Tag Archives: ipod

Rediscover your lost favourite songs in iTunes

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Rob playing air guitarThe past decade has been a boon for music lovers (once you get past the whole most-digital-music-sucks thing). The iPod turns 10 years old this October; as you’ll no doubt recall from much of the commentary at the time, it was Apple’s biggest mistake and quickly vanished into obscurity.

But the iPod wasn’t the world’s first portable digital music player… and it wasn’t even Apple’s first foray into that space. That honour goes to iTunes, which turns 10 years old on Sunday.

iTunes has turned us all into our own personal DJs, with the ability to create and update playlists – either manually or automatically, using iTunes’ powerful Smart Playlist feature. You end up with separate playlists for the gym, for your morning commute, for your afternoon commute, for dinner parties, for keeping the kids happy during long drives, for getting the kids to fall asleep during long drives…

But one of the side effects of playlists is you start to forget the stuff that isn’t in them. Apple gives you a Smart Playlist called “My Top Rated”, but that can quickly become a self-fulfilling (and repetitive) prophecy if you aren’t diligent about rating your songs. You may find that you have thousands of songs on your iPod, iPhone or Mac, but you end up listening to the same handful over and over again because, well, they’re the ones that are in your playlists.

Now, if you’re the kind of person who relentlessly mines their music collection to freshen their playlists, then you don’t have this problem. But for a lot of us who don’t do that kind of spelunking very often, and who have songs that we’ve actually forgotten we own, a little automation can help unearth some lost gems.

So I’ve created two Smart Playlists to help me keep the hits coming.

The first is for routine listening. It uses several criteria:

  • Rating is greater than three stars.
  • Genre is not Podcast, Children, Voice Memo, Comedy or Spoken Word
  • Media Kind is Music

I limit the list to 100 songs, selected by least recently played.

The result is a playlist include songs I’ve liked in the past, but haven’t heard recently. (Depending on your listening behaviour, you’ll want to tweak the rating setting to populate the playlist with enough songs. You may also need to exclude a few more genres.)

The second is for discovery. I duplicated the first playlist, but changed the rating criteria to less than one star – that is, unrated. As I listen to that list, I find I do a lot of skipping… but I also rate the songs as I go. (And often I’ll just plow through a bunch of them in iTunes.) That helps to feed my routine listening list as well as all my other Smart Playlists that rely on ratings.

Thanks to this setup, right now I’m listening to “Somehow” by The Vapors, which I haven’t heard in years. Next up is “The Way It Goes” (iTunes) by Wild Strawberries. If you try something like this, and recover some long-lost treasure from the dusty corners of the iTunes vault, let me know what it is.

Update: Kate Trgovac has created what I now consider to be the good version of this post, including the key missing ingredient: a screen shot. And if you want to take a more rigorous (and quite possibly more satisfying) approach, check out this amazing system of playlists and scripts from Maximilian.

Am I really the only person with Earbud Incompatibility Syndrome?

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Okay, listen: we can be friends and all, but there is a barrier between us, a profound and irreconcilable difference, a gulf that will never truly be bridged.

Specifically, I’m starting to think I have weird little mutant ear canals.

I’ve never been able to make earbuds work for me; one of the little buggers invariably drops out and dangles for a moment before its weight pulls its counterpart down as well. And foam earplugs never quite do the job of sealing me off from the outside world.

Now Alex has this gorgeous little Apple Bluetooth headset for her gorgeous little iPhone. It just parks in your ear and sits there until you take it out.

That is, it parks in your ear. In my ear, it hovers briefly and then plummets to the sidewalk, where it bounces into the nearest sewer grate. (Actually, that’s hypothetical; with a price tag of $130, I haven’t given it that opportunity. All my testing has been conducted in carefully controlled conditions involving foam-cushioned floors and trained professionals standing by to find the damn thing.) Ergo, no stylish Apple product for me; I am doomed to forever wander the world with one of those hook-over-the-ear headsets that might as well have the word “DORK” spelled out on it in high-intensity LEDs.

So here’s my question: am I the only person on this planet who suffers from Earbud Incompatibility Syndrome?

