What will the keynote bring?

Originally posted by who the fuck are you?:
I like that it gets the artwork for you, but I still have quite a few albums it can't find cover art for….and these aren't obscure titles or anything.

It was about 60% accurate at home - missed some really obvious ones like the entire Beatles collection. Still helped a lot, but not as accurate or thorough as I would like.

Originally posted by nkotb:
Is there a way to upgrade without dealing with the gapless play?

If you decide to skip the Gapless Playback check (simply by playing a song), you can go back and choose individual albums to make Gapless by highlighting the entire album, right-clicking (or the Mac equivalent), and in the get info, mark the album for gapless playback (bottom right).

The new shuffle is like a matchbook:

<img src="http://images.apple.com/ipodshuffle/images/specsdimensions20060912.jpg" alt=" - " />

there is a good chance that my external drive is now fried and i have lost all my music thanks to this update, woo fucking hoo

Originally posted by pdx pollard:
there is a good chance that my external drive is now fried and i have lost all my music thanks to this update, woo fucking hoo

I'm hearing this a lot actually. Apple should have made it clear that this is optional.

Originally posted by vansmack:
I'm hearing this a lot actually. Apple should have made it clear that this is optional.

well I have ordered a new drive and data recovery software, i will definitely back up now rather than waiting

I still don't 'get' what the gapless playback feature is and why you would want it?

Originally posted by brennser:
I still don't 'get' what the gapless playback feature is and why you would want it?

as far as i can tell, it means when you are listening to your ipod there wont be a gap between songs, some albums have tracks that flow together, that was impossible to hear correctly on an ipod before

Question regarding the external drive… The hard drive in my iMac went into retirement and luckily i had it backed up to a partition on a external drive so i'm booting the os from the external drive instead. Is this external drive problem happening if your data files are stored on it and the os is on the internal drive? And are these problems being caused by iTunes creating it's gapless files…

I'm still wondering what will happen to battery life of the hard drive based iPods as its recommended to keep the file size small, less than 9MB, in order to conserve power. The larger the file the more power the iPod uses in spinning the hard to in order to read the file into memory.

Originally posted by pdx pollard:

Originally posted by brennser:
I still don't 'get' what the gapless playback feature is and why you would want it?

as far as i can tell, it means when you are listening to your ipod there wont be a gap between songs, some albums have tracks that flow together, that was impossible to hear correctly on an ipod before

Live recordings as well. Its use is so limited that I wich Apple would have asked if the user wanted to serach for those as well, like they did before the Album Art. Would have saved a few hard drives…

Originally posted by kosmo vinyl:
Question regarding the external drive… The hard drive in my iMac went into retirement and luckily i had it backed up to a partition on a external drive so i'm booting the os from the external drive instead. Is this external drive problem happening if your data files are stored on it and the os is on the internal drive? And are these problems being caused by iTunes creating it's gapless files…

Most folks who have reported hard drive failure have an external drive with the music on it and boot from an internal HD with the OS.

Some folks have reported internal drives with both the music and the OS together.

Granted these are a handful of people who seem to have a few things in common:

(1) Older computers or external hard drives
(2) Lots of music (say over 10,000 songs)

Therefore, if you have a lot of music and an old computer, back up your tunes first, or skip the Gapless check by playing a song when iTunes opens and tells you that it's doing the check.

Computers don't like to check massive amounts of data (say 20gb) while being interrupted. That's why Windows has to restart Defrag and Disc check so often - because when it's interrupted it lets go of what it's doing. It doesn't appear that iTunes is doing that and it's over working a lot of older drives.

Originally posted by kosmo vinyl:
I'm still wondering what will happen to battery life of the hard drive based iPods as its recommended to keep the file size small, less than 9MB, in order to conserve power. The larger the file the more power the iPod uses in spinning the hard to in order to read the file into memory.

Too early to tell - those benchmarks will require a few days of testing, and I'm certainly not going to do it myself. You raise a good point though and I'm sure somebody will do the test, it's just not going to be me.

