I do not know why some users swear on iTunes and prefer to use it as their main software for their music collection. The biggest drawback in my opinion is that iTunes was designed to only work with iPods and not other mp3 players from different manufacturers. I personally think that it is a bit way of to install iTunes if you do not own an iPod but apparently some users are doing it.

And one of them decided to write a program called iTunes Sync that would sync the playlists in iTunes with a lot of mp3 players from different manufacturers such as Creative Labs, iRiver and Sandisk. Not all players are working yet but the author is trying hard to implement support for them in future versions.

continue reading "Sync iTunes with non iPod mp3 players"

The joy that Apple decided to sell DRM free music on their popular iTunes plattform was overshadowed by two elements. The first one was that the DRM free songs would cost $0.30 more which could not really be explained. The second element was discovered after users were actually able to purchase drm free songs at iTunes.

Account information, namely name of buyer and account name, remained as information in the DRM free files. While this should not be a problem for everyone some users would have at least preferred to receive information about this before making the purchases.

I did find a great way to remove this information right in iTunes. All that needs to be done is convert the song(s) once which will remove the personal information. Please note that you only have to change the preferences (steps 1-5) once. Start at step 6 if you have changed them before. Here are the details:

continue reading "Remove personal information from iTunes DRM free songs"

Are you using the rating feature of iTunes and your iPod a lot ? I can only speak for myself but I never used that feature at all because it seems to be a lot of work to rate thousands of songs.

There is however a way to rate songs automatically using a free software called AutoRate (Macintosh) that rates track automatically according to how often they have been played and skipped. The ratings get synced with iTunes which means that you do not have to rate all of your songs by hand to achieve this goal.

Songs that are played more often receive a higher rating while skipping songs penalizes the songs. This is of course no bulletproof system. New songs will most likely not get such a high rating than songs that you have been listening to since the first day.

continue reading "Autorate songs in iTunes (Mac and Windows)"

Users with Microsoft Windows Vista and an iPod might have encountered the problem that under certain circumstances the data on the iPod could become corrupted after removing it from the computer that was running Windows Vista. According to Microsoft the problem could arise under two circumstances which I pasted below:

• You use the Safely Remove Hardware feature in the notification area to disconnect the iPod. Then, you disconnect the USB cable.
• You use the Eject command in Windows Explorer to disconnect the iPod. Then, you disconnect the USB cable.

Both surely look like the normal way to remove an iPod from the PC, wonder if this did not happen if you simply removed the iPod without using the Safely Remove Hardware feature or the Eject command.

continue reading "Finally an iPod update for Windows Vista"

I’m usually not using iTunes at all because I think the software slow and overloaded like the Windows Media Player. If I want to play music I use Winamp and to transfer songs to and from my iPod I use Floola. I still have iTunes installed but as I said it is only used very seldom. To be honest, I did not even knew that there were visualizations for iTunes available. You can think of them like the ones on Winamp for instance. I found this amazing visualization for iTunes and decided to write an article about it. I think it would be best to walk you through the installation and activation although it is nothing complicated. Download and install Magnetosphere and start iTunes afterwards.

Click on the Visualization tab and select Magnetosphere from the list. Last thing to do is start either a song or playlist and click on Turn Visualizer on. I suggest full screen mode which looks awesome instead of windowed mode.

The developers did not include a lot of information about customizing the plugin. I was able to figure out the following. Pressing the A key adds one hundred particles to the visualization while pressing S reduces the amount by one hundred. Please be cautious about this. If you add to many particles your computer could stop responding at all.

continue reading "iTunes Visualizer Magnetosphere"