I’m turning into a big fan of Smart Playlists in iTunes 7.
Here is my current iTunes situation:
- 2500+ songs
- Wide range of genres
- Lots of podcasts
- Lots of podcasts improperly labeled as music after initial import of MP3s.
This makes Random Shuffle basically worthless if I’m beyond easy access to my computer or iPod to skip over tunes or podcasts that don’t meet my tastes for a random shuffle.
Before, I could have unchecked items from the 2500+ I didn’t want in my random shuffle, but that’s way too much of a pain. But now I can achieve the same results in under a minute by creating a new Smart Playlist:
This Smart Playlist I whipped together cleans things up by:
- Removing files labeled as podcasts
- Skipping songs I’ve had a habit of skipping
- Limits plays to files with 128kbps Bit Rates (filters podcasts not properly labeled as podcasts)
- Removed Country (there’s a time and a place for Country, but not every day for me)
- It also eliminates unchecked songs, picks 100 matching songs at random for this playlist in my iPod, and updates on the fly in iTunes
Smart Playlists provide an almost limitless number of criteria for building custom playlists. Life is good.
How have Smart Playlists changed your listening habits?
iTunes 7 is causing a friend’s PC to grind to a halt. As one song comes to an end and the next begins, iTunes is chewing up enough resources to cause songs to stutter. We tried disabling Crossfade Playback to see if that would help. It did. Now the resource gobbling period is much shorter.
The computer is a Toshiba laptop with 512MB RAM and a 2.4 Ghz processor. The iTunes version is 7.0.1.8
Is there something else my friend can do to keep iTunes 7 from taking over his system? Or is this a good excuse for him to upgrade his laptop?
iTunes 7 is causing a friend’s PC to grind to a halt. As one song comes to an end and the next begins, iTunes is chewing up enough resources to cause songs to stutter. We tried disabling Crossfade Playback to see if that would help. It did. Now the resource gobbling period is much shorter.
The computer is a Toshiba laptop with 512MB RAM and a 2.4 Ghz processor. The iTunes version is 7.0.1.8
Is there something else my friend can do to keep iTunes 7 from taking over his system? Or is this a good excuse for him to upgrade his laptop?
iTunes 7 is causing a friend’s PC to grind to a halt. As one song comes to an end and the next begins, iTunes is chewing up enough resources to cause songs to stutter. We tried disabling Crossfade Playback to see if that would help. It did. Now the resource gobbling period is much shorter.
The computer is a Toshiba laptop with 512MB RAM and a 2.4 Ghz processor. The iTunes version is 7.0.1.8
Is there something else my friend can do to keep iTunes 7 from taking over his system? Or is this a good excuse for him to upgrade his laptop?
Have you ever had problems downloading songs on iTunes? Things were not working well for me on Saturday night while I scrambled to pick up some Bob Dylan for a party. The Essential Bob Dylan has 34 tracks. Only 3 downloaded successfully on the first attempt (Mr. Tambourine Man made it):
The annoying part was the recurring error message (shown above) I received and had to acknowledge 31 times. Once through the first time, I had to click Pause then Refresh to give them another try. Then again . . . and again. More failed downloads, more clicking on error messages. I believe it took eight passes to bring down the two-disc set.
This is the first time I’ve had this problem. Is it a common issue? Ben seems to believe it is not and had no problem downloading the 477 tracks in The Complete U2. What has been your experience?
The thing I like most about traditional web search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN is that they ask very little of me as a content creator. All I have to do is make my web site easy for to crawl by their search engine spiders. The beauty of this is that it’s a fairly easy thing to do, and I don’t have to change a thing if additional search engines are launched. New search engines can index my site’s content and display results from my site without any additional work on my part.
Compare that to video search sites like YouTube, Google Video, Veoh, iFilm, etc. where each service expects me to upload my content to their servers. They expect me to upload content I’ve created to their servers so they can serve ads around it, use it to build online communities, and basically profit from my work. Doesn’t that seem strange?
Online video services should stop wasting their most valuable asset: their contributor’s time. Why should I spend hours logging in to dozens of online video sites, uploading the same video over and over again, then adding the same titles, descriptions and tags at each site? The redundancy involved is insane.
Of course, I’m not totally opposed to sharing my content on video sites since they have something I like: viewers. The problem I have is with how inefficient it is to contribute content to online video services today. If online video services are really interested in great content from busy people, they need to figure out a way to streamline the publishing process.
Here’s what I want from online video services interested in my content:
2. Video services should obey robots.txt protocols, giving content creators the ability to opt-out of content syndication with all or selected video services.
3. Video services that link to the original source rather than host content (example: iTunes podcasts) should look first for torrent versions of a file so creators of great content don’t become victims of their own success with skyrocketing bandwidth charges.
Until something like that exists, there is a great opportunity for a video uploading services that lets me upload content once then pushes it to all online video services. Additionally, if it provided a dashboard reporting views, downloads, favorites, comments, etc. on each video services, I’d be very very happy.
What do you think online video services could be doing better from a content creator’s perspective?
This is a list of web sites and products mentioned during Roald Marth’s presentation at Dynatek’s 14th Annual User Conference at VisTaTech Center in Livonia, MI:
- Dynatek - Thank you to Dynatek for inviting Ro to speak.
- Apple - iTunes - The most popular free audio syndication site today.
- Skype - Talk for free to anyone in the USA & Canada. Free worldwide Skype to Skype calls.
- MySpace - The extremely popular social networking site. Have you joined yet?
- Palm - Ro recommends the Treo 700p.
- WhereToLive.com - Roald’s Day Job
- Technology Evangelist - The blog. Subscribe to keep up to date on technology.
