Your iTunes library is an embarrassment to you and your family. Fix it now
Unless you are some kind of OCD music nerd, your iTunes library is likely a mess. Sure, you always meant to properly assign genres to your old Napstered tracks, or delete all the one-off songs in your library (that old Rick Astley track you used to think was so funny, for instance). But of course you’ll never get around to it without some help.
Doug Adams has been making amazingly useful Apple Scripts to do this for many years now, but if you’ve used them, then you’re the alpha geek I already mentioned above. Now, though, Doug has packed these functions into a $2 app for the Mac, and it is the perfect way to finally spring clean your filthy, crusted music library. It’s called TrackSift.
Chomp, chomp. Apple gobbles up the startup app-search service
Along with iTunes (ten minutes to transfer a TV show to my iPad?), the iTunes Apps Store is possibly the worst experience one can have while using Apple products. You can never find anything good; all the listings are clogged with scam software and other crap; and it is slow, slow, slow. The good news is that Apple looks set to fix it, with the purchase of Chomp.
You might have suspected that the right music – whether it’s thrash metal or Mozart – keeps you more focused or relaxed.
Now a trio of brain researchers have studied the effects of playlists on the brain, resulting in a nifty little book called Your Playlist Can Change Your Life. In the book’s 200-or so pages, they explain how to use specific playlists to alleviate anxiety, promote concentration, get happy or move into a flow state thanks to Brain Music Treatment or BMT.
If you can’t make it to New York for BMT therapy, for $9.99, you can also download a Common BMT File. Created from more than 2,000 people’s brain waves with the help of evidence-based BMT tech, they say it acts as a kind of aural “first-aid” before you get your own playlists together.
Intrigued (my current nightstand read is Mark Changizi’s excellent Harnessed about music and the brain), I talked to author Dr. Galina Mindlin about what playlists have the most impact, cleaning up your music collection and her current heavy rotations.
We could subtitle this the “Steve Jobs” edition, his death in October gave rise to any number of oddballtributes and events. The most disturbing? The hatefulcrazy congregation of Westboro Baptist Church staged a series of protests in an attempt to mar Jobs memorials held in Apple’s home town on Oct. 19. The Kansas-based group announced via iPhone that they would stage a hate fest. True to form, they held up their nasty banners outside the Apple campus and at Cupertino High but were met with counter protesters determined not to let them ruin the day.
Apple’s new music service, iTunes Match, launched today as a beta, and it includes the handy ability to upgrade your low quality audio tracks to lossless audio tracks and then mirror them in the cloud. In this video, I’ll show how to set up iTunes match and upgrade your songs. It just couldn’t be easier.
I could tell what Sonos and its PR firm thought about the product as I walked in.
Festooned over a thousand square feet of penthouse atop one of San Francisco’s finest boutique hotels were samovars of fresh coffee, pitchers of fresh-squeezed juices and a banquet table overflowing with edibles under picture windows filled with panoramic views of Union Square and the San Francisco skyline. The layout was also outfitted, front-to-back, in a couple thousand dollars worth of Sonos gear — including the subject of this review, the Sonos Play:3 ($299).
This news item has a few “lost in translation,” issues but is still interesting: some people in China are apparently complaining that Apple is promulgating pornography there.
According to Communist Party of China mouthpiece People’s Daily Online, a man rang up China National Radio to complain that he downloaded an app that contained “sexually explicit written material.”
The music options on the iPhone have sure gotten exciting over the last few months. First Apple unveiled iTunes Match, then Spotify launched their app in the US, and now Turntable.fm has brought their amazing social music experience to the iPhone. Earlier this morning Turntable.fm released their new iPhone app that enables users to listen to Turntable.fm DJ Rooms wherever they go.
Sharefile's new iPad was delayed for violating Apple's rules on in-application purchases, even though the identical iPhone version sailed through.
Negotiating Apple’s in-app purchase rules stalled one app for two months, even though it was similar to the company’s iPhone app which made it through the approval gauntlet in just a week.
Apple’s new 11-inch MacBook Air is simply incredible. Of course you probably already knew this puppy was light, and gorgeous, but the power that this tiny machine packs is truly breathtaking. Optimized for speed and portability, the new MacBook Air improves on its predecessor to prove that it’s the best notebook computer Apple’s ever made.
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