To correspond with the release of my Take Control of iTunes 10: The FAQ, Second Edition, I sat down (virtually) with Chuck Joiner and talked about iTunes and music on the MacVoices podcast. It’s just under an hour, and you can listen here.
A number of people have found that iTunes Match sometimes matches incorrect tracks; not that the songs are wrong, but that the versions might be wrong. This seems to happen especially with music that has been remastered. iTunes may match either an original or remastered track, and the user who matched the track may have tho one that iTunes doesn’t have. This can be a problem, if, say, you prefer an original album over a remastered version, or vice versa.
But I today I found, for the first time, a bad track coming from iTunes Match, one with an audible problem. It’s one of an excellent set of Bill Evans recordings, The Last Waltz, from the summer of 1980, just before his death, made at the Keystone Korner; the song is Your Story, While iTunes matched these tracks, I was listening to some of this music today, and found a bad track. There’s a gap of about a half-second at one point in the track. Looking at it with Rogue Amoeba’s Fission, you can clearly see the missing chunk of music:
If this happens, you’re basically screwed. Who can you complain to? Contact the iTunes Store? I doubt anything will happen. The only way to have a good copy of the track is to take your original and make sure it stays in your library; if you ever have to download it again, you’ll get the track with the gap. It’s worth noting that this track is not available on the iTunes Store. This makes me wonder exactly how they match such tracks; do they match them to tracks that other people have uploaded?
I don’t expect this will happen a lot, but the fact that it happens at all shows the weakness of this system. iTunes Match clearly needs an option for tracks that you don’t want matched, ones that you want uploaded, because the matched version may not be the same as yours.
Has anyone else found matched tracks that have similar problems?
(As an aside: if you like Bill Evans, there are two box sets of this run at the Keystone Korner, in San Francisco, between August 31 and September 8, 1980. The Last Waltz is music from the first sets, and Consecration has tracks from the second sets. Just a week before his death, Evans was playing some of his finest performances. These two box sets, together with Turn Out the Stars, recorded at the Village Vanguard in June, 1980, comprise 22 discs of astounding piano music.)
Update: my son came across a bad track today. It’s a match of Philip Glass’s Witchita Vortex Sutra, from the Minimal Piano Collection box set. There are clicks throughout the track, with one big dropout at 4:25:
My ebook, Take Control of iTunes 10: The FAQ was a best-selling compendium of tips, tricks and explanations about how to use iTunes to wrangle your digital media collection. More than a year has gone by since its release, and, even though Apple didn’t up the version number by an integer, iTunes has undergone enough changes to warrant a thorough update to this book.
Take Control Books has just released Take Control of iTunes 10: The FAQ, Second Edition. To quote a TidBITS article presenting the book:
Since iTunes 10 originally came out, Apple has revamped its approach to online media, bringing us such new features as iCloud and iTunes Match. This book answers the many questions that users have about these features, including a new chapter dedicated to the Cloud.
At 173 pages for the PDF edition (page counts aren’t relevant to ePub and Kindle versions), there are more than 30 pages of new content in this second edition. Priced at $15 (with special upgrade prices for owners of the first edition), this book helps you appreciate and understand the process of bringing media into iTunes, tagging it, adding album artwork, and organizing it into playlists.
Once you’ve become an import specialist and tagging genius, you can enjoy your music, movies, audiobooks, and ebooks, and more without hassles when it’s time to find a particular item or when you want to do something special like sync a select subset of music to your iPod, create a party playlist, identify music you haven’t heard in a while, listen to the chapters in an audiobook in the proper order, or get the most out of iTunes in the Cloud features, including iTunes Match.
So, if you want to be an iTunes power user, get a copy now – in PDF, ePub or Kindle format, or any combination of the above – from Take Control Books.
Over at Macworld, we’ve just introduced Ask the iTunes Guy. This occasional column will take readers’ questions and explain how to do what you want with iTunes. I’m the iTunes Guy, and I’ll be answering questions over the coming months. So far, response has been well above what we expected, and we have dozens of great questions, so look for a first column with your questions and my answers soon.
I’ve never been especially interested in “period dramas,” but I heard about Downton Abbey, and thought I’d check it out. The first two seasons have already been broadcast in the UK, and are available on DVD. In the US, the second season is starting today on PBS.
This is a series about a quintessential British country manor. The house looks huge, even though you only see a handful of rooms in the show. There is an aristocratic family, headed by the Earl of Grantham, a surprisingly liberal aristocrat. He has an American wife, and three daughters. Downstairs are the servants, an interesting crew of footman, maids and cooks. Much of the story involves the relations between the two groups, as well as the romantic doings of the sisters.
Yes, this is an upscale soap opera, not my usual type of TV. But from the very first episode, I was drawn into the wonderful writing (coming close to Aaron Sorkin’s work) and the excellent acting of the entire cast. I didn’t know many of the actors, but one who stands out is the venerable Maggie Smith who gets a large number of bon mots, as the Dowager Countess and the Earl’s mother. There is quite a large cast for a series, allowing for a number of story lines to take place concurrently, yet you never get a feeling that there’s too much going on.
The series manages to be extremely interesting throughout, without slipping into overt soap opera situations, and factors in the events of the time. Beginning in 1912, the day after the sinking of the Titanic, it goes on through World War I, which has a major role in the series.
