Music on your mac: Beyond iTunes

iTunes is one of the oldest Apple applications, and it is been around before even the MacOSX. It a media player and although it started as a purely music management tool it is now handling movies, podcast, radio streams and iPod/iPhone apps. However, in an average library still, the largest portion is the music. The average libraries can range from a few GB to TB, meaning from 1000 songs all the way up to 100,000 songs. And if we assume that you have the maximum number of songs still you might get bored. You heard all those songs again and again and again... What is afterwards... Well radio stations are one option, but not the best. Even if you find a station that plays Jazz or Rock only from Jazz artist to Jazz artist it might be a huge difference. So what do you do in that case?

Well the best solutions that have come up is Last.fm and Pandora. Both are great tools to find new artists and expand your music horizons. So how do they work what is the difference? I puzzled myself for a while and finally I found the answer. A very comprehensive article by Steve Krause, a well know analyst in the field of technology and gadgets world. I recommend reading the whole article to fully understand the concepts of the two different world.

Last.fm: It is probably the first tool of its kind. It is a collaborative based system for music recomendations. How it works? You are searching the artist you like, and it will start a station playing a random song of that artist. You can mark as Love or Ban that artist and the song. The filters will compare you sellection with the sellection of other users, and will find new suggestions for you. The more you listen, the more sellections.
Pandora: It is a complete different concept. It characterize the songs in 200 different parameters (music genes) ranging from the general genre all the way to beat rythm and melody. By letting you sellect an artist it will start filling the segments of your music genome as they call it. Based on that genome new music will be coming your way every time you are logging on.

Pros and cons:

• Music recomendation: Pandora although smart, if you love more than one genre of music it can easily balck out and run out of suggestions. Last.fm on the other side since it is based on simlar taste base, it will never run out of options although it might take wrong route.
• New artists: Since the Last.fm filters are socially based, before a new artists is surfaced, it will take time since it has to make it to the favorites of other users before it is piped to you. Pandora, on the otherside is independed of that so even the next minute after a new artists is added into the database, will come up as a suggestion.
• Interface: Pandora is purely web based interface, and recently it introduced the Pandora Desktop, which utilizes the Adobe Air. It is still however a snapshot of the web interface. Last.fm gives out a stand-alone program that is different from the on line interface. The Last.fm application is scrobbing (the word is used from last.fm to denote the tracks you listened to) all the songs you heard on your iPod.

Overall both programs have their pros and cons. I would say that the ease of use, Last.fm is much better than the one from Pandora. However, the music recomendation is more acurate from Pandora, since it is based on analyzign your taste. Given the fact that is a much newer application it has room to improve.

The botom line is that Last.fm and Pandora are great alternatives to iTunes, and are extremely helpful to discover new artists.

File systems and Disk formating.

For all the new mac (and PC users) essential accessories are the external hard drives for back ups and extra storage. One of the most critical questions is how to format the hard drive. In the Utilities folders of your Applications there is a small tool that is called Disk Utility and it is probably the most essential tool you have. It is the tool that will format, clone, make disk images and many other great stuff. The one thing we will focus here is the formatting of hard drives. Once open the utility you will see a screen that shows on the left side the list of the Hard Drives, and the various options namely: First Aid, Erase, RAID, Restore. Select the Erase and you will have the following screen.

And as you can see there there are various options on the format type and the name of course. The two main options are the HFS (Mac OS extended) and FAT32. There two drastically different formats developed by Apple and Microsoft respectively and they are different approaches in handling the different bits of the hard drive. There are 4 different variations of the the Mac OS Extended (case sensitive, journaled and combinations thereof)
File Allocation Table or FAT is a computer file systems architecture originally purchased by and then developed by Bill Gates and Marc McDonald during 1976/1977. It was used through the whole history of Microsoft (MS DOS, Windows) until the Windows Me. The structure of the FAT system is the division of the hardware space to sectors that contain specific number of bits and a number of bits to describe those sectors (12, 16 and 32). The system will allocate a sector or sectors of the drive to each file. Now if since the Hard Drives are using the Binary system 0 and 1 the number of bits that can be allocated to one file is 2³²=42944967296Bytes=4GB. So there you have the number one issue with FAT32; the maximum file size cannot exceed the 4GB. However, the format is acceptable by any type of operating system MacOS, Windows, Linux/Unix etc. Also one of the major benefits is the least data loss in case of hard drive failure. Since the the damage can affect the a sector or a neighboring group of sectors damages only the file that is occupying them. One of the disadvantages is the fragmentation that occurs to the drive over the repeatedly erasing and writing. This can increase the seek time and can slow down the process. Although there are de-fragmentation tools are not as effective.
Pros: Minimum data lose.
Cons: Maximum file size 4 GB, fragmentation.

