Results tagged “itunes”

My iPod goes with me everywhere and I listen to it constantly. Whether it's in the car for the daily commute or at my desk while I'm coding, the vast majority of my music is delivered that way. Those days that I accidentally leave it at home are the bad days, the bleak days of despair, the days that I have to (shudder), listen to the radio.

I'm also a bit partial to statistics about my music listening habits and one of the reasons I love last.fm. Ever since I joined back in 2006 I've scrobbled just about everything I've listened to from both the home "stereo" (these days a MacBook Pro, Bose speakers) and my iPod. But by far, the iPod accounts for the majority.

Last week, like an idiot a true early adopter, I upgraded iTunes to 9.2.1. And that promptly broke the ability to scrobble iPod plays. Bollocks. But, credit where credit is due, last.fm released an update to the client app which fixed the issue nicely. Which is really rather impressive response time.

So now I'm all happy and can breathe again because as any last.fm addict will tell you...

A while ago I wrote count-by-artist to go through my iTunes Library XML file and count up all the tracks by artist. I hadn't ran it for about 18 months so this morning while sipping my coffee I decided to fire it up to see if anything had changed.

Aha, and while Depeche Mode, The Cure, and Skinny Puppy have the most songs in my music collection, they're also who I've listened to most over the past four years. Coincidence?

Who do you find you end up listening to most?

[Moozik: Elefant - Sunlight Makes Me Paranoid]

On Saturday night, my better half accidentally dropped her iPhone into the toilet in Borders book store. You know, as you do. At first glance everything appeared to be ok. Phone dried off. Still worked. No harm no foul. Blimey those iPhones are cool, they're water proof and everything.

No they're not. For when we got home we realized the phone now would not charge. At all. Nothing. Bugger.

So armed with a grand plan of just saying "I dunno what happened, the phone just won't charge anymore" we go to the Apple store and speak to one of those nice genius bar people. After shining a light into the charging socket of the phone he tells me "sir, the phone has water damage". Damn those liquid sensors.

So we end up coughing up $199 because water damage is an out of warranty service item. Gulp. Oh well. At least we can restore the contacts, photos etc from a backup when we sync the phone in iTunes for the first time. Right?

Well, yeah, if that actually worked.

The phone was plugged in, iTunes recognized it, asked me if I want to create a new phone or restore from a backup. I select restore from backup.

"Cannot restore from backup because the iPhone software version is too old. Please select create new phone, update the iPhone software, and then restore from backup".

Now, in a moment of comedy gold, Apple decided that no one should ever need more than one backup. Your previous backup is clobbered by any new one you make. And who can guess what iTunes decides to do when you select create new phone?

That's right, it does a fucking backup. Lovely. So how am I supposed to restore from backup when you've just deleted the backup I was going to restore from? Thanks iTunes.

So, let this be a lesson to you kids. Don't drop your iPhone in the toilet.

[Moozik: Jesus Jones - Blissed]

I just had a mini cleanup of my iTunes library, got rid of some duplicates, songs I didn't even know I had, and albums I'll never listen to. Brought the song count down to 12,475 songs.

Now, some of those songs I've listened to a lot, and listen to all the time...

...and some songs I haven't even listened to once.

So I've decided that it's high time that I at least attempt to listen to those songs that I think I want to keep but for some reason haven't really gotten around to it. Enter iTunes Smart Playlists.

You can create some incredibly powerful playlists this way but sometimes the simplest are the best. Just give me the songs that have a playcount of less than ten.

So that's narrowed it down to 9142 songs. Which I suspect are going to be on heavy rotation for quite some time.

[Moozik: Depeche Mode - Wrong]

I don't usually post this much about a particular band in general and if you don't like Depeche Mode then you've been finding these postings of mine all rather boring. And with that, here comes, you guessed it, another Depeche Mode post.

I did pony up my cash for the iTunes Pass after all and got my first two downloads right away. The single, Wrong, did take a good few listens to get into but I'm pleased to say it has grown on me over the past couple of days.

In true shock, horror, film-at-11 style news, the video for the song is actually quite good. It reminds me of the days where the music industry actually put some effort into making entertaining videos.

So, give it a gander, what do you think?

[Moozik: White Lies - Farewell To The Fairground]

Apple are using my favorite band in a little experiment. They just announced their pass feature and as far as I can tell, it's like DVR'ing an entire season of a TV programme, but for music instead. You pay up front and then you receive new songs, remixes and videos via iTunes on a regular basis as they become available.

I don't really think I'll find the new feature useful for other bands, but I'm totally stoked that they chose Depeche Mode as their Guinea Pig. Of course, I'm this close to handing over my $18.99 for my Depeche Mode Pass.

They're my favorite band after all. Have I mentioned that?