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	<title>Tom Gidden &#187; ipod</title>
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		<title>iTunes Library Regeneration</title>
		<link>http://gidden.net/tom/2007/05/10/itunes-library-regeneration/</link>
		<comments>http://gidden.net/tom/2007/05/10/itunes-library-regeneration/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 10 May 2007 12:48:43 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Tom Gidden</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Techie]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[bug]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[ipod]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[itunes]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[podcasts]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[rant]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://gidden.net/tom/2007/05/10/itunes-library-regeneration/</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The final major thing that "I Don't Like About iTunes and iPod" has annoyed me from Day One:  the monolithic bloaty binary library, and the accompanying tidy-but-inefficient XML backup.  For a small library, it's no problem, but mine has major issues.  Heck, and I don't even consider my ~40GB library to be particularly big!

Over the past few months, I've noticed that iTunes has been getting slower and slower.  It's clear that iTunes doesn't scale particularly well.  For anything under, say, 5000 tracks, it starts up quickly.  If you go much above that, it gets sluggish on startup.  Searches start getting slower too.  This doesn't happen linearly, either.
The binary library file was also significantly larger than the XML library file.  As a rule, I've noticed that the XML tends to be a little bit smaller, but my binary file was almost twice the size of the XML.  In this case, I felt it was worth regenerating the library.
Okay, the usual procedure for this (rather drastic) action is to shut down iTunes, and purposefully corrupt the binary library file.  iTunes will then rebuild the binary from the XML "backup" when it next starts.  If you just delete the file, it'll assume you don't have a library and will wipe the XML too.  So, I tend to move the old binary into a backup directory and then create a new dummy file.
In the past, this has tended to work well.  Occasionally there are a few quirks:  in an old version of iTunes, I seem to remember the play counts got trashed.
This time, there was a problem.  My Podcasts section was empty!  The files were still there, but they didn't appear on the list.  I then noticed that there was a new static playlist called "Podcasts" with all my old podcast files, but as as normal audio files rather than categorised podcasts.  These items didn't appear anywhere in the Library section: just the playlists.  So, it's not seemingly possible to delete them from iTunes.
I tried adding the Podcasts again from the iTunes Store, foolishly hoping it would notice the existing files.  Unfortunately, it just downloads fresh copies instead, naming them with a " 1" suffix.
So, I deleted the files manually, and then used the excellent Super Remove Dead Tracks from Doug Adams's site.
This problem highlights the design bloat I spoke about in my previous post.  Back before podcasts, audiobooks, video and all the other stuff appeared in iTunes, everything was neatly kept in the Music Library, and it all worked.  It was possible for the filesystem and iTunes to get out-of-sync with both missing and excess files in the iTunes Music folder, but on the whole, it worked well.
Nowadays, the addition of these new media types to the increasingly-inaccurately-named iTunes has complicated everything.  There's no central folder of everything and stuff can seemingly fall through the cracks.  If a Podcast isn't in the Podcasts list, it won't appear anywhere.
I think Apple should build a new piece of software, called iMedia or something like that, for managing everything currently handled by iPod, iTunes, iPhoto, iPhone, Apple TV and Front Row.
They should also consider using something intrinsic to the OS -- such as Spotlight -- to manage the libraries themselves, rather than relying on easily-breakable and easy-to-desynchronise monolithic files.  At the very least, they should rework it using Core Data, and if I had my way, also add "proper" RDBMS support to Core Data so I can use MySQL as my music library index!
In the process, they should reconceptualise the whole thing.  How should a digital hub operate?  It should work well with multiple libraries at the same time, with network nodes as data suppliers, so families and housemates can share media.  It should allow offline media integration, such as Delicious Library, so I can organise and manage my books and DVDs too.  Ideally, I'd want it to be able to control DVD jukeboxes, so I could build the mother of all home entertainment media servers around a single Mac Mini and a bunch of external jukeboxes, sources and filestores.  It should be open enough to allow companies like Elgato to fully integrate stuff like EyeTV.
That's the kind of innovative thinking we've come to expect from Apple.  Instead, we've got bloated, inflexible creeping featurism of the kind we've come to expect from Microsoft.
Oh, one more thing.  I'm on iTunes 7.1.1 on OS X, and it's crashing more than it did before.  I've had it bomb out a few times while converting videos for iPod.  Not good.
In conclusion, I must say that I still prefer iTunes and iPod to the alternatives... by a long way.  They're just not as good as they could, or should, be.]]></description>
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		<slash:comments>-2</slash:comments>
	
