[Download This Episode] In this episode, we talk about the flaws of iTunes 9. [01.7 MB] [0:05:00] [Hosted by: Josh Schnell & Grant Brunner] [Subscribe]

Hey, iTunes 9.0 was a milestone release, bugs are too be expected, right? Well, maybe not. After looking at the list of bugs that they patched the original release reeks of an early release that wasn’t fully tested before going public. Anyway, a patch is better than no patch, so go update your iTunes kids.

Resolves issues browsing the iTunes Store. Addresses a performance issue where iTunes may become unresponsive. Fixes a problem where iTunes may unexpectedly quit. Fixes a problem syncing Podcasts in playlists to iPod or iPhone. Fixes a problem sorting albums with multiple discs. Addresses an issue with the Zoom button not switching to Mini Player. Improves application syncing for iPod touch and iPhone. Genius is now automatically updated to show Genius Mixes.

Photo Credit: Thomas Hawk

Want a back to school 2009 sampler pack from Apple?  All you have to do is become a fan of iTunes and the next thing you know, you’ll be getting a coupon code with a bunch of new songs for FREE.  Well, nothing’s free, because you’re allowing Apple access to some Facebook stuff for research purposes, but, no need to freak out about it.  Facebook’s likely already sold your stuff around the internet a million times, so what’s the big deal in giving to Apple? I thought I’d be getting  a giant pile of crap and a lot of pop music, but I’m actually surprised that it’s filled with some decent music.  They might be using your music preferences and selecting songs to send you by that, but it’s just a guess, since I can only get one coupon code to try it out. Thanks to Heather for the find. Photo Credit: tupton

With Apple’s release of Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, the maximum size of icons in application has been increased to 512 pixels by 512 pixels from Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard’s 128 x 128 pixel icons. Now, most would think ‘Who cares about icons’? Well, actually quite a few people notice. If you hit command-tab with any of the Apple applications running you might notice how nice of an icon that each of the icons display. There is one exception, which surprises me; iTunes. iTunes does not have a 512 x 512 pixel image. I’m not entirely sure why this would be the case nor the reasoning behind the icon not being updated, despite iTunes just being updated to version 9.1 less than a week ago. The only possible reason might be because Windows can only support 72 x 72 pixels in terms of icons. But then one would question why Apple wouldn’t want to use a higher resolution icon in their Mac OS X version of iTunes. A better operating system must deserve a better icon, right? Why the OS X version of iTunes does not have a nicer icon is just baffling. I mean even iPhoto ‘06 has a decent icon and the software is 3 years old already. There are also some other applications that have bad icons. So far I have only found two others.

Cyberduck

Utorrent, including the icon for utorrent files.

All of the bad examples are below:

It’s not like Snow Leopard just happened to be sprung on everybody with no notice what-so-ever. Developers had well over a year to update icons, even if for no other reason future proofing their software. Maybe it only annoys me, but alas it is annoying to have to look at the icon and see such pixelation.

We here at Macgasm are very proud of our podcasts, and we want to make sure as many people can access them as possible. We’ve recently noticed that it might not be obvious how you can subscribe to our podcast, so we’ve decided to rectify that. Now, every podcast post will now have a link labeled “Subscribe” that will load our podcast in iTunes automatically. If you want to subscribe to all of our podcast content, you can SUBSCRIBE HERE. If you want to subscribe to just our audio podcasts, you can SUBSCRIBE HERE. Photo Credit: DeclanTM

For all of you waiting anxiously to see Steve Jobs up on stage (I missed you Steve!) the wait is over: today’s keynote is now online. You can watch it here or download the podcast from Apple Keynotes on iTunes. (Hopefully I’ll be able to finish downloading it before you all start watching it so I can get decent speeds…) By the way Steve, thanks for making me crave another iPod Nano I don’t need/can’t afford to buy even if it comes with a “free” video camera! Why don’t I just give you my credit card?

[Download This Episode] In this episode, Grant and Josh talk about all of the announcements from today’s Stevenote. [09.4 MB] [0:23:50] [Hosted by: Josh Schnell & Grant Brunner]

There are those among us who may still enjoy making “mix” CDs for ourselves or others. Did you know that you can print out an entire track list for a particular playlist? It’s actually quite simple.

Create Playlist This one we’ll leave up to you. Create any playlist you want or use one of the canned ones that comes stock with iTunes. For our example We’ll use the Top 25 Most Played. Select Playlist To Print Click File -> Print This will bring up a dialog box where you can select which type of layout you would like. My favorite is to use ‘CD Jewel Case Insert’ and Select Mosaic. This will provide a list of songs on the left along with a Mosaic of the album covers on the right. Print out your Cover It’s that simple. Things to remember. The track list can only display 25 items when doing a CD Cover insert. If you’re doing anything other version the only limitation should be the size of the paper. An example of the Top 25 songs that I have can be found here. One thing to keep in mind is that these covers can be quite large in terms of space. My example is 7.1 Megabytes. It’s not a whole lot, but it’s a nice little trick that can spruce up that mix CD that you’re making. Or as a handy way to backup your playlists in case you decide to do a wipe and reload of your computer when you install Snow Leopard.

