I am not having much luck these days with Apple software updates… Last week I wrote about the fact that the Safari 5.1 update has broken the “Cycle Through Windows” command in the web browser, at least on my machine. Other readers report being unable to reproduce the problem, either under Lion or under Snow […]
A little while ago, I discovered the joys of music sharing over a wireless network. All it took was the purchase of AirPort Express base station and an AirPort Express Stereo Connection Kit. I added the AirPort Express to my local network and connected it to my music system’s A/V receiver in the living room […]
By now, most iTunes users probably have downloaded and installed iTunes 10 and have been introduced to what Ars Technica calls “the cringe-inducing vertically aligned window controls”: As Ars Technica writer Chris Foresman notes, these vertically-aligned controls are used in conjunction with the removal of the actual title bar of iTunes’s main window to “save […]
The launch of Apple’s new Ping network via the iTunes Store poses some interesting questions. If you’ve ever shopped at the iTunes Store, you might have noticed that there isn’t just a single iTunes Store for everyone in the world, but an iTunes Store for the US, another one for Canada, one for France, one […]
Over the years, I have developed certain habits when it comes to using iTunes to manage my music library (which is my primary use for iTunes). Ever since Apple added more view options, I have been using a column-based set-up, i.e. with the Column Browser visible on the left next to the sidebar, with two […]
Yesterday, I wrote a post about using Keyboard Maestro to assign command-F as a shortcut for selecting iTunes’s search field in the toolbar. As I noted in my update after receiving e-mail feedback from several readers, it turns out that there is a built-in shortcut for selecting the search field in iTunes, which is only […]
As far as I can tell, iTunes has no built-in shortcut to enter its “Search” field in the toolbar: There is also no menu command for it anywhere in the iTunes menu bar. If you want to use the keyboard to enter this “Search” field without having to use the mouse, the only built-in option […]
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a post about my theory regarding the internal scheme used by iTunes to determine which artist name is used in the “Artists” column (when using iTunes in column view) in cases where several tracks with the same underlying sort artist name have different artist names, which often occurs […]
As the holiday season approaches, I’d like to indulge in a bit of wishful thinking… This is not just something that I’d like to get for Christmas. It’s something that I wish someone (preferably Apple itself) would actually make, sell, and support. Because right now, if you are not happy with iPhoto, you can get Aperture […]
Ever since Apple introduced the “Album Artist” and “Sort Artist”/“Sort Album Artist” tags/fields in the track information in iTunes, I have been experiencing problems with the way artists are displayed in the “Artists” column when browsing my iTunes library in column view. The “Album Artist” and the “Sort Artist”/“Sort Album Artist” tags serve two different […]
There is simplifying and streamlining, and then there is dumbing down. I am afraid that, with this latest “improvement” in iTunes 9, Apple’s engineers have crossed the line: This is what you get on your screen each and every time you create a new empty playlist. As if all iTunes users with a moderate level […]
Various new iTunes 9 features will be discussed at length by other outlets. But, as someone with a very large music collection (over 300 GB of files), I thought I should mention something that is not mentioned in the release notes and yet has a very significant impact on my daily use of the application: […]
Phew. Finally someone at Apple has come to his/her senses. In iTunes 7.1 back in March 2007, Apple introduced a new promising feature that enabled you to apply new tags to your music tracks called “Sort Artist,” “Sort Album Artist,” etc. But for some reason they made it incredibly cumbersome to actually edit these fields. […]
The (optional) internal behaviour of the iTunes Store links is no longer as useful as it used to be.
Is ripping an audio CD really such a CPU-intensive task, or is iTunes just a badly written application?