after one pass, without making any really tough calls, I slimmed my iTunes library by a third.

And don't get me started with video. I haven't even bought that many TV shows or movies from iTunes, but I can already see it's going to cause problems. Once my son passes his Dora phase, it'll be adios, Swiper, no swiping my hard drive space. And as much as I loved those seasons of Weeds, I can't see myself ever watching them again, so if push comes to shove, Nancy and Conrad will have to go too.

I understand some of you may not have the guts to delete this stuff completely, but do yourself a favor and move the files to an external disk. Then put it away, mark down the date, and if a year later you haven't touched it, delete that thing and use it for porn again like it was meant to be. If you're having trouble getting started, Merlin posted some good tips about using smart playlists to identify the lame stuff.

Smart people like Peter Walsh are making a career out of helping us purge our physical junk, but we neglect our computer junk and end up with digital rec rooms stuffed full of bad 311 albums and box sets of Fastlane. What's the worst that can happen anyway? You'll have to buy a few albums again? Trust me, you won't even miss them.

”Put Your iTunes Library on a Diet” was written by Matt Wood for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on October 15, 2007. Except as noted, it's ©2010 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Amazon launches sale of DRM-free MP3s

Merlin — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 17:35:30 -0400

Daring Fireball: The Amazon MP3 Store and Amazon MP3 Downloader

Given the Amazon MP3 Store’s audio quality, prices, and user experience, I can’t see why anyone would buy DRM-restricted music from iTunes that’s available from Amazon. And given that Amazon is quite a bit cheaper than iTunes Plus, you might as well check Amazon first. I plan to.

I'm with Gruber -- this is a welcome and fan-friendly addition to the marketplace. And, frankly, I'm glad there's finally somebody out there who can really give Apple some competition in this area.

One thing: I'm surprised that MP3 sales links aren't yet mixed into regular CD sales pages. That must certainly be high on their TODO list. Because Amazon's Google juice is strong as hell, and on the day they put "Buy This Track Now" onto a few dozen thousand PR5+ music pages? Well. That may be the day Apple gets to really see what competition in this space looks like.

”Amazon launches sale of DRM-free MP3s” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on September 25, 2007. Except as noted, it's ©2010 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

"Perfect" iTunes equalizer setting

Merlin — Mon, 27 Aug 2007 07:18:34 -0400

Perfect

I noticed a lot of people are favoriting this screen grab of the "Perfect" iTunes equalizer setting (I posted it to Flickr, so I won't keep forgetting it when I need it).

Ever since I saw this in that Mac OS X Hints article, I've used it as my default equalizer in iTunes -- it seems to give a nice pop to MP3 tracks in particular.

HOWTO and specific settings from the original article:

Open the equalizer, and from the pop-up menu, select "Make Preset." Call it "Perfect," because it is, and set the following levels, from left to right (skip the Preamp section):

db +3, +6, +9, +7, +6, +5, +7, +9, +11, +8 db

”"Perfect" iTunes equalizer setting” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on August 27, 2007. Except as noted, it's ©2010 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

iTunes Plus, DRM-free tracks, arrive on iTunes Store

Merlin — Wed, 30 May 2007 08:40:50 -0400

iTunes Plus (iTunes link)

For help getting set up with "iTunes Plus" (giving you access to buying/upgrading EMI's DRM-free tracks), don't miss this handy helper from MacUser.

The DRM-free features are being billed as “iTunes Plus”: in order to turn it on, you have to click on your account name in the top right corner of the iTunes store. You’ll be prompted for your password, and then brought to the account information page. The top button on that page now reads “Manage iTunes Plus.” Clicking on that will let you choose whether or not iTunes will show you DRM-free tracks when available. Click the checkbox and hit “Save Changes” and you’re ready to rock.

”iTunes Plus, DRM-free tracks, arrive on iTunes Store” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on May 30, 2007. Except as noted, it's ©2010 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Microsoft to boldly go where Apple is already going...eventually

Merlin — Sat, 07 Apr 2007 09:17:58 -0400

Microsoft changes tune on selling DRM-free songs

Exciting news on the digital music front. Microsoft plans to follow Apple's plan to sell DRM-free tracks from EMI to its extant army of Zune enthusiasts. Welcome to the social:

"The EMI announcement on Monday was not exclusive to Apple," said Katy Asher, a Microsoft spokeswoman on the Zune team, in an e-mail to the IDG News Service today. She said Microsoft has been talking with EMI and other record labels "for some time now" about offering unprotected music on its Zune players in an effort to meet the needs of its customers.

Way to innovate, Redmond. Once the period of EMI's exclusive deal with Apple has ended, this should make both Zune owners very happy.

[via: Boing Boing: Microsoft dropping DRM from Zune Music Store]

”Microsoft to boldly go where Apple is already going...eventually” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on April 07, 2007. Except as noted, it's ©2010 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

MacBreak Weekly Special: the iTunes & EMI deal

Merlin — Mon, 02 Apr 2007 12:22:08 -0400

MacBreak Weekly Special Edition: Fixing A Hole

Hosts: Leo Laporte, Merlin Mann, Alex Lindsay, and John Gruber

A special edition discussing the Apple EMI announcement. Look for our regular weekly MBW on Tuesday as usual.

