In this episode, Katie and David dig deep on iTunes including Library management, playlists, sharing, and network attached storage.
Links of note
Dupin – Remove Duplicate Tracks
Sync your iTunes Library with Dropbox
The Apple Chap article on ripping and adding metadata to video
Follow up links
Practically Efficient Hazel Markdown Post
Notational Velocity Markdown Build
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Timely podcast! Thanks….
I was just thinking about moving my ITunes Library from my media server to an external drive and along comes this podcast. I currently use a Mac Mini as my media server that serves my media to my Apple TV’s (old and new) and to my other computers using home sharing. With movies and songs, it’s very easy to fill up the internal storage on the mini.
Got some good tips that I had not thought about – so I will have to try it out and see how it works out for me. Thanks again for all your efforts.
Really enjoyed MPU 038. Can’t wait for Doug AppleScript suggestions from other listeners as well as smart playlist suggestions. Really appreciate the iFlicks tip.
Thank you.
I too keep my video files off my internal drive because of space considerations. Unfortunately it makes adding files to the library a bit more tricky. Why can’t every Mac ship with at least a 1TB drive?
Since you asked, here are some of my favorite iTunes Smart Playlists:
RANDOM – Playlist is Music / Media Kind is Music / Genre is not Holiday / Genre is not Sound Effects / Kind does not contain PDF Document / Live updating. (This is used when I want a random play of music that doesn’t include Holiday songs, music videos, audio books or anything else. It’s my most used Smart Playlist because I build just about every other Smart Playlist off it.)
FILM SCORES – Grouping contains Film Score / Live Updating. (I use Genre as Soundtrack, but not all soundtracks only contain score. Using the grouping modifier helps when I only want to listen to scores and not sung songs. Yes, I could use multiple Genres for one soundtrack album, but somehow that rubs me wrong.)
BEST OF 2010 – Playlist is Random / Year is 2010 / Rating is in the range 4-5 stars / Live Updating
iPLAYLIST – Playlist is Random / Rating is 5 stars / Last Played is not in the last 1 month / Limit to 8 hours selected by random / Live updating. (Great for filling my iDevices with my best music that I haven’t heard recently).
You were also asking about Audiobook procedures. Using the Harry Potter books as a case study, I used Audiobook Builder to join the chapter tracks together. One huge benefit of doing this in my eyes is that each chapter contains the CD chapter breaks. So even though I may wind up with a 40 minute track for Chapter 2, it’s broken into 8 bits within the one track. This also lets me assign the chapter art from the books in addition to the main book cover art. This way when I listen on my iDevice the book cover art shows in the album view, but each chapter has it’s own unique art from the book. I know, it’s super geeky and way too much for most, but having a file like this makes it much more easy for me to accept books as audio files only. Too bad they’re not sold like this because creating the files myself took quite a bit of time.
OK, I’ll stop boring you now. Thanks for the great shows!
Thanks for describing your Smart Playlists, they were pretty useful for me!
Katie is right, it is possible to rip a CD audio book,without paying for a program.
On the other hand, AUDIO BOOK BUILDER from SPLASM is only $9.95, and if you rip many AUDIO BOOK CDs (say check out books from the library to play on your iPod), AUDIO BOOK BUILDER is well worth the ten bucks.
I had music scattered on five computers and wanted to bring it all together in a central “Home Share.” DUPIN really helped! It enabled me to simply consolidate the iTunes libraries from the different machines, then let DUPIN find and clear out the inevitable duplicates.
One last comment.
You mention iTunes bloat in the show. Something I hear a lot of people talking about these days. I thought listeners may be interested in reading an article I found over at TidBits about this very issue. It asks the questions, what is bloat and does it apply to iTunes. They come to some surprising conclusions. Including that if you only install English language support iTunes 10 is a mere 65MB. You can read the full article at the below link.
http://db.tidbits.com/article/11615
RESPONDING to BRUCE re BLOAT
Good link to TidBits.
But I think TidBits writer misses a semi-truck sitting in his dining room.
Remember when the BP well blowout was all the news that was? If you followed the story, some idjits promoted the idea of nuking the well. Then when Obama did not order an immediate strike, they started criticizing the President for not taking decisive action.
“What’s worse than shrimp soaked in crude oil? Radioactive shrimp soaked in crude oil.”
Anyway, the “news” cycle feeds on itself.
iTunes is really just a front end to SQL. iTunes, the program that offers ability to buy music, videos, and store those purchases (and others you rip yourself) then coordinate them with iDevices is spare. The meda files folders inside the iTunes folder get really large, so an iTunes folder can easily become ginormous.
