Recently in iTunes Category

Normally, when I travel, I keep pretty busy.  But this past trip, when I arrived at the hotel, I did a quick digital checkin and then flipped on the TV —a rare thing. I couldn't find anything of interest; so, I left the TV on HBO with some crazy vampire thing, TrueBlood, about to start. I had some passive knowledge that HBO had a series about vampires and thought it ridiculous.

They played two episodes back to back. So awesome! I'm now completely hooked! I bought the first two seasons at the iTunes store (Season One, Season Two) and have now caught up.  Unfortunately, HBO has not released any episodes in the current season (three).  Season four has been scheduled for production.

HBO has a brilliant marketing campaign for the series, including bottles of "TrueBlood" that can be purchased. I particularly like this iPhone wallpaper, a special bandage just for vampire bites for "fang bangers." If they sold these, I think I would purchase a box as a conversation starter!

Alan Ball, of American Beauty and Six Feet Under (both of which I loved!) is the creator and producer of the series. I think he also is one of the screenwriters for this series, which is based on the book series by Charlaine Harris. However, a quick internet search reveals that the HBO series includes at least one additional character not found in the novels.

The intro to the HBO series is fantastically evocative and exquisitely sets the tone for the series! The music, with its cajun influence, is awesome.  I bought some of the tracks at the iTunes store.  The small town setting in Louisiana is compelling and authentically done. The symbolism is nothing short of brilliant. The religious overtones are, as they should be, nothing short of disturbing. The set design, lighting, casting, and costume design are flawless. This series is exceptionally well done!

Related articles:

• HBO's 'True Blood': Season 3 Goes 'Twilight' (with a twist) (beliefnet.com)
• How HBO has pushed back the boundaries of modern television (guardian.co.uk)
• HBO Gets More Sookie (observer.com)
• HBO "True Blood" Season 4 (popcrunch.com)

Yes, I've ranted about my AppleTVs world without end!  Well, apparently, one of them was just completely messed up:  the hardware was bad.  Naturally, it wasn't under warranty.  (I think Apple only has a 90 day warranty unless you spend the extra money on AppleCare.  I always do for computers but hadn't for the AppleTV.)

So, I bought a new AppleTV.  My god!  The thing actually works!  After having been plagued with sooo many issues for sooo long with the other device, I was fully expecting this one not to function properly either.  But it works well!  And I purchased AppleCare for this one.

The only thing that greatly annoys me with the AppleTV:  the largest hard drive you can get is 160GB.  That's ridiculous.  I frankly don't give a rip what Apple thinks, Tim thinks he should be able to store his entire media library on the AppleTV hard drive and not have to clutter up the home LAN with streaming audio/video!  This would also give me another backup for the media files!

I do love being able to stream nearly 10,000 photos and music on the large flat panel TV downstairs for parties—like the one held here at the house last Saturday night.  (BTW:  Bristol Farms does a great job catering!!)  My photos just look awesome on the big screen, if I say so myself!  :)

I just stumbled onto this new program, TuneUp, from TuneUpMedia.com. It's an iTunes plugin that has a number of really cool features:

• The program will analyze your iTunes library and report back all of the tracks that have incomplete information and create a "dirty" playlist.  Incomplete information might mean the track is missing any of the data listed in the graphic to the right.


• Drag any of the "dirty" tracks into TuneUp.  TuneUp then analyzes the sound footprint of the track to determine what the track actually is and offers to retrieve all of the missing meta data for the track.  In other words, you could have a track in your iTunes library called "Track 09."  TuneUp would figure out what the track name, artist, album, genre, year, cover art, and actual track number on the album are and populate all of that data, replacing the "Track 09" with the real info!  That's rather remarkable!  But there's more...


• TuneUp will follow what you're listening to, offer videos of the track in a sidebar (just click to play the videos right there in the sidebar), a bio of the artists, tell you about the upcoming concerts for that artist in your area, even let you purchase the tickets, share related items about the artist from ebay, let you tweet what you're listening to.


• Other features too...