If so, would medical science be interested?

If not, if there are others like me, are there enough of us that the pharmaceutical industry will soon be offering a treatment? (“Earbuds used to be my worst enemy. Now they’re my best friend… thanks to Aurica. Aurica isn’t for everyone. Side effects include swollen lobes, agonizing auditory hallucinations, cerebral liquification disorder and, in rare circumstances, projectile spine ejection.”)

Who wants to join a support group?

Video on an iPod? That’s so one month ago.

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A few days ago, to much oohing and aaahing, Steve Jobs released the first-ever video-playing iPod.

Or did he?

It turns out the open-source community may have beaten him to it. The fine folks who are hard at work porting Linux to the iPod managed to run video on an iPod Photo more than a month before Jobs’ big announcement.

That gladdens the hearts of those of us who bought our iPods a scant month or two before Steve mounted the stage. (You’ll never convince me that my purchase didn’t somehow trigger the whole thing.)

Similarly, the news from late in the summer that Linux-based audio recording is now enabled on late-model iPods warms various and sundry cockles. While this has been possible on earlier models for some time, I’m still champing at the bit to plug in my mic (okay, mic and preamp…) and start recording. Especially since Tod Maffin tells us that the video iPod will record stereo sound at 44.1 kHz.

So how long before I’m recording belches and armpit noises with my iPod Photo? A while yet. iPod Linux is still unsupported on fourth-generation iPods and their photo siblings, and may cause them to… let’s see, what does the FAQ say?… spontaneously melt into sad little gleaming white puddles.

You have been warned…

The real story is broadband

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Yeah, there was a lot of sexy stuff in Apple’s announcement today: new thinner video iPods, iMacs with remote controls and built-in video cameras, new video features in iTunes.

But the story that got buried was the fact that Apple also released a USB dial-up modem. Why? For the folks who buy those new iMacs but don’t have a cable or ADSL connection. Among Apple’s customers, they are now the exception to the rule.

Until today, every single iMac shipped with a dial-up modem. Back in the late 1990s and even the early 2000s, for most of us, every Internet connection we made began with those whooshes and beeps.

But times change. And broadband (which connects using the iMac’s built-in Ethernet port) is now widespread enough that Apple figures customers won’t miss the modem jack. And those who still need it presumably now feel sufficiently marginalized that they’ll be willing to fork over US$49 to keep their connection alive.

Probably fair enough (especially if you’re shelling out something around two grand for an iMac in the first place). But there are some unsettling implications depending on how far this approach spreads, and how quickly. There’s still a big wide digital divide between tech haves and have-nots, and broadband is firmly on the privileged side of that gulf. Giving the haves even more of an advantage only serves to magnify the divide.

That said, the good news is that broadband has spread widely and quickly enough that Apple can make this choice as a sound business decision. And that’s the biggest reason those sexy new video features make sense.

The industry rightly sees Steve Jobs’ release of the original iMac, and the death of the floppy drive, as a milestone in the development of personal computing. The death of the dial-up modem will be remembered the same way.

Supreme Court says yes to MP3 players (and the 21st century)

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From the Canadian Press, Top court refuses to hear appeal on MP3 players

The fight over a levy on iPods and other digital music players ended today when the Supreme Court of Canada refused to hear any further arguments on the matter.

That means there will be no levy applied to digital audio recorders such as Apple’s popular iPod and iPod Shuffle as well as other MP3 players like iRiver.

“Obviously we’re disappointed. We felt it was self-evident that those products are sold for the purpose of copying music,” said David Basskin, of the Canadian Private Copying Collective (CPCC), the non-profit agency which collects tariffs on behalf of musicians and record companies.

This was a pretty questionable approach even back in 1999, when the Private Copying Tariff (a levy on recordable media like audio cassettes, recordable CDs and MiniDiscs) was first introduced. It casts a very wide net, tacitly assuming that if you’re buying recordable media, you intend to use it to copy music that you don’t own. (Or, technically, music you don’t own a license to. Welcome to the fun world of intellectual property law.)

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