Let’s say that you happened to have a folder of MP3s somewhere. Perhaps on a disc. Perhaps on a drive. Perhaps it was on a friend’s computer. Perhaps there were literally tons of awesome albums that you would quite like. You know, for, erm, backup purposes.
Well you might get as far as importing those in to your library and they would probably work. But if the tracks/albums weren’t labelled very well, then your library would get ugly. And if you tried to use the CDDB iTunes “Get CD track names” functionality, you’d be presented with a message along the lines of “iTunes can only access CDDB track names for CDs that it imported itself, please reimport the CD” – or words to that effect.
Your options are to burn Audio CDs of all the albums and then import them, which is a time-consuming hassle, or to use one of the various iTunes Applescripts available to try and hack the names in from the various sources. My experience of these scripts/sites – it doesn’t work. (You could of course import them and name them manually… but, well, let’s not even go there.)
The way around this is through Toast and a variation on option 1. I have Toast Titanium 8, but I know this functionality goes back at least as far as 7, if not further. It’s a little fiddly, but definitely better than creating real CDs of these albums. It’s quite simple – create an Audio CD in Toast as usual, but rather than burning it to CD, look under File > for an option to “save as disc image” (or Apple + D). It’ll create an .s2df file, which, again using Toast, can be mounted as a disc image (under Utilities or Shift + Apple + M). As soon as you do this, iTunes will likely spark in to life and start importing for you.
Far quicker than creating CDs, and yes, it’ll quite happily query CDDB to get the track names for you. Job done.
Here’s an Applescript I wrote. Basically, select a playlist in the left menu (e.g., My Top Rated) run this script and it will create a playlist folder with a playlist for every album (and every track in that album) for each album in the playlist. Make sense!?
I wrote it because the way I keep track (so to speak) of tunes I like is by rating them as 4 or 5 stars – which makes them appear in the My Top Rated smart playlist. But I also hate having incomplete albums on my iPod, so this is a simple way of syncing your My Top Rated, and all tracks of the albums in it.
Probably needs iTunes 8 or greater (or whenever playlist folders were introduced) and if it destroys something, it’s not my fault! It will also delete an existing playlist folder, so you can regenerate the folders as required.
It seems I’ve always been an angry man. I recently received several copies of the same stupid damn email. You will have seen it, it’s the “Bill Gates is going to give you some money for forwarding this email” bullshit. Here’s a sample..
Title: PLLLLEEEAAASSSSEEE REEEAAADDD! IT WAS ON GOOD MORNINGAMERICATODAY!
After scrolling through pages and pages of email addresses you get to some text:
“To all of my friends, I do not usually forward messages,
But this is from my friend Pearlas Sandborn and she really is
an attorney.
If she says that this will work – It will work. After all,What have
you got to lose?
SORRY EVERYBODY.. JUST HAD TO TAKE THE CHANCE!!! I’m an
attorney, And I know the law. This thing is for real. Rest assured
AOL and Intel will follow through with their pr omises for
fear of facing a multimillion-dollar class action suit similar to the one
filed by PepsiCo against General Electric not too long a go.
Dear Friends: Please do not take this for a junk letter.
Bill Gates sharing his fortune. If you ignore this, You will repent
later .
Microsoft and AOL are now the largest Internet companies
and in an effort to make sure that Internet Explorer remains the
most widely used program, Microsoft and AOL are running an e-mail
beta test.
When you forward this e-mail to friends, Microsoft can and will
track it (If you are a Microsoft Windows user) For a two weeks
time period.
For every person that you forward this e-mail to, Microsoft will pay
you $245.00 For every person that you sent it to that forwards it on,
Microsoft will pay you $243.00 and for every third person that receives
it, You will be paid $241.00. Within two weeks, Microsoft will contact
you for your address and then send you a check.
Regards. Charles S Bailey Genera l Manager Field Oper ations”
Blah blah blah etc. Obviously such a load of crap. Yahda yahda.
Why am I mentioning this? Because I was blogging about the same damn thing, way back in 2004! So I was just as angry then, and people nowadays are still as stupid. Nothing changes.
I keep forgetting a nifty thing about Firefox. You have the quick search area at the top right corner of the browser. When you’re visiting a page that has a search box, if you click the icon to the left of the box, you might see the option to add that site to your quick search list.
The site will need to be implementing the Open Search kajiggers. For anyone wanting to do this, add the following line to your document:
and then create a file called Search.xml in the root of your site that looks like this.
replacing template=”" with the correct search URL for your site. Notice also the image is the base64 encoding of your 16 x 16 icon. Marvellous.
Anyway, it seems that Google UK doesn’t do this and I imagine, due to the availability of the above, Mozilla aren’t really maintaining the search extensions part of the Mozilla Org site, as searching for a Google UK quicksearch, isn’t helpful.
So here’s the XML you need. It will also make the default to use only UK pages.
In OSX, save the file in
YourUser > Library > Application Support > Firefox > searchplugins
In Windows XP:
C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\searchplugins
Enjoy.
I recently had the dubious pleasure of buying and setting up a new computer for a friend of mine. As a skinflint, his budget was tight, and he
wanted to reuse as much from his old PC as possible, which included his rather dated D-Link DWL-g520+ PCI wireless card. Getting it working was a bit of a nightmare, but I finally did, so hopefully some of the following will be of use. All the drivers and files needed are in a zip file at the end.
The other day I got a dodgy looking email from Paypal, which told me that on {nothing} my bank account {nothing} did {nothing}. Now, I’m fully aware of phishing and all the assorted scams, but this one looked legit. A quick review of the message headers revealed it looked good, and nothing in the email suggested that it was an attempt at scamming me out of my login details. So I figured, what the heck, I’ll report it to Paypal, and see what happens.
Despite its failings as a phone, I really did like bits of the iPhone. The interface is amazing. The apps and app store stuff is brilliant. And whilst I love my Archos, as a Mac & iTunes user, getting music on to it and syncing and all that sort of stuff was just a nightmare I could no longer live with. So the obvious choice was to get an iPod Touch. So I have a 2nd gen 32gb iPod Touch and it really is brilliant. OK, so it’s missing the GPS, but other than that, it has all the benefits of the iPhone, minus the crappy phone bit.
And that, in particular, means apps. Yes, there’s been a hoohar over Apple’s policing of what apps it deems to be acceptable, but that does ultimately mean that the apps available to you are top notch. And one of those is the ITunes Remote*. It’s so simple – it connects to your shared iTunes library over wireless, and turns your iPod Touch or iPhone in to a full featured remote for your iTunes library. Which means, if used in conjunction with say Airport Express to distribute music around your house, you can have a really – erm – awesome home media thing. Your computer with iTunes can be anywhere in your house, you can have speakers wherever you are, and all you need is your Touch to adjust what’s playing. It works brilliantly. And – it’s free!
Thumbs up.
* I don’t know how to link to a iTunes app, but if you access the store, look in the free section and it’ll be there.