Today Apple sold its 10,000,000,000th (that's billionth) song at the iTunes Store—all in less than 7 years. The music industry can gripe all it wants, but Apple has made them a lot of money they would otherwise have lost to file sharing!

Today's Business Insider has this headline: Blockbuster Collapses: Shutting Down 500 Stores In Desperate Bid To Save $200 Million. I'm actually shocked they survived as long as they did. They ended last year almost $1,000,000,000 in debt.

By closing 500 of their weakest stores, they hope to reduce operating expenses by $200 million. They are also exploring other ways to increase liquidity and find new emerging distribution channels.

Let me offer them a touch of advice. Liquidate now and save everyone the misery to come.

While appreciating their search functionality, I've been rather ambivalent about Google. But in recent days, I've decided it's time for me to explore other options aside from using Google exclusively for so many things.

Yesterday I went to demonstrate setting up a free Blogger account. Now Google requires the user give Google a cell phone number to set up a free account! This isn't an option. Claiming the need to reduce spurious blog accounts, if you want a Blogger blog, you must give Google a cell phone number. Google will send that number a code which then must be input to continue the setup process.

This makes me angry.

How dare they!

But it gets even worse!!

Quoted directly from Apple's response to the FCC, Apple claims that one of the reasons the Google Voice App (which would allow iPhone and I think iPod Touch users the ability to place phone calls from their device without using AT&T, a corporation I loathe) was rejected from the iTunes App Store:

In addition, the iPhone user’s entire Contacts database is transferred to Google’s servers, and we have yet to obtain any assurances from Google that this data will only be used in appropriate ways. These factors present several new issues and questions to us that we are still pondering at this time.

What?! I wonder if the end user would have even been aware of such a devious action?! Oh it would probably have been buried deep within the bowels of some user agreement 99% of us just click "I Accept" without reading.

In my mind, this is despicable conduct.

Yes, Google has become too big, too powerful, and is collecting too much information. I no longer trust them.

Somehow I totally missed Boz Scaggs' music, but I love it! Check out this one at last.fm! I was just listening to it.

Breakdown Dead Ahead by BOZ SCAGGS

I've been working with my iTunes library (on and off) for weeks now because Apple's iTunes Plus (referred to now as iTunes +) upgrade process made one hell of a mess out of it. I've recovered as much of my music as is possible at this point.

The iTunes + upgrade process, where for some small amount of money, you can unlock your music, play it on all of your devices, and get a higher quality encode, was initially a download disaster! When I first ran the upgrade process, iTunes automatically deleted all of the originals replacing them with the upgraded music. I was a bit worried about that but had, thank goodness, made a complete backup of my iTunes library before I began the upgrade process. (In fact, I keep 4 historical backups of the iTunes library.)

Then months later, I begin to notice that an album here, an album there, a downloaded movie, didn't play. I thought the files must have gotten corrupted. I replaced the non-playing files the backup copies and all was well. Then I realized that this was not a small issue. I had thousands of files that wouldn't play. The files were sitting (in their entirety) on the hard drive but did not play. Then I recalled that during the upgrade process, once, the downloaded files appeared to download more than once but actually never downloaded at all. I had contacted Apple and they reissued the downloads even though their servers indicated the downloads had been completed. Were these files the ones that were all messed up? Which ones were they?

Well, no, as it turns out, huge numbers of my personal files, that I had ripped years ago from CDs I personally owned, also would no longer play. What a mess. I was most unhappy as it took me literally years to rip my entire CD collection into iTunes. I couldn't find any simple solution. And my old CDs were thrown out in the move to California!

I tried to contact Apple's iTunes support. Well, in Tim's opinion, Apple might as well no longer have iTunes support. Even though I have Apple Care, even though I've been a loyal Apple supporter in good times and in their bad times, I got virtually no support: I got to instant message with a support person for about half a day. After stating that the new version of iTunes had been a disaster, he reissued a download of every file I ever purchased from Apple. But the download "got hung up." It never happened. He told me to wait over night and try again. The next day: nothing.

The next day, Apple's iTunes instant messaging "support" was no longer available. Now I had to send them an email (after having to call them to find the hidden email support link) and wait for 24 - 48 hours for them to reply. What crap!

