Paint the Tiger, Carve the Swan

I’ve downloaded iTunes 8, mainly because I was a bit interested in Genius. More from a technical perspective than anything else right now, although it may end up replacing Party Shuffle (especially since lately I’ve been skipping tracks lots…)

So, I’ve heard mixed reports about it so far - that it doesn’t work with Classical music, for instance. I can verify that it does, for instance Canon in D major brings up a selection of other classical music. I can’t vouch for how good a job it does, since I’m still somewhat of a naïve listener of classical music.

I do think it’s funny that the Beatles cannot be used for Genius, but for Badly Drawn Boy, it seems to do a pretty good job of choosing similar music. I’m not sure how much is Genre-based, since I have fairly well genre-d tracks.

As for the new UI - I don’t mind it too much. I do miss the view that had the album art and tracks grouped by album, since that was the main view I used, except for when in Party Shuffle.

The Genius Sidebar annoys me a little that it is trying to get me to buy stuff - I think it’s just a rebadging of the Mini store, which I didn’t use anyway. Thankfully, you can turn this off. At least Apple got it right with the explicit asking of permission this time before sending your iTunes library data back to the mothership.

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Hmm. That is new. Google Music.

I’m guessing it will now be better to use Google Music to check for artwork and so on than Amazon.com.

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John Gruber is well worth keeping in your feed list. Not only is the stuff he writes generally entertaining, on the ball and well written, but he finds other good stuff too.

Take, for example, his recent comment on How Apple is Changing DRM. Which, let’s face it, I wouldn’t have come across otherwise.

The flip side, though, is that DRM rules the day for paid video content.
[From Daring Fireball Linked List: May 2008]

I think that (tech-savvy) people are more accepting to have DRM applied to video content for a couple of reasons. First, you are less likely to keep watching the same movie over and over again. You are likely to listen to a piece of music over and over again. People will rent movies, either on DVD or from an online source, for this exact reason. By definition, rented movies must have DRM, else you have effectively bought them.

The second, and I think more important reason is to do with viewing modes of video. Most video is watched on a single device - at this stage still the device it was bought with. If you purchase a video on your computer, it’s probably to watch it there. Or, you have purchased/rented something as part of a system and plan to watch it on, say, an Apple TV, which uses the same DRM system as iTunes on your computer.

Perhaps in the future, as people have more video devices that can view the data they buy or rent, we will find less of an acceptance of DRM.

A third reason that just struck me is that traditionally, music was sold without DRM, even whilst in a digital format. Digital video has never really been sold without DRM. Even if it’s trivial to disable the DRM in DVDs and make copies, say to use on a device that doesn’t have a DVD drive.

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Did you ever notice that The Gossip • Standing In The Way Of Control is a ripoff of Loverboy * Turn Me Loose?

Now, these links were obtained from the iTunes Australian Store, by right-clicking on them. But they don’t work for me when I try to use them to get back to those tracks…odd.

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Using python, it’s easy to get data from IMDb into your iTunes database.

You’ll need a few tools to get this working. appscript, py-IMDb and CocoaDialog. Install each of these, and for the latter, note where you store it. I’m not going to go through the code, as it is fairly well commented. If you can’t get it to work, leave a comment and I’ll see if I can help.

IMDB2iTunes.py

Note that you will need to save the file above, and rename it so it has a .py extension.

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I’ve consolidated all of my media onto my new Mac Mini, but didn’t really think some things through when I first did it. For instance, I put all of my video data in before transferring my music across. I’ve still kept a copy of my music on the laptop, for what it’s worth, but because I just copied files, then I lost all of my rating data.

I looked at a couple of solutions for transferring the ratings, the most promising was a semi-manual method of creating smart playlists, one for each rating.

That was too old-tech for me, so I came up with a solution that uses Remote Apple Events. Now, to make the code easier, I’m using python and appscript, so make sure you have both of those installed.

#! /usr/bin/python

import appscript

# Set up the two iTunes libraries.
local = appscript.app('itunes')
# You'll need to replace jens.local with your remote machine's name
remote = appscript.app(url='eppc://jens.local/itunes')

local.lib = local.playlists()[0].tracks()
remote.lib = remote.playlists()[0].tracks()

# Create a dictionary with all local track names/artists/albums

library = {}

for each in local.lib:
    key = each.name()+":"+each.artist()+":"+each.album()
    library[key] = each

# Iterate over every remote track.
# If it is in the local library, take the local rating and
#    apply that to the remote track.

for each in remote.lib:
    key = each.name()+":"+each.artist()+":"+each.album()
    print key,
    if library.has_key(key):
        each.rating.set(library[key].rating())
        print "rated."
    else:
        print "doesn't exist in local library"

That’s it. I’ve used this to transfer all of my ratings from local to remote iTunes. Granted, there is no check to see if I’ve got all of the local tracks on the remote machine - but that is mainly because I don’t have my Podcast library on the remote machine, and I hope (know?) I have all of the music, and that’s the stuff I care about.

Here’s a screenshot from my remote library.

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This seems to be pretty new in iTunes (i.e., I haven’t noticed it before): if you are viewing an album in the grouped view, and you have ratings on some or all of the tracks, it displays an average rating for the album:

This is in a different set of stars to the normal rating of tracks. However, you can explicitly rate an album too, which changes it to the other type of stars:

Interestingly, if you do this to an album with tracks already rated, it will choose ratings for the tracks that haven’t been rated, so that it creates the right total rating:

This rating isn’t stored with the track, if you open the Info window for one of the hollow star rated tracks, it hasn’t actually been rated.

This is quite interesting.

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A bit over ten years ago, some mates of mine formed a band, and they had one performance: at Viv’s 21st. Their whirlwind tour of Robe over, the Scabby Nannas split up, moved on to other projects, and so on.

They are back.

I never thought I’d link to a myspace page, but here we go: The Scabby Nannas.

You can hear their one original track “Always Go For Goals!”, and if you look hard enough you’ll also find videos of their performance earlier this year at the Walkerville RSL. Not sure if this was a paying gig, or just Viv’s 31st, but videos don’t lie.

Since then, they’ve apparently been hard at work, recording this track (and possibly some more, under a secret alias I can’t remember anymore).

(I’ve put this under Popular Music, although I’m not sure they are exactly “Popular”, per se. Maybe one day).

Oh, and happy birth, Mitchell Vickery.

Always Go For Goals • Super Villian • Scabby Nannas ★★★

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With a proper host, I have finally achieved the ability to do proper analysis of my logfiles. Since my traffic amount has been fairly high, I thought I would try to find out where all of my megabytes went!

I’m using Analog, since that was free and did sort of what I want. I started writing my own tool, but got bored with that pretty quickly.

27% of my usage was in the XMLRPC.php file. Which had me stumped, until I remembered I’d used ecto to backup all of my posts, a couple of times as it turned out. This was 14 Mb, which I shouldn’t have to do all of the time.

There’s still more stuff for me to find out - like how much of my bandwidth is being used up by Blogsome users who haven’t changed stuff within their template and I had pointing to mine.

Prélude No. 3 For Clavier • Dominic Miller • Shapes

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