Play Count (10)

Once again!
And another notch up! Not a single change on the most listened ones, but I have managed to raise the bar, every single song has at least, 9 plays on it.

Play Count (9)

Nothing has changed, at least on the top played ones, as I'm anal on getting the play count to be the same across the board, it will take me quite some time, but I guess I can make it.
It took a month to go over my collection, that is, the collection that was the least played, now I have listened to every single song at least 8 times (and counting).

20 Gs

Added the CDs I have ripped on the weekend to my iTunes library. Wanted to post this here, because I have noticed that I broke the 20 GB mark, I can't believe I have that much music, not to mention, that much HDD space!

ITOH the iPod I have can hold 3 times more that amount of files, I find that simply and utterly amazing, an uninterrupted month of music.

Thor reinstall- 1st problem

It seems like I have been way too optimistic...
The iTunes Playlist did transfered all the Play Count and Ratings, but, I found out today that some of the tracks are not properly linked to the iTunes Playlist.
Definitively not a biggie, but, nevertheless, a royal PITA.

New life for Thor

Reinstalled Os X on Thor.
This time, I used the 2 HDDs as a one, with Disk Utilities' RAID setup.

Right now I have a 149 GB HDD to play with, since the whole thing is sort of "virtual" is the right word, I'll have to be specially careful with backups, since, if one of the HDDs goes down, the whole thing will go down in flames, taking all the information with the fire!

The whole process wasn't that painful, although, not until I had all my iTunes data on the HDD again, I was not relieved. On this setup, since I don't have different partitions like before, migrate the iTunes data from Thor to Trantor will be a lot easier.

Play count (8)

Once again, nothing much has changed, except that I have moved up one notch, every single theme has been listened at least 7 times (or more)

iTunes firewall warning

This is new... Since yesterday's upgrade, now iTunes warns me that I can share my collection because of my firewall settings.
Well, that's the idea, I don't have the "Share my library on my local network" option enabled.

Play count (7)

Not much has changed... Except I have listened to all the Music Library file at least 6 times already... The anal iTunes Player/ Listener on me can't let this occasion pass just like that :D

Play count (6)

More music! Being listening a lot to Casiotone for the painfully alone lately.
I simply love it, electronic, and yet, really melancholic too.

The ones that stayed behind

I was browsing thru my CDs the other day, I have all my CDs ripped and on iTunes, looking for any that perhaps escaped the ripping.

Found out two:



Real Live - Bob Dylan

Autobahn - Kraftwerk



I really don't remember why I skipped those when ripped the CD collection, about 2 years + ago... Specially the Bob Dylan one.

The iTunes Library is hopeless

The iTunes Library file cannot be saved. An unknown error ocurred (-51)

This is a first timer for me... Popped up about an hour ago.
Clicked Ok on it, and continued to listen to my music with out any problem whatsoever.
Closed iTunes, re opened it, no problem at all.

There are a lot of Google pages dealing with this, all of them with different error codes, the most common seems to be the number 50.

Google: The iTunes Library file cannot be saved. An unknown error ocurred (-51)

Play count (5)

Not much has changed on the most played list, but, ITOH, reached the (at least) "5 times played count" for every song on my iTunes playlist.

Certainly not a national landmark, but nevertheless, I find it interesting.

Play count (4) - featuring Antony & The Johnsons

I'm listening a lot of music lately, to the point that I have noticed that I have listened to all of my songs at least 3 times already.
The current most played is still The Pogues' Misty Morning, Albert Bridge, but I have been totally hooked to I am bird now, I can't stop listening to it.

The singer, a rather particular fellow, called Antony Hegarty, also singed a song on a very interesting jail house flick, called Animal Factory, in which the music was composed by John Lurie, I have been looking for that soundtrack for years, but I'm pretty sure it doesn't exist.

Antony and The Johnsons
Antony and the Johnsons

Transferring Play Count info on iTunes

I'm really, but really anal when it comes to my Play Count statistics ( link 1, link 2 & link 3), I like those to be consistent and real, even across boxes; so I have looked all around for a program, script, trick or something that would allow me to transfer the data back and forth between Thor and Trantor.

