Category Archives: Mac

iPad, iPhone, Mac

yes, you can move your iTunes 11 library to iTunes 10

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I asked earlier if anyone had any pointers on moving an iTunes 11 library to iTunes 10.  I didn’t want to downgrade iTunes 11 to iTunes 10 on a single computer, but rather wanted to move an iTunes 11 library that exists on one Mac to an unused iTunes 10 library on another Mac.

The answer appears to be an almost-perfectly-unqualified yes.  Via Twitter and app.net, I got several suggestions.  I decided to try the one that was the easiest: export my iTunes 11 library to XML, and then import it into iTunes 10.  I figured if it didn’t work, then I probably hadn’t lost too much time.  It worked!

So here are the steps that I followed:

  1. On my old Mac, I launched iTunes 11 and went to File -> Library -> Export Library, and saved my library to a flash drive.
  2. After that had completed on my old Mac, I quit out of iTunes and ejected the flash drive that held the library file, and also ejected the external hard drive that housed the actual media in my iTunes library.
  3. On my new Mac, I connected both the flash drive and the external hard drive.
  4. On my new Mac, I launched iTunes 10 and went to File -> Library -> Import Playlist and selected my exported iTunes library.  It began churning away.  Since that library has ~35k items in it, it was clearly going to take awhile, and I left it to do its thing while I ran some errands.
  5. On my new Mac, I checked and everything that I was most concerned about (playlists, ratings, etc) was there!  All of my metadata had been preserved, and my media files had been moved to my new Mac’s hard drive.  (Thankfully, I had enough space.  They’ll be moved off to an external hard drive soon.)  I spot-checked several songs, playlists, videos, and podcasts, and everything was there.
  6. To confirm that I had everything, I compared the size of my new iTunes media folder with my old iTunes media folder, and discovered that the former was larger by about 8 GB.  I discovered two things that didn’t get copied over: all of my Books, and all of the application files for my iPhone and iPad.  The former is surprising, since it had gotten everything else, the latter is unsurprising.  So on my new Mac, I went to File -> Add to Library and added those books and applications back in.

Next up is to move my photo library from my old Mac to my new Mac, which should be a lot easier, and then sync my iPhone and my iPad to the new Mac and make sure that everything works.  Once that is done, I’ve got a few clean-up items to do on my old Mac, and then I can let it go to its final resting home.

Many thanks to Brian Webster for the original suggestion.  I’m pleasantly surprised that it was so easy.

Apple, Mac

ten more reasons I hate iTunes 11

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I’ve already given you ten reasons that I hate iTunes 11, but now that I’ve been using it for awhile, I’ve got ten more.

  1. The Artists view doesn’t show all of the artists that are in my library.  I have an artist where I have several hundred songs, and yet they’re not in the artist view.  All of the songs are tagged appropriately, and they live in the same folder as all of the rest of my music, but somehow this artist isn’t worthy of the Artists view.  
  2. Navigational behavior is inconsistent between views.  Here are some examples:
    1. If you open up the information for a song in the Artists view, you don’t get Previous and Next buttons (and their attendant keyboard shortcuts).  If you open up that same song in the Songs view, you do.  Both of these are lists of songs, why do I get buttons in one place and not in another?
    2. If you delete a song (which I’m doing a lot of, because the move to iTunes 11 has duplicated a bunch of songs) in the Artists view, you lose focus and have to click with your mouse again to get focus somewhere.  In the Songs view, if you delete a song, focus moves to the next song.  Why is this inconsistent?
  3. I keep on accidentally hitting the menu arrow next to songs, because it seems that its click target is a lot bigger than the button is, and it’s not in a consistent location.  For example, if I’m trying to shift-click to select several songs, I often accidentally hit that stupid menu arrow for one of the songs.  It interrupts my workflow.
  4. There is bloody well nothing on that menu arrow that I use, so it’s especially obnoxious that I keep on hitting it when I don’t care about it.
  5. I really miss iTunes DJ.  I used it all the time to just randomly shuffle through my complete library.  It let me rearrange the songs that were coming up, and I could remove things that I wasn’t in the mood for.  “Up Next” is not nearly as useful, especially since I can only see a scant handful of songs that it’s going to play next.  iTunes DJ is also the only place in iTunes where I actually liked Cover Flow.  (I mostly don’t mind the loss of Cover Flow, but I do here.)
  6. File > Display Duplicates is gone.  When you’ve got a library as large as mine, this feature made it a lot easier to identify duplicates, determine which one you wanted to keep, and delete the rest.
  7. Gapless albums are gone.  This was awesome for live albums, as well as albums where the tracks flow seamlessly from one to another (the canonical example here is probably Dark Side of the Moon).  This function keeps iTunes from cross-fading songs on gapless albums.  Now listening to live albums is annoying, and Dark Side is all but unlistenable.
  8. Search doesn’t always take you anywhere useful.  I like the drop-down that appears in search, but if you’re in the Artists view (which is the only view that I find even remotely palatable), searching just takes you to the artist where the album or song that you searched for is contained.  This is utterly useless if you have a lot of songs by an artist.
  9. It doesn’t remember where you last were if you change views.  Let’s say you had a song selected in the Artists view, and then you go to the Podcasts view.  Go back to Artists, and you’re back at the top of the Artists view.
  10. There are default settings for podcasts that I apparently can’t manipulate.  They’re not in the Preferences, they’re not anywhere on the odcasts page that I’ve noticed.  But every podcast has a little settings icon, and there’s a “use default settings” checkbox there.  I would like for the default to be that it downloads all available episodes, not just the most recent one.  I can’t do that, so I have to go to each and every podcast, click its settings, and change that value.  Why have default podcast settings if I can’t access them?

