Working With iTunes

Over the past several years many have told me they are confused with iTunes; most of them are non-Macintosh users. So I decide to write this post in hope of giving, the many whom I have yet to speak to about this topic, some guidance.

To understand how to work with iTunes you will first need to understand the terminologies associate with iTunes.

Definitions

The music management application installed on your computer is called “iTunes“. Within the application you have access to the “iTunes Store“, where you can purchase apps for iOS devices, and depending on the country you live in, you may be able to purchase music tracks, rent or purchase movies and TV shows.

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Apple’s iTunes Related “Unforgettable” Announcement [Updated]

Apple posted a teaser message onto their web site and in iTunes Store about an announcement to be revealed Tuesday, November 16 (07:00 PDT US).

Apple in the past never puts such announcements in their iTunes Stores, the current message only appears in iTunes Stores that have a music component (ie. USA, UK, Japan, Australia, etc.). One can therefore speculate that this announcement has to do with iTunes, iTunes Store or music.

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New Elements of iTunes 10

Here are several aesthetic changes and new functionality in the latest version of iTunes application.

The first thing you will notice with this latest version of iTunes is that the icons on the left panel has all lost their 3D/colour effects. Many critics have complain that the change is ugly, this may be true, but I think the new design places the focus back on to the content: music tracks, videos, apps and the iTunes Store.

The problem seem to be the inconsistent applications of these 3D effects. Some controls have gain the latest Apple aluminum hardware look but others has the Aperture styling. These inconsistencies make the application feel unfinished, and continues the theory that iTunes is Apple’s platform for experimenting with OS X UI designs.

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Apple to Live Stream Music Event Sep. 1st

As many of you know, Apple will be holding its annual invitation-only music event at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco on September 1st, 10:00 (US PST).

For the first time in a long while, Apple will be streaming this event live over the Internet using its “HTTP Live Streaming” (presumably “QuickTime Broadcaster”). Unfortunately, if you do not own one of Apple’s products you will not be able to watch it via the Internet.

Apple® will broadcast its September 1 event online using Apple’s industry-leading HTTP Live Streaming, which is based on open standards. Viewing requires either a Mac® running Safari® on Mac OS® X version 10.6 Snow Leopard®, an iPhone® or iPod touch® running iOS 3.0 or higher, or an iPad™. The live broadcast will begin at 10:00 a.m. PDT on September 1, 2010 at www.apple.com.

Sep 1, 18:00 London Time
Sep 1, 13:00 US Eastern Time
Sep 1, 12:00 US Central Time
Sep 1, 10:00 US Pacific Time
Sep 2, 01:00 Hong Kong Time
Sep 2, 03:00 Sydney Time

iTunes 9.2 Now Available


Last night Apple made available Mac OS 10.6.4 Update, now the version of iTunes that supports iOS 4 and all its functions is now available from Apple’s Downloads page or from Software Update on your Mac.

Unless you are using iTunes on Windows platform or that you have an iOS supported device running iOS 4, there is no rush to update your iTunes to this version. For the former type users there are 3 security issues that this version of iTunes fixes as documented in the Knowledge Base article, About the security content of iTunes 9.2.

iPad Apps Now Available in App Store


Ahead of the iPad official release on April 3rd Apple had made available the iPad Apps in the iTunes App Store.

Many sections now have a toggle switch to choose either iPhone or iPad apps. It also appears that Apple is slowly releasing the reportedly over 1000 apps, as some of the ones I was expecting like TwitePad is no where to be found; at least not easily.

How-to: Handle iTunes’ iPhone Carrier Update Dialog?

You may have read in forums and elsewhere about the “iPhone Carrier Update” dialog presented by iTunes each time the iPhone is connected to iTunes 7.7 or later. In the past I had suggested that if your iPhone is “carrier unlocked”; not connected to one of the Apple carrier partners in your country, you should not apply this update when Apple’s dialog comes up.

