Sonos Solved by Support Superstar

It's a few years since the name Sonos crept into my business vocabulary. It is very much the home audio system of choice for our clients who want music all round the house. For most of our works its been an absolute dream, we convert our clients CDs, load the digital files into their iTunes library, Sonos picks up the tracks from there.

Happy iTunes, happy iPod, happy Sonos - everyone's happy.

From time to time though it does go wrong, so a couple of times I've had to reinstall the Sonos computer controller and reboot the music library. And in one notable case our client's system just stopped working. Anyway yesterday we were called in to sort out the pesky Sonos, once and for all. Three hours into the task and not getting very far I did more digging around the main Sonos website and found mention of support over internet chat. I crossed my fingers and hit the button. A few minutes later I was chatting to Gordon.

Gordon is my hero.

One of the things I found out is that Sonos has a diagnostic facility. Using the main controller facility you create a file which you send to Sonos. As the file is submitted you get a code number, I sent that to Gordon and in a few seconds he had some suggestions. With his help we got the malfunctioning hand controller back working, loaded the latest software in the main Mac, updated the software in four of the five Zone players. In a few moments of joy I blasted some Bach over the rooftops of London.

Along the way I learnt a few mini-lessons that I think will help me should we be faced with this knotty problem again. First, update the controller software running on your PC or Mac. Then use that to load music into the Sonos library and maybe link into internet radio stations. Make sure that works properly.

Second, tackle the nearest Sonos device first. This is the unit that has to be hard wired to your router. Its should be an easy matter to press the mute and volume up button which reboots the unit. Check with the Sonos desktop controller to make sure this unit has been found. I'd also suggest moving the Sonos off its default channel, I think I put this on 1 rather than 6.

Sonos runs its own network in which each Zone Player links to the next. It doesn't matter how well your home wireless network works, how good the signal is, Sonos ignores this and does its own thing. Sadly its own little world can be screwed by your home mobile phone, the baby alarm or a radio doorbell. Hence try to get it away from any likely source if interference. Having got the first Zone Player working move onto the next closest because that's daisy chaining the network around your house.

This is what we did, progressively updating each Zone Player software as we went. We also updated the software in the handheld Sonos controller. Having spent a couple of hours getting to this stage we hopped round the house in minutes setting the other three units. When we got to the last unit we could see where the problem was - simply no signal this far down the house. On previous visits we'd started here and tried to solve this unit's malfunction, obviously a hopeless task that was never destined to work.

We were left having to explain only one thing to the client. Why did it work originally and not later? Well, Zone Players are brick like units. They don't look great on display in a very well decorated house so my client had them tastefully put away in purpose built cupboards with nice, close fitting doors. Add soft furnishings, carpets, rugs - the signal that rattled round the empty house just gets soaked up in a furnished home. So the final part of the solution has to be installing a Sonos Bridge unit, this doesn't play music but it boosts the signal, I hope, enough to reach the far rooms of the home.

Thanks Sonos, I understand. And thanks Gordon, wherever in the world of Sonos you may be.

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.

Error Code 39 - Vista - Lost DVD & CD Drives

If I ever get famous I shall use my position to publicise what will become known as Underwood's Second Law of Computing - never start a quick job on a Friday afternoon.

Client rings up, he wants some music put onto his iPod from the backup DVDs we supplied when we ripped his CD collection last summer. As he's off on holiday he wants it done quickly, and his PC has broken. Can we help? Yes, this is one for our great standby program XPlay 3 which enables you to move digital music files onto (or off) an iPod without using iTunes. "Great" says client (who lives in Chelsea) "I'm on the A12, about 10 minutes away, can you do it while I wait?"

Of course, we did, and client went away to his cottage in Suffolk very happy. But afterwards I couldn't use either of the DVD drives on the PC. They were there in the System properties boxes but with a yellow warning triangle next to them. Looking into properties it said something about Code 39, a driver being out of date. I fiddled and fiddled, by which time it was 18:00 and I had to be somewhere else. But it nagged at me all weekend, I put in an hour on Saturday and a couple of hours on Sunday, but no joy.