		<series:name><![CDATA[iTunes and iPod rant]]></series:name>
	</item>
		<item>
		<title>iPod Video Conversion in iTunes</title>
		<link>http://gidden.net/tom/2007/05/10/ipod-video-conversion/</link>
		<comments>http://gidden.net/tom/2007/05/10/ipod-video-conversion/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 10 May 2007 12:48:14 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Tom Gidden</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Techie]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[bug]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[ipod]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[itunes]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[rant]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[unicode]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[video]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://gidden.net/tom/2007/05/10/ipod-video-conversion/</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The kludginess of video conversion for iPod in iTunes is another one of the things "I Don't Like About iTunes and iPod".  I don't like the conversion process, and I particularly don't like the bug I think I've found.

Even before I got an iPod Video, I managed to accumulate a few videos in my iTunes collection.  Mostly music videos, in various formats, but a few other things too.  I've got a few from the iTunes Store, which transfer to the iPod just fine.  However, most are different formats and need re-encoding.
Apple have not made this as easy as they could.

"Movies" and "TV Shows" have their own sections in iTunes, but music videos appear in the music list.  This is inconsistent with the iPod, on which music videos get their own section in the "Videos" top-level menu.
As a result, it's difficult to focus just on the music videos for conversion.  You can use a Smart Playlist, but you don't get full control of the items in a playlist:  for example, you can't delete items without going to the main library list.  This is important later, after conversion.
You can't change the type of a video by bulk editing.  On import, my non-iTunes-purchased videos came up as "Movies" rather than "Music Videos".  To change this (and therefore decide where they appear on the iPod), you have to "Show Info", select "Video" and then change the "Video Kind" dropdown.  This function does not appear in the "Multiple Item Information" window usually used to edit groups of items.  The keyboard shortcuts for this procedure are also non-optimal, and this all translates to a lot of mouse work.
After a track is converted using "Convert Selection for iPod", it is not marked in any way.  The original is not unticked, tagged or labelled.  Instead, you have to look at the kind, such as "QuickTime movie file" or "MPEG-4 video file", and it's possible those are the same.  Otherwise, it's up to the Date Added column.
As the original files aren't disabled, they still trigger the warning dialogue on the next sync, saying that they're incompatible with the iPod.  The originals in my opinion should be unchecked so they don't get synced.  I'd ideally export the files out and then remove them altogether.  However, as there isn't an easy way to select those originals avoiding the converted versions, it's a chore.

