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The Boxee rebellion
Recently Apple released the Apple TV 2.3 update, an update that brought four noteworthy improvements:
1. You can stream music from your Apple TV to an AirPort Express Base Station or other Apple TV via AirTunes.
2. The Apple TV can work with a greater variety of remote controls.
3. Video playlists created in iTunes appear on the Apple TV.
Trimming your music tracks
While most of the music you rip with iTunes is ready for listening right away, some tracks can contain extraneous sounds or silence that you may want to remove. Some examples are applause following music that is recorded live, introductions to live tracks, between-song banter on live recordings, or silence either before or after a song. You’ll often find silence sandwiched between listed and “hidden” tracks on CDs; these tracks are only hidden because they follow a long silence added to fill up space (and make you think an album has finished). If you like the song in question, you’ll probably want to listen to it without waiting or fast-forwarding.
There are two ways you can get rid of applause, introductions, and silence. The first uses iTunes, and it’s easy to apply to any track, except one with a hidden track (which has silence in the middle). Start by finding a song you want to trim. If the part you want to trim is at the beginning, play the track until you get to the good part—the music—and note the time at which it starts. If the extra stuff is at the end, such as applause, find when the music ends and note that time.
Next, select the track and press Command-I. You’ll see the iTunes Info window for that track. Click on the Options tab, and you’ll see two fields labeled Start Time and Stop Time. If you want to change the start time, type the time you noted in that field; if you want to change the time at which the track ends, enter a value in the Stop Time field. Click on OK. The next time you play your song, both iTunes and your iPod (after your next sync) will take these new values into account.
The iTunes Info window showing the Options tab and the Start and Stop Time settings.
There’s one downside to this, however. If you copy the track to another computer, or play it on another type of music player, these start and stop times won’t be recognized. They’re only recorded in your iTunes library; the actual track is not altered (which is a good thing). However, you may want to alter a track and completely remove silence or applause. That way, when you put it on another device or listen with other software it will be gone. To do this, you need to use editing software and trim the file itself.
One program you can use is Rogue Amoeba’s $32 Fission, a non-destructive editing program that can work with a number of files formats, including compressed files such as AAC and MP3. The screenshot below shows a song opened in Fission. The first 1:45 or so are the Grateful Dead tuning up and talking. You may want to remove this, so you can hear the song right away. In the screenshot, that section is selected. You can move around in a track in Fission and play the music from any given spot to pinpoint the actual moment when the music starts or ends. Select what comes before or after that, delete it, then save the file. Now, you’ll have your file without its introduction, applause, or silence—but keep in mind that the change is permanent; if you want to restore what you’ve cut, you’ll either need to keep a backup copy of the file, or rip it again from its CD.
Fission shows you your music as a waveform, making it easy to analyze and edit.
For songs with hidden tracks, the procedure is a bit different. Hidden tracks are appended on the last track of on album, following several minutes of silence, so you can’t make changes with iTunes’ Start Time and Stop Time settings. If you open a track like this in Fission, you’ll clearly see the first song, then the silence, then the “hidden” song. You’ll need to select the silence, then click on Remove & Split. Fission will delete the silence and split the track into two new tracks. When you save them, you’ll have a folder with those two tracks, that you’ll then have to tag correctly in iTunes to indicate which is the original named track, and which is the hidden track. (Both will contain the original tags so you’ll need to change one of them.)
Fission makes it easy to split files containing hidden tracks, deleting the silence that separates them from normal songs.
iPod touch draws the short straw
As you’re likely aware, Apple on Thursday night released version 2.2 software updates for the iPhone and iPod touch. Those updates bring several improvements to both devices, with one notable exception—iPod touch users miss out on all the improvements made to the Maps application.
iPhone 2.2 brings Google Street View, public transit maps, walking directions, the display of addresses on dropped pins, and the ability to e-mail locations to others, all within Maps. Pull up Maps on a newly updated iPod touch, and all you’ll find is a Maps application identical to the one in the iPod touch 2.1 software.
In the past, Apple has said that accounting conventions require the company to charge for full-featured updates (ones that include substantially new features or additional applications). But the Maps update seems relatively minor, and Apple has offered neither a paid update to bring the new Maps functionality to the iPod touch, nor an explantion why the touch has been left out in the cold.
Review: Sonos Multi-Room Music System 2.7
Read enough reviews and you understand that part of a reviewer’s job is to present an unemotional—even detached—evaluation of Product X, Y, or Z. For this reason, you almost never see reviews that begin:
“Oh, my stars and garters, this thing is amazing!!” because such effusive language is likely to cast the objectivity of the review in doubt. To bypass that doubt I’ll begin my review of the latest iteration of Sonos’ Multi-Room Music System with:
Oh, my stars and garters, this thing is amazing!
(Note the more restrained single exclamation mark.)
