iTunes Movie Ripping? Again?

You buy (or more likely bought) a CD and now you want to listen to it on your iPod. iTunes does the conversion, with as little fuss and drama as you could wish for (generally).

Chances are your iPod will show movies, maybe you've downloaded a trailer from the Apple website or even converted one of your own home movies. A process which reminds you of the dark ages of computing.

If only you could just put your movie into iTunes and have it rip the film into the digital file you need. Now wouldn't that be great.

There have been suggestions in the past that this feature would be added to iTunes, it does seem to me and many other people that this is the "missing link" in the entertainment flow, all the more important now that Apple TV seems to be gaining ground. You can handle all sorts of entertainment products, but that DVD you bought, well .... you're on your own for that.

So I was interested to see a footnote to a recent post on Mac Rumors noting that a forthcoming release of iTunes will have a facility to download Blu-Ray DVD data from Gracenote (the database currently used to source your CD metadata). OK, it's a major leap from that snippet to concluding that DVD ripping will be offered soon, but if you add it to all the other suggestions it could be that a major new feature upgrade is on the near horizon.

Put it another way, why add movie database features if you're not going to offer movie ripping?

iPod Service Module Error

You may have seen the earlier entry on this blog posting suggested solutions to the dreaded iPod Service Module Error. Since this was originally suggested (sadly not be me but by a blog reader) I've received many positive comments saying this soultuion has worked for others.

If you're looking at this and the earlier, longer, set of instructions and for any reason you having a problem I'd suggest you look at the responses to the posts. These don't automatically appear and one of the comments suggests an alternative location at which one of the instruction steps can be located. Best of luck with this.

Oh, and in answer to another post, I don't think there is a "simple" solution to the curse of the iPod Service Module Error.

iPod Alaska? No iPod Sound - A Frozen , Pinched Solution

One of podServe,co.uk's clients rang earlier this morning to say that his iPod had suddenly lost sound. Had been working fine but all of a sudden nothing. He had tried connecting other headphones and using a docking system, but no sound from the iPod. If he cranked the volume up to the maximum he could hear a tinny noise, nothing more.

My suggestion was to restore the iPod as he has all his music on his PC, nothing would be lost apart from an hour or too as the iPod re-syncs. If that didn't cure the fault my only other suggestion was an iPod doctor.

Client rang back a couple of hours later. Having done some digging on the internet he found two possible solutions - to put his iPod in the freezer for a few minutes, and to pinch the bottom right corner. So, he gave it a good pinch, then froze it for 30 minutes. Much to his amazement - it worked. So if you suddenly lose sound give you iPod a pinch and if necessary the cold treatment.

iPod, no sound, podserve.co.uk

XPlay 3 & Senuti

Ever since podServe began I've been using a great program called XPlay, now in its third incarnation. There have been so many times when this piece of software has got me (and our clients) out of a tight spot. Here's a typical case study.

Client has three iPods, a USB hard drive and a new computer replacing the machine that previously housed his music library. The old PC was damaged beyond recovery so the task we were given was to reconstruct one complete music library from four locations. The procedure is pretty simple, you just recover the music from each iPod, merge it with what's on the drive and then do some housekeeping to remove duplicates.

So each iPod was connected in turn to one of our Windows machines that runs XPlay 3, and it dutifully recovered two of the three iPods. Unfortunately it struggled with the third. XPlay recognised the iPod and opened it, but refused to display the contents of the music folder. We were able to update the iPod's firmware (an XPLay function), ran standard Windows disk checking functions, but all to no avail. Music stays stuck on iPod which by bad fortune holds more music than any of the other units.

What could be done? Nothing to be lost by trying to recover the music on one of our Macs. I didn't have much hope and was mentally planning my "Oops sorry" speech to my client. XPlay is Windows only, the equivalent software we have on Mac is called Senuti (yes, that's iTunes backwards). I was immensely relieved to find Senuti quickly grabbed the iPod and promptly started to download the music from iPod to the Apple hard drive.

I was so pleased to have achieved the recovery we needed I was more than happy to overlook the slowness of Senuti compared with XPlay. So while I remain an XPlay fan I'm finding Senuti is quickly winning a place in my heart.