Album Art

One of the most popular enhancements to our CD ripping service was including album art. I don't mind admitting at first I was sceptical but today ripping CDs without adding album art is unthinkable. Well, yesterday I thought the unthinkable.

One of the best decisions I made was to go with iAlbum Art as the software to embed album art in our clients music. It works like a dream and Mike's tech support has been great. Something I was taking for granted when we upgraded our version of iTunes. I don't know if the upgrade was coincidental and maybe Amazon made a change at their end but horror, iAlbum Art just stopped working. Program opened fine, seemed to run but resolutely no little pictures were added. Small panic, we've got a couple of thousand CDs in process right now.

Thankfully the fix was simple, iAlbum Art 2.1 plays nicely with iTunes 10 and co-operates with Amazon. If anything it runs better, with better art and a snappier response, I think. We breath a sigh of relief and stick more CDs into the computers.

drop.io

One of the best things I've found on the web is drop.io - an incredibly simple and effective file sharing service. So many time it's helped us deliver files to clients.

But no longer, drop.io is no more. They've sold ought to Facebook. Well done them, and thanks for what you've given us over the years.

iTunes Music Store Receipt Email

If you receive an email seeming to be from iTunes Music Store, with the header including a receipt number, some dodgy maths in the "bill" - whatever you do, DO NOT click on either of the hyperlinks in the body text.

I did, and spent the next couple of hours regretting it. More on the podServe blog.

Thanks to AVG Anti-virus and Spybot Search & Destroy for a happy ending.

Wow - Gracenote - 200 billion ripped CDs.

Gracenote has now processed its 200 billionth query, and received its one billionth metadata submission, according to data shared Thursday morning by the company.

Apple Synch Notifier Exe is Missing - Solved

Call from a CD ripping client with a problem on their PC (Vista Business). This is the error message -

Apple synch notifier exe is missing

Core file missing.

Did some digging, found a solution - go to Control Panel and you will probably see an entry for Mobile Me. Delete that, seems to solve the issue.

iTunes How To Videos

OK, we're going to blow our own trumpet here. We're a CD ripping company and we want you to get the best out of your music experience. We want happy clients.

So we've produced a set of How to ... videos covering topics such as how to load the music data files we supply, how to create smart playlists, how to move your iTunes music library ... and more.

Take a look at the videos. Hope you like them, if you'd like to see more let us know.

Low Cost CD Ripping

We rip CDs for clients, but mainly in the London / M25 region. Over the years we've had people express a demand for our services from outside our usual collection area.

So we set up a mail based CD ripping service called MP3 by Mail. Hard to believe we're coming up to four years old. But yes, we're still here, ripping CDs for iPod owners, for Sonos lovers and a whole raft of people who simply want to make their music portable. Check out our (other) site.

Apple TV

Just to update an earlier post - the installation with Apple TV running with Windows 7 (which previously stubbornly refused to sync) - has suddenly sprung into life and happily syncing music and photos.

Multiple Tracks in iTunes Library

Had a phone cal from one of our photo scanning clients - can we help them with an iTunes problem?

So on Friday I went over to survey the situation. Looking at their iTunes library was first step, which explained a lot to the client because as a Sonos user that was the way he looked at his music. Immediately you could see he had three copies of each track.

His first question was why? Well, if you set in Preferences / Advanced that you have a tick in the box for copying music into your iTunes library, when you go through the loop of adding to the library (File / Adder Folder) this is what happens. Even if that track is in the folder already, another copy will be made and added to the original folder. You get from one to two copies. Do it again, even if you're not sure what you were hoping to achieve, you'll get another set of tracks - your third.

Second question, how do we correct this? The only way is the tedious one. Hit show duplicates, then grind through the duplicated items and delete them. Took me hours, but eventually done. That's the exciting side of being a cd ripping service.

What's with Apple TV?

Not so long ago Apple described their network to TV bridge device - Apple TV - as a "hobby"device. Rather cruel I thought, even though on the scale of iPads and iPhones this hasn't been a roaring success, at least in sales terms. You have to admit some Apple products are cursed by being ahead of their time and I'm wondering if the time has come for Apple TV.

Many moons ago, when we got married, we inherited an old TV set. I bet the speaker inside cost less than 50p. Dreadful. Have you seen today's TVs? The sound from a new set is brilliant in comparison and many sport multi speaker surround sound systems to compete with cinemas. So what could be more natural than to pump your music via iTunes into your living room via a compact device such as Apple TV. Several of our CD ripping clients use Apple TV for this and are very happy with it. If you think coverflow looks good on your iPod Touch wait till you see it on a top-flight plasma screen.

Our other venture in analogue to digital media conversions, our photo scanning service 1Scan, is also recommending Apple TV. Trust me, your holiday photos or your old family image library will look great blown up on screen. But you also get an automatic facility to turn static images into a rolling slideshow.

The interface that drives Apple TV from your computer is iTunes, a program familiar to so many people now. And it runs faultlessly on Mac and Windows. Apple TV will play nicely with your home wireless network although if you must you can drive it via ethernet. In typical Apple fashion (forgive the pun) it looks cool in its nice white box, makes no noise although I have noticed they can get very hot.

Look great, sounds great, networks nicely and is reasonably priced. What's not to like about Apple TV?