Today, Monday, I just had to get the DVD Reader / Writers back so I sat down to crack the problem. Which I eventually did. I won't bore you with how but I will tell you why it went wrong.

Connecting an iPod to a computer incurs the risk that it will be grabbed by iTunes and automatically synchronised. Client's iPod should be linked to his PC, even though that's broken. So I didn't want to run the risk that all his music would be lost, specially as he was sitting in my kitchen reading The Times. So to be absolutely safe and sure I deleted iTunes from that PC.

Now I find that a consequence of deleting iTunes in Vista (plus a few other programs according to Microsoft's website) is that the uninstall program deletes key values in Registry. It is Registry that lets your operating system know what is attached, so the computer thought the DVD devices were corrupted.

The fix was achieved by running a downloadable fix from Microsoft, equally it would probably have been fixed when I re-install iTunes for the project that begins tomorrow. So there you have it - if you lose your ROM drives, if you get the yellow triangle and driver error code 39, you know what to do - but most of all, if you plan to attempt a quick computer job, don't do it on Friday afternoon.

Useful Podcasts - at Last.

When I first heard about podcasts I thought they'd be big, really big. I know many clients sign up for them, I know here in the UK The Archers daily radio soap is one of the most popular and that comedian Ricky Gervais has made squillions from his hilarious podcasts.

But somehow I think the technology has not blossomed as I'd expected.

Anyway, I came across a useful collection of podcasts from respectable academic sources under the title "50 Terrific iTunes U Lectures to Get You Through the Economic Crisis". Worth taking a look.

iPod Wins the Cup

Last Sunday Tottenham played the all-conquering Manchester United at Wembley. Despite being a lifelong Spurs fan I didn't watch (partly due to family commitments, mainly because this is another major sporting event on pay-per-view), perhaps couldn't bear to watch as given recent football form I expected Man U to regally thump Spurs.

I checked to find the final score, hoping it would be less than 5-0, only to find it was 0-0 and into extra time. So I switched on the radio and listened. When it went to penalties I was sure Spurs would lose, and they did. Then on Monday morning the sports pages were saying Manchester had won with the help of an iPod. How?

My first thought was the goalkeeper had used his to block out the sound of opposing fans trying to put him off but no, apparently Manchest had used an iPod to show their goalkeeper footage of Spurs players taking penalties, I assume this gave him an inside track on their preference to hit the ball to the left or right. Sure enough Tim Foster cleverly anticipated a couple of kicks and the rest, as they say, is history.

Now we at podServe have converted a lot of video to run on iPods, very good it is too. But one thing has always bothered me, and I was remined of this last night by a CNet posting on ripping videos / movies in iTunes, and that is copyright. I don't think it is a legal right to copy video onto an iPod if the source material is commercial.

So here's my issue - why aren't Man U being sued for copyright breach? My guess is that the footage they had stored for Foster was clipped off TV broadcasts. If it was then I think a little naughty has been committed - unless you know otherwise. I'd love to hear.

iTunes Help in Video

Last week I had a few tech support calls, you know the type "How can I fix iTunes?", or "My iPod won't ..." plus a couple of very techie questions. One call came to my mobile while I was at a clients home setting up his music library and linking it to Apple TV. After the call my client asked if I'd thought of recording the instructions?

Total conceit overwhelmed me, client is an agent for artists and actors, was he thinking he'd found the next Sean Connery? Mr Bean? No, he politely pointed out that I'd delivered the instructions far too fast for person on the other end of the line to understand or make notes as we spoke. Client says this is complex, I need to take it more slowly, run through it a few times. Above all - get onto the clients screen and show him exactly what to do. Make it personal, make it interactive, bring it into the 21st century. At which point we digress into conversation about how a famous actor has just been paid a huge sum to do a voice over for some kind of instructional film.