Finally, all of the music got downloaded. But, oops... Only the music and movies to which they still have rights to distribute through iTunes. Many songs are no longer available on iTunes and therefore no longer available to replace my files that no longer play.

After downloading most of my music, movies, and TV shows, comparing all of the files from my original library to the new downloaded library one by one, going through my backups file by file and comparing them to the new and old libraries, replacing the old protected files with their iTunes + upgrades one at a time, I've finally recovered every file that can be recovered. Interestingly, inexplicably, a significant number of the files that had stopped playing all of a sudden played again! What's with that?

Now, to be fair to Apple, I must also note that many, many files played the wrong song when clicked on. In other words, it was as if the directory information on the hard drive was an absolute train wreck. Maybe the disk drive crashed and burned during one of the iTunes + upgrade processes causing all of this mess. I will never know. But all of the files now live on a new hard drive.

What I do know is that I lost many files in this process, found well over 141 duplicate files (as a result of iTunes rearranging compilations and collections). My library of music went from 9.747 songs to 8,555. My movies went up from 25 to 29. My TV shows went from 770 to 785. My audiobook collection went from 55 down to 49. My iPhone applications remained the same at 114.

Keep your music files backed up multiple times!

... Tim-style!

Manhattan Beach must have more children per capita than any other city in the USA! I'm completely serious! I've never seen a place with more children--really young children. Thursday and Friday nights I ate dinner at California Pizza Kitchen and Chili's respectively. Both evenings the number of loud and generally badly behaved children was unbelievably high.

As incredulous as it may sound, on the half of the restaurant I was in, on Thursday I counted 37 children under the age of about 5! What if they all spontaneously decided to take over the restaurant? I swear there were not enough adults to have prevented it! Screaming, crying, doing what less-than-1-year-olds do, the place was out of control. The dining experience was completely unpleasant. I couldn't wait to get out of there. Chili's the next night was little better.

By California standards, these are inexpensive places to eat. So I guess the moms and dads take the family out to eat here. I actually asked the waiter at California Pizza Kitchen if Thursday nights was kids night. (I was going to avoid it in the future.) He rolled his eyes and said with a bit of disgust in his voice, as some toddler let out a particularly shrill screech: No, believe it or not, it's like this every night.

So when the girl that cuts my hair told me about the ArcLight Theater at the Cinema Dome in Hollywood, describing it as kids-free and very well done, I immediately wanted to go there. The tickets are pricy: $15--hence no children: indeed, a small price to pay. A large, very nice theater (with reserved seating) on Sunset Blvd., I had a fantastic time enjoying a dinner and movie: Mamma Mia!

The movie's setting in the Greek Isles was spectacular. The music is, well... you know. I bought the soundtrack. Meryl Streep was a sensation. She can sing, too!! Is there anything she can't do on stage?! Pierce Brosnan?? Was the casting director snorting cocaine, or what?! The man can not sing. At least the audio mixer amped up everything else to drown him out.

This was a great feel good movie, and the only thing loud and out of control was the awesome music. I highly recommend it.

Here is a good article at the iPod Lounge for Mac users who are interested in ripping your legally owned DVDs so you can watch them on your iPod. (They also give info for Windows users.) The article includes settings and information related to format. Handbrake, a great little application which I've used many times, is not completely intuitive. The step by step directions, presented by the iPod Lounge, along with some explanation of what the settings all mean and do is very helpful.

I'm in the process (this very moment, actually) of setting up a media server for the house that will provide access to all of the digital media content to any television or computer in the house. Regrettably, I can't find a single comprehensive solution to address all of the digital assets: TiVo, AppleTV, iTunes, Podcasts, Photos, the Verizon DVR, etc. I suspect that Apple has been developing this for the last few years, but that will probably be a completely proprietary solution.

And the thought of ripping all of the DVD content I own is just too overwhelming, especially when the new BluRay format is getting ready to pounce and make all of the lower resolution DVDs look less than desirable on the large HD flat screen TVs. And then there is the hard disk space requirement. For standard definition alone the space required is insane!

