The MacTrack – iPhone, iPod, iPod Touch and Mac News

Convert iTunes Store music files

by Kirk McElhearn, Macworld.com

One of the biggest announcements made by Apple during the recent Macworld Expo was the news that, soon, all music sold by the iTunes Store will be free of digital rights management (DRM) restrictions. Currently, some 80 percent of music sold on the iTunes Store is without DRM, with the remainder to follow by the end of March.

While this frees up iTunes Store purchases for playback on other devices, or with other software, there may still be a hurdle if you don’t use a compatible device, or if you want to use these files with Windows software. For the music files sold by Apple are in AAC (Advanced Audio Coding) format. (Contrary to what many believe, this is not a “proprietary” format owned by Apple, but rather part of the MP4 specification.) But not many devices support AAC. Aside from Apple’s offerings, Microsoft’s Zune, the SanDisk Sansa, several Sony devices (the PlayStation Portable, Walkman and some phones), the Sonos Digital Music Player, the Squeezebox, and some other devices can play back AAC files. A handful of player programs support AAC, but not some of the most commonly used Windows programs such as Windows Media Player. But nearly every digital music player can play back the more ubiquitous MP3 format, as can most home DVD players and car stereos (via MP3 CDs).

If you want to take advantage of the vast catalogue of music available on iTunes (while Amazon.com has a broad selection, iTunes still has many exclusive albums, or albums with bonus…

read full article via Convert iTunes Store music files | Playlist | Macworld.

Need to rate your iTunes music tracks?  Don’t want to interrupt your current activity by switching to iTunes?  You need I Love Stars

This neat little application sits on the menu bar and allows you to set the iTunes star rating of the track currently playing.  You can do this either by clicking on the appropriate star or, even nicer, the application is mouse scroll-wheel aware so you can simply roll the wheel whilst hovering over the application’s display in the menu bar.

If you right-click on it you can see the current track name and album.

Oh, did I mention?  It’s FREE

Also worth looking at is another, more feature-rich, free application: You Control: iTunes

If you want a quick and simple, no fuss rating tool you be hard pressed to find better than I Love Stars.

Stockholm, Sweden – Snarb.tk today announced the immediate availability of Cover Stream 2.2, a major update to their unrivaled iTunes controller that extends iTunes Cover Flow to the desktop. The new version adds Jukebox mode, mouseover desktop controls, integrated lyrics support, a daemon launcher and plenty of options to customize application behavior and appearance. The new version also resolves a number of bugs in earlier releases and is a recommended update for all users.

Cover Stream is one of the most popular iTunes controllers for the Macintosh, and a true piece of eye candy! Developed exclusively for Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, Cover Stream extends iTunes Cover Flow to the desktop,

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Does your iTunes library need some TLC, attention, cleaning, sorting out and general first aid?  I know mine certainly does, so I was really excited to learn of a potentially great new utility called ‘TuneUp‘, from TuneUpMedia, the features of which are:

Your music collection is a mess. TuneUp fixes it:

• Automatically clean your mislabelled music
• Find your missing cover art
• Be alerted to upcoming concerts based on your collection
• Get the best music content from the web.

Find your missing cover art.

• Automatically search for missing cover art
• Choose from multiple album covers
• No more grey music notes
• Bring sexy back to your iPhone and iPod

Currently only available for Windows users (boo!) but soon to released for Mac users as well (hurrah!).  You can sign-up for a notification when TuneUp is available for the Mac at the TuneUp website or by clicking here.

TuneUp comment about the availablity for the Mac on their blog:

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Nashville, Tennessee – RingtoneFeeder has evolved since its launch in April 2008 and the subscribers are getting more value for their money now than when they signed up originally. When RingtoneFeeder first started the subscribers would be getting just a single ringtone every week.

Currently the subscribers are receiving 4 ringtones every week. One vocal and one instrumental ringtone, both of them in two versions, with and without a ringing sound embedded. This option was made available recently based on user feedback, but the price structure remains the same.

The annual subscription which is priced at just $19.98 will now provide 218 ringtones as the subscriber will

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Occasionally, when using iTunes (if iTunes has previously crashed), I come across a fault: iTunes won’t quit, it just reloads itself each time I try to close it. This issue also prevents my Mac from restarting/rebooting unless I do a quick and dirty cold restart (either using the 10s power button method or dropping to a terminal window and issuing a ‘sudo shutdown -r now‘ terminal command).

Further investigations have discovered that the SRS Labs iWow plug-in (see my previous post) is to blame:

Here is some background

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If you want to enhance your iTunes audio, for a modest outlay, I thoroughly recommend iWoW by SRS Labs.

This iTunes plug-in gives much deeper and richer bass, and a fully immersive surround sound quality to your music.

At $29.99 it’s worth every cent (or for me in the UK, every penny). Try the free 14 day trial. You’ll never be satisfied with iTunes’ plain vanilla audio again!

The plug-in processes audio in realtime so your actual tracks remain intact and unchanged.

One particularly good feature is it’s Read the rest of this entry »

I thought I’d share a little utility that I use on a daily basis but would be lost without, in fact I don’t really consider it an add-in as it’s used so much. You Control: iTunes gives you full control over iTunes from the menu bar. There are many utilities that can do this but where this one excels, for me anyway, is the ability to rate a song directly from the menu bar without having to switch back to iTunes.

I can already control track playback with my Apple keyboard but was frustrated that firstly, most of my tracks remain un-rated and secondly, to rate a track I had to interrupt what I was currently doing and switch back to iTunes (hence the reason for most of my tracks being un-rated).

The interface to You Control: iTunes is highly configurable allowing you to show as much or as little of the controls as you wish.

Scrolling track and album details can be shown in the menu bar, either Read the rest of this entry »

Then try WireTap Studio by Ambrosia Software, a great utility that allows you to isolate and record the audio from any application. If you need to capture audio from Safari, a game or anything really then this handy application will do the job for you.

It even allows you to combine the audio from two sources, both of which you can nominate for example audio from a program and your mic or line-in.

Features include:

• Record Anything
• LivePreview™ Bliss
• Lossless Audio Editing
• Export with Ease
• Podcast Like a Pro
• Scheduled Recordings

You get a 30 day free trial of the application initially so it’s easy to discover whether it’ll suit your needs. If you decide to purchase it then it costs $69 (or in some circumstances, if you qualify, $30).