I’ve been using iTunes 11 a lot in the hopes that I could come to some kind of peace with it, but I still hate it every single time I touch it.

iPad, iPhone, Mac

Mac users are the original BYOD

During MacIT last week, my fellow advisory board members and I gave a panel session titled “Things You Should Know: Mountain Lion”.  During my slot, I talked about the evolution of BYOD.  I couldn’t cover as much as I wanted during that time, and lots of people talked to me after the session, which gave me even more ideas about this.

The modern roots of BYOD can be traced to the iPhone.  People started buying their own iPhones and using them side-by-side with their corporate-issued smartphones.  When the iPhone gained Exchange ActiveSync support in 2008, people started ignoring their corporate-issued smartphones and doing more and more corporate work on their iPhones.  Additionally, people who never had corporate-issued smartphones now started using their personal iPhones against corporate resources.  IT had to adapt to this influx of new and unsupported devices.  Some companies began issuing iPhones (and other smartphones as well, as more competitors to the iPhone appeared).  Still others decided that it was better to let employees buy their own phones, and their IT infrastructure would just have to support it.  Bring Your Own Device suddenly became a thing with its own acronym and its own policy.

BYOD has plenty of advantages, both to the employee and to the company.  Employees get to buy hardware that they like to use.  They can consolidate onto a single device and not carry around two smartphones.  Companies and their IT departments now have fewer devices that they have to manage.

Just about the same time when we started to take BYOD seriously, and when companies were creating official policies about how they would handle BYOD, the iPad came onto the market.  It was a natural extension to BYOD to allow these new tablets onto the corporate infrastructure.  As with the iPhone, the iPad also paved the way for other tablets to follow suit.

Now, we’re seeing BYOD extended to laptops.  Companies are starting to allow their employees to bring their own laptops.  Those of us who have been Mac users for a long time look at BYOD and realize that we’ve been doing BYOD for years and years, we just never put a name on it.  If we did put a name on it, it was “sneaking around”.  Mac users have been using their personal laptops for work purposes for years and years.  Sometimes it was just when working at home, other times it was bringing it to work and figuring out what was necessary to get it to work on the corporate network.  These clandestine Mac users would trade information amongst themselves about what works and what doesn’t, what software was necessary to make everything look okay, and how to be a Mac user and not look like you were a Mac user.

I know a number of Mac IT admins who got their start in companies that were willing to look the other way when Mac users brought their laptops to work.  They became known as the IT person who could help out the Mac users, either by helping them with the right settings or software to be more functional on the corporate network, or who were willing to make the right tweaks to the infrastructure to support Mac users without impacting everyone else.  They didn’t start as Mac IT admins, and they didn’t even necessarily start as Mac users themselves, but they helped out and learned a lot by doing.  The MacEnterprise mailing list got its start several years ago, and has always had a sizeable element of trying to figure out how to get Macs to work in an environment that, at best, doesn’t support Macs, and, at worst, might be actively hostile to them.

For us longtime Mac users, BYOD has helped engender a lot of changes to IT that makes it easier for us to be Mac users.  The cloud, SaaS, virtualization, and virtual desktops have all made it possible for us to easily access data and applications that we had to fight our way around otherwise.  IT has had to adapt to support all of this.  On one hand, a heterogeneous environment can be more difficult to manage; on the other hand, happy users and a more flexible and adaptive environment can be easier to manage.

