02.16.06

Self-Repairing Electronics

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When I worked in tech support, we had a name for the phenomenon of problems that mysteriously resolve themselves as soon as a tech arrives to help: “Solved by Tech Proximity.” It happens a lot—either the problem was transitory to begin with, or the process of walking through the symptoms makes a user more careful and conscious of the correct procedure, so he doesn’t make whatever mistake he was making when the tech wasn’t there. But since I am the tech guy, it’s not supposed to happen to me.

Here’s what I’m talking about:

  1. I bought a car power adaptor for my aging, battery-challenged iPod. When plugged into this adaptor, my iPod emitted a hissing sound through the headphone cable that leads to my auxiliary input adaptor. I spotted what looked like a line-out jack on the power adaptor and tried plugging the auxiliary input cable into that. With a loud pop! the auxiliary input adaptor stopped working. Turns out that jack was intended to supply power to an FM transmitter.
  2. After a period of rest, the auxiliary input adaptor worked again, but poorly. The sound was tinny and I really had to crank the volume on the head unit to hear it, making switching between iPod and radio a pain. Also, the display on the head unit went blank when I switched to the iPod, and I couldn’t switch between the auxiliary input adaptor’s two input channels.
  3. Shortly after all this, my PowerBook’s internal hard drive stopped working—it wouldn’t even spin up. I had a recent backup on an external firewire drive, and my PowerBook automatically detected that and booted from it, but this made synchronizing my iPod difficult because the iPod doesn’t like FireWire daisy-chaining—it likes to be the only FireWire device present. But if I held it just right (for some reason it seemed to work better if the cable was perfectly straight—lack of cable shielding, maybe?) it worked—slowly.
  4. I figured I’d kill two birds with one iPod car charger. This particular model comes with a USB docking cable that plugs into the charger, so I figured not only could I power the iPod in the car, but when I got home I’d take the cable in and sync to iTunes with it. But it turns out my iPod is too old for this to work—it syncs via USB, but it won’t derive power from it.
  5. Not knowing this, I plugged the charger into my cigarette lighter, the cable into the charger, and the iPod into the cable. There was another pop!—and then unusually loud music. My adaptor was working normally again—it sounded great, the display on the head unit worked, and I could once again switch between inputs.
  1. When I got home I took the USB cable in, figuring that part of the plan was still worth a try. There was a message on my computer screen (which I’d left on all day, downloading via Bittorrent) saying the computer needed to be rebooted. When I did that, one of the partitions on the external drive failed to show up. This was annoying, but then I noticed that the computer had booted from its internal drive rather than the FireWire drive. SMART diagnostics found no problem with the internal drive, and the bad partition on the external drive had minor directory problems from which I didn’t even bother recovering the data, since I no longer needed it anyway.

    Self-reparing electronics: really cool, or kinda creepy? I say cool.

06.30.05

Apple’s Podcasting FAQ

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Apple now has an Official FAQ on the podcast support in iTunes 4.9 with, among other things, a little bit of detail on the bookmark feature I mention in my AppleScript page. An interesting point is that the play count tracking works differently in the podcast library than it does in the regular music library: although the play count number isn’t incremented until you reach the end of a track, a podcast episode is no longer considered “unplayed” the moment you hit the play button. This is visually represented by the disappearance of the blue dot to the left of the episode title. What it means, though, is that if you use the built-in play count-based management (“Keep all unplayed episodes” in the settings panel), episodes you’ve started but not finished won’t be synced to a clickwheel-equipped iPod. Just one more reason to use my script instead.

Daring Fireball today features the best explanation I’ve ever read of the iPod’s commanding market share. I particularly like the bit about the font change—I personally am not a typography geek (though my limited desktop publishing experience has left me with a deep and burning hatred for Comic Sans and Matisse ITC and the people who use them), but I love reading analyses by people who really know and love this stuff.

06.29.05

Podcast Management Update

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As I mentioned yesterday, the new version of iTunes with podcast support rendered the most popular post on this blog obsolete. Since iTunes has an option to automatically delete podcast episodes you’ve already listened to, the main reason for using the script is now built-in.

But not the only reason. There still isn’t a way to mark tracks for removal or retention while away from the computer, listening to tracks on an iPod. I’ve updated the script to work with iTunes 4.9’s built-in podcast support, and I’ve created a special page just for both versions of the script. Enjoy.

Also on that page is a little bit of technical information on some of the interesting features included in the new iTunes. Executive summary: Apple now has the premiere platform for listening to podcasts, at home and on the go. If you’re listening on anything else, you’re missing out.

06.28.05

iTunes 4.9

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A while back I created an AppleScript to manage podcasts in iTunes. That script, which has brought more traffic to this blog than all my other posts combined, just became obsolete. Today Apple released iTunes 4.9, which includes support for podcasts.

Rather than putting enclosures into a separate playlist or genre, iTunes 4.9 keeps them separate from the rest of your Library. Clicking “Podcasts” in the “Source” window brings up a list of all your podcast subscriptions, each of which can be expanded to view all the individual files that have been downloaded or are available to be downloaded. The iTunes Music Store now has a Podcasts genre, and the directory contained all the podcasts I currently subscribe to except one (the exception was My Silver Mount Zion, a post-rock music podcast, which I’ve submitted for inclusion). Unfortunately, there doesn’t appear to be a way to subscribe to podcasts that aren’t already in the directory. This is incorrect—see update below.

The part that makes my script redundant is in the settings for the podcast source: you can tell iTunes to keep all episodes, just the most recent episode, all unplayed episodes, or the most recent 2, 3, 4, 5, or 10 episodes of each podcast. I’ve set mine to “all unplayed episodes.” Unfortunately, there’s no way to use ratings to save or keep episodes regardless of play count, so my script still has some functionality that isn’t duplicated in iTunes—but I could probably script a way to manipulate play count based on ratings. I’ll look into it.

