Apple Gets Nasty with the Palm Pre

The latest version of iTunes (8.2.1) kills the Palm Pre’s ability to sync with iTunes. The Palm Pre is a smart phone aimed to compete with Apple’s iPhone.

That is seriously nasty on Apple’s part. Way to screw over your own users while maliciously attacking the lesser competition.

That’s another black mark on Apple.

Why Bother Attacking the iPod?

Microsoft is attacking Apple with another wasted commercial:

As of June 2008 (a year ago), Apple had sold about 163 million iPods:

As of May 2008, Microsoft had sold 2 million Zune Mp3 players.

Zune has been a lost cause since launch. Trying to outflank Apple by labeling Zune as the cheaper alternative will only damage Microsoft’s brand and reputation (as I pointed out before).

I do want to see Microsoft put up an intelligent fight (although I am not sure why I care).

Please Microsoft, pick better battles.

Digital Beatlemania

The Beatles are finally getting remastered. Digital quality versions of the legendary band’s albums are going to make their way to store shelves on September 9th (the same day that Rock Band: The Beatles will be released).

This is long overdue.

However, you shouldn’t expect to see the Beatles on iTunes or any other legal online music distributor which is pathetic because I can say with absolute certainty that the remastered albums will be available for illegal download on September 9th if they aren’t leaked even earlier.

That’s all for tonight. I have an absurdly early flight home from Arizona in the morning. Until next-time.

iTunes DRM & Price Change

Apple announced that iTunes would be going through some changes at Macworld 2009 in early January.

Well folks, those changes have happened. Near as I can tell, iTunes is now DRM free! This is good because it lifts a lot of the crazy restrictions that Apple was placing on legally purchased music – It’s nice when companies stop punishing people who purchase things legally.

They have also implemented a new price structure by adding $0.69 and $1.29 price tiers to the existing $0.99 tier. The pricing is up to the record-labels or owners of the tracks.

Needless to say, there aren’t many $0.69 tracks. I couldn’t actually find any during my perusal of the iTunes store. That being said, I honestly didn’t see a ton of $1.29 tracks among the music that I like to listen to. It’s clear that they have only priced popular songs at $1.29.

If you are like me and don’t particularly excited for trendy or modern popular music (because I’m cool like that), you shouldn’t notice much of a difference in the pricing structure.

Another thing that you might notice is that some of the same recordings are priced differently based on the album they are from (See Sweet Home Alabama in the image above). I’m not sure if that will stay the same, but it is the case for the moment.

President Obama: Pirate-in-Chief???

Last week President Obama gave Queen Elizabeth II an iPod with 40 show tunes as a gift.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation pointed out that the President probably violated the iTunes terms of service as a result of giving her the gift. At the very least it is incredibly ambiguous.

I took a look at the terms of service for myself and they are absolutely correct that there seems to be no real answer about who owns the music after a user pays for it.

I recommend reading the original EFF post because it clearly explains the problems and ambiguity with our current intellectual property laws. Any attempt to improve upon their post would be a total waste of your time and mine.

This just goes to show you how ill-equipped our legal system is for present and future technology.

"YES WE CAN accidentally violate ambiguous terms of service agreements!"

Back That Mac Up

If you’re here, that means you’re serious about backing up your Mac. Trust me, that’s a good thing. Remember, we’re thinking about our backup fundamentals of redundancy, frequency, and spread.

Throughout this article, I want you to think to yourself: “what is my data worth to me?” In my case, My Mac holds pretty much everything important to me in my life:

• My photos – including every digital photo I’ve ever taken. Ever.
• My music – including every terrible Enrique Iglesisas song I downloaded off iTunes (Because you just can’t have too much “Don’t Turn Off The Lights”).
• My writings – including that 7th-grade English report on Captain America that everyone made fun of me for. Who’s laughing at my detailed analysis of Cap’s Adamantium/Vibranium alloy shield now? That’s right, none of you.

I can’t be sure what you’ve got on your computer, but chances are it’s just as important to you as my stuff is to me. And believe me, if something were to happen to your stuff it’s impossible to underestimate just how much you’ll miss that fanfic of you getting Bat-grapple freaky with the Dark Knight. My stuff’s important. Your stuff’s important. What you have to remember is:

You need somewhere else to put your important stuff

Your stuff is currently on the hard drive inside of your computer, which is great. But if something happens to your computer, or even just your hard drive (they have been known to die on their own from time to time), you’re toast. What you want to do is secure an alternate location to stash your stuff. And that means…

You need to get yourself an external hard drive

No kidding. You really do. How big is up to you, but I would recommend getting one at least twice the size of your current hard drive. Right now external hard drives are running about $100 to $200 for the kind you’ll likely need. Pick a size that works, read some reviews, and get your hands on some external storage goodness. Once you’ve done that, it’s time to:

Grab a good piece of software for backin stuff up

I’m going to start with the easiest. If you’re running Mac OS X 10.4 (Panther) or later, then you need to get SuperDuper. It’s free. It makes an entire bootable clone of your hard drive. You can set it to run overnight and have your backup done by morning. Why are you not downloading it right now?

If you’re willing to throw some cash down, I’d recommend buying SuperDuper for $28. When you buy/register the free version, you get access to superfun features like scheduling, so you can set your backups to run periodically.