It’s a pretty awesome time to be a Mac user in the enterprise, and I think that it’s just going to get easier and easier from here.  It’s also a pretty awesome time to be a Mac IT administrator, since these skills are in high demand as more companies decide that it’s time to adapt to a changing workforce and an ever-changing array of devices that must be supported by their infrastructure.

Mac

professional software != software used by professionals

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Adam Engst of TidBits got upset that an update to Apple Pages that impacted Engst’s workflow for creating EPUBs.  In short, Pages changed several behaviors that Engst relied on for creating EPUBs.  Engst, even though he knows that Apple’s release notes are not reliable indicators of what changes have gone into a product, accepted the new update to an essential application without testing it.  And when things broke, he found himself in a very difficult position that required a lot of time and effort to fix.  He says this about the experience:

That shows a profound lack of respect for customers on Apple’s part, and is particularly offensive when it comes to tools used by professionals. It’s bad enough when Apple causes normal users significant headaches, such as with the massive changes in iTunes 11, which cannot be downgraded to iTunes 10.7 (see “iTunes 11: The Features Apple Removed, and Alternatives,” 4 December 2012). But when Apple’s decision to conceal changes threatens one’s livelihood, it’s time to start looking at tools from companies who care about their customers.

The problem is, Engst missed many issues.  Any professional knows that you don’t update software that is essential to your business without testing it first.  You make sure that it works first, and you run it through several tests before updating everyone.  Engst also had unrealistic expectations about Apple updates: it’s already well-known by everyone who’s been using Macs for years (as Engst has) that Apple’s release notes are quite thin and rarely give information about all of the updates that are included in this.

But most importantly, “software used by professionals” is not the same as “professional software”.  Professional software does have higher expectations associated with it: higher expectations about how it’s tested, how it’s documented, how it’s supported.  In general, this means that professional software has a higher price tag associated with it.  Software that just happens to be used by professionals doesn’t have those expectations.  Apple has never claimed that Pages is professional software.  Basing your professional workflow around an application that is not professional software, and then not testing updates when you know that you cannot trust the release notes for this application, is not professional behavior.

This isn’t to say that I don’t think that Apple’s release notes should be so short.  Writing useful release notes isn’t difficult, and Apple should step up and do it.  That said, I think that expecting software used by professionals to be up to the bar set by professional software is unrealistic.  Use professional tools, get professional results.  Use tools that aren’t intended for professional results, and you might get lucky and get professional results, but you can’t rely on it.  Pages is $20.  You get what you pay for, and you did not pay for a professional application.

(Edited on January 28th, because I can’t type and got the price of Pages wrong.  It’s $20.)

Mac

how to rip audio losslessly from a DVD?

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Okay, I asked on Stack Exchange, but I’ll ask here too …

In Mountain Lion, how do I rip only the audio from a DVD as losslessly as possible? I have several concert DVDs that I would like to listen to on my iPod. I have an extensive music library1, which is mostly ripped from my own CDs in Apple Lossless format, so my best-case scenario is getting lossless audio off of the DVDs and converting it to ALAC.

I realize that the audio tracks on DVDs might already be lossy if they’re in AC3 format, but PCM is lossless. If there is PCM audio on the DVD, then I want to rip that from the DVD and convert that to ALAC. If there is AC3 audio on the DVD, then I want to rip that from the DVD and pretend that I’m not annoyed by a lossy resampling in the conversion of AC3 (which I can’t listen to on any device that I own) to AAC (or something else).

I know that Handbrake is great for ripping video, but its FAQ says that it doesn’t do audio only.  AudioHijackPro will record the audio, so that’s introducing an unnecessary layer of loss if the audio is PCM, and I’m not sure if resampling an AC3-to-AAC is less lossy than recording an AC3 track into MP3.

I’m willing to deal with a convoluted workflow to achieve my goal. I could also revert to Windows if necessary; I’ve got a Win7 VM readily available, and I have a Win2k8 server sitting under my desk for testing purposes.

  1. Currently around 40k tracks, and ever-growing; I purchased over 100 albums last year alone. ↩
Apple, iPad, iPhone, Mac

a memo to Notifications Center (Mountain Lion edition)

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Dear Notifications Center,

I hate you.

I hate you because you’re that obnoxious person at the party who has to be the center of attention, even though you’re ostensibly on the sidelines.

