Onlydarksets » iTunes

iTunes Genius – too clever by half?

onlydarksets — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 01:02:14 +0000

I don’t mean to rag on iTunes, but, as music managers goes, it does kind of suck. I was intrigued by the new Genius sidebar in iTunes 8, though, so I gave the upgrade a spin.

The first snag is that the Genius sidebar has to examine every single file before it will start working. All 11,000+ of my music files are on network storage, which my PC accesses over 802.11g wifi. That took a little under 3 hours to complete. Yes, hours. Why did it have to rescan every file? Why didn’t it just use the database iTunes had already built (which, incidentally, took under 30 minutes including processing album art)?

So, after a half day of processing, I finally had a chance to test it out. As always, I started out with Metallica to see what comes up. Can anyone spot what’s wrong with this picture?

Yes, I clicked the link in the “Genius” sidebar, and, yes, it’s referencing the version of the song on Reload. Now, I understand it’s using heuristics to recommend alternative music. However, it’s doing a simple lookup for the “Songs You’re Missing”, so if the ID3 data matches (which it did), it shouldn’t show up on the list. Incidentally, it found 9 songs I “didn’t” have, 4 of which I did, in fact, have (everything except the new singles and the Swizz Beatz single):

Not to mention the albums/artists it just couldn’t “find”. The archaic stuff, I understand. However, I’m pretty sure this should have pulled back some results:

You have to get the simple stuff right.

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Turn off iPhone backups in Windows iTunes

onlydarksets — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 15:24:43 +0000

When the iPhone syncs, iTunes will often perform a backup that is excruciatingly slow. Mac users have an “easy” (i.e., available to anyone) way to prevent iTunes from doing backups. A less publicized version of the same method exists for Windows:

Quit iTunes.

Press Win+R (opens the Windows Run dialog)

Type or copy the following command:
“%CommonProgramFiles%AppleMobile Device Supportbindefaults.exe” write com.apple.iTunes AutomaticDeviceBackupsDisabled -bool true

Open iTunes.

Connect the iPhone.

Make Sync without backing up.

Alternatively, if you don’t want to use the command line, a company I have never heard of has released an application called “iPhone Backup Switch“. As the name implies, it simply turns off or on iTunes’ iPhone backup process.

If neither of those work, there is also a method that involves editing the iTunesPref.xml file.

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Multi-room audio for $100/room

onlydarksets — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 17:25:25 +0000

This looks like an intriguing project. You can use the iPhone or a Touch to control multi-room audio, at a cost of just $100 per room. Basically, the Airport Express lets you use iTunes to stream music wirelessly, and iTunes can manage more than one Airport Express. The iPhone can wirelessly control iTunes, and it can manage the Airport Express through iTunes.

That said, I don’t think this is a true multi-room audio solution, in that it does not appear that you can listen to different songs in different zones simultaneously.

One note – it does not look like you need to hack the WRT54G to support WDS.

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iTunes 7.7.1 fixes app store bug

onlydarksets — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 15:12:53 +0000

It appears 7.7.1 has fixed a bug where apps downloaded to the phone were not being backed up properly. Now my sync time is painfully slow, just like everyone else! I’ll be turning off app syncing now…

Edit: Scratch that – it was just the first sync that took forever.

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