A Happy New Year to All
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.
Make Your Own Personal Dropbox With iCloud
iCloud has some interesting features, notably its ability to sync data and files across devices, be they Macs or iOS devices (iPhones, iPads and iPod touches). However, I find Dropbox to be very practical for syncing files that I want to access on multiple Macs. I store a number of files that I need to access in a Dropbox folder, so I can have them, when I need them, on both my desktop Mac and laptop.
I came across a tip on the Mac.AppStorm website today, which explains a very simple way to create a personal drop box using iCloud. While Dropbox is free for 2 GB of storage, you get 5 GB with iCloud. Dropbox has many advantages, notably its integration with many iOS programs – as well as other platforms – but if you need more than 2 GB of storage, you have to pay $10 a month or more.
The secret to leveraging iCloud for this purpose is a “hidden” folder that stores your iCloud data, and that can, in essence, be used as a receptacle for files you want to share. This folder is found at ~/Library/Mobile Documents; for those unfamiliar with that type of path, in the Finder, hold down the Option key, click on the Go menu, and choose Library. (You won’t see the Library folder listed there if you don’t hold down the Option key.) Then go to the Mobile Documents folder in the Library folder.
If you have two Macs, you can see how this works immediately. Create a new folder inside this Mobile Documents folder, or copy a file to it. Check the same location on your other Mac, and, as long as you have network access, and the file’s not too big, you should see it there in a few seconds. It also seems to sync more quickly than Dropbox; perhaps the iCloud process polls for new files more frequently. (In the screenshot below, I created a folder called “iCloud;” the other folders are used by different applications that store data on iCloud.)
Since this folder contains other folders for applications you use that sync data using iCloud, it can be a bit messy. So create a new folder, call it something like My Dropbox, or My Shared Folder, or even just iCloud, to remind you were files are. Then, make an alias of that folder; press Command-L, or hold down the Shift and Option keys and drag it to a new location. You might want to put it on your Desktop, or in your Documents folder. Put it somewhere easy to access. Instead of creating an alias, you might want to simply put it in your Finder sidebar; press Command-T to do this.
You can now use this folder to store and sync files from one Mac to another. Basic iCloud accounts come with 5 GB of free storage, so if you just need to sync a few files, you won’t hit the limit easily. (Though this may depend on what kinds of files other applications sync to iCloud; this 5 GB also includes space used by your iCloud e-mail account; and if you back up iOS devices to iCloud, these backups use space as well.) If you’re a MobileMe member, Apple has given you an extra 20 GB through June 30, 2012, so you currently have 25 GB. If you like this idea, and need more storage, you can buy an additional 20 GB for $40 a year.
It’s worth noting that one problem with Dropbox is that, if you have folders shared by others in your Dropbox folder, they count against your quota. (I’m pretty sure this wasn’t the case a while ago, but I’m currently sharing a couple of large folders with clients, and these are using up most of my 2 GB.) So using this iCloud folder can give you more space, if your running out of room in your Dropbox folder, and don’t want to pay more.
This trick works well for files you only need to sync between your own Macs. Unlike Dropbox, there is no web access to files, no way to share subfolders with others, and no Public folder, where you can give a friend a link to download a file that you’ve stored in your Dropbox folder. But it’s a good way to keep some basic files up to date on multiple Macs. (If you don’t have a Dropbox account, you can get a free account with 2 GB of storage.)
Note: A Macworld colleague pointed out that Apple says that using this folder in the manner described above may lead to data loss. I’d be careful, then, in putting your only copies of files there, unless you have a backup. I haven’t seen any issues with it, but I’ll follow it over time and see if anything unexpected occurs.
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Music Notes: Haydn’s Baryton Trios
Haydn wrote scads of works for the baryton, a stringed instrument, similar to the viola da gamba, but with sympathetic strings which either resonate as the main strings are played, or are plucked with the thumb. The reason for this number of compositions was because Haydn’s patron, Prince Nikolaus Esterházy, played the baryton. The majority of these works – 126 of them – are trios, with baryton, cello and viola. The lack of a high instrument – a violin – gives them an interesting feel. They sound a bit like viol consort music, because the combination of the cello and baryton give a strong bass sound.
