itunes 10
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iTunes 10.1.2 available, adds CDMA iPhone Compatibility
Apple has released iTunes 10.1.2 today, ripe with support for the CDMA (Verizon) iPhone. Apple's cryptic release notes are stingy with details, saying: "iTunes 10.1.2 provides a number of important stability and performance improvements. iTunes 10.1.2 syncs music, movies, and more with iPhone 4 (CDMA model) and provides a number of important stability and performance improvements." Those of you thinking of inviting a shiny new Verizon iPhone to your home next month will be ready to roll with this update (of course, everyone should nab the update). You'll find it in Software Update now.
Apple granted patent behind new iTunes extras features
Today, Apple was granted a patent covering the ability to sync movie extra features with particular times or locations in videos. This is the same technology Sony is quietly testing now in the iTunes store with The Other Guys, Salt, and Resident Evil: Afterlife in which movie buyers can enter search terms to see scenes in the movie where that term was used. Since the extra features are only available for iTunes content, like iTunes LP, Apple clearly hopes to woo bonus feature-loving consumers to purchase digital copies over Blu-rays or DVDs. Of course if this strategy is going to succeed, you'd think Cupertino would want to expand support for iTunes extras beyond the original Apple TV and the desktop to include the one million second generation Apple TVs sold and three million plus iPhone 4s out there. But hey, what do we know?
iTunes 10 now offering social playlists with Ping
After Twitter integration and iPad migration, looks like the next stop for Ping is social playlists. That's right -- the next time you make a mix in iTunes 10, clicking on the playlist arrow will give you two options: you can either purchase the playlist as a gift to your friend or loved one, or publish the playlist to Ping itself. Once your playlist is published, you can even give your friends on the network the option to edit it, making it a community playlist of sorts. Of course, this last option only works if you really trust your friends' taste. After all, it just wouldn't do to have Philip Glass invade your "Core Workout Playlist" featuring such beloved anthems Move This by Technotronic and Whoomp! There It Is by Tag Team.
iTunes restores Genius sidebar
The launch of iTunes 10 in September left a lot users disappointed for several reasons. In addition to the lack of a complete rewrite that many people were hoping for, the highly underwhelming Ping social network was added, and the subsequent 10.0.1 update replaced the former Genius sidebar content with Ping. Thankfully, despite Apple's insistence on tightly controlling the user experience (which is generally a good thing), the company has been willing to reverse course from time to time to restore functionality or designs that users preferred. Users that miss the Genius sidebar content will be happy to learn that Apple has made server-side changes to iTunes (meaning no software update is required on your end) so that we now have Genius recommendations back in the iTunes sidebar. The sidebar now combines the functionality of the Genius and Ping. Genius recommendations are always available, and if you use Ping your activity is also displayed. Recommendations now appear as soon as a song is selected, before it's even played. It's a step in the right direction; hopefully next year we'll finally get the ground up re-write that iTunes so desperately needs.
Apple publishes Ping guidelines for artists
Apple has published official Ping usage guidelines for artists which describe exactly how to create an artist profile and begin posting content. According to the guidelines [PDF], artists are encouraged to hold off on creating a profile until they have several posts ready to go, because "Fans will be far more likely to follow you if they can tell that your profile is active." I agree with Apple there. Additionally, artists are encouraged to submit videos (2GB max), as long as they're in .mov, .m4v or .mp4 formats. Apple also suggests that artists create videos with iPhones whenever possible. Apple also lists what's not allowed on an artist profile, including "...pornography, hate speech, racism, nudity or drug use." Most of the artists I follow are relatively quiet, with notable exceptions like Jack Johnson. Some users have panned Ping, but I've found the 10.0.1 iTunes update to make it much more enjoyable.