Where iTunes IS bloated is Apple’s insistence on using it as the interface for APPs AND the data APPs programs use. There should be a way to send PDFs to your iPad without going through iTunes, or the kludge workarounds offered in GoodReader etc.
It is dead easy to send a file to my Android Nexus One. Plug it in USB, drop the file on the SD card. Also can be done with Bluetooth, but does require a $1 Android App.
ANYWAY, iTunes is NOT bloated. It brings together logically related functions and access to the data those functions use. It unnecessarily complicates connecting to an iDevice to sync data not in iTunes.
BUT the round and round blogs / media commentary plant the idea iTunes is bloatware. Those folks have to have something to write and whine about between SteveNotes,
The “radioactive shrimp” they don’t seem to go near is: how better to handle all the things iTunes so seamlessly brings together?
Here’s a useful iTunes tip: reserve 1-star for files that you want to trash and never hear again. While listening on yer phone or iPod, you can rate the bad song with a star, and when you sync, it’s easy to find (a smart playlist of 1-star songs) so you can delete the file(s).
Once again, I find myself learning more about apps that I started taking for granted years ago. Great show.
Since I suspect many, many households struggle with multiple user issues (as you touched on), I thought I’d share how my wife and I manage our shared iTunes account. We take advantage of the comment field and use a simple, 3-letter system based on our first initial.
I put an E in the comment field of songs that are for my ears only; B for hers; and A (all) for songs that we both like.
This lets us easily create playlists that only query songs we want. For example, all of my smart playlists check the comment field for E or A. Hers check for B or A.
We’ve been doing this for years, and it works great. It’s also dead easy to edit or change the letter in comments individually or in batch at any time. Best of all, all of the smart playlists instantly update when we do.
By the way, thanks for linking to Practically Efficient! As I know you’re well aware, this MPU listener loves all things Markdown and MultiMarkdown.
Let me start off by saying great podcast I always learn something new.
I will share how my wife and I share our iTunes library between both users on the same mac.
First you need to move your entire iTunes folder, library and all into /Users/Shared folder.then open iTunes while holding down the option key and select choose library… ‘and then go to /Users/Shared and select iTunes.
iTunes will start and you should see your music.
Quit iTunes and open Terminal.
Enter this command, followed by enter after each.
cd /Users/Shared
chmod – 777 iTunes
Now logout and login to the other user account open iTunas while holding down the option key and and choose /Users/shared/iTunes and you should be golden.
here is a link to a blog post that showed me how to do this, one thing every time iTunes is updated you need to open the terminal and enter the commands. also in the blog they say to use 775 that didn’t work for me
but 777 did this may be because my wife and I both have admin access.
I hope this helps someone.
http://steve-on-sakai.blogspot.com/2009_07_01_archive.html
I do something very similar to Culley for 5 iTunes libraries in my household (mine, my wife’s, and my 3 kids). All media is located in /Users/Shared/Music/iTunes and then in the respective subfolders that iTunes creates. Each person’s library file(s) and downloaded album artwork resides is his or her Music/iTunes folder.
I then have a script to manage the permissions — set_itunes_permissions.command:
#!/bin/bash
cd /Users/Shared/Music/iTunes
sudo chown -R admin *
sudo chgrp -R staff *
sudo chmod -R 777 *
Basically all our media is “owned” by the admin user I use on the system for maintenance and software installs and updates, and the group ownership is staff, ensuring that we all can modify the files (although I’m not so sure that’s the best idea with my 6- and 4-year-old children). Finally, I too had issues with 775 permissions, so I go with 777.
One thing I did in the past was to have the actual iTunes library files, XML files, and album artwork located in the Shared path as well and create symbolic links in the users’s local iTunes folder. Not sure why, but it was flaky at best, and I had to have additional lines in the script to make sure ownership of the library files was for the respective user.
One thing I’m still battling with is album artwork. If a user on my Mac downloads or updates album artwork for tracks, it only appears in that user’s library since using the normal Apple methods, artwork is stored separately from the media file itself, and then you end up with multiple copies for each user that downloads artwork. Any ideas on being able to do this short of embedding the artwork in the files themselves (which is what I assume happens when you drag artwork into the files’ Get Info dialog)?
Oh, this would be ever so much easier if Apple would create an iTunes server, maybe as part of Mac OS X Server?
– phil –
It sounds like you guys are sharing a desktop computer with your family. How about if you and your wife each have a separate iTunes library on each of our laptops?
