Cyan Worlds has released its classic puzzle adventure game Myst for the iPhone and iPod touch. Once the best-selling PC game of all time, Myst places players in the shoes of a character named the Stranger, who uses a special book to travel to the mysterious island of Myst. Players then explore the island from a first-person perspective, solving interrelated puzzles to complete their journey. The iPhone version includes all the areas, or “Ages,” from the original, along with artwork that surpasses the original in quality, full music and sound effects, an auto-save feature, a bookmark system to save and restore progress, touch-based controls, and original movies and animations. Myst is available now from the App Store for $6, and is a 727MB download
If, like me, you have some smart playlists lovingly created within iTunes.
Whilst simple to create these smart playlists can be extremely powerful and can dynamically select music tracks (or other content) depending on their pre-set criteria. By carefully selecting the criteria you can develop playlists that always have relevant and ever changing content, automatically.
Now, suppose you want to create a new Smart Playlist based on an already pre-existing smart list and then make some minor changes to it? Apart from recreating the entire playlist from scratch again is there a way to help automate this somewhat?
Yes, there is! Simply:
STEP 1
Select the playlist you want to base your new one on
Go-to the File Menu
Choose Library…
Select Export Playlist…
In the Format drop-down list choose XML Save the file to your desktop
STEP 2
Next, import the playlist:
Go-to the File Menu
Choose Library…
Select Import Playlist…
Choose the file you exported in step 1.
iTunes will import the playlist’s selection criteria, not the actual tracks, and you can then edit it to make your minor changes and then rename it appropriately.
Note: If your import result in a standard, plain track listing and not a smart playlist, ensure that in step 1 you have remembered to choose XML in the Format drop-down. Without this important step it won’t export the selection criteria.
Below are a couple of example Smart Playlists that I use to demonstrate their power, and why you may want to copy one rather than recreating it from scratch:
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…
(cross-posted from the Official Google Mobile Blog)
The world just got a little bit smaller. Google Earth is now available for the iPhone and iPod touch, allowing you to fly to the far reaches of the world from the palm of your hand. Since we launched Google Earth for the desktop in 2005, we’ve had over 400 million unique downloads, and people from around the world have used it to view their house, research travel destinations, learn how to make the world a better place, find local businesses, and view geo-located photos. Now, with a free download from the iTunes App Store, you can fly through the same 3D immersive world of Google Earth you’ve come to love, without having to fire up your desktop computer.
Check out this video tour to see Google Earth for iPhone in action:
Not only is having Google Earth on your iPhone convenient, but the touch interface is a very natural way to interact with the Earth. Just swipe your finger across the screen and you fly to the other side of the globe; tilt your phone and your view tilts as well. You can pinch to zoom in or out, or just double tap with one finger to zoom in and two fingers to zoom out. We also integrated the My Location feature, so with a touch of a button, you can fly to where you are in the real world on your phone. In addition, we have over eight million Panoramio photos, which are geo-located photos of places, and you can view any and all of them from your iPhone. Besides being beautiful, high-quality pictures, they’re specifically of places, so you don’t have to see some guy’s family on vacation in Thailand–you can see the beaches, the temples, all the things that give you a real sense of the place. Here is a nice shot of the Grand Palace that I found on my virtual tour of Bangkok:
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.
This is a tale of a crashed iPod Touch and it’s subsequent painless restore:
A few days ago my iPod Touch (16GB) crashed and went into restore / recovery mode, or perhaps I put it into restore / recovery mode accidentally. At boot-up it showed the restore / recovery screen: a USB cable being plugged into iTunes (see image on the right).
In case you don’t know:
to quit a hung application you press and hold the home button, for 5 to 10 seconds
to force a complete device restart you press and hold the lock/unlock button along with the home button for about 5 to 10 seconds
I’d been having a few problems with it, prior to the crash: it wouldn’t stay connected to my home wi-fi network and had started behaving strangely. I forced a device restart (maybe 2 or 3 times) and it then showed the ‘restore-me’ icon (as described above).
Maybe it ‘decided’ it needed a restore (as system problems were apparent) or maybe I didn’t let go of the home button – I was distracted reading a web page at the time about the upcoming Apple event ( New MacBooks look amazing BTW).
I re-connected it to iTunes which detected an iPod Touch in restore/recovery mode and offered to re-flash/reload the firmware and operating system and I accepted – the firmware and OS were loaded, verified and the iPod Touch rebooted (took about up 30 mins up until the reboot I think).
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,
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:
Washington, DC – KavaSoft today released KavaTunes 3.2, the web jukebox for iTunes. KavaTunes makes websites that look and work just like iTunes, so you can browse, search and play your music from any web browser. KavaTunes features continuous playback, so you can queue up an album or playlist and listen to one song after another.
KavaTunes can add album artwork to your music library, and includes artwork in the catalog. KavaTunes can also create web catalogs that look and work just like an iPod. Visitors can browse and play your music using the familiar iPod clickwheel interface.
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:
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.
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.
Rumours are around that BBC programme content may be available in iTunes shortly, now that Apple has announced iTunes will be able to handle movie rentals (and their expiry etc).
This, coupled with Apple’s (long anticipated) move to a rental model, means that we can look to getting BBC iPlayer onto this platform too, as we should be able to use the rental functionality to allow our programmes to be downloaded, free, but retained for a time window, and then erased, as our rightsholders currently insist.
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Posted by Richard