How to kill that Ping drop-down in iTunes 10
Apple recently updated iTunes to version 10.0.1 which, among other things, added drop-down access to Ping, Apple's social network for iTunes customers, into your library. Some of you like Ping more than others, and there are those in the latter group who are completely disinterested. The Mac Observer explains how you can eliminate that drop-down menu from iTunes 10 entirely. The procedure is simple. First, quit iTunes, launch Terminal and enter the following: defaults write com.apple.iTunes hide-ping-dropdown -bool TRUE Finally, quit Terminal and re-launch iTunes. Presto! The drop-down is gone. The Mac Observer also describes how to restore the menu as well as how to re-orient the control buttons in the upper left-hand corner to a horizontal, rather than vertical, position. Hop over to find out how.
Are you using Apple's Ping?
Ping is Apple's first earnest foray into the social network game. Introduced with iTunes 10, Ping lets users see the music their friends are buying from the iTunes Store, leave comments, and point out what they like. There are also several musicians participating. The more active among them post photos and videos, stories, and so on. It's a young network with lots of potential, but for now, some folks are less than impressed. A recent update to iTunes put Ping in your music library (it used to be limited to the iTunes Store) and added a big 'ol sidebar. Our question to you is: are you using it? I'll admit that my interest has waned, and that's because nearly all of the updates I see are of the "[Person X] is now following [Person Y]" variety, which isn't very interesting. Perhaps if the artists I followed were a bit more active, I might use it more. Am I the only one? Complete our short poll below and let us know if you're using Ping. We'll post the results at a later time. %Poll-53434%
iOS alarms broken for New Zealand users after Daylight Saving
We just started Daylight Saving Time in New Zealand yesterday. Since then, many iOS users here have experienced what's probably one of the weirdest bugs I've ever seen: our alarms are now going off an hour early. My iPhone's alarm woke me up at 5:50 in the morning today instead of 6:50, and it turns out I'm not the only one. In the iPhone's built-in Clock app, setting a recurring alarm will cause it to trigger an hour early every time if you're running iOS 4.1, iTunes 10.0.1, and live in a Southern Hemisphere country that's just gone over to Daylight Saving Time (which, for now at least, just means New Zealand). It's also been affecting US users in Indiana since late June because of the weird time zone situation in that state. For some reason, non-recurring alarms aren't affected; so far, changing recurring alarms to non-recurring is the only thing that's fixed the problem. Standard Time doesn't start in the US until November 7, which is right around the time that iOS 4.2 is supposed to come out. Since this bug is probably something that can only be addressed by an iOS update, and since a relatively small portion of iOS users will be affected, I won't be surprised at all if Apple sits on this bug until November and bundles the fix into iOS 4.2. Meanwhile, Australian iOS users in territories that observe DST will have something to look forward to: unless this gets fixed before October 3rd, their alarms are going to start going off an hour earlier, too.
How to replace iTunes 10's grey with eye-popping black
Several iTunes 10 users were less than thrilled with the new all-grey UI theme. I've gotten used to it, but I agree it was a bit prettier with the color icons in the sidebar. Here's how you can replace the grey entirely with an eye-popping, high-contrast black and white. First, quit iTunes. Then open up Terminal and enter the following: defaults write com.apple.iTunes high-contrast-mode-enable -bool TRUE Re-launch and pow! You'll be presented with the UI depicted above. It's definitely legible, and Macworld suggests that it looks best in List View. They also explain how to switch back. We don't know if the stark theme is better, but it is different.