I thought about getting a mac mini and merging our libraries into one iTunes library/account and then use the home share feature to listen to the music on our own laptops. The problem is if we are out of town then we wouldn’t have our libraries on your laptops. I figured keeping separate libraries and a shared library would be too hard.
Was this covered in the podcast? Maybe I missed it.
At the 12 minute 00 seconds mark David mentioned using the TimeCapsule as a network drive for holding media. I wanted to raise a few points:
1) In theory the connection should be no more dodgy than using a wireless connection with the sharing feature you discussed.
2) I personally recommend using a FileServer that exports a media volume via NFS, SMB/CIFS or AFS. Then you can setup the auto-mounter to always mount the share on the fly when the volume is accessed. This allows you to have multiple users manage the contents of that Volume from different machines with different accounts and managed access.
a) in the configuration I don’t set the library to the remote volume, I simply ‘Index’ it and configure iTunes so that it does not copy the files when they are ‘added’ to the itunes library. This keeps the sorting/searching meta-data function fast as the information is all local to each machine.
3) There are third party DAAP servers (http://www.opendaap.org/ and http://www.fireflymediaserver.org/) that make your iTunes Library available over the wire/air. This coupled with a network volume export means very flexible options for iOS devices (Apple TV, iPad, iPod Touch, etc.) and regular desktop/laptop machines.
Ummm when I download iTunes 10 for the mac from the website it’s 95mb and not “a few hundred”.
I think David mentioned iFlix to help get metadata for video files but it does appear that this app is no longer maintained. I’d love to know what other people are using to get this metadata for video files (movies) in iTunes. I’ve ripped about 20 DVD’s and it would be great to use a tool that will automagically fetch DVD cover art and metadata from IMDB or some such place.
Any suggestions would be appreciated.
Gang,
It’s “iFlicks”, not “iFlix”
http://www.iflicksapp.com/
Enjoy,
David
Is the link under Notational Velocity Markdown Build correct?
Thanks, David. My Google-fu failed me.
G,
Thanks. I probably glossed over David’s comment as I don’t have a TimeCapsule – just a normal Airport, but I do have 2TB drive plugged into the usb port of the Airport.
I like your idea of a FileServer and will have to look into the DAAP server route. Wish there was a simpler solution though. I think I can figure it out, but the rest of the family may find it a pain if they have to do any configuration/troubleshooting when I’m not home.
Great podcast! I’ve been so set in my ways in iTunes, I’d never considered there might be different and better ways of management, ha! So I now have a new OF project just on the 8 or so new ideas I got from this podcast
. Thanks Katie and David!
I do have a question that I did not hear mentioned in the podcast. Maybe someone here can offer me a suggestion/solution:
How do you stop the exclamation mark in iTunes that states (to the effect)…”Since you haven’t listened to a podcast in a while, iTunes will no longer update it”? {Sorry, I forget the actual wording, but this is what it’s saying in my head as I read it.}
I can’t make it to all the podcast I want to hear, but I still want to have access to them. For most, I have the subscription set to “download most recent” and “only keep most recent”(erase the rest).
It really irritates me to see that iTunes decides on it’s own to stop downloading podcasts. I can’t find a preference option to disable this “feature.”
Can anyone help with this?
Thanks,
Lee
As usual, a great show!
For those thinking of using a NAS to store music, I tried it and gave up. I had iTunes using a database local to my Mac and the music available as a Samba share on my NAS (1 GB/sec ethernet). The actual playing of music wasn’t bad, it was all of the housekeeping that iTunes does that steered me away from it. Startup as well as many day-to-day operations were very slow, presumably beacuse of high network activity. Now that I can stream to my Airport Express, my need for making music sharable via a NAS is not needed.
Maybe someone has a suggestion for a problem of mine. I have iTunes and all media files on my iMac in the basement. While I love working on this machine, I usually end up working on my MacBook in a different room. I know that I can stream music at any time from the iMac to my MBP or Airport Express; it is just not a pleasant experience. Browsing an iTunes library is a lot nicer when it is local, rather than shared. Examples are the lack of album art, lack of better delineation of albums, and rating songs. As far as I know, I can’t even make a playlist without being on the machine where iTunes is hosted! Has anyone come up with a good solution for using iTunes in this fashion? Thanks in advance!
Paul -
This isn’t an elegant solution, but if you could set up a playlist to stream from the iMac and use Home Sharing and AirPlay in the latest iTunes to play from the iMac to the MBP. At least I think that would work. If I remember correctly, it will even display the artwork of what’s playing. And if you have an iPhone, you could use the remote app to change the songs on the iMac rather than trying to browse a shared playlist from the MBP.