Update: You can add podcasts that aren’t in the directory, simply by dragging a link to the RSS feed into iTunes. I’d tried this before and it didn’t work, but I was trying to drag the URL from NetNewsWire. Dragging a link from Safari works just fine.

03.14.05

Managing Podcasts with AppleScript

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In my last entry on the subject of podcasts, I mentioned that I was planning on writing an AppleScript to help me manage the podcasts to which I subscribe. That AppleScript—my first—is now complete.

My problem was that deleting podcasts after listening to them was not just a matter of dragging a few files to the trash. Let’s imagine, for example, that I have five files from one podcaster. Let’s say that I listened to two of them in their entirety while walking around with my iPod yesterday, meaning there are two files with a play count of 1, and of those two I want to save one to listen to again. And maybe I also started listening to another, realized I wasn’t interested in the subject matter of that particular episode, and stopped listening before the playcount was incremented (which occurs when the iPod reaches the very end of the file). Let us further imagine that all five of these podcasts are labeled according to the date on which they were uploaded, which means absolutely nothing to me, the listener. How do I remember which podcasts I wanted to save and which I wanted to delete? Probably by playing them in iTunes in the hope that the first couple of minutes will be enough to jog my memory.

My new AppleScript changes all that. It looks at all the tracks in the “Podcasts” playlist (which is assigned to them by NetNewsWire 2.0 Beta) and deletes

  1. tracks with a rating of exactly 1 star and
  1. tracks with a play count greater than 0 unless they also have a rating of exactly 5 stars

    I chose to use the ratings this way because the rating is the only tag I can change while listening to a file on my iPod. If I’m listening to a track and decide I don’t want to finish it, I just set the rating to 1 star and it’ll be deleted the next time I synchronize and run this script. If I want to save something even if I’ve already listened to it all the way through, I set its rating to 5 stars. Otherwise, anything with a play count greater than 0 gets deleted.

    By “deleted,” by the way, I mean the track is removed from the iTunes library (which also removes it from the Podcasts playlist) and the file is moved to the trash. At the end of the script, a dialog is displayed showing how many tracks were affected.

    So the workflow now is this: when I plug in my iPod, it sends the new play counts and ratings to iTunes and receives any new files I’ve downloaded since the last sync. Then I run the script, cleaning out anything marked for deletion according to the rules detailed above. If any changes are made, the script automatically re-synchronizes the iPod. (A previous version of the script didn’t automatically re-synchronize.)

    The script, if you’d like to try it yourself, is here. Since it’s written in AppleScript, it will work on Apple computers only—I’ve tested it on my PowerBook running iTunes 4.7.1 under OS X 10.3.8. To use it, unzip the file and drop the script in /Library/iTunes/Scripts/ (if you want it to be available to all users on your computer) or ~/Library/iTunes/Scripts/ (if not). Please note that I make no guarantees about the functionality or safety of this script, and you use it at your own risk.

    Incidentally, everything I know about AppleScript I learned from Beginning AppleScript, and everything I know about controlling iTunes via AppleScript I learned from iPod and iTunes Hacks. If you’re interested in learning AppleScript and/or getting more out of iTunes and your iPod, you can help me out while helping yourself by buying a book through one of those links.

    Update: I’ve added a couple of lines to the script so that if it does find tracks to delete, it automatically re-syncs the iPod, so you don’t have to do it yourself. If it doesn’t delete any tracks, there’s nothing new to synchronize, so it skips that step.

02.02.05

iPods at Microsoft

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Wired has an interesting article today about Microsoft employees and their iPods. It’s very encouraging, but not surprising. I’ve tried a few of the other MP3 players out there—some are cheaper, some are smaller, some have all sorts of features like FM radio and built-in voice recording—but none approach the usability and elegance of the iPod. I have a third-generation 20GB iPod, and when it dies I’ll buy another. I plan on getting an iPod shuffle soon, too.

It was interesting watching industry reaction to the iPod shuffle—by which I mean not the reviews and other media coverage, but the response of other MP3 player manufacturers. They said the technology was old, it didn’t have anything new to offer, and it wouldn’t be usable without a screen. Less than a month has passed, and those same competitors are now dropping their prices in an attempt to compete. Apple stores can’t keep the shuffle in stock—most have a waiting list of around 120 buyers.

What those companies either didn’t realize or didn’t want to admit is that the shuffle couldn’t help but be popular at this point, because only on an iPod can you play music from the iTunes Music Store. That means more exclusive tracks, more celebrity playlists (turns out Andrew Lloyd Webber likes Eminem), and more overall selection than you’ll get from any other legitimate source of music online. With that kind of momentum behind it, the shuffle doesn’t need a screen to be successful. Besides, if you’re in a situation where looking at a screen would be pracitical, Apple suggests an iPod, iPod photo, or iPod mini. If you’re jogging, you don’t need a screen—take an iPod shuffle.

So I’m glad to learn that white headphones are a familiar sight in Redmond, but I’m not surprised. Apple got this one exactly right. They released a good product with a good online service supporting it. They enticed people to use that online service by offering good software for free, and by securing exclusive content that people actually wanted. They timed everything perfectly—they didn’t put a lot of money into catching the early adopters, but they also didn’t take on the burden of entering a mature market with a new product. And they understood, as they always do, the importance of design and the “cool factor.” Microsoft didn’t. So now Microsoft employees wear their iPods to work, and it’s not because they’re not loyal, but because it’s the best product in its class and offers music they can’t get on a Microsoft-backed player.

Besides, if Microsoft wants to hire the best and brightest tech workers, it should expect to learn from those employees. If the they overwhelmingly choose a competing product, it says a lot more about the product than the employees.