Published by dekay on December 2, 2005
in Uncategorized.
What if:
Pandora technology is integrated into iTunes and iTMS. For 15 €/month you can subscribe to three pandora stations (which are defined and modified via iTunes playlists and ratings), whose songs you get like a subscription based service. Protected AAC files that expire once your subscription is over. BUT the selling point will be: you can select 10 songs each month that you can keep like any other song purchased at iTMS.
Subscribing to these pandora stations is as easy as using a podcast, in fact the streams are podcasts with, say, 10 new songs a day.
Just dreaming.
Published by dekay on October 7, 2005
in Uncategorized.
Andy Budd has a very awesome tutorial on advanced smart playlists. Definitely worth checking out. And if this is way too complicated for you: check out Smart Playlists.com
btw: my personal hint for all of you using smart playlists and iTunes ratings. Use Applescripts to transfer your ratings to the MP3 file’s ID3tag’s comments section. This way you will never lose those ratings even if you are moving your tunes from mac to mac…
I just realized a very useful feature for filling my iPod: you can have multiple playlists inside a folder, but cannot select the folder to be automatically synched with the iPod. However what you can do is create a smart playlist that contains the folder’s contents! So now it is very easy to drag stuff to the iPod without actually changing its “synch settings”. Just drag a new playlist into the synched folder and it will appear on the iPod as soon as the next synch will be done.
Published by dekay on September 7, 2005
in Uncategorized.
Apple has done it again. This is the new look, possibly for all other iLife apps, Safari and all other brushed metal apps? What may look cool might become stale pretty soon. Inconsistencies in Apple’s GUI design have been appearing for years now - long gone are the days where all apps were equal; where is the updated Human Interface Guideline? Does Apple still adhere to its own standards?
Somehow I am always stunned by Apple’s fresh design whenever they change things. It still looks a lot better than anything else - and actually there is no alternative. But I am getting annoyed at the inconsistency as well as the diversity within Apple’s own product portfolio. Change is good, but a lack of focus and direction is not.
Published by dekay on September 4, 2005
in Uncategorized.
Wikipedia may help with getting your music collection organized. Although I still think the “Genre” Tag in MP3s is useless in its current incarnation. What use makes it when you can browse music by genre but then try to classify not in broad genres but in much detail? So my solution is to use the general broad genre and then fine tune by using the” grouping” tag.
iTunes finally speaks podcast - but not very fluently yet. There is much eye candy, but it doesn’t just make things nicer it also covers up some very annoying bugs.
What I do not like:
- podcasts are very separate from the rest of iTunes. There is no way of creating a smart playlist for podcasts.
- there is no per-podcast setting
- there is no way of saying: “take the most current podcast with a hit counter of 0″
- how do I get old podcasts into the system and make them bookmarkable?
Further links:
Oh and I almost forgot [added Jul 3rd]:
- please file bugreports and feature requests
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