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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Betalogue » Blog Archive » iTunes 7.3 update: Weird package problem:

It still holds for 7.3.1, and it applied to downloading the package only, or installing and keeping it and then trying to reinstall it again.

It used to be that if you started to listen to a Podcast, it was marked as “Not New”, and was no longer synced to the iPod. This is no longer true - it now syncs all Podcasts that have a play count of 0.

It kinda caught me a bit by surprise, when I came across some Podcasts I was sure I’d listened to, and when I played them, I only got the last few seconds. I must have started a new track playing before the end.

The one thing I like about Windows1 over OS X is that you can have shares set to auto-mount on bootup. I used to use an AppleScript to do this, which was okay, except OS X still disconnects when you sleep. Not that I sleep my machine much, anyway.

Then today, I read a great hint on MacOSXHints: Make sure iTunes mounts a networked music library. Basically, instead of running iTunes from the location it is installed in, you create an alias on the music server volume, and run it (via another alias back into the dock) from there.

Then, before loading iTunes, it mounts the volume, if it can find it. Otherwise, iTunes will not run. Which is fine by me, since all of my music is on that server!

1. Mind you, Windows does have some other crappiness in conjunction with this. Lately, I’ve been finding that it won’t always mount all of the shares, even though I chose automatically mount after rebooting, and it sometimes forgets my passwords. Similarly, you cannot connect more than once to a server with different credentials. I mean, seriously?

With the inclusion of the artwork view in the iTunes main window, this task is much, much easier. Before, I had to use some crazy AppleScripting to find the tracks missing artwork; now I just have to scroll down until I find the tracks that are missing it. And then hunt around for the CD, or google for it.

I’m thinking of re-ripping my CDs to 192kbps AAC, which will make the files about 1.5 times their current size. I currently have 43 GB of music, but some of this is downloaded (iTunes Store and Podcasts), so the whole database won’t increase by this much.

I’m also going to make some other structural changes. I’m not going to have iTunes manage my music files, just the tags inside of them. That way it will play nicer with a variety of clients. iTunes moves files around when you change the ID3 tags, so another version of iTunes, or Xbmc, or whatever, can’t find them anymore. It might mean the filenames are wrong, but I think every system I use will have a database of the tags, rather than the files themselves. I just hope the various systems update the tags when they have been changed.

I’m also going to stop using my Wireless Router as my DHCP/DNS server. I just don’t like the inflexibility that Netgear’s system has in this regard. I want to be able to add static IP addresses, and have the hostnames resolve. Which I know the SpeedTouch modem did using it’s DHCP/DNS setup.

And then I can isolate the wireless segment of the network a bit more. Not that that’s too much of an issue using WPA, but you never know…