I did discover this though. I plugged my iPod in at work, and some songs that I purchased at home from iTunes weren't on my work computer, but they were on my iPod. iTunes at work asked me if I wanted to add these songs to my library and copied the songs from my iPod to my work computer. This only happens for songs purchased from iTunes and if the computer is authorized for your account. They also upped the number of authorized machines from 4 to 5. The purchased file transfer should have happened year ago, but I'm glad it finally did happen.

For point of clarity, after the first time you synch with the iTunes 7, you can right click on your iPod to synch purchased songs.

Originally posted by vansmack:

(1) Older computers or external hard drives
(2) Lots of music (say over 10,000 songs)

ding and ding

last of the non lamp looking imacs and a 4 year old external firewire maxtor

and 27500 tracks

the weird thing is that i really wasnt that upset about it, guess just have different priorities now

Originally posted by pdx pollard:
the weird thing is that i really wasnt that upset about it, guess just have different priorities now

And you're a smart enough techie to know that this meltdown was on it's way. External hard drives weren't really made for every day, constant use. The orignal design was for transporting large files between computers. If I get 3 years out of an external drive, I feel like I've done really well.

Back to iTunes 7, I asked it to check for artwork at home again last night and it did a much better job of finding artwork. It looks like this is a project in motion, so I recommend asking ti to check often, assuming you don't have an old external hardrive with a lot of song files….

Who's going to be the first in the neighborhood with a 'Zune'?

<img src="http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/dayart/20060914/450zunebw.jpg" alt=" - " />

Microsoft's Zune media player unveiled

By TODD BISHOP
P-I REPORTER

Microsoft Corp. Thursday morning confirmed details and showed the first official images of Zune, its portable media device that will challenge the iPod.

The company said the first Zune will be a 30-gigabyte model with a three-inch screen and an FM radio tuner, available in black, brown or white.

Built-in wireless technology will let users share songs from device to device.

Microsoft did not name a price for Zune, which is slated for release later this year. Apple sells its 30-gigabyte iPod for $249.

An accompanying music service, Zune Marketplace, will offer users the choice of purchasing individual tracks and albums, or receiving unlimited songs for a subscription, the company said. People who receive tracks through the sharing feature will be able to play them for free three times or for three days, then prompted to buy the songs themselves.

Originally posted by vansmack:
It was about 60% accurate at home - missed some really obvious ones like the entire Beatles collection. Still helped a lot, but not as accurate or thorough as I would like.

No Beatles available from iTunes therefore no album art.

Originally posted by beetsnotbeats:

Originally posted by vansmack:
It was about 60% accurate at home - missed some really obvious ones like the entire Beatles collection. Still helped a lot, but not as accurate or thorough as I would like.

No Beatles available from iTunes therefore no album art.

There are many albums not available on iTunes that it found artwork for, so I doubt this is the case. I would be very disappointed (albeit not entirely surprised) in Apple if this was the case.

Originally posted by vansmack:

Originally posted by beetsnotbeats:

Originally posted by vansmack:
It was about 60% accurate at home - missed some really obvious ones like the entire Beatles collection. Still helped a lot, but not as accurate or thorough as I would like.

No Beatles available from iTunes therefore no album art.

There are many albums not available on iTunes that it found artwork for, so I doubt this is the case.

Artwork found with the iTunes app or through other channels?

I would be very disappointed (albeit not entirely surprised) in Apple if this was the case.

Album art is also copyrighted so they may be simply covering their ass.

Originally posted by beetsnotbeats:
Artwork found with the iTunes app or through other channels?

Found with the itunes app. At work, I alomst never put artwork in, but it's getting pretty full, and many of these albums aren't available off iTunes. Some examples out of the next few on my party shuffle:

The Smiths - Queen is Dead
The Famous - Light, Sweet, Crude
Dangerdoom - The Mouse and the Mask