Okay, all of those are design flaws.  Fairly annoying ones, too.  I've been of the opinion for a while that both iTunes and iPhoto were great packages in their day, but are in dire need of redesigns and rewrites.  They've lost their simplicity and elegance.  They're bloated.
The next thing, however, is a bug, demonstrated by this screenshot.  A number of the converted videos appear with blank names and artists on the iPod.  They play fine, but they're just not there.
In addition, it's also made the band's Music Videos entry appear six times:  three with the correct name, and three with a blank.  All six menus contain the same items, as above.
Upon investigation, all of these files are named fairly oddly.  They appear fine in the Show Info "Info" panel, but on the "Summary", there's a quirk:  the names are spaced out, and the file path has alternating underscores.  Checking the file paths and the iTunes Library XML file gives similar results:
I've seen this kind of thing before.  It looks like it's almost definitely a Unicode interpretation error.  As with most other modern string-handling APIs, NSStrings inside OS X (Cocoa) are stored with (at least?) two bytes per character, rather than the old-style one byte per character.  It's easy to make the mistake of failing to convert this back and assume one byte per character.
In the example above, the artist name -- R&#246;yksopp -- is clearly not plain ASCII, so I wouldn't be surprised if the programmers of iTunes's conversion interface failed to test for this problem.  However, I did also encounter the problem with some videos with plain English names and artists, too: my copy of Leonard Nimoy's "The Ballad Of Bilbo Baggins" also came up blank.
To fix this problem, I just went into each item's "Show Info" in turn and retyped the names.  Fine for the few items I imported, but not if I'd had any more.
I think Apple's point with all of this is that you should buy all your videos from them.  Mine mostly came from "enhanced limited edition" CDs instead.
Incidentally, in the shots above, you might notice two different versions of the incredible "Remind Me" video by R&#246;yksopp.  I've discovered that there are (at least) two subtley-different versions of this video, and the one on the iTunes store isn't quite as good.  Apart from the gratuitous cartoon boobie shot, the non-iTunes version has a couple of little hidden jokes in the background, and a few more scenes.]]></description>
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		<slash:comments>-3</slash:comments>
	
		<series:name><![CDATA[iTunes and iPod rant]]></series:name>
	</item>
		<item>
		<title>iPod Photo Bloat</title>
		<link>http://gidden.net/tom/2007/05/10/ipod-photo-bloat/</link>
		<comments>http://gidden.net/tom/2007/05/10/ipod-photo-bloat/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 10 May 2007 12:47:57 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Tom Gidden</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Techie]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[bloat]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[iphoto]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[ipod]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[itunes]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[rant]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://gidden.net/tom/2007/05/10/ipod-photo-bloat/</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[In the process of replacing my iPod, I've noticed a couple of things "I Don't Like About iTunes and iPod".  After my previous rant about iPod reliability, I'm now onto the sloppy programming behind iPod's photo functions.

So, I started transferring all my media to the new unit.  The music went across fine.  Videos, not so much, but more on that later.  Photos, however, were taking hours to transfer.  iTunes was "optimising" the photos.  I remember this taking a while back when I got the previous iPod, but I'd forgotten how slow it was.
I've got about 19GB of photos, all neatly keyworded in iPhoto.  Since I got my iPod Photo two-and-a-bit years ago, I've kept a copy of my collection on my iPod: usually with "Include full resolution photos" ticked.
So, what's it doing?
It's decompressing the photos into YUV format at iPod screen resolution.
Each photo, regardless of the original file size is "thumbnailed" to a new file of about 851K on the new iPod Video, and marginally less on the iPod Photo and the Nano.  This is allegedly to offload some of the processing effort from the iPod to the host computer, so the iPod doesn't burn through batteries trying to do the instant photo scrolling thing.
Problems with this approach:

It takes a long time to convert all my photos.  I've got an iBook G4 1GHz, not an eight-core Big Mac.  Since the screen size is different on the new iPod, the whole process has to be done again.  I'm also not convinced it's thumbnailing particularly efficiently.  I bet ImageMagick would be faster.
It uses up a lot of space on the iPod.  Okay, I'm not likely to use up the 80GB any time soon, especially since my iBook doesn't have the disk space to store all that anyway.
It uses up a lot of space on the host machine: in my case, 9GB extra!  That's almost 10% of my laptop's HDD.
iTunes/iPhoto isn't well-behaved enough to clean up after itself.  The thumbnails have a nasty habit of sticking around.  If a photo is deleted, there's no guarantee the thumbnail will be deleted.  If you change iPod model (like I did), the old, useless, wrong-sized thumbnail will stay there.  If, after noticing this bloat, you disable some or all Photo syncing, the cache still sits there.  Considering how long the process can take, I understand this design decision, but I don't necessarily agree with it.
It takes ages just to transfer these thumbnails compared to transferring the (smaller!) originals.  Now that they've canned FireWire over the slower, less reliable USB2.0, iPod syncing is sluggish.  Piping this crapload of excess data around really doesn't help.