Adding artwork to multiple songs in iTunes 10
iTunes 10 has a cool new feature that allows you to create a Smart Playlist based on whether or not your music has artwork. To use it, simply set "Has Artwork" to "is false" when creating the playlist. You can (optionally) add "Media Kind: is Music" if you want to avoid seeing podcasts, movies, and other items that don't have artwork. I recently decided to clean up my iTunes library. This involved taking all of the music out of the iTunes library and only adding back music that I knew I really liked. I was also making sure the metadata was accurate, including the artwork. I had been adding the artwork via TidySongs, but it had been acting a bit unreliably and claiming that iTunes was not responding (the developers tell me there is a new version available for Windows and a new Mac version is due "soon"). So, I started adding artwork manually. Something very strange has happened that I can't completely explain, so I'll just describe it. I've found songs in my "No Artwork" playlist that had artwork (clearly visible when using Cover Flow), but if I examine the song individually using the inspector, the artwork is indeed missing. I'm not sure how this is happening, but I have noticed a pattern that might give a clue: all of the "phantom" artwork was added by dragging manually to the "Drag Artwork Here" area on the bottom left of the iTunes window while multiple songs from the same album were selected. If I examine the files in the Finder, some of them have the artwork, and some of them don't. Why is this happening? I have no idea. Frankly it makes no sense, and I suspect that there's a bug in there somewhere. (Or maybe that fortuneteller actually did put a curse on me.) Whatever the reason, there does seem to be a workaround. Select all of the songs that you want to apply the artwork to Use command+i to call up the inspector Drag the artwork to the inspector instead of the "Drag Artwork Here" area I don't know why, but that method has worked 100% reliably for me without leaving any "stragglers" lacking artwork. It's a bit of a hassle, but that's a trade-off I'll take for something that works better. Thanks to Guillermo Esteves for drawing my attention to the new iTunes feature.
Dear Aunt TUAW: Burn baby burn
Dear Aunt TUAW, Is iTunes slowly encouraging the death of CDs? The burn icon at the bottom of the interface has disappeared as you can see in this screen shot. Concerned, Your nephew Sean
iTunes 101: Play other people's music, increase contrast
Here's two tips for the new iTunes 10 that you might not have seen yet. First up, 9to5Mac shares the news that you can now plug any iOS device with music on it into iTunes 10 and listen in to whatever music is available without having to enable "manual sync mode." That's a nice bonus -- if you're at a party, and your friend wants to hear a tune you're carrying around on the iPhone, you can just plug it in, hit play, and dance the night away. I presume all of the usual restrictions on sharing music are still there (music bought on one account can't be downloaded to another, obviously), but at least just for listening, iTunes 10 makes things much easier. Mac OS X Hints also shares a tip for those disappointed by the look of the grayed-out icons in the iTunes 10 sidebar. By putting a certain line into Terminal, you can enable "high contrast mode" for the app. It won't bring back the colors (it basically just inverses the sidebar from black-on-white to vice versa), but if you need a little more action in the iTunes sidebar, you can give it a shot.
Talkcast reminder: iTunes, iPods and all the week's news, 10pm ET
Holiday weekend or no holiday weekend: we're live tonight on Talkshoe, so call in and chat with us. Of course, there were a few announcements of note this week, but that doesn't mean we can't talk about anything besides iTunes 10 or new iPods! Bring your interests, your questions and/or your gripes and we'll lay it down. To participate on TalkShoe, you can use the browser-only client, the embedded Facebook app, or the classic TalkShoe Pro Java client; however, for maximum fun, you should call in. For the web UI, just click the "TalkShoe Web" button on our profile page at 10 pm Sunday. To call in on regular phone or VoIP lines (take advantage of your free cellphone weekend minutes if you like): dial (724) 444-7444 and enter our talkcast ID, 45077 -- during the call, you can request to talk by keying in *8. If you've got a headset or microphone handy on your Mac or your PC, you can connect via the free Gizmo or X-Lite SIP clients or using the Talkshoe client's ShoePhone tool; basic instructions are here. We'll kick things off at 10pm ET/ 7pm PT. See you there!
