Sep 30

Anatomy of the iTunes library

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I’ve been thinking of backing up my computer to do a fresh installation of OS X. I do this frequenty to ensure that the speed of my 6 year old PowerBook stays up to par with my current demand.

I’ve been noticing lately that the price of external hard drives have been dropping and I’ve been considering picking up one for back-up purposes beyond my biannual wipe-out. While doing this I want to keep my iTunes music intact. This includes playlists, ratings, album artwork, iPod settings etc.

This article will go over the structure and possibilities of the iTunes playlist. It should be mentioned that you should always create a back-up of any file that means enough to you before you “tweak” it.

First let’s find the file. The iTunes library is an xml file that normally sits on the local user documents on the hard drive. In a Mac running OSX head to /userX/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music Library.xml (the xml may be hidden) and on a PC with Windows its in \Documents and Settings\username\My Documents\My Music\iTunes\iTunes Music Library.xml

Now let’s get into the nitty gritty. Before opening the file make sure to open it in a plain text editor. DO NOT USE MS WORD. I recommend TextWrangler (OS X) and Edit Pad (Windows). Both offer a free and very usable version of the software.

The first few lines of the XML give a head’s up of what’s going on behind the scenes of your program:

      Major Version1 Minor Version1 Application Version7.0.2 Features1 Show Content Ratings Music Folderfile://localhost/Volumes/max/itunes/ Library Persistent IDD5A292963EC7CAEB Tracks
  • This shows what version of iTunes your running (in my case 7.0.2)
  • I am allowing the program to show my ratings.
  • I also have my library stored on a network hard drive called “max”. In “max” is a folder called “iTunes”. This is where all of my music is stored (more on that later).
  • The Library Perisistant ID is where my library resides (in computer terms).

Now onto the tracks:

10236  Track ID10236 NameKarma Police ArtistRadioHead AlbumOK Computer GenreRock KindMPEG audio file Size6278920 Total Time261616 Track Number6 Date Modified2006-05-10T07:55:14Z Date Added2006-05-25T23:24:24Z Bit Rate192 Sample Rate44100 Play Count4 Play Date3258238538 Play Date UTC2007-04-01T06:15:38Z Rating60 Persistent ID57318355222A2A50 Track TypeFile Locationfile://localhost/Volumes/max/itunes/RadioHead/OK%20Computer/06%20Karma%20Police.mp3 File Folder Count4 Library Folder Count1

Boy, that's mouthful. It's easy to take in though. Let's break it down:

  • The track ID is the unique number of the track in the library.
  • In this case it was the 10,236th track put in.
  • The name of the track is "Karma Police" from Radiohead's OK Computer CD.
  • The genre is Rock. Next comes the type of file it is. I have a majority of my files in MP3 format (or MPEG audio).
  • How big is the mp3?
  • That's what's next. The total time.
  • This is the 6th track on the CD.
  • I last modified the file on May 10, 2006 and added to the library on May 25, 2006.
  • The mp3 was encoded at 192k at a sample rate of 44.1k. With the price of hard drive space I don't go below 192k anymore. The higher the bit rate, the better the sound and the bigger the file.
  • I've played the file 4 times.
  • The last time I played this was on April 1, 2007.
  • The 60 rating is out of 100. In this case 3 out of 5 stars.
  • The persistent ID stays intact on every entry of the XML. Hence the name.
  • The file location is next.

If I have not explained anything, it means I do not have enough working knowledge of the entry.

Playlists anyone?

Namemellow Playlist ID37308 Playlist Persistent ID1A8DDF9F540360F5 All Items Playlist Items   Track ID2166   Track ID2166   Track ID2286

Once you get the hang of tracks, the playlists are cake.

  • The name of this playlist is called "mellow"
  • The unque Playlist ID and Persistant ID come next
  • It will show all items, then the
  • Playlist items. (this simply calls back to the Track ID in the library. The items repeat until the playlist ends.

Now why I am writing this? Well once you know how something works the more likely you are less afraid of it and can make it work for you. Why should you have to re-rip or reimport all of you songs from that remote drive and loose you ratings, playlists, and other related material?

  1. All you have to do it install iTunes on your new hard drive and make a back-up of the new XML file.
  2. Then, with the program closed, paste in the old XML file with your data on it.
  3. Then open up the file in a plain text editor and do a find and replace to the location of your files (let's say on that network drive).
  4. Relaunch iTunes and your files are right there with no crazy !s next to them.

I hope this has proved helpful to anyone wanting to know more about what goes on behind the scene of iTunes.

written by tom

Sep 29

Laptop Journal: Toshiba Satellite A135-S4656

tech Comments Off

I’ve had this laptop for about 3 weeks and here’s what I’ve run into so far…

When I was in the market for a Windows-based PC I figured I’d go with a laptop. Prices have been dropping and performance didn’t seem to be too much of an issue for what I was planning on doing with it. The Toshiba Satellite A135-S4656 went on sale a Best Buy for $349 and jumped on it.

With an 80GB hard drive, 520 Celron, and 512 MB of ram I thought this would be good enough for some programming I was planning on doing along with the low resource e-mail and www surfing.