The thing is, I really don't think any of this is necessary!
Now that the iPod Video is better specced, why can't it do its own thumbnailing, and cache them locally?
And at the very least, why do they have to be possibly the least efficient file format?  JPEGs aren't hard to decode, and while I could understand the need for keeping lower resolution thumbs on the iPod, I can't see why JPEGs wouldn't do.  While admittedly the iPod uses hardware to decode video, it still manages to do some reasonably sweet 3D graphics in the new iPod Games, and I don't think they shoehorned a Radeon into the iPod, so the thing's capable of doing maths, to say the least.
As far as the hard drive is concerned, the standard reply is to get a bigger drive.  I've already got a 100GB drive in my iBook, and I still cling to the concept of portability, so an external drive is out.  If there was a good reason for this, I'd think about being more selective, but it's just waste and sloppy programming on the part of Apple.
It seems probable that Apple crammed in this functionality with the underpowered iPod Photo, and then failed to update the codebase.  I accept that the Nano might not have the oomph to do the work and would need the offloaded conversion, but then again, the Nano's not going to store a huge cache anyway!  When it comes to the larger, more powerful iPods, it should act differently.
I'm sure Apple aren't losing any sleep over this problem:  they're too busy working on the OS X-based iPhone and the inevitable touchy-feely non-phone-iPhone iPod that will accompany it.  That thing will presumably be able to do the thumbnails itself.
It still doesn't excuse the sloppy coding that's currently there.]]></description>
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		<slash:comments>-6</slash:comments>
	
		<series:name><![CDATA[iTunes and iPod rant]]></series:name>
	</item>
		<item>
		<title>iPod Reliability</title>
		<link>http://gidden.net/tom/2007/05/10/ipod-reliability/</link>
		<comments>http://gidden.net/tom/2007/05/10/ipod-reliability/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 10 May 2007 12:47:48 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Tom Gidden</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Techie]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[80gb]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[hardware-failure]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[ipod]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[ipod-video]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[itunes]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[rant]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://gidden.net/tom/2007/05/10/ipod-reliability/</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Last week, I got a new iPod Video 80GB from eBay, and in the process of transferring my media a number of things caught my attention.  Some of these are known about already, but they're things "I Don't Like About iTunes and iPod".  I'm covering these in a few separate posts, as I've got quite a bit to say on the subject.

Firstly, the failure of the old iPod.  Okay, this bit's the average iPod rant... nothing new here.
I've bought three iPods for myself now: a 20GB G3, a 60GB Photo, and this new 80GB Video.  However, I've owned more like six, thanks to AppleCare warranty replacements.  Although I'm known for having a "negative aura" when it comes to hardware (and am seen by some of my peers as the ultimate hardware tester), I've been careful with the iPods.  All have had an approved skin or case (usually an silicone iSkin), and have been treated well.  I haven't gone hiking, underwater or into space with them, or even regular commuting.  No significant drops either.  Even so, they keep failing.  I still haven't experienced the infamous battery problem, as none of my iPods have lasted long enough.
Last time, I took my 11-and-a-half month old iPod Photo 60GB on holiday with me to the Caribbean.  It started the "click of death" about one day into the trip.  I checked the warranty and I had only about a week left:  it would expire before I got back to civilisation.  So, I called my friend Henry to ask him to call AppleCare and ask them to let me buy the one-year extension when I got back.  They did.
Promptly, the iPod started working again.  I have no idea how Apple managed to reset the warranty trip remotely.  I'm guessing they have a satellite to do this.
Anyway, it worked fine all year.  There were no signs of failure, so I couldn't really get it fixed.  Last month, the extended warranty ran out again, and shortly afterwards, the click of death started again.  Within a day, it wasn't reliable enough to sync.
So, off to eBay I go.  To justify the cost of a new iPod, I sold my seldom-used PSP and games, plus the old iPod (clearly marked as faulty) and accessories which don't fit the new iPod anyway.]]></description>
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		<slash:comments>-5</slash:comments>
	
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