One-touch GarageBand sound effects
Congratulations! You saw the name GarageBand in the title of this story yet continued reading. That makes you part of an exclusive fraternity—those whose eyes don’t glaze over when they encounter mention of this oft-ignored iLife application. And it’s too bad that so many eyes do glaze over, because GarageBand has some very useful features that people miss because they haven’t taken the time to explore the program.
Take, for example, a colleague of mine. Just the other day he sent this message:
For a future special edition of a podcast I want to have an interface that lets me play a few sound effects/audio clips on demand by pressing a button. It’s too rapid fire for me to open a bunch of files and switch windows and press play — I need to hit a key and play a sound.
Do you know of any utility that lets you do that, map sound effects to keys?
The answer, of course, is GarageBand. I suggested he follow these steps:
1. Create a new podcast project.
Ripping and playing audiobooks
Audiobooks have become increasingly popular as digital music players such as the iPod have become commonplace. While it’s great to listen to music while commuting or exercising, you can use some of that time to listen to your favorite author or the latest non-fiction best-seller. You can download digital audiobooks from the iTunes Store or Audible, but you can also buy audiobooks on CD and add them to your iTunes library. Here’s how to best deal with those CDs.
Ripping audiobook CDs
If you buy your own CDs, ripping audiobooks is a snap. You won’t want to use the same import settings as you do for music, because spoken word doesn’t need the same quality. So, before you rip the first CD, go to iTunes: Preferences, click on the General icon, then click on Import Settings. If you’re only planning to listen to the audiobook on an iPod or in iTunes, choose AAC Encoder from the Import Using menu. (If you want to use the files with other players or software, choose MP3 for better compatibility.) From the Setting menu, choose Custom; you’ll see settings for Stereo Bit Rate, Sample Rate, and Channels. For bit rate, choose 64 kbps; as I mentioned, voice needs only a small amount of data to sound good. Leave the sample rate at Auto, and, from the Channels menu, choose either Stereo or Mono. For most books, Mono is fine; I only use Stereo for “full-cast productions”, such as plays, where several performers are spread across the soundscape. To get the most out of your encoding, select the Optimize For Voice checkbox. Then click on OK, then on OK again twice to save your changes. (Make sure to note the settings before you change them, so you can change them back to what they were for music when you’re finished ripping your audiobook.)
Most audiobooks range from about five to a dozen discs, and each disc is generally split up into many files. There are two ways you can import your audiobooks depending on whether you want one file per disc, or a lot of files. The former makes it a bit easier to keep track of the files but the latter can make it easier to spot chapter and section breaks. If you want to join all the files on a disc, select all its files, then choose Advanced: Join CD Tracks.
Whether or not you join tracks, the next step is to do some simple tagging of your files. Select all the tracks on the CD, then press Command-I; this brings up the Info window for multiple items. The easiest way to tag audiobooks is to put the author’s name in the Artist tag and the book’s title in the Album tag. Set the genre to Audiobook, and, if the disc number is not entered, do so; otherwise your files will be out of order after you’ve ripped all your discs. One important thing to do: click on the Options tab, then, from the Remember Position menu, choose Yes. Click OK to save this information—this will let your iPod or iTunes keep your place when listening to a long file.
First look: boxee
Recently I presented the steps for hacking an Apple TV so that it could use boxee (yes, that’s small-b-boxee), the open-source media center application that allows that Apple TV to stream content from such sources as Comedy Central, Hulu, BBC, Last.fm, SHOUTcast, Flickr, and PicasaWeb to an Apple TV or computer. But what of boxee itself and its implementation on the Mac? That’s for today.
The big idea
The giant minds behind boxee describe it as a social media center. Using boxee you can play unprotected videos and music and view images that are stored on your computer’s hard drive or on devices on your local area network. Additionally, you can enjoy content from Internet sources such as Hulu, SHOUTcase, and Flickr. The “social” component is the friends you add (and who add you). Friends can see what they’re watching and listening to, with the idea that if your buddy Marty had the good sense to watch the latest episode of The Daily Show on Comedy Central, maybe you should too.
boxee is based on XBMC, an open-source media player with versions available for Mac, Linux, Windows, and Xbox.
Getting
In order to use boxee, you need an invite. And you can get that invite in one of two ways. You can visit boxee and sign up for an invitation. As of today, that invitation will be slow in coming as there are loads of people who’d like access to boxee and the service is weeding through endless requests. The other way is to find someone who has a boxee account and ask them for an invitation. Currently, there’s no limit to the number of people someone with an active account can invite.
Thinking outside the Apple TV with Boxee
Within Apple’s hallowed halls, the Apple TV’s status seems ever-changing. One minute it’s a hobby. The next, because of greater availability of media in the form of iTunes movie rentals, it’s less hobby and more avocation. And then when movies don’t come as quickly to the iTunes Store as Apple would like and sales of the Apple TV fail to take off, in part, because of this lack of content, back to hobby status goes the smallish set-top box. And in the meantime, the lack of new features and system updates makes one wonder if Apple’s set it sights on a brighter and better Something Else.
