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The Little App Factory - Pay What You Want
Buried amidst Apple's latest announcements is news to make your digital life easier. The Little App Factory, which produces very useful utilities, offered up a "pay what you want" bundle for five of its Macintosh apps via Paddle: Evom, Grappler, Ringtones, RipIt, and iRip. All of the apps work in Mac OS X 10.6 and up. The deal is available until September 27, 2013. The current average price for the five utilities is US$3.45, while the recommended price is $29.00. No matter what you choose to pay, these apps will not disappoint you. Evom, which I confess is free on the site, takes video and converts it to an iOS-compatible format. I've used it to convert YouTube videos, Flash, AVI and WMV files. As The Little App Factory advertises: Drag. Drop. Convert. It's that easy. Grappler, according to The Little App Factory, lets you play and save video or audio off the Web. I've never used it, so I can't tell you anything about it, but you can read about it on the site. It normally sells for $19.95. iRip helps you copy your files off your iPod onto your computer. I've recovered a variety of music libraries from PC and Macintosh formatted iPods, and think iRip works really well. I had tested version 2.0, but 2.1 is the current version now. Normal price is $24.95. RipIt takes your personal DVD library and lets you convert it to iPhone, iPad, or an iPod compatible file. It works well and lets you protect your original media from children's abuse, dog teeth, and any number of other mishaps. Normal price is $24.95. Ringtones lets you take your favorite music and use slices of it as your phone ringer. It works with DRM-free music. I used it to rip a line from Jevetta Steele's "Calling You" from the Baghdad Cafe movie soundtrack. Fun stuff for the normal price of $12.95. This is a bit off topic, but if you want to see Jack Palance and CCH Pounder (Warehouse13) in very non-traditional roles, rent the movie! Paddle offers other bundles also, but I've not bought from them previously. My notice of The Little App Factory deal came via email from Wallpaper Wizard, to which I subscribe.
Play .dvdmedia files with VLC
Update 2013-04-11: Thanks to Felix Paul Kühne, lead developer of VLC for Mac, this feature has been added to VLC 2.0.6 without the need for the user to make any changes to the app. If you use that version, or later, you do not need to take the steps below. The article below remains only for reference. -- TjL Lately I have been ripping a bunch of DVDs using RipIt which has an option to save the rips as ".dvdmedia" files. For those who aren't familiar with ".dvdmedia" files, they are a special kind of folder, similar to ".app" or some ".pkg" files which aren't "files" but look and act like them. Inside of a .dvdmedia file is a VIDEO_TS folder as you'd expect from a DVD rip. The good thing about .dvdmedia files is that you can double-click on them and have them open. The bad thing about them is that the only app that I had which recognized the .dvdmedia file extension was Apple's DVD Player.app. In particular, VLC does not recognize it as a valid format. If you are a Mac "power user" you might think, "No problem, I'll just use the 'Open With...' menu and tell Finder to open .dvdmedia files with VLC. That will work." However, if you choose "Change All" to set all .dvdmedia files to open with VLC, not only will it not work, but it will make it so that .dvdmedia files are no longer shown as files at all! (If that happened to you, Tantek Çelik has the solution: use SetFile -a B /path/to/file.dvdmedia and it will undo the change.) The good news is that you can very easily add .dvdmedia as a recognized extension to VLC. You just have to add the appropriate information to the file VLC.app/Contents/Info.plist. Specifically, you have to add this: after the CFBundleDocumentTypes section. (Note: I found that via the VLC forums and tested that it worked for me in VLC version 2.0.5.) If you'd rather not try to edit the file yourself, you can download my Info.plist file and replace the existing file in the app. To do so, download the file to your Desktop (or wherever you will easily be able to find it) and then locate the VLC.app. Make sure the app is not running, and then Control-Click on the app and choose "Show Package Contents" from the context menu. Inside you will find a "Contents" folder. Open it and you will see a file named "Info.plist" which you can delete (rename to something like "Info.plist.original") and then drag the Info.plist file which you downloaded into the "Contents" folder. After that you will need to log out and then log back in to see VLC offered as an option to open .dvdmedia files. Once it is set as a recognized app for .dvdmedia you can set it to "Change All" so that other .dvdmedia files you have or create in the future will also open with VLC. If you ever decide you don't want to use .dvdmedia anymore, simply rename the files and remove the extension, and it will immediately appear as a folder once again. Caveat: Because you are replacing an app inside the VLC app wrapper, you may need to fix the Info.plist file again when VLC.app is updated. Hopefully VLC will eventually include this feature by default. Alternative fix via Terminal.app If you are comfortable with the command line, you can do all of the above much more easily. Again, be sure that VLC.app is not running before making this change. (Note: I assume VLC.app is installed in /Applications/. If you have installed it somewhere else, change the "cd" line below.) These four lines will: a) change directory to the correct folder, b) rename the existing "Info.plist" file to "Info.plist.original," c) download the new "Info.plist" file and d) register VLC as an application capable of opening .dvdmedia files: Make sure that last command (which starts with /System/Library/) is all one long line. If you use that command, you don't have to log out and back in to open .dvdmedia files with VLC. (Hat tip to Mac OSX Hints for that one!)
TUAW Review: Tagalicious for iTunes metadata, artwork, and lyrics
Tagalicious is a $20 Mac application from the The Little App Factory (best known for their excellent DVD ripper RipIt), which will clean up your iTunes library metadata, fetch artwork, and even find lyrics. So far, it's been extremely impressive both in accuracy and price. I had a Guns N' Roses song "1-01 Sweet Child O' Mine.mp3" with existing metadata saying it was the song "Sweet Child O' Mine" from their Greatest Hits album. Tagalicious said it was "Welcome to the Jungle." I played the file in iTunes, and sure enough, my metadata was wrong. It was "Welcome to the Jungle." I have no idea how Tagalicious figured that out, but I suspect it is guilty of practicing witchcraft. The current version 1.0.1 shows a great deal of promise, although it lacks some more advanced features. Then again, that is what version 1.x releases are all about: get a solid foundation started, and then see where you need to grow. Read on for more details and information.
RipIt yanks your DVDs right off the disc
HandBrake handles most of my DVD-ripping responsibilities just fine, but RipIt came to our attention recently, and as a simple one-touch way to get a movie off of a DVD and on to your hard drive (in order to, say, watch it on a laptop without lugging the disc itself along), it looks pretty simple. In fact, it's about as cake as these things get: load up the app, throw a disc in your drive, and press Rip -- a few minutes later (a 7.9gb rip took about 30 minutes for me), you've got a DVDPlayerMedia file on your hard drive to watch at your leisure. It's $18.99, which is pricey, especially (again) compared to HandBrake, which is conveniently open source, and provides tons more ways to rip things. But if you do a lot of movie ripping and want to have one single button rather than worrying about formats or encoding, that $19 might be well spent.