Here’s how to create ringtones for your iPhone right from your iTunes library.  This will only work with songs you ripped to iTunes, or the 256kps DRM free downloads.  If you have DRM songs you can burn them to a CD, and then re-import them into iTunes.

In iTunes, right-click the song you want, go to ‘Get Info’ and change the start and end points so it’s 30 seconds in length. Verify that your Encoder in Import Using is set to AAC.  You can set the quality to any setting you chose.  I prefer the 256 kbps setting. Right-click the song again, ‘convert selection to AAC’. Find this new file and drag it from iTunes to your desktop. Right click on the file and select Get Info; then, rename the file extension from .m4a to .m4r. Import it back into iTunes and it will appear as a ringtone. Tada!

Now the song will be placed in your ringtones folder.  You can delete the .m4a converted track from iTunes now, so that you don’t have the thirty second track on your album.

Boy Genius Report is getting the ball rolling today with some screen captures of iTunes 9 and its integration with the social media sites — in particular Facebook, and it’s pretty cool.  But, if you take a deeper look at the screenshots, something has gone unmentioned in the article that is probably a lot more newsworthy, if you ask me. Take a look at this screen capture, and the area I highlighted.  Looks like a Samsung device doesn’t it?  It could be nothing, but it sure looks like a Samsung YH-J70JL just underwent a sync and is asking to be ejected.  If this is the case, then it looks like Apple is opening up iTunes 9 to the masses, and that other music download services better start to panic. Things might get messy!

Whether we like to admit it or not, we’ve all downloaded music at some point.  Tags and album art don’t always match up the way we might like them to, and manually editing the file info is tiresome at best, and downright annoying at worst.  Didn’t we invent computers so we could take mundane tasks out of our lives and do something a little more interesting? I’m kind of cheating here a little because it’s an Air App, but I thought it was handy enough to pass it along to you. Tidy Song literally tidies up your crappy media tags in the songs. Do you have a song by Sublime that’s labeled as Bob Marley?  Everyone has one or two of those kicking around.  Tidy Song fixes it.  It also removes duplicate songs, fixes misspelled songs,  fills in years and genre information, and adds missing album artwork.  It’s beautiful.

The iTunes store is fantastic. I love that music, movies,TV shows and applications are always available to me. However, there are obvious flaws. I could go on for days about the flaws, but there is one that I feel needs to be addressed here: Tabbed Browsing. Let’s get one thing straight, the iTunes store is just a browser. It only browses one thing, but it is a browser nonetheless. We’re all familiar with the concept of tabbed browsing, and I’m sick of not having the option in the iTunes store. It is almost impossible to comparison shop or browse effectively when you can only have one selection at any one time. Think of what a Utopia we’d be living in if we could bring up a handful of similar applications, and then tab between them to compare them. This simple feature would make using the iTunes store a much better experience. Let’s let Apple know what we want. Tell them that tabbed browsing is a no-brainer. Photo Credit: frozenchipmunk

Apple’s currently fighting legal battles on many fronts these days, but it’s to be expected when you’re a company with such a huge public outreach. The latest? A fight between Palm and Apple regarding Palm’s masquerading as an iPhone so that it can connect to, and sync with, iTunes. Apple claims only the iPhone has the ability to sync with iTunes (does it smell like an anti-competitive problem to anyone else?), and they’ve been taking measures to block Palm from getting its grimy little hooks into iTunes. Palm, on the other hand, has a completely different philosophy on the matter:- Palm says that Apple, which allows only its own devices to connect directly with iTunes software, is misusing the standards put in place to foster interoperability between computers and devices using a U.S.B. connection. Complaints have been filed and Palm doesn’t seem to be taking this one lying down. Apple’s strategy is obvious, but the real question is, how long can Apple keep other devices out of iTunes? It would be a huge blow to Apple if the Zune, or other third party devices were able to sync with iTunes, but there’s no doubt that the market could use some legitimate competition. I’m a big proponent of competition in the tech industry, so I wouldn’t be heart broken if Apple eventually loses out here. That being said, Victor Ganata brought up a really interesting point about this whole debacle, “Is it really legit for one USB device to masquerade as another USB device, though?” I find it hilarious that Palm is crying foul after having their phone blocked from iTunes, when they clearly have no qualms about masquerading their phone as a device that it is not. It’s starting to sound like the real case that needs to be ruled on here is whether or not device manufacturers have the right to have their phone acting as other devices. My guess is No. [via NY Times] [image via zoovroo & oskay]