Given that, who can blame owners of these devices for wanting to take measures into their own hands and enhance the Apple TV in ways not sanctioned by Apple?
Certainly not me, as I’ve altered my Apple TV so that it can stream video from Comedy Central, YouTube, CNN, MySpace TV, and NBC’s Hulu; stream audio from the BBC, Last.fm, and SHOUTcast; display pictures from Flickr and PicasaWeb; and access content on computers on the same network as my Apple TV.
And you can too. Let me show you how.
Sharing your iTunes music with Simplify
I’m increasingly interested in the notion of making my iTunes library available to me wherever I go. Oh sure, I have plenty of iPods and with a sackful of the things I could manage to truck my music with me, but that’s not what I’m after. Rather, with iPhone or iPod touch in hand, I want to listen to a favorite tune or podcast not on the device. One way to do that is with Simplify Media.
And simple pretty well describes it. To use Simplify Media you simply download the client application for your computer (available for Mac, Linux, and Windows), sign up for the free service—providing a username and password—install the application, and tell the client whether you want to share your iTunes library and playlists or the contents of your Music folder. Give the client the go-ahead and it uploads a list of the unprotected music files (just a list, not the the music itself) to Simplify Media HQ. (I uploaded a list of over 17,000 tracks and it took about five minutes to complete the process.)
On the iPhone side of things, just drop $4 on the iPhone/iPod touch Simplify Media client, launch it, enter your screen name and password in the Settings screen, and tap Done. It will take a couple of minutes for the client to update the contents of the connected library. Once that update is complete, tap the name of your media library in the Media list screen and you’ll be presented with a screen that displays, at the very least, All Albums, All Artists, All Genres, and All Songs. If you’ve chosen to display your iTunes library and playlists, your playlists will appear on the screen.
Songs, artists, albums, genres, and playlists are displayed similarly to the way they’re shown in the iPhone’s iPod area. Tap an entry and you’ll see the items it contains. If you tap an artist’s name and you have more than one album represented by that artist, the albums will be listed as separate entries under that name. You can also choose All Songs when there are multiple album entries. Regrettably, the iPhone/iPod touch client lacks a search feature. I’m hopeful that one comes soon as navigating a large music collection without it can be a chore.
To play a track, just tap it. The Now Playing screen will show you the artist’s name, track name, album name, the year the track was released, and, if available, album artwork. Tap the Artist button in the upper right corner of the screen and you can view a short biography of the artist (if available). Tap a Lyrics button to view any available lyrics. At the bottom of the screen are the expected Back, Play/Pause, and Forward buttons along with a volume control.
Simplify's Now Playing screen
While I intend to use Simplify largely for mobile listening, you don’t have to. With Simplify Media installed you can listen to your music library from any computer. Just fire up the client, enter your username and password, and you’re in. Additionally, you can invite up to 30 friends to listen to your music. They’ll need to create Simplify accounts of their own, but once they do, just send an invitation to their screen name. In their copy of the client they’ll see your screen name listed under a Received Invitations heading. To accept the invitation they need only click a green button next to your screen name in this area. Once they accept that invitation your Simplify library will appear in iTunes as a shared library.
Simplify Media won’t play protected tracks or videos. iTunes needn’t be running on the host computer for Simplify to do its job. The Simplify Media client must be running on that computer, however.
I’m impressed. I think you will be too. Give it a go.
Play almost any audio file
iTunes is a powerful audio player that supports a variety of formats, including the space-saving MP3 and AAC, the uncompressed AIFF and WAV, and the proprietary Apple Lossless. But as you explore the Internet, you’ll come across other file formats with names such as FLAC, SHN, Monkey’s Audio, Ogg Vorbis, and so on (for a list of common formats and their file extensions, see “A Plethora of Formats”).
While you can’t play these files with iTunes (at least not out of the box) other programs will let you play such files. Or you can convert them to iTunes-friendly formats; after doing so, you can add them to your iTunes library then listen to them on your iPod or iPhone. Here’s how to work with other audio formats you may come across.
All about formats
Because MP3 and AAC get most of the press, a lot of iTunes and iPod users have never heard of the many audio formats out there. Lossless formats—those that compress music without removing any information, just like a zip file—such as FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec) and SHN (Shorten) are widely enjoyed by music fans who want the highest fidelity. You can find them on Web sites of artists, including the Grateful Dead and Nine Inch Nails; on sites such as Nugs.net, which sells live concerts as well as albums by dozens of bands (including Buddy Guy, George Clinton & The P-Funk All Stars, Metallica, The Black Crowes, and David Grisman); on live music Web sites such as Etree BitTorrent and Archive.org’s Live Music Archive, where trade-friendly bands allow free downloads of their live recordings; and from classical music labels such as Pristine Classical, an online dealer of historical classical music recordings. (Most sites also offer MP3 or AAC files as well.)
Here are some of the formats you're likely to come across.
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