Praise for Apple TV's AirTunes Support

Posted Thursday, February 21, 2008

In my previous post, I criticized the Flickr support in the Apple TV "Take Two" update.

Now it's time for some Apple TV praise.

One of the new additions to Apple TV is support for AirTunes, the Apple technology that enables you to wirelessly beam music from iTunes. AirTunes has been around for a while, having debuted in Apple's AirPort Express mini-wireless base stations. But support for AirTunes is new in Apple TV, and it's a big deal.

"But," you say, "why use AirTunes when you can connect to a shared iTunes library with Apple TV? After all, Apple TV has always been able to do that."

You are correct, astute reader. But there are some excellent reasons to use Apple TV's new AirTunes support.

Crossfades. When playing music in iTunes, you can have the program crossfade songs: one song fades out while the next fades in -- like on the radio. Apple TV can't do crossfades with the music on its hard drive, nor can it crossfade tunes that it's accessing from a shared iTunes library. Ah, but by playing back in iTunes and beaming to AirTunes, crossfades are yours. They add a professional-sounding touch to your playlists.

To set up iTunes to do crossfades, choose iTunes > Preferences, click the Playback button in the Preferences dialog box, then click the Crossfade Playback box. Adjust the slider to specify a duration for your crossfades. Tip: To quickly navigate the many panes in the Preferences dialog box, press Command-(left bracket) and Command-(right bracket). These shortcuts also work in the Song Info dialog box. They're in the book!

Better still, you can even use your Apple TV remote control to pause and resume playback and skip to the next and previous songs.

Radio. Like the Internet radio stations in iTunes? With AirTunes, you can stream them to your Apple TV -- and your stereo. Bliss.

AirFoil. Want to stream any audio from your Mac to your Apple TV? Get AirFoil, from Rogue Amoeba Software. This $25 wonder lets you beam any audio your Mac produces to your Apple TV. Play radio stations that use RealPlayer, QuickTime Player, or Flash.

AirTunes on Apple TV? A good thing.

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Apple Updates iTunes, QuickTime

Posted Tuesday, November 06, 2007

Get 'em now: minor updates to iTunes and QuickTime.

Macworld articles on the updates: iTunes 7.5 and QuickTime 7.3.

Tip: Don't want to supply your email address before downloading iTunes? You don't have to. Just uncheck the "keep me informed" boxes before clicking the Download button.

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iTunes 7.1: Full-Screen Cover Flow and a Bit More

Posted Thursday, March 08, 2007

iTunes 7.1 is here (download).

The new version brings an enhancement I wished for some time ago: the ability to display a full-screen view of Cover Flow mode. Yay.

My colleague Chris Breen has details on navigating the full-screen Cover Flow view.

Elsewhere, iLounge has a nice visual summary of other, mostly minor, changes in iTunes 7.1. And MacFixit is reporting on problems some users are experiencing with full-screen Cover Flow view on some Mac models.

Happy downloading!

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Steve Jobs on Music Piracy and Protection

Posted Wednesday, February 07, 2007

Macintouch links to a fascinating essay by Steve Jobs that was quietly published on Apple's Web site yesterday.

Background: Regulators in several European countries have been making noises about requiring Apple to open up the iTunes Store in ways that would enable songs to play on devices other than iPods.

Jobs outlines the reasons why the iTunes Store must sell content in a way that makes it difficult to pirate. In a nutshell, he says, "the record companies made me do it." That is, Apple's agreements with the recording industry require Apple to wrap each song in a "digital rights management" surveillance bracelet.

The answer? Make the record companies stop requiring the surveillance bracelet. After all, they sell many, many more unprotected songs -- in the form of audio CDs -- than they do protected ones.

It's a sound argument, if you'll pardon the pun. And it's fascinating reading.

Memo to Steve Jobs: more essays like this, please!

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iTunes 7 and Cover Art: Tips and Speculation

Posted Monday, November 06, 2006

I love iTunes 7's Cover Flow view, which lets you "paw through" your music collection in much the same way you could paw through the albums in a record store. (Kids: If you don't know what the last part of the previous sentence means, ask your parents.) Indeed, I like the Cover Flow view so much that I wish Apple would add an option for viewing it in full-screen mode.

I also like that iTunes 7 can retrieve artwork for songs that are already in your library: just choose Advanced > Get Album Artwork. But there's a big catch: iTunes retrieves artwork for only those songs that Apple sells in the iTunes Store. If your music library is like mine, you're likely to have a lot of generic album covers in your Cover Flow display. There's still a place for third-party artwork utilities or good, old-fashioned Google image searching.

(Tip: You can enlarge the Cover Flow display by dragging the resize area just below the Cover Flow scroll bar. To page through covers, press the arrow keys on your keyboard.)

Beginning with iTunes 7, though, the way cover artwork is stored can differ depending on how and where you got the artwork. The key difference occurs when you retrieve artwork for songs already in your library. Rather than storing the artwork in the music files themselves—which is how iTunes and other music jukebox software have always worked—iTunes 7 stores the art in a separate database.

One complication of this surfaces if you move a song file from one computer to another. When the artwork is embedded in the file—as it still is with purchased music in iTunes 7—the artwork travels along with the file. But with songs whose art you've retrieved using the Get Album Artwork command, the art and the music are two separate beasts: move the song, lose the art.

There's more to this than I've described here, and there are workarounds. The intrepid iTunes investigators over at iLounge have put together an excellent guide.

But this change begs the question: Why? Why divorce art and music? Why diverge from standards that have served the digital music scene well for many years now?

My guess: copyright.

Album artwork is protected by copyright, and Apple's legal brigade may have felt that it isn't appropriate for iTunes to be embedding copyrighted artwork in files that may have originated from, shall we say, other sources.

Anyone have any other ideas? Can there be a good technical reason why retrieved artwork isn't embedded in the music files, where it belongs? Better performance might be a reasonable excuse, but CoverFlow seems to work just fine with artwork that's embedded in the file, too.

I am, as Ross Perot once said, all ears.

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Choices, Choices

Posted Wednesday, August 16, 2006

I was ripping an audio CD yesterday and iTunes displayed the dialog box you see here.



Hmmm. Which one do I want? There's no way to tell the difference—this particular iTunes dialog box lacks a horizontal scroll bar or size control that would allow me to see how the two entries differ.

I can't remember which one I chose, but I did get the correct track names.

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