And then you have the issue of developing an affordable digital media backup strategy. I'm already dealing with a LaCie HD failure at the moment–a 1TB drive. When drives contain that much data, losing one is no small concern. And yes, they do die! This is the third hard drive failure I've experienced in 2008! That's a huge issue.

I have two 4 TB Drobo's with a network interface on the way to address the backup and redundancy issues. But what of catastrophic loss like fire or theft? I'm curious about off site backup. But .Mac, now MobileMe, limits backup capacity to 60 GB, which doesn't even cover my documents folder, let alone my digital media assetts: 20,000+ photos, then thousands and thousands of videos, podcasts, and music files...

I'm curious about Amazon's S3, with JungleDisk, which, as inexpensive as it first seems at .10 per GB per month plus bandwidth usage, adds up quickly when you're talking about terabytes of data. Redundancy is good but is also both very time consuming and expensive.

Then how do you fully and completely automate the backup/redundancy process? I certainly don't want to spend any of my time checking to see what new files have been added to iTunes to back up just those, etc. This must be completely and reliably automated.

Who has explored solutions? Has anyone found anything you really like that works well?

Who ever would have thought...

Too often technology just complicates my life. (Some of you are thinking: I can't believe you just said that! But it's true.) I guess we have to take the good with the bad, because life in any time has both. But sometimes a technology comes along that really makes me smile. This post is about such an application: Shazam.

I just learned about this application from one of my good friends who is driving around someplace New Hampshire, lost, listening to the radio, using his iPhone 3G to identify the music on the radio and his location on the map.

How many times have you been someplace and wanted to know the name of the song you are hearing: on the radio, in a movie, in the grocery store, at a restaurant. Maybe the song is a blast from the past (you can't quite remember the name or group) or maybe it's a song you have never heard and really like--would like to purchase. Now the information you need is just two touches away!

Shazam is a free application at the iTunes Store. Touch the Shazam icon on your iPhone so it will "listen" to the music. A few seconds later your phone vibrates, and Shazam gives you a picture of the album cover and all of the details of the music! I am blown away. This is an awesome idea. And It really works! Click on the picture in this post to go to the app on the iTunes Store.

You also get links to purchase the song right then on your iPhone from the iTunes Store. (You must be on a WiFi network at the time for this feature to be available.) You get links to any YouTube videos featuring the song. You can even attach a photo (from your iPhoto library or one you just snapped with your phone) to the song and share it via an instant email to anyone in your address book. "Hey! Remember 10 years ago when we heard this here..."

This is just insane. Loving it.

As most everyone knows, I travel a great deal these days. Today I printed out my boarding pass for Delta. Again, I love the convenience. But this time I was shocked. The boarding pass doesn't look the same at all.

Now I must first confess to believing that 98% of all advertising is nothing but noise, even graffiti as far as I am concerned. I LOATHE advertising! On rare occasion an advertisement has some merit on its own. Rarely.

Well, the new Delta boarding passes have full color advertisements on them. Damn! I'm printing out an advertisement, using my ink (which we all know isn't inexpensive!), so I can get on their plane?! Aggravation and irritation. I'm sure they are looking for every way they can find to make money to compensate for rising oil prices and keep fares affordable. And I must confess this is a clever idea as it has great margins: virtually no cost for Delta at all, just profit!

But the boarding pass also includes some useful information as well: the weather forecast for the place I will be. Now that's really useful and convenient, especially since they are forecasting thunder storms. They also feature recommended (read: paid advertisements) places to eat with their phone numbers, tours and other "touristy" information.

Well, they almost provided me a service but had to make some money out of it as well. OK, I'll take the good with the bad.

Today the iTunes Store is 5 years old. In just five years Apple dominates all sources of music distribution, surpassing the previous king of the hill, Walmart, about a month ago! Predictions are that Apple may capture 25% of music world-wide within only 4 years! How quickly times can change. And I'm lovin' it!

Interesting! I had heard about this project years ago and lost track of it somehow. Just doing some hit and miss all of the music had redeeming quality--unlike so much of what the industry shovels at us today. I'll spend some time exploring this site.