Hierarchical File System or HFS was introduced by Apple in September 1985 specifically to support Apple's first hard disk drive for the Macintosh, replacing the Macintosh File System (MFS), the original file system which had been introduced over a year and a half earlier with the first Macintosh computer. According to the HFS the Hard Drive into logical blocks of 512 bytes. Those blocks can be then be allocated (allocation blocks) to various files. The HSF uses 16 bit system to allocate those blocks in binary system so the number of different allocation blocks are 2¹⁶=65,536. Therefore the limit of 65,535 allocation blocks resulted in files having a "minimum" size equivalent 1/65,535th the size of the disk. So for a 1 GB disk, the allocation block size under HFS is 16 KB, so even a 1 byte file would take up 16 KB of disk space. However, being younger than FAT has a smarter way of handling the folders. It consists of 5 hierarchic blocks:

• Logical Block 0 and 1 that contain the information for the system start-up
• Block 2 contains the Master Directory Block (aka MDB). This defines a wide variety of data about the volume itself, for example date & time stamps for when the volume was created, the location of the other volume structures such as the Volume Bitmap or the size of logical structures such as allocation blocks.
• Logical block 3 is the starting block of the Volume Bitmap, which keeps track of which allocation blocks are in use and which are free.
• The Extent Overflow File is a B*-tree that contains extra extents that record which allocation blocks are allocated to which files, once the initial three extents in the Catalog File are used up.
  
• The Catalog File is another B*-tree that contains records for all the files and directories stored in the volume.
  

This architecture results in a more effective seeking and faster response and eliminates the need of de-fragmentation. However since one block handles all the files it prevents multitasking and further if the section of the hard drive that contains that information is damaged the hard drive is having a complete failure. To address this issue Apple introduced the HFS Plus that fixed the multitasking but the catastrophic failure remains an issue. In the MacOSX generation system these formats are known as the Mac OS and Mac OS Extended. Although they addressed all the mentioned issues, this file management system is not compatible with any other operating systems.
In November 2002 Apple introduced the Journaling which allows the system to log the changes before they are executed. So although typically deleting a file involves to processes deleting the file entry and then marking the space it is occupying as free, a power failure in any of the steps will results in abnormalities. For example, if the power failure occurs during the first and second step, the file will be erased without being deleted. Journaling will first log those changes and then execute them marking them while it is done. That will ensure that both steps are executed properly and in the right order. With 10.3 it was introduced the case sensitivity that discriminates Names for names or NaMeS.

Pros: No file size limit, 255 characters to name the file and folders, case sensitive, journaling.
Cons: Minimum file 16kB, maximum file limit, lack of cros-platform compatibility, danger of catastrophic data loss.

So when you buy a new drive, think before you start using it. If you plan to store videos that is more than 4 GB (only videos can be single files larger than 4 Gb) then go for Mac OS Extended, Case Sensitive, if you are planning cross platform definitely use FAT32. Especially for the USB drives, since the added bonus that are RAM types of drives, has almost no seek time, regardless of fragmantation. Just keep in mind that the K=1024, M=1024x1024=1,048,576 and G=1,073,741,824 bites. So your 1 TB drive is 1,000,000,000,000 bits is actually 931 GB and not 1000 GB.

Combining pdfs in Leopard.

This question came from a friend. In an effort to archive old photography journals he cut their back of and then scanned them; odd pages first followed by the even. So once everything was scanned, he was left with two pdfs one containing the odd pages (1, 3, 5, ...), and one the even pages (2, 4, 6, ...). He wanted know to merge the pdfs in a way that the the resulting will be 1, 2, 3, ... Of course you can do drag and drop in preview and with some copy past you are done. However his magazines were too big and doing this for 150 pages, was time consuming and worst of all he had to make it for many many magazines. He asked me how and immediately I thought of Automator, the very lightly used utility that sits around in you Application folder. Yeah, the one with the robot. So that thing can be used to automate processes either by recording your steps or by programming. So let 's see how it is used here. We need to be able to select the files, and then combined them by taking one page of each, putting them in order to make a new file, that will be moved on the desktop and named as final Document.

Start Automator and you will be greeted by the nice screen that ask you what would this be. In this case I just select Custom.
Once done find the finder icon that has all the files and folders commands and the one on the top is for "Ask for finder items". We will need two of those, one for odd (item 1) and one for even (item 2).
Once that is done we can continue with the pdf merging. Form the Library panel select pdf and then "Combine PDF pages". Notice there an option Append and Shuffle. Append will add the second document to the end of the first. Shuffle will take the first page of the first document, add the first page of the second document, and continue with the second page of the first document etc... just like a casino dealer shuffles card.
Notice here that the various elements of the work flow are interconnecting. That means that the initial elements of each step are results of the previous one. Once this is done we need to take the file from the temporary place that is stored and move if to the Desktop (or anywhere you wish to) and rename it to Final Document (or any other name). For that we need to more functions from the the library the Move and Rename and we add them. Not really in any particular order.
Now click run and you are done! Well almost. Once you open the document in Preview you will see that it is rotated by 180 degrees (upside-down) . That is a common bug in the Automator work flow easily fixed by the tools menu of Preview by consequently rotate the document.