This set of the Complete Baryton Trios contains all 126 baryton trios, on 17 discs, and another 4 discs of octets, quintets, and variants. These works are fairly simple. Prince Esterházy was clearly not a virtuoso. These works make few demands on the performers, yet they have an attractive, peaceful sound. As with much of Hadyn’s music, there is a feeling of joy and happiness in these works. None are very long – movements are just a few minutes each – and the melodic development is fairly basic.
This music is nothing like Haydn’s string quartets (I especially like the complete set by the Angeles String Quartet), yet have the charm of simple, enjoyable music. Is it worth buying a 21-disc set of these works, even at a budget price? Probably not. I find this is nice music to put on in the background when I’m reading or working, attractive music to set a comfortable ambience when having dinner, or something to just relax to. Unfortunately, there are very few recordings of these works (see this Amazon search), so if you’re interested, the best way is to either get this box set, or choose from the few single discs available.
Another, more attractive option, is to get Brilliant Classics’ Complete Haydn Edition, which, on 150 discs, contains all of the baryton trios, all the symphonies, all but two discs of the string quartets, all the piano sonatas, the excellent piano trios, and many other works by Haydn. This set is a mixed bag, but for the essential works – the symphonies, piano sonatas and piano trios – it’s worth getting. Toss in the baryton trios, which you’ve probably never heard, and you get a nice package.
Ballooning iTunes Album Artwork Folder
I recently noticed that the Album Artwork folder in my iTunes folder (~/Music/iTunes/) has more than doubled in size. I recall, not long ago, that it was around 2 GB, but it is now around 4.6 GB, for roughly the same amount of music. (About 80,000 tracks, or just over 5,000 albums; the album number is more important, as there is only one cache file stored per album.)
The Album Artwork folder is a cache folder that iTunes uses to quickly display album art in the program’s different views. It contains three sub-folders:
- Cache, which is the cache for album art embedded in files in your iTunes library
- Cloud, which is a local cache for album art embedded in files in the cloud, if you use iTunes Match
- Download, which stores album art that you downloaded from the iTunes Store, either when you purchased content, or when you used iTunes to find artwork for music you ripped (right-click on one or more tracks, then choose Get Album Artwork).
As you scroll through your iTunes library, the program reads the album art in files or linked to them, and displays artwork in the program’s window. All the cache files do is allow iTunes to display art more quickly, rather than having to extract the artwork from the ID3 tags in music files when it wants to display it.
So, at some point, iTunes must have changed the way artwork is saved in this folder. I notice that the majority of my artwork files in the cache folder – these are .itc files – are 969 K. Some of the files are slightly smaller, and some are much smaller, but most end up being the same size. But I’m very careful to keep most of my album art around 100 K or smaller; when I find art on the Internet, I scale it to 600×600 (if it’s larger than that), then save as JPG, and make sure to compress enough to keep the files small.
I have always had this folder excluded from my Time Machine backups, so I can’t see when the size changed. If any of my readers can check in their Time Machine backups, I’d be interested to find out if their folders have increased in size, and, if so, when. My guess is that something was changed in iTunes 10.5 or 10.5.1 which altered the format of cache files, or changed their size.
A Harsh Attack on Steve Jobs, By Way of a Review (Not Mine) of His Biography
It is not often my wont to criticize what other journalists and bloggers write, but I came across a review of Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs on the elitist New York Review of Books web site (the same one which, a couple of weeks ago, a conspiracy-theory fueled article about the Dominique Strauss-Kahn affair). I’ve subscribed to the NYRB off and on over the years, but the type of attack articles they’ve taken to publishing pretty much ensures that I won’t do so again.
I read the Steve Jobs biography, which is certainly no surprise, since I write about Apple products. (If you haven’t read it yet, it’s about half-price on Amazon.com.) Fittingly, I read it on my iPad. I have to admit that I found it painful to read. I had long heard stories about Jobs’ mercurial personality, but reading it in such harsh detail was brutal and shocking. I think it’s fair to write about the biography, and about Jobs, and point out strengths and weaknesses in books, but the NRYB’s approach is to tell the entire story of a book in a “review,” which is especially problematic for a novel. Do you really want to know most of what happens in a novel before you read it? Over the years, I managed to avoid such reviews, unless I had already read the novels in question.