They also have a podcast series at iTunes.

The Music Genome Project®

On January 6, 2000 a group of musicians and music-loving technologists came together with the idea of creating the most comprehensive analysis of music ever.

Together we set out to capture the essence of music at the most fundamental level. We ended up assembling literally hundreds of musical attributes or "genes" into a very large Music Genome. Taken together these genes capture the unique and magical musical identity of a song - everything from melody, harmony and rhythm, to instrumentation, orchestration, arrangement, lyrics, and of course the rich world of singing and vocal harmony. It's not about what a band looks like, or what genre they supposedly belong to, or about who buys their records - it's about what each individual song sounds like.

[From Pandora Radio - Listen to Free Internet Radio, Find New Music]

Few things can be as exciting, as uplifting, a cause for a savoring pause as the sweeping beauty of a glorious melody. I spend much too little time feeding my soul with classical music which I so love! But, with the holidays at hand, I went to my iTunes collection and did a search for Пётр Ильич Чайкoвский. Ok, ok... so I typed it in English: Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky.

Out from the speakers popped the Berlin Symphony Orchestra's performance of Pas de deaux from the Nutcracker. Dear god that's just so plangent it's astoundingly brilliant, beautiful melodic composition! [Yes, remember, you can double click on any word on my blog for its definition.]

Let's see: using Zucker's logic, everyone that has ever created anything that runs on a PC should pay Microsoft a premium price because Microsoft wrote th operating system that powers the majority of the PC's on earth. Oh, but people who use Windows are already paying! I forgot. <evil smile>

NBC Universal CEO Jeff Zucker has said that along with flexible pricing experimentation, the company was seeking a cut of Apple’s hardware sales during iTunes contract negotiations. Speaking at an event organized by Syracuse University’s Newhouse School of Public Communications, Zucker said “We wanted to take one show, it didn’t matter which one it was, and experiment and sell it for $2.99. We made that offer for months and they said no,” Zucker said. “Apple sold millions of dollars worth of hardware off the back of our content and made a lot of money,” he added. “They did not want to share in what they were making off the hardware or allow us to adjust pricing.” NBC Universal, in partnership with Fox, today launched a public beta of the Hulu.com video service. Responding to a separate question, Zucker said that “Apple has destroyed the music business. If we don’t take control on the video side, they’ll do the same” to video.

Source: NBC Universal wanted cut of Apple hardware sales

"Sold millions of dollars worth of hardware off the back of our content"? What drugs does this man do?! NBC ain't all that! The guy is crazy! I bet his legal department can't wait for him to move on to some other company.

I found these little tidbits from yesterday's Apple news of interest:

• On the Apple earnings call, CFO Peter Oppenheimer cited some research from Strategy Analytics placing the iPhone as the “fourth highest selling handset in the U.S. market in the September quarter.” (The Motorola V3 was No. 1).
• Apple has sold 1.4 million iPhones in a little over a quarter. It took the iPod more than two years to reach the same number of sales. The price cut helped it reach that number, by nearly doubling the daily sales of the iPhone. And Apple says it is on track to sell 10 million iPhones by next year.
• iTunes has now sold 3 billion songs, and 100 million TV shows.

Source: Digging Into Apple’s iPhone Numbers

I have always felt guilty about how little I tag. I see the value of it. I just never think about it when I write. Now tagging goes to a new level pushing the bounds of broadcast technology, making it more interactive.

Thursday, September 06, 2007 - 10:10 PM EDT
Responding to the desire of millions of people who discover music via their favorite local radio broadcasts, Apple, iBiquity Digital, and major radio broadcasting groups unveiled today the result of an industry-wide initiative to create a new, free service called "iTunes Tagging."

iTunes Tagging is designed to make music discovery, purchase and listening even more fun and simple for all. iTunes Tagging enables consumers using HD Radio receivers that have been equipped with a special Tag button, to "tag" songs that they hear on the FM dial for subsequent purchase via iTunes.