iTunes 10 drops custom ringtone purchasing
Along with the up-front iTunes 10 changes (social awareness, monochrome sidebar, new-attitude icon), it looks like Apple has quietly dropped one store-centric feature from the latest version. Roberto Baldwin at Mac|Life notes that the feature allowing users to buy a section of a track from the iTunes Store for use as a custom ringtone has gone AWOL between 9.2.1 and 10. Granted, there are lots and lots of ways to make DIY ringtones from tracks you already own or other sources, but the iTunes-authorized method was certainly convenient. Apple may be proud to announce that Ping already has over 1 million users, but now we know that none of them are making ringtones straight from the store. [via MacRumors]
iTunes 101: Share your Ping profile
Here's a tip about something that had me confused for a while, I hate to admit. After setting up Ping in iTunes 10 and getting my profile just so, I naturally wanted to tell the eager masses where to find me. After all, many of the folks I follow on Twitter were sharing URLs to their accounts. But where did it come from? The answer is quite simple. Log into your account, and right-click (or control-click) on the "My Profile" link. Then select "Copy link" from the contextual menu and you're all set! Paste that address in Twitter, email or where ever you want to broadcast your shiny new account. Another, more roundabout way of accomplishing the same task is to search for yourself on Ping, and when your name shows up under "People," right-click your avatar icon and choose "Copy link." We'll have more iTunes 10 tips and tricks coming right up.
Apple's Ping gains a million users in first two days
We're still trying to figure out exactly what Apple's new Ping social network is good for, but apparently quite a few people are curious about it: it's already racked up a million users in its first two days. That's just a third of the people who've downloaded iTunes 10, so we're sure the numbers are will grow even faster as more people snag iTunes and the network effect starts to kick in -- and things will get really crazy if Apple and Facebook ever work out their little tiff. Just remember: it's a social network... for music.
Fixing broken iTunes Automator workflows in iTunes 10
If you depend on Automator workflows for managing music or other tasks in iTunes, the upgrade to version 10 may have come as a bit of a cold shock. Macworld pointed out that most available workflows for iTunes simply would not load with iTunes 10; a frustrating circumstance, to be sure. Fortunately, the problem turns out not to be that complicated; Automator's version checking thinks that iTunes 10.0 is a lower version than 9.0, because the versions are sorting alphabetically instead of numerically (oof!). Macfixit points to a workaround: opening up the Info.plist files inside the packages for the dysfunctional workflows and manually changing the version threshold. It's not ideal, but if you have critical Automator functionality that would otherwise keep you on iTunes 9, it's worth a try.
iTunes 101: Using the Album Art widget
Here's a cool new feature in iTunes 10 that we haven't mentioned yet: when listening to any song in your library, you can double click on the album art window in the lower left hand corner to detach it from the main window and see it full size. That's not new -- you could get a closer look at the art in previous versions of iTunes. But what is new is that when you mouse over that detached art, you now get full QuickTime-style controls for your tracks. You can then minimize the main window (using those weirdly-aligned buttons, of course), and then just control the music directly from that square widget (which can also be resized any way you want). Pretty neat, and somewhat hard to find if you don't usually zoom in to see your album art full size. This replicates some (not all) of the functionality provided by CoverSutra and a number of other "iTunes controllers," so it looks like Apple has (yet again) decided to make a popular function in third-party apps part of the official thing.
Ringtone creationism not for sale in iTunes 10, but DIY method still seems to work
Not that we've ever been a fan of paying an additional 99 cents to turn an already-purchased track into a seconds-long ringtone, but if you fancied the option in iTunes 9.2.1, we're sad to inform you that yesterday's update seems to have nixed said option. But hey, look at this way, now you can learn a new skill: how to make iTunes 10 ringtones free of charge with some filename finagling. The old method still seems to work just fine (instructions via More Coverage link below), so turn that .m4-frown upside down!
iTunes 10 quick tip: Liking a song in Ping
Here's a quick tip for iTunes that puzzled a few of us this morning: once you've gone ahead and set up Ping in iTunes 10, how do you 'like' a song instead of an album? The albums have those handy thumbs-up buttons, but it's not as obvious for songs. A bit of exploration reveals that the 'Like' command is under the pop-up menu for each song, along with the other song-specific actions like gifting, sharing, wish-list-adding and the 'Other Versions' search. We'll have more iTunes 10 tips and tricks coming right up.