Whenever there’s an update, not only do I have the badge on the App Store telling me that you would like attention, but I’ve also got you sitting there in my upper left corner of my desktop telling me that no, really, you’d like some attention now.  And my options are either “upgrade” or “details”.  There’s no “dismiss”, there’s no little green X.  There’s just those two options.  I can’t get rid of you without opening up the App Store, even though I’ve already decided that updating you isn’t in my top priorities right now.  In fact, on my home server, you’re always going to have a little red badge on the App Store because that server is still running iTunes 10, and if there’s anything that I hate more than you, it’s iTunes 11.  You’re a close second, though, and if I consider your iOS brother, I might actually hate you more because you’re even more obnoxious in the smaller form factor.

Oh, and I hate you because I can’t tell you that there are notifications that I never want.  I never want to be notified with sound, and you don’t even give me the option to not have sound on some notifications (I’m looking at you, Facebook notifications).  I don’t want banners, and I don’t want alerts.  There’s a reason that I never install Growl on my own, and that I uninstall it if some other bloody application decides to install it without asking me.  The only notification that I ever want is a little badge, preferably with a number in it, and maybe a bounce on the dock icon if something is truly desperate for attention.  Other than that: GTFO.

I hate you because your sort order is impossible to scan if there’s a lot of items in there.  My options are to sort manually (because I totally want to have to manage a list of apps manually) or to sort by time (because I totally care about whether I last managed an app 3 months ago or 3 months and 1 day ago).  Why can’t sorting alphabetically even be an option?

I hate you because you take up a precious spot on my menu bar, and you’ve also broken all of my muscle memory that told me that Spotlight was always the rightmost item in my menu bar.  Now Spotlight, that’s something that I use all the bloody time.  I don’t have a single application or anything else in Notification Center (go on, go look at my settings for you: everything’s listed under “not in Notification Center”), but there you are, not just sitting in my menu bar all the time, but sitting somewhere where I’d love to have something that was actually useful to me.

I want to be able to make sure that any new app never gives me a sound or thinks that it is somehow worthy of alerts or (grrr) banners.  But no, I can’t do that.  I have to manage every single individual app by itself, and I either have to remember to do that when I install the app, or wait until the app fires an unwanted notification, get annoyed by the unwanted and unnecessary notification, and then go through and do the same damn thing again where I remove all badges, alerts, sounds, and everything else.

In short, feel free to FOAD.

No love,
Nadyne.

Mac

iTunes and half-star ratings

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Some time ago, I discovered that you could enable half-star ratings in iTunes with a simple Terminal command1:

defaults write com.apple.iTunes allow-half-stars -bool TRUE

Ever since I enabled that, I’ve been happily half-starring items.  When your music library runs to well over 40k songs, there is a difference between a five-star song, a four-and-a-half-star song, and a four-star song.

But then, sometime after I upgraded to Mountain Lion on my work computer, I noticed that all of my half-stars were gone.  My heart skipped a beat: I’d put a fair amount of work into rating those songs, and the idea of having to go back through and re-doing it made me quite cranky.  But I love my half-stars, so I quit iTunes, ran that Terminal command again, and re-launched it.

And then, I discovered that all of my half-star ratings were back.  Apparently those half-stars weren’t lost, they were just truncated when the correct bit wasn’t flipped.  Which means I can stop flipping out.

So, if you ever find yourself in my boat, try re-enabling half-stars with the Terminal command above, and see if iTunes does the right thing.  I hope it does.

  1. A tip of the hat to The Unofficial Apple Weblog for the original tip. ↩
Apple, Mac

local and iCloud notes in Notes.app?

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Does anyone know if it’s possible to have both local and cloud notes when using Notes.app in Mountain Lion?  I’ve been using Notes.app on my work Mac, and I have some notes in iCloud that I’d like to have access to when I’m at work, but I don’t want my local notes to get merged into iCloud.  I’ve tried a few different configurations, and I don’t seem to be able to keep both.

Has anyone else found a solution to this?  Other than “don’t use iCloud” or “don’t use Notes.app”, that is.

Fusion, Mac

Fusion 5 is here!

Before I get swept up in all of the VMworld madness, I’d better not forget to let you know that Fusion 5 has been released!  I’ve been dogfooding it for awhile, and ’tis awesome.  It works well with both Mountain Lion and Windows 8, not to mention the Retina display on the new MacBook Pro.

The thing that I’ve noticed the most is that Fusion 5 has made some great strides in performance.  I used to have to be careful with running Fusion if I wasn’t going to be near a power outlet soon, but now I don’t worry about it.

More details are over on the Fusion blog‘s announcement.