"iTunes tagging takes music discovery on the radio to the next level," said Greg Joswiak, Apple's vice president of iPod Product Marketing, in the press release. "When a song plays on your HD Radio that you like, a simple push of a button will tag it and later give you the chance to preview, purchase, and enjoy it with iTunes and your iPod."

Source: MacDailyNews - Apple, iBiquity Digital, major radio broadcasters announce iTunes tagging for HD Radio

Technorati Tags: Apple, itunes, media

I read a small excerpt from an interview with William Gibson*, as part of his new book (Spook Country) promotion. Here are some interesting notions: because everyone Google's everything, even printed book media now has a hyper-text cloud that swirls around it, a Google ether cloud. And because you construct your own Google searches, your own mind is the most significant limitation to your capacity to use this tool. Except for sheer luck, when Google plops something before you that you've never seen before, something completely unanticipated, you're "still really inside some annotated version of your own head."

Gibson said that eBay is annotating and cataloging the world's attic. "The tentacles of that operation extend into every flea market and thrift shop and basement and attic in the world" making it possible for a person in some remote location to be a curator of the absurd, of "some tiny obscure area of stuff. ... It's like some sort of vast unconscious curatorial movement."

Gibson's last two books, Spook Country and Pattern Recognition, are more about the world we live in now than his science fiction vision of the future. He stated,

"Well, I thought that writing about the world today as I perceive it would probably be more challenging, in the real sense of science fiction, than continuing just to make things up. And I found that to absolutely be the case. If I'm going to write fiction set in an imaginary future now, I'm going to need a yardstick that gives me some accurate sense of how weird things are now. 'Cause I'm going to have to go beyond that. And I think definitely over the course of these last two books--I don't think I'm done yet--I've been getting a yardstick together. But I don't know if I'll be able to do it again. I don't know if I'll be able to make up an imaginary future in the same way. In the '80s and '90s, as strange as it may seem to say this, we had such luxury of stability. Things weren't changing quite so quickly in the '80s and '90s. And when things are changing too quickly, as one of the characters in Pattern Recognition says, you don't have any place to stand from which to imagine a very elaborate future."

And I think he's right, the 80's and 90's were a period of some stability. Since the turn of the century, we have lost our national sense of security and stability. Yet I would argue this has far less to do with the terrorists than with the use of fear to shift the balance of power to the office of the presidency (republican or democratic being irrelevant) and the significant aggregation of wealth to fewer and fewer people.

Gibson visited Second Life last December and made these observations about the experience:

Well, you know I didn't go as myself. I went as the guy that I cooked up when I signed up, so nobody knew it was me. ... It's deserted. It seems like functionally it has to be deserted. If it's not deserted it crashes. So there's all this empty, empty architecture. There's whole cities where there's only one other person and they don't even want to get close to you. And when you do succeed in finding a group of other avatars, people aren't very nice. ... They're meaner than they are in the real world. ...

You know what really worried me about Second Life? It's that after I'd spent maybe like four or five hours checking it out last December, I was walking around in the Christmas shopping crowds here, and every so often I would see somebody from Second Life walking down the street. There are people, always well under 30, who look like they've escaped from Second Life. ... They dress like an avatar, they're built like an avatar. It's a very spooky thing. And I think somewhere in my file of lines for fiction there's one about a guy, his girlfriend looks like he found her in Second Life.

Source: Amazon Bookstore's Blog: Writing Fiction in the Age of Google: William Gibson Q&A;

• "Spook Country" (William Gibson) (book at Amazon)
• Audiobook on iTunes

*Science fiction writer Gibson is credited with creating the term "cyberspace" in 1984 with his revolutionary novel, Neuromancer

"In the US of all the music releases in 2006, 32% were digital-only releases. They weren't released on a CD. Live concerts, independents. Look how far we've come. One third of the music released in this country was digital only."

I came across these two iTunes visualizers that seem to be popular at the moment. So I downloaded them. Pretty coo, actually. It would even be more cool if my AppleTV could play these as the screen saver instead of just photos or album art.

One of the programers is funny:

I make no guarantees that this won't break iTunes, your Mac, your car, or your cat. Numerous people have been using it without problems so far. Then again, maybe you're special...