Registering SuperDuper also gets you access to the program’s SmartUpdate feature, which is a fantastic way to backup. With the free version, every time you backup with the program it just makes a clone of your hard drive, file for file. That process can take hours, which is why you usually want to run it overnight. With the registered version of SuperDuper, you can set your backups to run more intelligently. The very first time you back up, the program makes a complete clone of your drive. But every subsequent time you back up, SuperDuper just compares all the files on your source drive to those on your backup drive, and copies/deletes only the ones necessary to make your backup drive identical to your source.

The upshot? Your first backup will take a few hours, but all backups after that tend to take about 20 minutes. A huge timesaver, and great incentive to backup more frequently.

That about does it for this post, but stay tuned. In my next post, I’m going to cover the backup features built in to Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard), the current feature of the Mac operating system. We’re also going to talk about online backup solutions, so stick around!

MacUpdate #1

Care to know what happened at Macworld 2009? Here’s the CliffsNotes version:

1. A victory for DRM haters everywhere (DRM makes me foam at the mouth). iTunes is dropping DRM on it’s music! They are also adding two new pricing tiers for record labels to use at their own discretion ($0.69 & $1.29 in addition to the existing $0.99). But what about the poor saps who are stuck with the old DRM locked music? You can unlock it for $0.30 per song. It’s kind of a rip-off… if you don’t want to pay; here is how you can break iTunes DRM for free. No hacking skills necessary.
2. A 17 inch MacBook Pro (yes it’s pretty): http://www.apple.com/macbookpro/?sr=hotnews?sr=hotnews.rss
3. A new version of iLife: http://www.apple.com/ilife/
4. And a new version of iWork: http://www.apple.com/iwork/

As predicted, nothing too big. Hopefully there are some better goodies to come.

Breaking iTunes DRM – No Hacking Necessary

I have a fundamental problem with what Apple. I’m very happy that they are stopping all of this DRM insanity (Click here to learn more about DRM). However, I think charging $0.30 per song, (which will be a lot of money if you bought a lot of songs) is insane. They aren’t raising the price of unlocked music, so why should you pay an extra fee for something that you already paid for? This is just further punishment for those who have legally purchased music.

BS like this brings out the pirate in me. AAAAARRRRR RAMING SPEED!

Anyway, here’s a simple way to break iTunes DRM without paying this stupid fee:

1.     Burn the album (or songs) that you purchased to an audio CD (not a data CD). Audio CDs are the kind that you can put into your car and they will play.

• It works best burn whole albums because your computer will be able to recognize the album and properly name all of the songs.
• If you are doing this with individual tracks, you should write down the song’s name, album, artist, and any other metadata you want because you will have to add them manually later.

2.     After burning the CD, delete the purchased music from iTunes.

3.     Import the CD back to your computer with the “Import” button in the bottom right corner. 

• Add the metadata back to the songs if necessary.
  • You can do this by right clicking on the song
  • Selecting “Get Info”
  • Then click on the second tab, “Info”
  • Type the names into the different fields
  • Click “OK”

4.     You’re done! No more DRM locks on your iTunes music!

 

I do advocate buying music whenever possible, but paying twice is wrong. Especially since these purchasers did the right thing in the first place. Apple is trying to get paid for the same songs twice, and that is some serious bullshit.

Join CD Tracks – An Excellent Trick on iTunes

There are just some songs that you have to hear together, and listening to them separate is just a sonic travesty. I have put a lot of thought into this, and come up with a list (please post any that I forgot).

Rock You & We Are the Champions – Queen

Heartbreaker & Living Loving Maid – Led Zeppelin

Load Out & Stay – Jackson Browne

Black Magic Woman & Gypsy Queen – Santana

Amie & Falling in and Out of Love – Pure Prairie League

Foreplay & Long Time – Boston

Eruption & You Really Got Me - Van Halen

Funeral for a Friend & Love Lies Bleeding & Candle in the Wind - Elton John

… and then the “absolute must play these two tracks together award” goes to Brain Damage & Eclipse - Pink Floyd

You can really add almost any pairing from Dark Side of the Moon, or any other prog rock concept album or rock opera. A lot of Pink Floyd or Dream Theater stuff can fall into this catagory.

Anyway… for years I have wanted a way to link two songs together in iTunes so that they are not played apart from one-another when I am listening on random. Honestly, a little part of my soul dies every time I hear Brain Damage and it isn’t followed by Eclipse.  

Turns out there is a way! It just isn’t very intuitive. 

The trick is to use the “Join CD Tracks” function in iTunes before you rip the CD to your computer, or if you don’t own the CD, burn the tracks to a CD, and then rip them back to your computer using the “Join CD Tracks” tool. This is actually easy to do… it’s just annoying, but for some songs, it’s worth it.

Rip - the act of copying content from solid media. Basically, this is copying music from a CD, or a video from a DVD.

You can follow these instruction to do so:

1. Put the CD into your drive. 

2. In iTunes, click on the CD, so that you are viewing the track list from that album.

3. Hold down the “Apple” button, or “Control/ Ctrl” button if you are on a PC, and select the consecutive tracks that you would like to merge.

4. While keeping those tracks selected, go up to the top of the screen, and click on “Advanced.”

5. Select “Join CD Tracks.” You should see the tracks linked together with a bracket.

6. Import the CD to iTunes normally.

7. (Optional) If you had to re-rip the album to your computer, you might want to delete the old tracks so that you do not have duplicates.

Give it a shot, it isn’t difficult to do. It just doesn’t feel natural.

It would be nice if Apple added a feature to join tracks together without having to do it from a CD… for now, this works.