But it seems like there is none, I did found this link, tho:

How to Sync your iPod with one computer, but Listen to it through iTunes on multiple computers

But the solution involves using the iPod as the method to store the Play Count info when plugged to a different box. I don't want that, I prefer to store the data on the box, and simply move that from box to box.

So I have being using this method to transfer all the music (by far, the easiest part) as well as the Play Count, ratings, etc, from the iTunes on Thor to Trantor.

So, close your iTunes if running, and the important files, the one that store the info, are 'iTunes Library' & 'iTunes Music Library.xml', it will be wise to make a backup of the original ones, before starting to edit those. They are located on the '~/Music/iTunes/' directory on a plain vanilla Os X/ iTunes install.
You'll have to do two things to the files, wipe the contents of 'iTunes Library' (totally blank it), and then replace the file 'iTunes Music Library.xml' with the one you are transferring from the other box.

So, on the box you want to transfer the Play Count data, open Terminal, and cd' to the above directory, then type:

cat /dev/null > 'iTunes Library'


Then, you'll replace the file 'iTunes Music Library.xml' from this box with the one from the other box, with the update Play Count statistics, etc.
If, for instance, the iTunes libraries are located on different places on the different boxes, you'll have to edit the path on the file 'iTunes Music Library.xml' now.

For instance, on Thor, my Quicksilver, the path is:

file://localhost/Volumes/data1/Music/iTunes/iTunes%20Music/


While on Trantor, the PB laptop, the path is:

file://localhost/Users/esteban/Music/iTunes/iTunes%20Music/


I use Emacs, with the Meta + X + replace-regexp function to replace the old path with the new one, trying to edit the file with TextEdit simply chokes the program, it is probably too big to handle.

After the files are blanked, replaced and edited (if needed), start iTunes and wait till it regenerates the whole Music Library again.

Play count (3)

An yet another one on the current most played tune on iTunes, it is getting harder and harder to beat the number one! :p

Play count (2)

Being listening to a lot of music lately... I have tried to the best that I could to rediscover the music I have not listened to in a while.
The play count did not change that much since the last Play count post, mostly because, using Smart Playlists, I have played the files I have only listened twice, it took me nearly a month to go thru all of those, as of today, I have a every single file played at least 3 times on my Music Library, the main playlist.

Play count

One of the features I love the most of iTunes is the play count, here is a screenshot of my most played tunes, right now my library has 4817 songs, using 19.19 GB, and spanning for 11.2 days.
I took the time, or the effort, to listen to each and every song, and not until I did the whole list, before starting to listen to them once again.

More on the iTunes interface

The other day I found a program to change the looks of the current iTunes release, to make it more 'Aquaish'.
It is a free program, 26 MB in size, you can get it from here: Aqua4iTunes; I have it installed on my PowerBook, running iTunes 7.2 -for over a month- without any problem.

More on the iTunes rounded windows

These are some pics I found on internet, comparing the window's corners from the previous incarnations of iTunes, with the newer releases.
Like I said before, I really don't understand the idea behind this, and I certainly hope that the next release of Os X does not look like this globally.








What really puzzles me regarding this whole "chopped windows thing " is why would Apple do it, and then again, why only on the iTunes window?
Would this be a preview of how the windows will look on Leopard?

Os X upgrade (& iTunes too)

After a lot of tinkering, did the upgrade for 10.4.9, and after a week or so, did the same for iTunes.
I have a special dislike for iTunes ever since they started to "cut" -to chisel- the window borders.
I really hate the way Apple did that! And also, I don't understand why they did it, iTunes was really, really good looking.


Anyway, there is a good thing, tho.
Before upgrading the system, while runing the previous version of iTunes, there were some songs that weren't transfered from the PowerBook to the iPod when doing a sync.
The thing was that I wasn't able to know which ones weren't, iTunes told me that some songs, including the one listed on the screenshot, for instance were not copied to the iPod.



After upgrading iTunes, when I performed the first sync, to my surprise, I found out that now it does inform me which songs are not copied to the iPod, jolly good!