Hasta La Gadget!

This article was written on March 06, 2007 by CyberNet.

Just yesterday Apple launched iTunes 7.1 which had a feature that sparked a lot of conversations on the Web. The big thing that has people talking is the full-screen Cover Flow, and other than that there isn’t much new according to their site:

Using iTunes 7.1, you can now enjoy your favorite iTunes movies, TV shows, music, and more from the comfort of your living room with Apple TV. iTunes 7.1 also supports a new full screen Cover Flow and improved sorting options to let you decide how iTunes should sort your favorite artists, albums, and songs.

The Cover Flow (pictured above) is a cool feature because it lets you shuffle through all of your albums while displaying the album cover, and it does it in a way that is sure to leave you in awe. Making it fullscreen adds a lot more to it, but to be honest I was expecting to see a version of iTunes that was completely compatible with Vista.

I started browsing around Apple’s site and found a page that had a list of things that still doesn’t work right with Vista. They do, however, say that they are actively working with Microsoft to fix these issues:

• Ejecting an iPod from Windows Explorer or the Windows notification area (system tray) using the “Safely Remove Hardware” feature may corrupt your iPod. To always safely eject an iPod, choose Eject iPod from the Controls menu within iTunes. If your iPod becomes corrupt, selecting your iPod in iTunes and clicking Restore in the iPod’s Summary panel should return your iPod to a working condition.
• iTunes may display text or graphics incorrectly on your screen. Resizing the iTunes window should correct this issue.
• Contacts from Windows Address Book may not sync with iPod.
• iTunes remains unsupported on 64 bit editions of Windows, including Windows Vista and Windows XP x64.

The first item was what really caught my attention because I have always used the “Safely Remove Hardware” to disconnect my iPod. I haven’t tried this version of iTunes on my Vista machine yet because of the problems it still has, so I’m running it on my one and only remaining XP machine. It’s not that big of a deal because I normally don’t do much with iTunes other than sync my songs and podcasts, but it would be nice to get this up and running on my primary PC which has Vista installed.

So now I’ll cross my fingers that Vista will be added to the list of operating systems that are currently supported for the next release. While I understand that Apple is going to cater to the Mac operating system more than Windows, I would have thought that a Vista-compatible version of iTunes would have been ready when the OS launched over a month ago. I’m a little disappointed with Apple from that standpoint.

Download iTunes 7.1

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Uh oh. Since its debut, the iPad has been variously hailed as the final nail in the coffin of all physical media and the savior of the magazine and newspaper industries. A few magazines, such as Wired, had truly impressive digital launches, with over 100,000 downloads of its first issue in June. It doesn’t seem, however, that the stellar start was in any way sustainable. According to the Audit Bureau of Circulations, which collects magazine circulation data from companies willing to furnish numbers, all iPad magazines have seen fall offs in downloads over the past few months. Wired was averaging 31,000 downloads from July through September, had 22,000 and 23,000 respectively in October and November. Other magazines have seen similar declines: Vanity Fair sold 8,700 downloads of its November issue, down from an average of about 10,500 from August through October; GQ sold 11,000 copies, its worst showing yet. Now, not all magazines release their numbers, of course — including The New Yorker, People, and Esquire — but the numbers we do have seem to be indicating a trend of general decline after a short burst of excitement.

iPad magazine sales numbers show steep decline over a few short months originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 29 Dec 2010 12:21:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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This article was written on January 29, 2008 by CyberNet.

Time Saving Tuesday

Album art seems to be the hot new craze these days, and with Apple’s Cover Flow (pictured below) more people want their library of music to be filled with gorgeous artwork. Cover Flow has changed the way that I find songs to listen to, and for that reason I wanted to show how you can use iTunes to retrieve your favorite album art.

Before we jump in we want to point out that there are numerous ways that you can add album art to your music collection, including the free MediaMonkey. This article only focuses on iTunes, but we’ll likely cover other ways in the future.

Below you’ll find instructions on having iTunes automatically fetch the album artwork, how to manually add it yourself, how to add it in bulk, and forcing iTunes to store album art in the music files. The end result will be a beautiful looking library filled with flowing album art…

–Automatically Adding Album Art–

Assuming that you have correctly added the tag information (artist, title, album, etc…) iTunes will be able to retrieve artwork for your songs automatically. Of course this relies on the album actually being sold on iTunes, which is currently a problem for artists such as the Beatles.