Let me tell you about after I brought it home:

Microsoft Vista: Vista seemed to be a cool OS at first. They’ve built in some added “security” to the OS. After a while that security got annoying, but I was able to turn it off. The OS was fine, as long as you don’t want to run anything else on it.

I tried running the iTunes installation 4 times to no avail. A confirmation to run the install came and went with no further.

I do some podcasting for Addpile.com and use a Blue Snowball USB mic. I would plug the mic in, Vista would recognize it but there would be no indication that the OS recognized the mic.

With these key and other frustrations I decided to try Ubuntu Linux on the laptop.  I ran a dual boot setup and was unable to load the proper drivers in Ubuntu for sound.  So Ubuntu was not in the cards for me.  Enter Windows XP.

I formatted the drive to see if I could run XP.  I know that XP will install iTunes and recognize my microphone.  It’s too bad that Toshiba made this laptop just for Vista.  Toshiba do not offer any drivers for this laptop to run Windows XP.  Another I should have looked at before buying this laptop.

Next came the memory.  The 512 MB of RAM was not able to run Vista.  There were countless moments that system choked upon program start-ups and other functions (save, export, etc).  I wanted to upgrade to the maximum 2 GB to run Vista smoother.   Again I chose Best Buy because they had a good deal.  Again, I struck out.  Both sticks of RAM I bought did not work.  The package I bought had “Toshiba” as a brand of laptop it would work with and the RAM speed would work.  A call to Toshiba tech support about the RAM didn’t help.  They wanted me to use their e-commerce site to buy the parts.

Next was the big one (and the one I’m currently in).  After my failed XP install I wanted to restore everything back to the factory setting.  The factory default using the Toshiba Recovery Wizard is very slow. It took the better part of 4 hours to set everything back to normal on the hard drive.  That did not include the Vista install!

After 4 hours of formatting and (I thought) partitioning the hard drive the computer rebooted.  Then I got a “hard disk error: bad partition”.  I tried to run the TRW again and that did not help.  I again called Tech Support.  They advised me to go to my local UPS Store (aka Mailboxes Etc) to drop the laptop off to get shipped to Texas for repair.  They told me it would take 5-7 business days to repair the hard drive. They would pay for shipping.
I would gather that I had a hardware issue with the drive, not a partition problem.  I’ll keep everyone posted on what I find.

written by tom

Sep 21

Comcast speaks out on “heavy users”

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Don’t worry, your crazy Aunt Tillie won’t get pulled off of the internet, unless she’s a fraction of a percent of Comcast users.

In the past few days there has been a flurry of discussion online about the policy of bandwidth caps by cable/internet provider Comcast. The reports have brought up a few things, but mostly it has to do with the 90GB cap per month some users were reaching that caused a stir.

The terms of the policy of use with Comcast is vague, which is no surprise.  The surprise came when they started enforcing it, which then scared some heavy users of the service.

A spokesman for Comcast wanted to put some rumors to rest.  Charlie Douglas, Comcast’s director of corporate communications for online and voice services, told ArsTechnica, “More than 99.99% of our customers use the residential high-speed Internet service as intended, which includes downloading and sharing video, photos and other rich-media,”  He went on to say, “[Our] policy is to proactively contact the customer via phone to work with them and address the issue.”

Comcast, being a company looking at the bottom line has done something wise: Rather than kill the contract right away with a user they ask that they bump up their service to reflect the amount of bandwidth they are using.  The “commercial grade” package includes more bandwidth among other nice little products you don’t have as a customer.  The package ranges from $95 to $160.

written by tom

Sep 19

Google pays $1 billion a year in “click fruad”

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Things must be going pretty good at Google.  It seems that the web giant pays $1 billion a year in “click fraud” or false clicks on it’s ad services.

Google’s AdWords programs were a relief to the banner ads of a few years ago.  The service paired text based ads with the content of the page being visited.  When a visitor clicks on an ad the web host gets paid.  This works great for Google, webmasters, and surfers.  Not so fast.

Google says less than 10% of the ads showed on AdWords are invalid.  That adds up to about $100 million a year in revenue the company can not make.  If the link does not work, Google doesn’t charge the advertiser so Google “eats” those invalid click-throughs.

Google settled a lawsuit last July (2006) for $90 million and about $60 million in credits to its advertisers in credits for click-fraud. Although spokespeople at Google say they are taking click-fraud “very seriously” they aren’t hurting with all that lost revenue.
Google has the power, money, and technology to take care of these click-frauds, but doesn’t seem to be doing a whole lot about it.

written by tom

Sep 17

Comcast clarifies it’s ‘excessive use’ policy

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There have been stories floating around online for a few weeks about how Comcast has shut subscribers internet service down due to excessive use.  To date there is no policy written down to clarify what that means.

The contract, which can always change, that Comcast has with its users only spells out “excessive use” as a reason to shut off service.

Now a spokesman for Comcast has clarified that “excessive usage”means.  Charlie Douglas explained that the threshold of “excessive usage” would have to be a subscriber downloading the equivalent of 30,000 songs, 250,000 pictures, or 13 million emails a month before service gets shut down.

Although not clarifing the amount of bandwidth this does make things seem promising to users of the service, who before had no idea if they were pushing themselves out of a contract.

written by tom