In other words, look at “pushing” the audio from the iMac rather than “pulling” it from the MBP.
Thanks for the reply, Phil. I’m using a push scenario now, but it is very inelegant, due to the fact that the iMac needs to be the master, and it is not easily updated. Consider the following scenarios:
1. I want a playlist for dinner music. Combing through a large music library is a time consuming task itself, then comes the tweaking of the playlist: adding, deleting, ordering. The only way I know of to do this is on the iMac.
2. I want to rate all of my music, which I usually do while I am listening to it. There seems to be no way of doing that on the device the music is being streamed *to*. Again, this needs to be done on the iMac.
I suppose I could use Screen Sharing to accomplish these goals, but the resolution mismatch between MBP screen and the iMac screen is uncomfortable enough that I tend not to use that feature unless I really have to. I wish you could run a single program on one computer and have the graphical display show up on another computer like you can on Unix…
Maybe I’m just whining too much and need to reconsider the Screen Sharing option
Has anyone tried MediaRover to keep your iTune libraries in sync?
There is an article on it here: http://www.maclife.com/awordfromoursponsors?destination=article%2Ffeature%2Fhow_sync_all_itunes_libraries_your_house
or
http://bit.ly/dCzNai
Re: MediaRover
I’ve just recently set this up, and find that it works like a charm. I’ve outgrown the 500 GB hard drive in my Time Capsule, and so have moved to a large external drive for Time Machine, and am now using the Time Capsule internal hard drive as my media server location for MediaRover. With both my Mac Mini and MacBook running MediaRover, if I add a song to one machine, it automatically shows up on the other. If I correct any metadata on one, like magic, it’s fixed on the other. It’s very cool!
Once again a fabulous show. Thanks for all the excellent information! In the last week or so I ran across an odd problem and thought I’d share it and the solution.
I set up a smartlist for podcasts after listening to one of your earlier shows. It was working perfectly until itunes and my ipod touch updated to the most recent versions. Suddenly my podcast smartlists would only play one at a time. Very frustrating!
I went searching around and found this is a problem if your podcasts are set to “skip on shuffle”. Since I had not had a problem before the software updates, it looks like the update must have changed a default setting for podcasts.
I went through each show and reset this under “get info –> options”. Now it works again.
I realize there aren’t many who create smartlists for podcasts, but if you do and it’s not working – check out this fix.
I use a Smart Playlist for Unplayed Audio Podcasts and a second one for Unplayed Video Podcasts (Media Kind: Podcast, Plays is 0, any of the following rules: Kind contains movie, Kind contains video). Sometimes I’ll see a video file that has movie sometimes it’s video, so you check both.
The advantage of this is that I can set my iPad to sync just the unplayed video podcasts (such as screencasts). Note that it won’t show up as an option in the playlist section of the Podcast screen for the iPad/iPhone unless there are videos in there.
With the unplayed audio/video podcasts playlists I don’t bother with syncing individual podcasts anymore.
Oh, I haven’t had a problem with my podcast smart playlists playing one at a time and I have all podcasts marked as “Skip on Shuffle”.
Listening to the comments section of the workflow podcast discussing these iTunes comments, there was a question about backup of the iTunes library. Rather than using Time Machine, I use Backblaze to do an on-line backup of my iTunes library. That way, I don’t have to worry about hard drive failure, especially since I have a lot of purchased music. If you use an external drive, you have to be careful because some of the services don’t support them.
If you’re importing many Audiobooks from CD into iTunes, Audiobook Builder is great. Used it several times myself. BUT, you needn’t buy that software if you already own Toast Titanium 10. It has an Audiobook importer too. I have not tried this yet myself (I just learned about it) but intend to try it for my next import. And it’s great for you if you already have Toast 10.
Has anyone here imported Audiobooks with Toast 10?
I learned so much from this episode. Especially as I prepare for the addition of a Macbook Pro to my iMac family. Thank you Katie & David! ~brian
It was mentioned that Ripit was used by David to rip dvds. I just use Handbrake and it works ok and it is free. Am I missing something
Gordon, Hi, I think David said he uses RipIt to rip the whole DVD, extra features and all, and then Handbrake to take out the extraneous stuff and just leave the movie. It’s a matter of choice. I just downloaded RipIt and you get 10 rips before having to pay, so that’s great. But 38, like all the other MPU episodes was a fantastic show.