Me and my Mac

Posts Tagged ‘itunes’

Syncopation! iTunes synchronization for the rest of us…

A few days ago i stumbled over the really awesome and simple app Syncopation from the ever so simple Sonzea. A developer who got fed up with synchronizing his iTunes by hand and took matters into his own hands.

The result: Syncopation.

Syncopation can sync up to 5 computers iTunes libraries automatically, manually, auto deletion and many more options and thus keep them the same. This is something i was looking for for freakin’ ages!

After a few initial hick-ups with files not being copied and stuff i managed to get it all working.
Basically what i did wrong, i think, was to merge 2 existing libraries that should be one thing from the start.

So i simply deleted one (after making a backup) and synched from scratch. Which worked much much better and solved most of my issues. One song kept bugging me, but that has been gone now too for some reason.

Support is clear, fast and easy going. So i didn’t mind at all to fork over the 20something euros.

And you should too if you have multiple macs with libraries that should be the same :)!

Genius is not so Brilliant… Or so it seems.

So today i was happy yo install iTunes 8. Try out the new stuff and found the new music browser a bit of a cheap knockoff from iPhoto. But otherwise a nice sight. I still prefer the list view though.

And another “huge” new thing is iTunes Genius.
Basically what it does it matching songs together based on various things and behaviours. Which all have to be uploaded to the iTunes store. Then when it is done stealing your private data and settings it compiles random lists of tunes which supposedly “sound great together”. Seemed like fun, so i went on to have my library indexed and sent that profile to the iTunes store. This took like 10 minutes.

Then i tried to make a few Genius playlists only to find out this feature seems only to work with iTunes bought tunes. Most of my music comes from imported CD’s and other sources. Thus Genius kinda didn’t work for me… Bummer!
Why can’t it index everything? THe logical explanation would be that iTunes store does assign meta data to each song and thus if it doesn’t come from the store it has no meta data to match songs to. But i think this is more of a dirty trick to lure people to buy more songs, obviously… If the system really would be as good as Steve so proudly told us it would be able to assign meta data on the fly and thus index every song submitted. But that’s just my logical thinking…

Now i’m gonna eat my pie!

iTunes App Store mumbling

Bitchin’ about the App Store… yea not all news and articles can be positive…

Why is everything in multiple categories? It’s confusing and rubbish… It appears there is like a million things in there and its a lot of the same in every category… For example, any music related game is also in the music category. Personally i think games should not be in the music category even if it were Guitar Hero itself… No matter how music related it is. It’s a game and games have their own category.

Another thing i noticed is the sheer amount of things that are not free. Not that i expected everything to be free but it can amount to quite some expenses even if you just want to try a few things. I didn’t see a demo period for any of the apps i looked at.

For the time being i didn’t buy anything and i won’t until i get my iPhone… Which i ordered on friday, not at T-mobile since they didn’t have any, so i ordered one at my work easier and faster.

I hope to try some apps real soon i saw some nice ones but they were for the iPhone, like using the camera and stuff. Or using GPS functions the iPod lacks…

Other than that i didn’t see anything new yet in the software, but i didn’t look very hard yet.