In this “review,” then, the author, Sue Halpern, tells the story of Steve Jobs. She is harshly critical of Jobs, and of Apple in general. Of Jobs himself, she says:
Steve Jobs cried a lot. This is one of the salient facts about his subject that Isaacson reveals, and it is salient not because it shows Jobs’s emotional depth, but because it is an example of his stunted character. Steve Jobs cried when he didn’t get his own way. He was a bully, a dissembler, a cheapskate, a deadbeat dad, a manipulator, and sometimes he was very nice. Isaacson does not shy away from any of this, and the trouble is that Jobs comes across as such a repellent man, cruel even to his best friend Steve Wozniak, derisive of almost everyone, ruthless to people who thought they were his friends, indifferent to his daughters, that the book is often hard to read.
I have to agree with part of the above. While I wouldn’t use some of the adjectives that Halpern uses, I did find the book painful to read, and ended up skipping over parts of it.
But where Ms. Halpern goes wrong is in blaming Apple for the woes of the world:
The day before Jobs died, Apple launched the fifth iteration of the iPhone, the 4S, and four million were sold in the first few days. Next year will bring the iPhone 5, and a new MacBook, and more iPods and iMacs. What this means is that somewhere in the third world, poor people are picking through heaps of electronic waste in an effort to recover bits of gold and other metals and maybe make a dollar or two. Piled high and toxic, it is leaking poisons and carcinogens like lead, cadmium, and mercury that leach into their skin, the ground, the air, the water. Such may be the longest-lasting legacy of Steve Jobs’s art.
Ms. Halpern seems to think that Apple is, if not the only manufacturer of computers and cellphones, most likely the largest and most responsible for their impact. In fact, Apple’s market share for computers is in the single digits, and while iPhones sell well, Apple’s market share is slipping in that sector. (Apple actually only sells fewer than 5% of all cellphones in the world.)
It’s convenient to attack Apple as a poster child for the computer industry, as was common with Microsoft a decade ago. But it’s not hard to look up statistics to back up the claim quoted above, which is the final paragraph of Ms. Halpern’s review. I’ll accept her judgement of the book, but her knowledge of the computer and cellphone industry is seriously lacking. The New York Review of Books could use some fact-checkers to avoid such a blatant personally-motivated attack.
What I Listen to Most
Just because I can. Using Doug Adams’ mySpins, which aggregates play counts from your iTunes library:
The first column is the number of plays by artist – you’ll note that I set the artist for classical music to the composer’s name, as it’s easier to navigate on iPods with the tag set this way. The Grateful Dead is in the lead, followed by Franz Schubert, notably because I listen to his lieder a lot; these are songs that are, on average, 3-5 minutes each. There’s much less Beethoven, because those are longer works: piano sonatas, string quartets, etc. Bill Evans beats out Brad Mehldau by a bit, in part because I’ve been listening to him longer. And Bob Dylan is very high up, as I have all of his albums, and listen to them regularly.
The second column is the songs I’ve played most, across albums (that’s what “pooled” means). In other words, I’ve listened to Playing in the Band, by the Grateful Dead, 151 times, over 59 different albums (lots of different live versions). All of the top ten pooled spins are by the Grateful Dead.
Note that these play counts are not absolute for all artists or songs, as removing then re-adding music deletes their play counts. I’ve done that several times with certain composers, and with many Grateful Dead concerts.
Review: The Complete Arkangel Shakespeare on CD
Buy from Amazon.com | Amazon UK | Amazon FR
Note: This article is originally from 2006. I repost this article from time to time, because these recordings are so enjoyable that anyone interested in Shakespeare should own them.
“We might be better off with public readings of Shakespeare,” says Harold Bloom in Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human. “Ideally, of course, Shakespeare should be acted, but since he is now almost invariably poorly directed and inadequately played, it might be better to hear him well than see him badly.” Not being as qualified to judge the quality of current Shakespearean performances as the erudite Bloom, I suffer from a dearth of Shakespeare here in the French countryside.