The reason is because the “iPhone Carrier Update” will update settings relating to the “carrier partner(s)” within your iPhone, and if your iPhone was unlocked and your SIM card is not from one of the “carrier partner(s)” the APN settings (data settings) of your iPhone will be overridden, causing you to have to update these settings each time.

You can read other tips to know when owning an iPhone in Hong Kong by checking out my article, What to Know When Buying an iPhone 3G in Hong Kong or the more layman article 10 Things a Layman Should Know About Hong Kong iPhone 3G.

iPhone Firmware 2.2 NOT for Hacked iPhones

As rumored Apple has released the iPhone firmware 2.2 today.

This is a warning to all users who had either jailbroken or unlocked their iPhone or iPhone 3G, this warning even goes for anyone using the iPhone 3G who had not done either, but may want to unlock in the future.

I strongly advice these users not to upgrade their iPhone firmware to 2.2 until the iPhone Dev Team had released an updated version of their PwnageTool.

This applies to the new version of iTunes 8.0.2 also, as we currently do not know if the latest version of iTunes will be compatible with jailbroken or unlocked iPhone and iPhone 3G.

I will update here when it is safe to upgrade your iPhone or iPhone 3G, please stay tuned.

Irresponsible Reporter of NYT

Today I read the article “My Songs, My Format” by New York Times’ Sean Captain (Late Edition – Final, Section C, Page 9, Column 1) and it erupted me to write the following letter to the Editor at New York Times (NYT).

Dear Editor,I was appalled to read such an article from New York Times.

Mr. Captain’s article is truly bias and had not explained clearly the facts about the topics he touched on. It would be very misleading to a layman reader of the article.

For example, Mr. Captain never explain the “AAC” codec (Encoder/Decoder), but instead referring it to “Apple’s format”. Implying that it is a proprietary format created by Apple. That is not the case.

The “AAC” format is part of the industry standard for MPEG-2 and MPEG-4, the version that Apple promotes is AAC MPEG-4, which commonly agreed by industry expert as having a better compression and sound quality than the MP3 format.

Aside from that Mr. Captain also fail to explain the concept of “bps” (Bits per Seconds), which is also very important when talking about compression formats and particularly important when comparing different codecs. One can not compare bit rates of different codecs directly. That like comparing apples and oranges.

Mr. Captain also fail to point out that there are many other MP3 players our there which also supports the AAC format.

As Mr. Captain correctly points out that Apple is a trend setter. Like when Apple removed the floppy disk player from their computers, “Macintosh” 5 years ago, everyone was up in arms calling it a stupid move that will destroy Apple’s market share. Now we see that other major manufactures are also following Apple’s directions and removed the floppy drive as standard equipment from the computers they manufacture.

Going back even further about 13 years ago, when Apple send out all their developers resources in CD-ROM format, the critics were all calling this a bad move, which is designed to force Apple’s developers to purchase the more expensive (at the time) CD ROM player option in their Macintosh. This took another 5 years for the rest of the world to realize that CD-ROM is a much better and preferred medium by the consumers.

Apple in the past had always try their best to stick with industry accepted Standards. Some times these Standards are well established in other times they may be recently approved as Standards, and lastly Apple’s own technology is adapted as Standards (ie. QuickTime, IEEE-1394 aka Firewire aka i-Link).

For a publication like New York Times, I believe it has much better integrity that to publish something that is so misleading to the average reader that cause them to draw an incorrect conclusion about the subject. As for Mr. Captain, he should be much more responsible to verify and clarify his facts and terminologies in his article, rather than to allow the readers to do the verifications themselves before coming to a conclusion about his article.

I am sure that Mr. Captain does not intentionally want to mislead the New York Times readers. I urge you to insist on a retractile or a following clarification article to this one by Mr. Captain.

Unfortunately, due to the commercialization of New York Times online I am not able to provide the link (URL) to the actual article on NYT’s web site.