I’ve resisted the (moderate) lure of the Apple TV device for quite a while. First, I had the excuse that my Internet connection was not good enough. In the imaginary world of unlimited bandwidth in which Apple products appear to have been designed, 1.5 Mbps (local wireless service) did not quite cut it. For the past […]
Now that iBooks is also available as a desktop app in Mavericks, I find myself wanting to use it for more than just purchasing e-books from its store on the iPad. I also want to use it as an alternative to Safari’s “Reading List” feature, by saving long web articles as PDF documents for reading […]
As a music lover, I collect, among other things, lots of bootleg recordings of live Prince concerts. Back in the pre-Internet era, I actually spent some of my hard-earned cash on bootleg LPs, CDs, and VHS tapes. But thankfully, with the advent of the Internet, it has become possible to build a very decent collection […]
Here is a telling example of everything that is wrong, in my opinion, with the current state of the music industry. Yesterday, I was listening to an Etta James mixtape from 2009. The mixtape included one song that I particularly liked, titled “Quick Reaction & Satisfaction”. So I decided to try and find more about […]
Apple has just released an update for iTunes 11 (iTunes 11.0.1) and I am glad to report that it appears to include improvements for two of the issues I mentioned last week. First of all, the View › Column Browser submenu is no longer disabled when the sidebar is visible. And then the egregiously bad […]
In recent years, using iTunes to manage my music library has always been, for me, a major exercise in frustration. The Spinning Beach Ball of Death has always been part of my experience using iTunes. While some aspects of iTunes’s performance levels have actually improved in iTunes 11 (notably the execution of AppleScript scripts, generally […]
Last week, I wrote that iTunes 11 can no longer open playlists in separate windows. This creates annoying limitations for those who, like me, are used to editing playlists in separate windows while looking at their music library in their main iTunes window. In particular, I wrote: So now if you want to, say, copy […]
This one is a major disappointment for me: As far as I can tell, it’s no longer possible to open anything in a separate window in iTunes 11 (except for that new “Downloads” window, of course). It used to be that you could double-click on a playlist’s icon in the source list/sidebar to force iTunes […]
Very interesting. Having a separate “Downloads” window is apparently too complicated and not user-friendly enough for Safari, but it’s a perfectly good idea to add one to iTunes: Sometimes you really do wonder whether there’s anyone over there who cares about consistency.
Here’s the first glitch I’ve encountered in iTunes 11 on my Mac Pro: When the sidebar is visible (“View › Show Sidebar”) and the source is a specific playlist rather than the default “Music”, the “Column Browser” submenu is greyed out and inaccessible. If the sidebar is hidden and the source is a specific playlist, […]
I have a very large music collection and for years now I have been struggling with iTunes’s poor performance levels. Things have been fluctuating somewhat over time, with some releases being nearly unusable and others somewhat better. Switching to an SSD drive as my startup volume has also helped somewhat. (There is of course no […]
There has been a fair amount of grumbling lately about iTunes lately: “iTunes: Time to right the syncing ship” (Jason Snell, Macworld) “iTunes’ ball and chain: Windows” (Allen Pike) I myself have done a fair amount of grumbling about iTunes over the years. With every year that passes, it seems that we are getting closer […]
This article is not about me. I am a long-time Mac user and the “iLife” has been part of my life for many years now, even though I’ve never fully embraced it, either due to technical limitations (limited bandwidth) or because of a lack of need or interest. I have several Macintosh computers, several iPods, […]
In my experience, speed and noise are the two trickiest, most subjective aspects of personal computing, especially for power users. Some people can’t hear fan noises, or they don’t notice them, or they don’t care. Others can be driven mad by hums and whines, even if they are not loud at all. As for speed, […]
I’ve been complaining about performance issues in iTunes for years. Just check out my posts under the “Macintosh › iTunes” categories to get an idea. For example, two years ago, I expressed the wish for an iTunes Pro for serious music collectors. Of course, such a thing has yet to see the light of day. […]