While we cannot always find such public readings, we can listen to recorded, dramatized versions of the plays, as with this set of Shakespeare’s 38 plays. With a cast of hundreds, most actors from the Royal Shakespeare Company, these works come alive through a skillful combination of reading, sound effects and music. As radio used to do when dramatizing works, the Arkangel set gives you the acting and the atmosphere. While one may be a bit irked by the “original” music, a sort of Coltrane-inspired Elizabethan music–why didn’t they use actual music of the period, including that composed for Shakespeare’s plays?–the overall production quality is about as good as it gets. Each play comes in a single CD jewel case containing two or three discs, with an insert containing a synopsis and cast information, and the discs are tracked by act and scene (with a handful of scenes that are split at the end of one CD and the beginning of the next one). When I imported a few of these discs to iTunes, the Gracenote CD Database, which iTunes uses to display track information, showed precise tags for each track, including, in the case of scenes that were split, the precise line numbers for the ends and beginnings.
The quality of these performances is excellent. While the occasional actor or actress sounds less convincing that they should–which may be because these actors are trained for working on the stage, not recording in studios–most of them are top-notch. One is quickly enveloped by the atmosphere, both textual and sonorous, and the plays roll on with astounding energy and verve. The tone is that of radio: not the radio of today, of course, but the time when radio was a source of performance and drama. But there is now “old-time” sound in these productions–they are modern and vibrant.
The recordings use the text of the Complete Pelican Shakespeare, an excellent and very readable edition of the plays. (This edition has thick enough paper to make reading easy, unlike some others, and the texts of the plays are in two columns with notes at the bottom of each page.) While there are some minor changes in the text (listening to King John, I noticed that “God” was replaced by “Heaven” throughout), reading the plays while listening is an enlightening experience. You get the advantage of clearly knowing which character is talking (which can be difficult at times when simply listening), you can see the spelling of unfamiliar words (and check the notes), and you get the emotion and intonation that you miss when only reading. Together, the recordings and printed text provide much more immediate understanding of the works.
At just under $400, this set is expensive, for sure. However, that comes to about $10 per play, and how can you put a value on Shakespeare? For fans of the Bard, or for those interested in discovering his work more deeply, this is a worthy investment. You may want to check and see if your library has this set, at least to sample one play before purchasing, but you really can’t go wrong with actors of this caliber, impeccable production, and a huge, heavy box that will impress your friends.
(Note that there is also a very good set of the plays from the BBC on DVD.)
DVD Review: Barenboim on Beethoven
Buy from Amazon.com | Amazon UK | Amazon FR
Daniel Barenboim owns Beethoven! Watching this set of DVDs and listening to his magnificent performances shows why Barenboim is clearly the pre-eminent performer of Beethoven’s 32 piano sonatas. While many will disagree – after all, there are countless recordings by dozens of performers – what comes through after seeing these recitals is the deep familiarity that Barenboim has with the music. Playing these sonatas for some fifty years, they have become a part of him, and this shows in the way he performs these works with such conviction. (And without scores, which, alas, too many performers depend on.)
This set contains films of a series of eight recitals that Barenboim performed in Berlin in 2005, comprising all 32 of the sonatas. Each recital lasts from an hour and a quarter to an hour and a half, and contains four sonatas, a mixture of early, middle and late works. The programs themselves work well, but any selection of sonatas played by Barenboim would be fine. The camera work is among the best I’ve seen for this type of performance; there are enough different camera angles to keep it from being repetitive, and the intensity of watching Barenboim perform is enough to trump the limits of filming. The sound is in PCM stereo or Dolby Digital 5.1; the surround mix is excellent.
Barenboim has already recorded the complete Beethoven sonatas twice: once for EMI when he was in his late twenties, and a second time for DG in the 1980s. One could say that these live recitals are closer to the second recording; slow tempi, much rubato, a great intensity and an often meditative approach to the music. Barenboim shines in the late sonatas, and at the end of the op. 111 sonata (no. 32), his intensity is such that he has to wipe tears from his eyes. But the early Haydnesque/Mozartian sonatas are also wonderful, with a full range of youthful passion.
In addition to the eight recitals, this set contains two DVDs of master classes, where Barenboim shares his knowledge and experience with six young pianists. While much of the discussion is quite technical, even non-musicians will find some of the comments illuminating, providing insights into music in general and these sonatas in particular.
This set is perhaps my best musical purchase in years. I plan to watch these recitals many times, and have gotten many insights into the music – some of the best for piano – simply by watching it performed.
