16 posts tagged “itunes”

I've really been enjoying the new Airport Extreme network I've set up here at 123. In particular, I was pleased to discover that you can now stream music to multiple Airport Expresses, enabling me to flood the house with music for those times when I'm going back and forth between the upstairs and downstairs.

Airtunes-multiple-speakers

This is 80s music Friday. The entire playlist is 671 songs long. That's all of the 80s music on my work computer that I haven't listened to in the past 30 days.

6aers: a version of this playlist (sans ITMS purchased tracks) has been added to my shared playlists.

80s-music-friday

Next four songs in Party Shuffle:

Jacksonville    5:24    Sufjan Stevens    Come On Feel The Illinoise!    Indie Rock
Sole Survivor    3:41    Asia    The Very Best of Asia - Heat of the Moment 1982-1990    Classic Rock
She Bop    3:51    Cyndi Lauper    She's So Unusual    Alternative
Letter To Bowie Knife    3:06    Calexico    Garden Ruin    Indie Rock

What is one of your addictions?
Submitted by Paperheart.

Making playlists in iTunes. As these screen captures attest, I can do it as a full-time job.

I never got tired of it. No matter how much time I spend on them, I always feel I can do better–that I still haven't found the ultimate method to create the ideal listening experience. Recently I've been using the "last played" field a lot in creating smart playlists, trying to solve the age-old problem that when listening to music in shuffle mode, some songs get played too much while others don't get enough.

Smart-playlist

To promote the Clerks II DVD release, Apple asked Kevin Smith to do a celebrity playlist. They got more than they bargained for, as he produced a list that exceeded the capacity of Apple's software to handle. To his credit, he declined to edit it down and put it up on his own blog, unexpurgated.

Apple_showtime-1

Apple just sent out invitations to their media event on September 12th. Looks like rumors of the "iTunes Music Store" and video streaming device are accurate, judging by the  logo Apple used on the invite.

Unless it's all just a big red herring, and the event is actually about the iPhone. Which would be epic.

The five-year anniversary of the iPod is fast approaching (Oct. 23rd) and it seems that new models are imminent. In recent days the Mac rumor community has reached consensus that September 12th will bring us the following:

• 2nd generation iPod Nanos, with increased capacities and possibly more colors.
  
• Upgraded 5g iPods w/videos (I'm hoping for bigger capacities, like 80 or 100gb)
• Movie sales through the ITMS (14.99 for new, 9.99 for older titles)
  
• 23" iMac
  

Hopefully a new version of iTunes, too, with more power-user playlist management features  Like the ability to use sql to write really complex smart playlists (dream on, sigh.)

Update: AppleInsider is predicting that the "one more thing" surprise at the 9/12 event will be a video streaming device, an Airport Express for video. If so, sweet-I'd buy one of those in a second, as long as it worked with my current hardware-I wouldn't want to have to buy a new Mac Mini just to use it.

Apple's World Wide Developer's Conference begins tomorrow with Steve Job's keynote. MacRumors has a good overview of what's expected:

Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) 2006 Rumor Roundup

As always before an Apple event, the Internet is rife with speculation, Apple's future product plans serving as a Rorschach blob (1) for people to project on their own desires and dreams for the future of personal tech.

My submissions to the Dead Wrong In Public game:

No ipods (they always get their own special event)
No iPhone (would probably gets it own event, of a shared event with ipod)
New intel-based X-serves
New intel-based Mac Pros
New content development tools for extending the iTunes/ITMS ecosystem (basically preparing the world for a completely Apple-based end-to-end content creation and distribution system) I anticipate in the next 12-18 months Apple will be opening up the "long tail" of media distribution, allowing people to make and sell music and movies using the ITMS, as a means of telling Hollywood that if they don't plan nice with putting movies on the ITMS, then Apple will simply sidestep them entirely.

As for Leopard, I would realy like to see improvements to the Finder and Spotlight. Spotlight has so much potential, but as currently implemented I find it annoying and often wish for the days when you could just type command-F and search file names very quickly. I also think networking could be improved a lot-it's still much more trouble than it needs to be to transfer files between machines, not to mention keeping two machines in synch. I agree with the latest date speculations which is that Leopard will be officially announced (what's happening at WWDC is only a "preview') at Macworld 2007 and shipped a month or two after that.

Steve Jobs's keynote starts at 10am tomorrow, and will be covered like by MacRumors.com at http://www.macrumorslive.com.

1 - After reading the wikipedia entry, it seems that, like a lot of people, I refer to Rorschach tests incorrectly. I'm using it in the sense of "people look at it and see what they want to see."

Today Microsoft announced that they are indeed going to produce a media player/iTunes killer, which they have xristened "Zune." Look forward to an onslaught of stupid puns, like, say, the title of my post. The article that announced the new product (? brand? products?) is hidden behind the Billboard paywall, but here's a quote from the TechCrunch post that quotes Billboard:

In an interview with Billboard, Chris Stephenson, Microsoft’s new GM of marketing for MSN Entertainment Business, said Zune will be an umbrella brand for what he says is “a family of hardware and software products” targeting various digital entertainment services.

Not terribly informative.

A Microsoft employee who is working on the project has started a blog on it called the Zune Insider Blog. And what blog serivce is he using? Typepad. Which, given Microsoft's propensity for always eating their own dogfood, pretty impressive. Here's his description of Zune:

It’s Microsoft’s new, holistic approach to music and entertainment. And yes, this year, we’ll be releasing a device as part of the project. Under the Zune brand, we’re looking to build a community for connecting with folks, all to discover new music and entertainment.

It's interesting how, just by what I've read so far, that I can tell this is going to be a disaster of epic proportions. Every hair on my BS detector is standing straight up. It's kind of a blink thing, because I can't articulate exactly why this seems so obviously a trainwreck in the making, but maybe it's the vagueness of it all. Based on the above, could anyone even answer the question "what is Zune?" Like if you asked "what is an iPod" the answer is immediately obvious. So is the answer to "What is Windows?"

A basic fact of business is that brands come from products. Products do not come from brands. It's as simple as that. That's why Zune will fail.