The visualizers are: Gas Light over at Steel Skies, and Magnetosphere over at Barbarian Software. Here is a screen shot from each. Neither does either justice.

Well, when the store opened again, at 6:00PM, the line moved quickly, and I was able to purchase my 8 gig phone within 15 minutes, unlike some of my friends in other states. The AT&T store in Orlando, for example, ran out of the 8 gig phones just before my friend, Mark, was to purchase his. His line of about 25 people moved slowly because AT&T's retail system went down. I have always had apprehension about Apple doing this deal with AT&T. I have never really been impressed with the company. (I'm trying to be nice.)

For example: When I went to activate my phone, through iTunes, upon completion of all of the information, the window says that AT&T will activate my account in less than 1 minute. After "a while," I got a response that reads, "Your activation requires additional time to complete." The window goes on to inform me that I will get an email when the process is finished.

At 8:48PM I got an email from the iTunes store stating that AT&T was now processing my application. Now, at 3:45AM, (yes, 7 hours later) I just called AT&T to see why the cell phone that is being replaced by my iPhone no longer works, but the iPhone is still not activated. Had I done something wrong? Of course not.

Certainly one can easily see that AT&T had absolutely no idea on earth that so many people would hit their system all at once to activate their new iPhones. This was completely unexpected. I mean, how could they have possibly anticipated this?! It has only been publicized in every conceivable form of media and highly anticipated the world over for how long now?!

AT&T's customer service stated that they could not give an estimated time my activation will be completed. Will their cell network even function with the new iPhone? Will I be able to get and receive calls? Or, after dialing a call, will I have to wait an indeterminate amount of time before the network actually puts the call through? Will they send me an email when the call is finally ringing?

...Not a good way for AT&T to begin our new working relationship with all of these Apple customers.

For me, no running of errands would be complete without going to a computer store. Today I went to two: the Apple store and CompUSA, both by/in Lenox Mall. I was shocked by each.

The Apple Store is under major renovation. While open, it is but a fraction of its former size–more like a bathroom! Even when full size, the store is clogged with people. This was insane. So why was I here??? ...

Then I went to CompUSA. I must confess to always having hated this store. The people who work there, when you can even find them, seem to actively avoid helping customers. But there were huge signs everywhere: they are going out of business--selling everything including the fixtures. Therefore, they had 10 - 30% off everything in the store--mostly 10%. I suspect the sale just started as the stock is still very high. I needed to upgrade the network switch at the house from 4 ports to 8.

So back to why I went to the Apple store. Every morning at 5:30 when I work out downstairs, I can't find anything on TV that interests me. MTV has become what they hated when they first started. Many of the channels air workout ads at that time. Geeze, I don't want to watch people sweat and smile while I'm sweating and dying!

So I decided to buy an Apple TV so I can stream content from my desktop, catch up on the daily podcasts I watch, and listen to music I actually like instead of the junk on MTV and VH1.

The press is suggesting this news has huge implications for Apple: billions in revenue! Since so much money will be involved, I'm sure that matter (litigation) is just beginning.

A recent out-of-court settlement between Apple Computer and a Vermont-based inventor has landed Apple the rights to a prestigious software design patent that may allow the company to seek royalties on a broad spectrum of digital downloads.

Michael Starkweather, a lawyer and author of the 10-year old patent, issued a statement on Thursday calling it a "billion dollar patent" that will have affects on the future of the "cell phone, iPod and PDA" industries.

"I believe that, with this patent in hand, Apple will eventually be after every phone company, film maker, computer maker and video producer to pay royalties on every download of not just music but also movies and videos," he said.

Source: AppleInsider | Apple gains control of critical digital download patent

I found another wonderful little application that lets you drag and drop music files off of your iPod back onto your computer: Senuti. So if your computer's hard drive containing all of your digital music files crashes, and you have them all loaded on your iPod, you're back in business!

This seems like a novel idea. I have only tried it on a local network, and it works fine, but then so would normal iTunes sharing. I am most interested in how well it works at streaming content over the world wide web. This from their website.

