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

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:

San Diego, California – Siavash Ghamaty introduces Recycler, the first recycling-friendly iPhone application for free download. “Recycler”, by developer Siavash Ghamaty, untangles those complicated and seemingly arbitrary PEC plastic codes on the bottom of your recyclables. Acceptable plastic recycling codes vary from location to location. Recycler allows users to add their location’s codes into an attractive interface that makes a green-conscious lifestyle easy.

“I created this application to remind myself of what items I can throw into my recycling and which just don’t go,” Ghamaty says, “After using this application for a couple of weeks, I ended up memorizing the plastic codes and hope other users do the same. It’s a win for the land fills and environmentalists either way.”

When asked how this excells over use of a standard notes application to store this information, Ghamaty replied, “It’s not just a Post-It note or reminder on your fridge that triggers memory, especially for the Mac-friendly user. Everything must look as good as the iPhone, visually appeasing and an overall nice experience. I feel I nailed this on a certain level and hope the audience agrees. Mainly, I just want people to recycle more.”

The App Store features other environmentally friendly tools such as Green Meter which focuses on fuel consumption. Ghamaty’s application is the first of its kind, blending answers to everyday recycling challenges with the convenience of the iPhone.

Ghamaty Website
Recycler
Download Recycler from iTunes
Screenshot 1
Screenshot 2
Screenshot 3

Siavash Ghamaty is a computer programming professional and has built other applications for the app store in the games and utilities genres. He runs Ghamaty.com, the home of an Adobe Flex/ Flash and iPhone development blog, as well as support for his iPhone applications. Copyright 2008 Siavash Ghamaty. All Rights Reserved. Apple, the Apple logo, iPhone and iPod are registered trademarks of Apple Computer in the U.S. and/or other countries.

Boston, MA – Outer Level today announced the immediate availability of Bullfrog Touch 1.1, the addictive arcade game for iPhone and iPod Touch. This new version adds 25 new challenging levels, redesigned game controls, better performance, and many other improvements.

Race against time to defend your swamp from invading bugs and return peace and quiet to your home. Hop your way through 75 challenging levels to earn your spot atop the online global rankings.

New in Bullfrog 1.1
* Game controls now use on-screen buttons
* 25 New Levels
* Pause brings up a new in-game menu
* New Save and exit option from in-game menu
* Updated Scoreboard graphics
* Improved rendering performance and controls responsiveness
* New Help screen replaces in-game tutorial
* Several bug fixes

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Smithfield, Rhode Island – nFinity Inc. is excited to announce that its award-winning QuickVoice Recorder is now available for the 2nd generation iPod Touch adding to its already existing line of voice recording software for the iPhone, Mac and Windows PCs. And as a special promotion, anyone can purchase QuickVoice for just $.99 simply by making their purchase through Apple’s iTunes (This is a limited time $15 bonus value).

QuickVoice is a professionally designed “touch & speak” recorder, offering many high-end features typically found only in dedicated hardware voice recorders. It is a powerful tool and ideal for business people, educators, students, musicians, and casual users alike. Conveniently record voice notes, reminders, dictation, meetings, interviews, shopping lists, to-do lists, and even entire lectures and multi-session seminars.

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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).

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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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Oh dear, looks like us Brits aren’t going to get the promised price cut on iTunes track downloads, full details are available via this BBC News Link:

BBC NEWS | Entertainment | UK iTunes shelves music price cut.

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 »

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).

The BBC Internet blog states:

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.

Time will tell …