- Bloglines - Our preferred feed reader. Create a Bloglines account, then subscribe to Technology Evangelist here.
- Google - Our preferred search engine.
- Sony - Ro recommends the SZ series laptops.
- YouTube - The popular online video site.
- Zillow - Check your home’s value here.
- Real Estate ABC - Or here.
- Kodak 570 - Ro’s favorite digital camera.
- Flickr - Popular photo sharing site.
- Firefox - A great alternative to Internet Explorer.
The latest HDTV podcast from the HT Guys (#76) mentions Technology Evangelist’s syndicated HD videos content available through iTunes. Click here for more information on how this is done or click here for all of our content syndication options.
Congratulations to the HT Guys on their upcoming 1-year podcasting anniversary.
Yesterday I posted on Democracy player, and right now it’s Technology Evangelist’s preferred player for techies. As we stated, it’s a wee bit buggy and not for everyone yet, so how can you watch our HDTV content if you’re not an uber-geek?
Recently we updated our feeds page with all of our video options. At the bottom you’ll see a button for the iTunes Music Store. If you have the latest version of iTunes installed, simply click on that button and it will bring you straight to our HDTV content. Hey, I’ll make it simple and give you the button below:
There are a couple of nifty little known secrets in there. The first secret is that content creators such as ourselves can create these buttons bringing viewers directly to the appropriate place in iTunes. This is great as it allows the viewer to jump directly to the place that they are interested in rather than having to scour iTunes for what the want. We struggled a bit since these links are designed to go directly to a feed, not to a list of different options such as 480p, 720p, etc. After hacking around a bit I was able to get iTunes to open a list of just our content. Here’s how you can create a link of all your feeds for your site:
1 – Open iTunes and go to the Music Store
2 – Search for your Podcast in the Music Store
3 – Right-click (pc) or ctrl-click (mac) on the ’see all’ link under the authors tab. Select the ‘Copy iTunes Music Store URL’
4 – You’ll end up with a link that looks like this:
http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZSearch.woa/wa/com.apple.jingle.search.DirectAction/
search?submit=edit&term=technology+evangelist&attribute=author&media=podcast
5 - We need to edit out of the link the part that says &attribute=author, as so the Music Store returns the proper result. The end link for us looks like this: http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZSearch.woa/wa/com.apple.jingle.search.DirectAction/
search?submit=edit&term=technology+evangelist&media=podcast
6 – We then created an image and hyperlinked to the above URL, which brings users to a page that looks like this:
The second secret is that iTunes does not just play 320×240 iPod videos, it can play anything QuickTime understands, including our 1080p content. That’s right, you can subscribe to our 480p, 720p or 1080p videos directly in the iTunes Music store. While most content owners are creating content in full-res SD and some are even doing HD, most I have found in iTunes only offer a itty-bitty 320×240 video. There’s really no need for that. With our feed options you can choose from MP3, AAC, Cell Phone video, PSP, Video iPod, 480p, 720p or 1080p. Since Technology Evangelist supports ‘Open Content’ meaning that we use universal CODECs that should play on any device that supports standards, you should be able to watch our videos just about anywhere.
Give it a shot. Click on the iTunes Music store button and watch how you’re taken directly to our content page. While you’re there, may want to subscribe to a feed or two… It’s always cool to be walking around with a Treo 650 watching the latest edition of ‘The Innovators’.
As I complete the editing of our next episode of "The Innovators" I thought it would be fun to mention some of the nifty little things that we do inside of each video as it’s posted. Since the next video will have a lot of URLs in it, I think you’ll find these tips handy. Please note that the following applies to our "Watch Now" clip only and not to the clips you would download via iTunes or any other RSS feed we may have.
Progressive Start
Our Watch Now clip is authored in such a way that it should start playing immediately if you have a 1Mbps or greater connection to our server. This means no buffering time, no waiting, nothing. If you only have a 56k connection or slower broadband connection to the net, that’s OK, you’ll just have to wait a bit longer. Unlike traditional streaming media, you’ll still be able to watch in full quality no matter what your connection speed.
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Chapter Marks
In the lower right hand corner of the player you’ll see a nifty drop down with a title in it. This drop down lists the chapters that are available for playback. If you have not yet downloaded a chapter yet, it will not show up in this list, only items you’re able to view will be in here. This is nice if you want to jump to a specific point in the video.
URL banners
You may have noticed that we place the URL of different web sites in the video feed. Not only are they handy to reference, but they are clickable too. For reasons beyond my comprehension, Apple decided to not change your cursor to a pointing hand when you’re hovering over a link, so the only way to know that you can click on it is if I tell you. Well, any time you see a black bar with a URL in it, you can click on it (and sometimes you can click on the name banners too).
Full Screen
I’ll be posting an experimental full-screen mode for users that don’t have QuickTime Pro. Once again Apple baffles the mind and decided to not allow full-screen playback unless the viewer purchases QuickTime Pro, or if the author puts special tags in their media to force the player full screen. Needless to say, we’ll have the special tags. I’ll be doing this with the 480p content, so make sure your box is able to play 480p h.264 video, otherwise it may stutter a bit.
Syndication
You can view any of our HD feeds right inside of your favorite video syndication software, such as Apple iTunes. Simply browse for our feeds directly in iTunes, or subscribe to our feed manually from this page. We offer feeds in 480p, 720p, 1080p, Video iPod, Sony PSP, MP3 and AAC formats. We’ll even be posting torrent feeds soon giving you access to the all new Democracy Player.
I’m about done editing our next episode, but as I have mentioned before it takes a very long time to compress the content. As soon as I have a majority of the video ready, I’ll post her online to help curb your HD addiction. Hope everyone enjoys these nifty tips!
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