To force iTunes to grab the artwork for an album just right click on the song(s) and select the Get Album Artwork:

One big issue I’ve had with this working is when dealing with compilation albums or soundtracks. Any albums that have various artists on them will likely be unable to download no matter what you try to do, unless you’ve actually purchased the songs from iTunes.

The album art that iTunes downloads is stored in a special folder created by the application, and is kept separate from the music itself.

–Manually Adding Album Art–

One thing that I’m impressed with is how easily you can manually add album art in iTunes. The nice thing about manually adding the album art is that iTunes will embed it into the song itself, which is actually a nice feature. That way the artwork will be available in applications other than iTunes.

Here’s what you have to do:

1. Find the image that you want to use as the album art. I recommend doing a Google image search for the album name, looking on Wikipedia, or pulling up the Amazon page.
2. Once you’ve found a good quality image just right-click on it and copy the image. No, you don’t have to save it to your hard drive.
   
3. Now go find the song you want to add the artwork to, right-click on it, and select Get Info. Switch to the Artwork tab, click in the blank box, and press Ctrl+V to paste the artwork in that you copied.
   
4. Hit the OK button on the window, and you’re done. The album art has been embedded in that particular song.

–Bulk Adding Album Art–

If you have a ton of songs from the same album there is an easier way to add the same artwork in bulk. This isn’t entirely necessary to do since iTunes only requires one song in a particular album to have artwork associated with it, but other applications may like to have each individual song tagged with artwork.

In iTunes select all of the songs that pertain to the same album, which can be done using the standard Control and Shift keys while clicking on songs with your mouse. After that you’ll pretty much follow the same instructions for manually adding the artwork above, but the area for you to paste the album art into is in a different spot:

–Embedding iTunes Album Art–

The album art that iTunes automatically retrieves is not embedded in the songs, which means that it will not be available outside of iTunes. Some of you may not mind that, but if you enjoy having the artwork no matter what application you’re using then you’ll want to go through these steps for each of the albums:

Note: This is unnecessary for any album art that you’ve manually added yourself.

1. Right-click on a song and click Get Info.
2. Go to the Artwork tab and press Ctrl+C to copy the artwork.
3. Now press Ctrl+V to paste it back in.
4. Hit the OK button.

When you copy and paste the album art in steps 2 & 3 you won’t really see anything happen, but you can easily verify that it worked by monitoring the date modified and/or filesize of the song. If you can see an increase in the filesize then the album art has been added.

It might take some time to get your library just the way you like it, but once you’re done the result will look great… especially for those using Cover Flow.

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A UK teen named Lamar Johnson has recently plead guilty to one count of conspiracy to defraud. His crime? It seems that he and his band (both in a musical sense and in a “Robin Hood” sense) used stolen credit cards to purchase something like $750,000 worth of their own music from both Amazon and the iTunes Store between January 2008 and June 2009. There’s no telling how much the group would have earned from royalties, and the name of the band hasn’t been disclosed (believe us, we looked), but something tells us that they probably recorded dubstep. Also, something tells us that — since the royalties would have to be paid out to someone with a bank account — this was a painfully easy case for prosecutors to crack. While Johnson will find his sentence tacked onto the 5-year jail term he is currently serving for grievous bodily harm, the rest of his 12 member “band” will have to wait until they appear in court in January to discover their fate.

Update: One of our fine commenters (christianoliff) dug up an article from the Sunday Mercury that discloses a little more info on the perp, including a dashing photo and the name of his MySpace artist page. Apparently his criminal enterprise was more of a 2-step thing.

UK teen buys $750,000 of his own music from iTunes using stolen credit cards (update) originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 22 Dec 2010 00:47:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Apple still controls 66.3 of the online music market, according to new numbers from analyst firm NPD. Amazon is in second place–a distant second at 13.3 percent of the market, all of this despite an aggressive push from sites like Amazon and Walmart.com to topple iTunes’ strangle hold on the industry.

Among Amazon’s approaches are deep discounts on records, like the new album from Kayne West, which sold for $4.99 its first week–less than half of Apple’s asking price. Great for consumers, but artists seem less than enthused. The Wall Street Journal quotes the Fleet Foxes’ Twitter feed, “Been working for nine months on something that will sell for 3.99 on Amazon MP3. That’s about the price of a whoopie cushion.”

Yowtch.

Apple actually managed to increase its market share in 2010, moving up from 63.2 percent. Amazon increased as well, moving up from 11 percent.