iPod

Just about everyone that uses iTunes has a hella hard time keeping their music files organized. This is a shame because (a) it’s actually pretty simple and (b) it is a colossal pain in the ass to move your library if it’s not organized correctly. (Note that I’m talking about the organization of your actual music files and not the appropriate tagging and categorization of your music library.) The bummer of the thing is that the folks at Apple unwittingly made this more complicated and difficult by trying to make it simple and easy. It happens. Trust me. I have been building software for just over a decade now and it happens all.the.time. Don’t get mad at Apple for this one. Let’s just fix it.

First I’ll tell you what you need to do, and then I’ll explain why.

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Right around 11 o’clock on the night of Sunday, March 16^th, is when my dad and I realized that our iPods had been stolen from our hotel room at the Tropicana in Las Vegas. My dad had left his charging on the bathroom counter and mine had been in the zippered front pocket of my bookbag with my headphones wrapped around it. We both knew immediately that they had to have been stolen, but we still tore the room apart looking for them. And we went down to the rental car and inspected every inch of it. It was laughable, of course. If you know me at all, you know I am absolutely psychotic about losing things.

After about an hour of searching, my dad was ready to go to bed. He had shot a 95 at Desert Pines that morning — his best round ever and first time to break 100! — and knew there was little chance that hotel security was going to care and / or help us at all. I was so angry I couldn’t see straight.
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My dad and I met in Vegas for a weekend of golfing after I visited the huge Con/Agg convention with Kelly and Bill. We stayed at The Tropicana, a classic Vegas hotel that has fallen on hard times. The place is just a wreck. Every night and every morning there was trash in the hallways, bits of paper, candy bar wrappers, ashtrays (on our no smoking floor). Someone had smashed the glass fire extinguisher box near the elevators and there was broken glass on the floor this morning. It was really just pathetic. The safe in our room’s closet was malfunctioning so if I wanted to stash any valuables I was out of luck.

In a decent hotel you’d expect the maid service to do several standard things: replace the towels, toilet paper, Kleenex, and used toiletries (shampoo, conditioner, soap), make the beds, and throw the trash. I’ve been traveling a sick amount in the last six to ten years and I’ve gotten accustomed to getting at least those things done. Not at the Trop. They made the beds. That’s it. No new towels, no shampoo, no soap, trash wasn’t thrown … you get the idea. My dad and I both have pretty short hair, so it wasn’t until Sunday night that we had to call the front desk — press zero on the phone, all of the special phone buttons like bellhop, room service, security, etc. were inoperable — to request more shampoo. And that is when we realized that both of our iPods had been stolen.

His 30GB and my 60GB (with my favorite Sony headphones) were jacked from room 559 at some point between about 6pm and midnight on Saturday. I know it was between those hours because that was the only time period in which my laptop bookbag — where I had stashed my iPod — was not locked in the trunk of dad’s rental car. We took our laptops and stuff like that with us when we went golfing, and left them locked in the car when we were away from the hotel room. Sucks.
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Let’s say you want to create a smart playlist in iTunes that will contain the 25 highest-rated Beatles or Bob Dylan songs that you haven’t heard in a while. That would be pretty cool, right? It’s not that simple, but it can be done. I’ll show you how.

The main roadblock you’re facing is that iTunes only gives you two ways of restricting / selecting songs. You can build a smart playlist based on songs that meet all of your criteria or one based on songs that meet any of your criteria. This any / all option really puts you in a corner. First I’ll explain why, and then I’ll show you how to fix it.

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I bought a CD today. It was a little bit strange. I can’t remember the last time I bought an actual compact disc. I’m sure this isn’t the first one I’ve bought since I moved to LA seven years ago, but I know that since I got my iPod the number of CDs I’ve purchased is in the single digits. That is somewhat incredible.

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A week or so ago I found a link to the Griffin Mirrored Chrome Finish iPod case on Dan’s site. Anything that beautiful must be mine. I ordered one immediately and it arrived last night. The previous case I had — Agent18’s video-shield — was awesome, to be sure. After a year and a quarter, though, it had seen better days. It’s a testament to Agent18’s quality that my iPod doesn’t have a scratch on it. But my new chrome one is just rockin’ cool. Sweet.

Head coaches in the NFL often “script” the first dozen or so offensive plays of a game. They do this to set the tone and pace of the game, and to try to get their players to understand that they want to dictate how the game will go. With that in mind I have “scripted” the first 3+ hours of the music I’ll hear on my iPod during Sunday’s LA Marathon.