Direct Download MP3 file

Here's a few links related to this very cool story:

Apple Unveils Higher Quality DRM-Free Music on the iTunes Store - "DRM-free tracks from EMI will be offered at higher quality 256 kbps AAC encoding, resulting in audio quality indistinguishable from the original recording, for just $1.29 per song."
EMI Music launches DRM-free superior sound quality downloads across its entire digital repertoire - "EMI Music will continue to employ DRM as appropriate to enable innovative digital models such as subscription services"
2 April press conference - Downloadable audio of the press conference.
Daring Fireball: EMI to Offer DRM-Free Online Music - "So much for accusations that Jobs was full of shit with his 'Thoughts on Music' essay"
EMI, Apple partner on DRM-free premium music | CNET News.com - "When a reporter asked Jobs whether a Beatles deal with EMI was upcoming, Jobs replied, 'I want to know that, too.' Nicoli stressed that 'we're working on it.'"
World music market - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia on Flickr - Photo Sharing! - My take on one angle of this: "Combined, independent labels have twice EMI's US market share...My suspicion is that indie sales spikes on iTunes may be what convinces the other majors to get into the game."

”MacBreak Weekly Special: the iTunes & EMI deal” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on April 02, 2007. Except as noted, it's ©2010 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Vox Pop: Want HD video from iTunes and Apple TV?

Merlin — Sun, 25 Mar 2007 12:03:07 -0400

Since the new TV can handle video up to HD's 720p resolution, there's been a lot of speculation about whether the iTunes store will eventually start selling HD content, such as TV shows and movies. You can bet that the desire for that quality of presentation is theoretically out there (at least it is for this HD TV owner). The problem, as many folks have discussed at length, is that the file size for HD movies, in particular, may be prohibitively large for the garden-variety home broadband user.

As Greg Keene notes, "With simple math, we can extrapolate that a 2-hour movie would be about 3.9 GB." That's not only a substantially lengthy download for, say, a residential DSL subscriber, it also represents the investment of over 10% of the available space on the Apple TV's drive (as well as, it should be noted, an equivalent chunk of space back on your Mac or PC's disk).

In his very good "Apple TV: iTunes Store Movie Quality vs DVD, HD, Cable," Daniel Eran writes:

Since the existing "near DVD" quality movies are already large downloads, Apple would either have to highly compress HDTV or accommodate much longer downloads. Don’t expect a sudden move to HDTV from iTunes...

Apple optimistically estimates that broadband iTunes users can download its “near DVD quality” movies in a couple hours, so HD movies would either take well over a day of sustained downloading at full tilt, or require far more compression.

This is one reason I think the Apple TV may be giving a kind of temporary competitive advantage to producers of shorter-length HD content, such as -- well -- let's say video podcasters. It's a big reason behind our decision to start shooting and releasing The Merlin Show in 720p over the next month or so. The current hi-res version of the show -- which actually looks pretty good on my Apple TV -- is presented at widescreen 854x480, which makes our most recent, 14-minute episode weigh in at 88 MB (about 6 MB/minute).

Here's a comparison of the three screen resolutions (720p, hi-res/854x480, and iPod/320x176) for reference (This is just for relative size comparison; you can mentally change the image's "mm" to "px.")

Seems to me that the typical expectation for podcasts is that, while they will be released on a relatively regular basis, they will also get downloaded automatically in the background and then get synched to a device like a Video iPod or TV for viewing at the user's convenience.

But, movies, and to a lesser extent, single episodes of TV shows, strike me as more of an impulse item -- something you want to download and watch more or less now. Knowing there's two hours and multiple gigs of disk space between you and Norbit might be a disincentive to downloading, right? But, then again, people don't seem to mind the wait of their Netflix queue, right? I dunno. You tell me.

Given the constraints of time and disk space, would you purchase (and wait for the download of) HD content for your TV? What do you think is an acceptable resolution for content on your HD TV? Anybody hacked on their unit yet? Whither TV, iTunes, and HD?

”Vox Pop: Want HD video from iTunes and Apple TV?” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on March 25, 2007. Except as noted, it's ©2010 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

TechDigs: Mac-friendly RAID 5 setup with Infrant ReadyNAS

Merlin — Thu, 25 Jan 2007 07:51:40 -0500

Help, My Hard Drive is Full! - TechDigs.net

One of my ongoing rants on MacBreak Weekly revolves around how hard I've found it to keep up with the spiraling need for responsible personal backup. Photos, movies, audio, documents, you name it. As Mark Pilgrim asked last May, "How do you back up 100 GB of data per year for 50 years?" And don't get me started on media rotation and offsite copies. The mind boggles. I mean, remember when a shoebox full of Zip disks and a copy of Retrospect was all you needed? Good times.

I don't have the long-term solution I'm after just yet (although, I sometimes think Amazon S3 is heading us in the right direction), but for the middle-term, my call for help has been answered handsomely by Greg Keene of TechDigs, who's put together a detailed breakdown on how he wires things together around his Infrant ReadyNAS NV (amzn) -- it's Mac-friendly, Raid 5-able, and has an assload of configurable options.

Greg lays out the problem he's trying to solve:

I have both Mac and Windows computers on my home network that all want/need access to these shared files for different purposes. Most video files are watched in the theater where we have a Media Center PC connected to a DLP projector. The photo files are used by all of the machines on the network for both viewing and editing. At home, most music is listened to over a Sonos music system, and three iPods are synced on Mac and Windows computers. However, when I travel I still want to be able to download podcasts on my MacBook Pro and sync them onto my iPod. The problem became clear with the realization that my life now simply demanded managing hundreds of gigabytes of data. It was time to move to the next level.

Greg goes on to detail how he handles basic setup, automated backups, centralized libraries for iTunes and photos, and more.

This is a great read and has been very useful to me in getting closer to a backup server solution I can live with. Thanks for putting this together, Greg!

Link to Greg's article »

”TechDigs: Mac-friendly RAID 5 setup with Infrant ReadyNAS” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on January 25, 2007. Except as noted, it's ©2010 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"