Genius Mixes

In addition to home sharing, another great iTunes 9.0 addition has been the "genius mix" function, which can be used straight from your iTunes library or taken on the road via an iPod.

What Apple has done with this function is collect data from 27 million users and their over 50 billion individual songs to determine as best they could which songs sound best with which other songs. So in my library that is very limited in 60s and 70s era british rock music it is very likely that choosing a song based on the Beatles will follow immediately with The Who since those are really the two bands whose catalogs I own that even remotely resemble one another. Here's a real life example I just tried: I wanted to create a mix based solely on the Beatles' "Maxwell Silver Hammer" which resulted in the following songs:

The Who - Pinball Wizard
CCR - Fortunate Sun
Monkees - I'm A Believer
Squeeze - Tempted
Beach Boys - Sloop John B

There's also an OK Go and Tenacious D song thrown in there, maybe to modern it up a little bit, but you get the idea.

Likewise, here are the first 5 songs on a mix based on the song "Prison Bound" by Social Distortion:

Rancid - Olympia, WA
NOFX - Bob
AFI - Totalimmortal
Clash - Death or Flory
Clash - Career Opportunities

As a fan of making my own mixes, I was skeptical at first, but Genius Mixes are usually so spot on in playing what I want to hear based on my mood that I've yet to need my own mixes since iTunes 9.0 landed.

Home Sharing

From the "where the eff were you when I was in college?" files, iTunes newest update 9.0 brought us something called Home Sharing. With Home Sharing, up to 5 computers on the same network can share their iTunes music libraries with one another. This means all you need to do is click and drag someone else's music into your own library and it's now on your drive ready to be copied to an iPod or just listened to at your leisure.

There are some hitches, of course. Something called "copyright law?" doesn't want you sharing music with other people who aren't you, so you need to "authorize" iTunes with the same user name and password on each device to be able to share freely. But with some creativity and trust this can be just a small hurdle.

Album Spotter

Album Spotter is a website that tells you which albums of a particular artist your collection is missing. Simply go to the site, upload your iTunes xml file, and decide which artist you want to check up on.

Seems like an interesting use of coding, though I'm not exactly sure who the target audience might be. If you like a band enough you'll probably already know which albums you're missing. Still, the website is free to use should you need it.

TuneUp Media

The product being sold at this website claims to clean up all of the information and album artwork in your iTunes library.

I doubt I'd ever pay for something like that, as I'm pretty obsessive with doing these things myself for my own collection, but I'd recommend it to everyone else whose mangled collections I have to witness. There's a trial version you should check out first if you're thinking about it. TuneUp supports both Mac and Windows.

There may me free alternatives, all listed at this website. I can't vouch for any of em'.

I Want That:

Apple Airport Express Edition:


Apple's Airport Express is one of the most versatile pieces of wireless technology that I'm aware of . It can act as either the center of a wireless network or as an extension to the range of an existing network. But for me its best use is as a way to listen to your iTunes music on any stereo system in your house.

The Airport Express has an audio-out jack that can be connected to any set of powered speakers with an analong or optical-audio input. From there you just connect to iTunes and tell it which set of speakers to play your music out of (you can select multiple sets depending on their proximity to the AE). This could be especially useful for laptop users and anyone planning to have parties at their house, especially if you have a set of outdoor speakers. Just think of the possibilities.

Macworld: Inside Airport Express

iPod Troubles

I haven't been updating too often in the past week or so. I've been much busier at work, which is probably a good thing. But also, I've been using any free time at home or work trying to figure out what has gone wrong with my iPods. They both simultaneously began displaying odd behavior, and I've been scouring message boards and making phone calls to figure out why. Here's my post on Apple's discussions website which details my plight. I don't think the iPods are broken, I just think I've accidentally corrupted all of the files and...well...I delete things:

I have a 2 month old 120gb Classic. I use it with a Mac. To save space, I delete most of my audio files from the mac after they are uploaded to the iPod (i trust it too much).