"MyTunesRSS allows you to access the music and videos from your iTunes library over a local network or even the internet. You can access your music from all over the world using a simple web browser. The user interface lets you search for titles for browse your whole library by album or artist. You can access your iTunes playlists or create new ones directly in MyTunesRSS."

I hate spending as much of my time as I do dealing with anti-theft deterrence. I mean, how much time in our lives is spent locking and unlocking, taking time to hide something from view so it won't be stolen, etc. And now, today, I am having to rip everything off of my iPod because I moved my music library off of my laptop as the hard drive is too small to hold everything I use.

Naturally this caused huge issues. For some reason my playlists all disappeared. And when I connected my iPod to my laptop, it said it was in sync with another machine ... did I want to erase it and sync it with this one? What?! It's the same machine. It was supposed to be the exact same music library just relocated to an external hard drive.

All of this because of people stealing from people. The music companies have charged absurd prices for years (theft) and now people have begun stealing from them (retribution?). As a result, we have digital rights management which is a royal pain for those of us who do not steal music.

I have discovered a fantastic little program, iPodDisk, that mounts my iPod as a server. It lets me read and manipulate it as a regular hard drive! So I am now wasting my time copying the files off of my iPod that disappeared during the relocation of the original music library.

Click to download the free app!

How much time do we waste because of theft?!

Complete with continuously streaming high quality music from his recordings, this artist includes an RSS feed on his web site. I so enjoyed his performances while visiting his site that I immediately bought 2 of his albums at the iTunes store! What a way to market yourself!

I like it!

"We all miss album cover art work, and the tiny digital cover art on your iPod just isn't the same. English designer, Michael Kennedy, has the answer that makes retro meet modern in a funked up way. I-Deck is a touch screen music player that revitalizes album art and user interaction which has been lost in current mp3 format. You simply dock your mp3 player into the base and use the touch screen to cycle through and select your tracks, flick it to skip, spin it to fast-forward and turn it to play. Then sit back and watch the album art play. From the Nirvana baby floating through to Madonna in a leotard, album art is back in vogue. Contact us if you require designers contact details." by Andy

Source: the cool hunter - gadgets

I just stumbled across this post from: The Potion Factory Blog

Podcasting will change the world. How do I know? Hordes of bored iPod users are waiting for your content. 6.5 million iPods were sold in the last quarter. Let me put that number into perspective:

6.5 million iPods / 90 days / 24 hours / 60 minutes / 60 seconds = 0.84 iPods sold per second!

In the same amount of time, 4.4 babies are born in the world. Considering that a large portion of the world population is not wealthy enough to afford iPods, it’s no stretch to say that there is an iPod sold for every baby born in the developed nations.

Yet, a lot of people don’t even know what podcasting is. Spread the word about podcasting. Spread the word about Podcast Maker too. We live and die by word of mouth.

Podcast Maker is an excellent tool!

I am privileged to be on the same team of people as those who did the podcasting of the NECC event. Listening to Barnaby's podcast from NECC is really what got me all excited about podcasting to begin with. You can check out my initial efforts with podcasting at our school site. Barnaby, who did the introductory presentation about Podcasting at the NECC event, is acting as the lead for this team here this week. Jason Ediger is our link to Apple.

The iPod and iTunes team leaders from Apple came for us to present ideas and suggestions. John Couch spoke to our group. Linda dropped in several times as well. It was a pretty intense time. But I am sworn to secrecy and can say no more.

Well, I will say, even more cool things are in the works.

We are charged with working on a year-long project of our choosing. This should be good as we have a team of very bright minds and driven personalities.

Several cool tools and resources were mentioned by various team members which deserve further exploration:

SubEthaEdit, a collaboration tool
Cog Dog Blog
Kitzu
AudioScrobbler
iStoryCreator

Technorati Tags: ade2005

Why can't this country create music like this? Instead we pander to the lowest level of trash, rap--which lacks melodic interest, beautiful timbres, and a message that is positive and uplifting.

This album is just fantastic stuff! A friend sent me this link to the iTunes store. I bought the album, and it is glorious. The song Mama will just slay you.

This is the link to their website. And, this is the link to the album at the iTunes store.