As I chugged home on the underground I gave the idea some thought and by the time I got to Liverpool Street I made up my mind to do it. How hard can it be to record the sort of thing I say over the phone ten times a week? I'll tell you. Easy bit first.

Select some software. I wanted it to run on my Macs, a much nicer platform. So I checked a few offerings. Now I know what it's like to be truly confused. After much head scratching I homed in on ScreenFlow from Telestream. I'd like to say its the best but to be honest it was the only one I could understand and from the trial I can safely say it works pretty much out of the box. That I thought was the hard part.

It being snowing so I sat down to make my first video. Good? Am I good? No, I'm hopeless - I think I've made ten shots (could have been twenty) at getting anything. The phone rings, the central heating kicks in and the boiler fires up, I start to spout gibberish, I click the wrong bit of iTunes - we even had a pidgeon fly into the door out to the garden. Eventually, after well over an hour, I have produced my first iTunes video. It's just over two minutes, I can't believe how long its taken me to generate such a short video.

I have managed to upload it to YouTube and if you're in the mood for a giggle search for podServeVid01 and you can cringe through it. Well done Telestream, your ScreenFlow is great and I'm very glad I made the investment. All I need to do now is work out why YouTube has destroyed the quality of my first full length, feature packed, all star, low budget movie.

And if you hear of an actor being paid a fortune "just" to do a voice over, he's worth every penny.

Ripfactory

Ever since the earliest days of podServe I've been in contact with Patrick McGrath, formerly of Ripfactory. If you're casting a film and looking for 'lovable Irish rogue' I don't think you could find a better match. He was always helpful and amusing. Our conversations were mainly about copyright issues and Patrick was a great help.

At some point Patrick raised the question of their robotic ripping system and datagrooming software. Somehow ripping in quantity had never struck me as anything other than a task suited to a parallel rather than a serial approach so I said no to the robot, but yes to their software. The investment was modest, less than £500, but I did expect it to work in accordance with their own leaflets.

It soon became clear that the code was horrendously defective. Despite the best efforts of their technicians none of the programs I bought ever worked as described. Then in the autumn of 2007 I was contacted by a very irate Ripfactory robot owner. He felt he'd been treated very badly by Patrick, sold a robot, paid for it, no unit supplied. This was followed by other contacts from people with the same or similar stories - orders not fulfilled, poorly performing products. They were not happy bunnies. As I've said to many people now, not buying a robot was one of the best decisions I have made in CD ripping. In fact it was such a good decision I think I'm going to make it again today.

I was prompted to put a post here on the matter, and I called it "Ripfactory RIP?" That prompted a call from a less than happy Patrick McGrath. Early in 2008 Patrick contacted me again and said that the issues my post had highlighted had been resolved to the purchasers satisfaction, that the US company MF Digital had taken over supply of the hardware / software bundle, so would I remove my less than flattering entry. Which I did. Despite one or two more rumblings and grumblings things went very quiet on the Ripfactory front.

Yesterday I got a message from a contact in America suggesting I visit Ripfactory's site. Well, it seems poor Patrick's company has hit the buffers and has passed over to MF Digital. This strikes me as better news for Ripfactory's existing clients as I've been impressed by the people I've spoken to at MF Digital. If I had a mobile phone number for Patrick I'd ring him and ask what happened to the investors behind Ripfactory whose pockets were so deep they'd never let the company go but I'll let that one pass.

In these parlous times, and with other robot offerings now available, it strikes me that more suppliers will be fighting over a shrinking market. It will be tough to stay in the game, although thankfully for MF Digital they have other revenue streams so hopefully they'll be able to stay the course. But I still don't think CD ripping is a robot-solved problem, or maybe I'm just a parallel man to the core.

Anyway, even if Ripfactory is no more I hope Patrick resurfaces. Robots are a dime a dozen; lovable Irish rogues are in short supply.