Anyway, over the weekend I updated iTunes AND I was using a program called "ipoddisk" to pull files from the iPod and put them back on the laptop. Either the iTunes update or using "ipoddisk" seems to have corrupted most of the mp3s on my iPod. I'm leaning towards the iTunes update. The iPod still connects perfectly to iTunes, but when I try to play the files they are unrecognized (marked with a little exclamation point.)If I try to play them on the iPod itself they are still recognized and accounted for by the memory, and the artwork and song information (song length, genre, etc.) is still there, they just simply won't play. They stop at 0:00 and never advance. This seems to have happened to MOST of the files. Suspiciously enough, a lot of the music by artists with names lower in the alphabet (AFI, Academy Is, Blink 182) still work, but after D or so, nothing works except random songs.

Nothing has actually said "corrupt" to me, but I can't figure out why the songs won't play anywhere. When the iPod is connected to iTunes and I try to play the non-working songs, I can literally feel my iPod "try" to load the song (the disk spins a bit), but nothing happens and the files still have an exclamation point. I also tried to maybe change ID3 tags, but apparently I can't.

I'm holding out hope that there are others experiencing something like this, because I really don't want to have to go through re-ripping all of 4,000 non-working songs. I did, however, confirm that deleting the "corrupt" songs from my iPod and then reloading them from the iTunes library fixes the problem. In my particular case, however, since I delete most files, this is not a solution for me.

Edit: I found out this also happened to my iPod nano, which confirms the good news that this can't possibly be a hardware malfunction and that the devices themselves are just fine. It's the files inside which I now believe were corrupted by "ipoddisk" (which is a dubious program) or possibly the iTunes 8.0.2 update or even an iPod firmware update that might have caused the issue. At any rate I'm getting a backup hard drive before I attempt to download the 3500 lost songs. I'm also glad at this point that it was ONLY 3500 rather than the 20,000 I hope to have a year from now.

Oh well, I can still listen to the Clash.

iTunes, DRM, and You

Buying music these days isn't what it used to be. You used to buy a record and then own the record and everything that came with it. But that meant you had to buy an album based on your hopes that it would be something you wanted. You couldn't test it out besides listening to a single or reading a review. The internet has obviously changed that dynamic. Downloading or ripping music has now become such a normal way of obtaining music that we now feel like we should not only be able to have the tracks that we download but we should be able to do with those files whatever we'd like. But when you purchase music through the iTunes music store you are in fact only renting that song file for as long as you use the computer it's on. This technology, called DRM, even limits (it knows) the amount of times you transfer the purchased track onto a device like an iPod. DRM exists in a lot of digital files and software these days, doing its best to prevent theft, even if it's at the expense of the honest consumers who are legitamately purchasing the goods.

In early 2009 Apple got permission from the RIAA to start releasing DRM free songs on a platform called iTunes Plus. The problem is that while the DRM tracks are .99cents, the DRM-free tracks will cost a bit more ($1.39). There's also a service that allows you to remove DRM from your previously purchased tracks, but that costs money too (.30 per track). While I don't think I'll use the service (I'll likely choose alternative means fo downloading those tracks if I lose them) I think the RIAA and Apple still don't really "get it" when it comes to music consumption in the ditital age. Increasing prices for DRM-free tracks just alienates those loyal, legal customers they already have who might view this as the final straw and take their business to Amazon, whose mp3 store has been DRM-free for a while.

Apple Vs. Apple Corps.

Continuing the McCartney/Beatles theme, did you ever notice that you can't "legally" download (can't say buy, since you don't technically own those purchases) Beatles albums online through any of the online mp3 retailers? While it may not seem like such a big deal given the ubiquity of ways to download or rip all of these tracks for free, it seems the mp3 market would represent a sizable chunk of revenue to those people who would stand to make some money from the Beatles' catalog being available online. So who are those people? Where does Michael Jackson fit in? There are a lot of parties involved, and it's not just Yoko being evil. Read about the drama, here.

Contrary to the belief of some, I think both Paul and Ringo would actually prefer to have their Beatles work available to legally download. Both have their solo work available through iTunes, and there's even a Wings track (Band on the Run) that was licensed to Activision for the most recent Guitar Hero title, "World Tour." So there goes any notion that the two surviving Beatles are just unwilling to join the digital age.

Hey iTunes, Don't Make it Bad -- CNN Money

Does Michael Jackson own the Beatles Music Library? -- The Straight Dope