For more than two years now I’ve been aggregating my favorite “running” songs into a discrete playlist specifically geared towards keeping me motivated and moving towards that 26.2 mi marker. Any time I see a song in my 9900+ track iTunes library rated with only one star, I know it means one of two things. Either it’s a crap song that needs to be deleted, or it’s a song that I one-starred while running because I wanted to save it to my special cardio playlist. It’s my own little iTunes lifehack.

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While shopping at Best Buy you may notice a somewhat newish brand of computer products going by the name Dynex. At first I wasn’t sure if I could trust these things; they’re usually exactly the same as the name brand stuff but 50% less expensive. I’m always wary of getting something that seems like such a good deal. In this case you’re wise to buy. Dynex is apparently the Best Buy “generic” brand. I just bought an A/V cable for connecting my iPod to my TV and it works perfectly.

The December issue of Men’s Health includes a Tech Guide with what it says are, “100 products that will change your life!” If you’re looking for the latest news in men’s health, for exercise routines, for dating advice, or for fashion tips, Men’s Health is a great resource. If you’re looking for the latest trends in technology, go somewhere else. Most of the items on their Top 100 list are ridiculous. I can’t imagine a universe in which I’d describe a plastic spork or a chainsaw as something that will change my life. And choosing the Zune as the #1 gadget is simply insulting. I have 9,000 songs using 35 gigs of space on my computer. My 80 gig iPod handles that. A 30 gig Zune won’t. End of story.

I have just about 9,000 songs (35GB) in my iTunes library, and I listen to music the entire time I’m in the office every day. I live and die by my smart playlists. I’ve seen more than a few tutorials lately about how to utilize this iTunes feature, so I thought I’d toss my hat in the ring with a few tips on how to make Apple’s killer app work better. Here are five tips to keeping your daily listening enjoyable.

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I love Please Take Me Home from blink-182’s “Take Off Your Pants and Jacket“. It’s a great song with one glaring problem: For some ridiculous reason they decided to pull a Nirvana on it and extend the track length of this 3:03 song to 6:06. So when I am listening to my iPod in shuffle mode (which is just about the only way I ever listen to iPod or iTunes), there’s three minutes and three seconds of dead air. Annoying. Very annoying.

I’m a computer geek. I really am. I am an ultra-nerd of the highest order. But I loathe graphics-editing, video-editing, and audio-editing. I don’t know why. I just do. Could I figure it out? Yes. Of course. I know there are programs that I could use to manually strip dead space from the ends of songs. Hell, I could probably use a hex editor and just delete the bytes from the actual mp3 file. But that’s annoying, too.

It just so happens that Apple was thinking, I can only assume, of me and my ilk when their coders sat down to develop iTunes.

Open iTunes. Browse your way to Please Take Me Home. Right-click it. Select “Get Info”. Go to the “Options” tab. Put a check in the “Stop Time” checkbox. Change the “Stop Time” value to 3:03. Done.

Brilliant.

If you got a black 60gb video iPod for Christmas — like I did — then you need to get one of Agent18’s video-shields. I’ve tried quite a few iPod cases in the last two or three years and this one is the best yet. It certainly has the best screen protection. You kind of get the feeling that it’s not a very good shock absorber, but I’m not one for often dropping or banging my iPod. If you bang yours around, you’re probably better off getting the silicone one from Xtrememac. (Forget the ones from Speck. Theirs are cursed by poor design.)

Xtrememac, by the way, also makes the best iPod FM transmitter.

Gee, I haven’t been involved in a meme in quite some time, and I’m currently nursing a wicked sinus infection and suffering from post-Sith syndrome, but I’ll play along. It’s a music meme, and everyone knows I’m a sucker for both. I should note that my copy of iTunes has 6811 songs, some 500+ of which were puchased via the iTunes music store in the 18 months since I got my first iPod. (The other 6300 or so are ripped from my own personal CD collection.) Anyone who thinks mp3s are the death-knell of the music industry is a moron. I should also note that I ripped all of the original soundtrack anthology about two weeks ago and have been listening to almost nothing else lately.

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I just read about Matt running with a Shuffle. My 40GB is much too big to take on a run. I’ve always wanted to run with music, but have never been able to get around the clunkiness factor. I’m finally getting back to running and rowing. I’ve pulled three four five 6k+, 30min ergs in the last week, too. Maybe I’ll be forced to buy one …