Quick Search Safari History

One of the issues I had with Safari is the inability to quickly search the history with or without spotlight tool. A Trick that was published a while ago at MacOSXhints.com describes the most standard method. From the History menu item select the show all history as shown below.

Thsi will reveal all the history and at the top right corner there will be an input for a search field. Alternative to that, is my tip that although it is not searching the whole history it is helpful since it is using the power of spotlight. All Help menu in 10.5.x have a spotlight feature, that searches the menu items. Recent history in Safari, is stored under the History menu and therefore it becomes spotlight searchable as is evident my the picture below.
This way you have your history always handy and you can find what you saw a few days ago.

iTunes Tagging Vs. Sorting

One of the features I love in iTunes is the ability to sort a song with a different title or artist than the one it is actual named with. so let ’s say that we have the song “I walk the line” as it was preformed by Bob Dylan. So it is part of the “Dylan-Cash sessions” and the album artist is Bob Dylan. However since in that song both Dylan and Cash are singing the artist song is Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash. The info panel wi look something like this:

The known iTunes Tag (info) panel.

However I want the song in the iPod to be indexed as if it was from Bob Dylan so I can find it under the selection Bob Dylan. So you can go to less famous panel called sorting. There you can change the title or artist (album etc) different that the original so it will be easier accessible.

The less known iTunes Sorting panel.

So now after this changes we can easily find this song under Bob Dylan, and not under Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash. It is extremely important especially when you are forgetting the duets, or if you are bilingual, and you are editing the tags in your native alphabet but you want to find it with the latin alphabet. This is useful for searching a song on iPod and iPhone that do not support other inputs. See the following picture for example.

The Sorting panel used for international sorting and tagging.

Now the best part is that you can find this song by either typing “Σπανουδάκης” or “Spanoudakis”.

Hello World... or who I am...

Hi all. My name is George or as most friends call me Webby, which overtime became DJwebby and since this name was taken in many on line services (gmail, blogger, AIM etc) I added the 2002 (the year I actauly veery actively engaged in the blogging community) and the GR to denote Greece the place on earth I call home. So the total is DJWebby2002GR. Which is pretty cool I think. I am an apple fun and I have been working with macs my whole live. For nearly 23 years. Overtime I not only learned a lot of tricks and hints in apple computer, but I also learnt to think apple. I developed a shell on my brain that is intuitively and processing in apple mode. I don ‘t think human and convert to apple. I think apple.
I was debating the creation of a blog for really long time, but my current mobile blog on cooking, music and other philosophical issues does not allow me to implement this extra blog there. Too crowded you see. But I needed to. I felt that I need to share my poor but strong knowledge on apple computers with the rest of you.
Before I start my posts on apple products, I would give you a small history on my Macs and my Apples. So:
1985 - My dad buys for his work his first computer. A Macintosh that after an upgrade runs with an external hard drive and 4 MB or RAM (I know it was insane).
1992 - He buys a second hand Macintosh LC25 (or II) and the macintosh becomes mine, but I stuck with the pretty colors of the LC display.
1995 - Upon passing to college in physics major my dad buys me the Performa 5300 which has awesome. I was kissing it good buy every night for one year.
2000 - I worked in the radio station for 5 years and I collected enough money to buy a car. That time the G4 tower comes out, and I forget all about the car… I own an G4 Tower witha DVD and 128 MB RAM
2001 - I move to USA as a student and my awesome computer stays behind, for my dad and my sister. I buy an iBook G3 with 256 MB of Ram and an amazing 16 MB video card.
2003 - My dad needs a new laptop. I buy an iBook G4 and he gets my older laptop. I also bought my first iPod refurbished for $350. A 30 GB hard drive, and the simple LCD.
2006 - I buy my iMac. I had a PhD and I should look professional. It is the Intel Core Duo 2 t 2.0 GHz with 1 GB of RAM (upgraded to 2GB later), 51q2 video Memory and has the build in iSight. Towards the end of the year I buy a MacBook Pro 2.33 GHz and 256 MB Ram. I also bought a new 80 GB iPod that plays video.
2007 - I gave away my iBook G4 (I regret it now because I never had guessed its sentimental value, but back then it was for a good cause).
2008 - I bought an iPhone.
So you can see that my apple history is rich and valuable. My first operating system was 1.2 where now we are through the 10 the generation. I would discuss the name of apple operating system in different post, but my point is that over the years I went through 8 different versions of MacOS. So stay tuned for my tips, thoughts and tricks for apple, the second most famous apple in the world. Second, only after to the legendary apple that hit Newton on his head, enough to make him to discover the law of gravity. And a fun fact: The first apple logo was picturing Newton under an apple tree? Random? I don ‘t think so.