It’s important to not watch the US versions of the first season. The seven one-hour episodes were, for some reason, cut down to four 90-minute episodes for the US. You can see a number of different versions here on Amazon.com, with both the US versions and UK versions available. Or you can get them for much less from Amazon UK.
It’s worth noting that after the end of season 2 there is a 90-minute episode called Christmas at Downton Abbey. The title suggests that it’s just some kind of Christmas story, but it’s actually the season finale, and you simply must see it after watching all of season 2.
I was surprised to be so attracted to this series, but the quality of the writing and acting is well above average. Even if you don’t usually care for this sort of thing, I’d recommend checking it out. You may, like me, become an immediate convert.
I’m moving house in two days, and in the past week, as I’ve been packing, I’ve realized that I’d accumulated an alarming amount of stuff. I’m not a hoarder, or a collector, but I read a lot, and listen to a lot of music. The amount of books in the house is astounding, and I’ve decided to toss about half of them. While I have a lot of CDs and DVDs, they don’t take up a lot of space: there are three big movers’ cartons of DVDs, and about 8 smaller cartons of CDs. A lot of my music is digital, and that doesn’t take up any space.
So, I’ve decided to buy less. And I’ve come up with a way to (try to) limit my purchases of recreational stuff: books, CDs and DVDs. I sell some stuff on Amazon.fr – used books and CDs, mostly, though books in English don’t sell often. I also make some money from readers to this website who click through to my Amazon affiliate links; that comes to several hundred dollars a year. So, my idea is this: I’m going to keep a ledger (well, a spreadsheet) of what I sell, and what I earn in affiliate income, and will only buy new things with that money. I’m planning to sell off a large share of my CD collection – mostly classical CDs – so that should turn out to be enough money for me to buy a bunch of new stuff. And I won’t count any digital purchases, as they don’t take up space. (Remember, you can help by clicking on one of my Amazon affiliate links before you shop at Amazon!) Fortunately – or unfortunately – I got off to a good start, selling some €500 of used go books, including some that are very rare. So my ledger currently has a nice credit…
Uncluttering your home can be a way of simplifying your life, and I’m going to try to do so this year. Rather than buy a lot of new books and CDs, I’m going to re-read my favorite books, and listen more to a lot of the music I already have. (Since I review classical CDs for MusicWeb International, I’ll get some new CDs that way.)
My main goal is to not use up any more space than what I already have for these things. (Which, for books, is frighteningly large.) I’ll let you know in a year how it works out.
Bonus: for some comic relief, here’s George Carlin talking about “stuff”:
TechCrunch is reporting that an upcoming Apple event, to be held in January, will focus on ebooks, and the company’s iBooks app. My first thought is that there’s not much they can do with iBooks to warrant a media event, with a presentation and announcement, but then I thought a bit more. What if Apple were going to unveil iBooks Match?
You’re probably familiar with iTunes Match. For $25, you can have iTunes match your music library, making your music available in the “cloud,” either matching tracks with music from the iTunes Store, or uploading those tracks that are not available in the latter. Why not do something similar with iBooks? I have literally thousands of dead-tree books, and some of them are big and unwieldy, and I would love to be able to read them on my iPad, rather than on paper. (In fact, I’ve been wanting to read Shelby Foote’s Civil War Trilogy for some time, but the books are humongous.)
iBooks Match could work like this. Using the camera built in to all recent and current Macs – or even iOS devices – the iBooks program either grabs a picture of the cover, or scans the bar code (the latter would be much easier, and this technology exists already, in the Delicious Library catalog software). It then searches the iTunes Store’s books section to find matches, and, if any are found, adds them to your library.
Of course, this is certainly unlikely, as book publishers are even more reticent to offer any such type of service than the record labels were to offer iTunes Match (though they did accept Apple’s offer, which I find surprising). But allowing users to transfer their print libraries to digital would be a big leap forward for ebooks in general, as most serious readers would have, instead of a handful of ebooks, hundreds of them, if not more.
The second possibility I see is a sort of paid lending library system. Personally, as agreeable as I find reading on my iPad, I don’t buy many ebooks, because the price, when compared to print books, is either very close, or more expensive. And this for books that I’ll read once, and never be able to do anything with (sell used, loan or give away). A paid lending library that gives you access to a certain number of books per month, for example, would solve this problem, and since you don’t actually “own” ebooks, wouldn’t change much for users. It would also guarantee a bigger revenue stream for publishers. (Amazon has free ebook loans for members of Amazon Prime, which offers free shipping, streaming videos, and a loan of one book per month. So why can’t Apple do better?)
No matter what, I find it interesting that ebooks are important enough to warrant an Apple event. Of course, this could also be a way of presenting a new iPad 3 with a retina display. While reading on the current iPad is acceptable, a retina display would make it much more comfortable.
I would like to wish my readers a very Happy New Year. I hope 2012 will be a wonderful year for you. Thank you for reading and supporting Kirkville.
Kirk McElhearn writes about Macs, iPods, iPads, iTunes, books, music and more. He's written a dozen books, is a Senior Contributor to Macworld, where he is The iTunes Guy, and writes for several other web sites and magazines. He reviews classical CDs for MusicWeb and audiobooks for Audiofile, and is a French-English translator.
Become an iTunes expert with Take Control of iTunes 10: The FAQ, Second Edition.
Also, discover the word processor for writers, Scrivener, in Take Control of Scrivener 2.