I’ve been using Delicious Library for quite some time, and since I got my first Mac have used Apple’s Backup software as part of my backup solution. When I upgraded to DL2, I noticed that the backups weren’t changing size any more. I dug into the QuickPick package provided by the Delicious Monster website, and noticed that it hadn’t been changed to reflect the changes made in DL2.

I modified the QuickPick for my own use, expecting an official version to come soon. As of this writing, I’m still waiting.

I asked Wil Shipley why there was no updated QuickPick and got this response: “I think most people running DL2 have Time Machine.” (full response here) This seems to me to be quite a large assumption on Wil’s part. True, Time Machine is the “preferred” way to back up your Mac now, but the Backup software is still available and I would imagine there are quite a few people who still use it. For what it’s worth, I use Backup, Time Machine, Backblaze and SuperDuper! to back of various parts of my data. I’ve heard too many stories of Time Capsules failing to trust it to be my only backup solution.

The Delicious Monster website still points to the DL1 QuickPick from its FAQ entry about backing up data. This really frustrates me because users may download the QuickPick and trust that it is backing up their data while nothing of the sort is actually happening.

If you are using Delicious Library 2.x and Apple’s Backup software, you can download the QuickPick I created to correctly back up your data.

iTunes 7.6 also fixed a nasty bug that would cause Smart Playlists created with a "Video Kind" rule to fail – sometimes horribly.

Maybe I’m not looking in the right places. I love watching video on my iPhone. I also have a few season passes to TV shows through the iTunes Music Store. Some shows, like my new favorite Dexter, don’t release any episodes until the entire season is available. Here’s where the problem comes in. The first season of Dexter is 14 episodes, each around 660-670 megabytes in size. I have a 4 gig iPhone, so there’s no way all of the episodes will fit. Luckily, iTunes offers some flexibility in how video is synced to devices. I can select to sync all unwatched episodes of a show, or a subset of 1, 3, 5, or 10 unwatched episodes. For some reason, though, I can only pick the most recent unwatched episodes. WTF? Why the hell would I download an entire series, then choose to only sync the last 10 episodes? Why on earth didn’t Apple put in a similar set of options to let me sync the first 1, 3, 5, 10 episodes?

As it stands now, I have to watch enough episodes on my computer or my video iPod to be able to sync remaining episodes with the iPhone. I can create a smart playlist that keeps track of the oldest X number of unwatched episodes, but it doesn’t sync to the iPhone. iTunes sees the playlist as belonging to the Music category, and I can only choose to sync music videos, not TV shows within playlists.

C’mon Apple. I know this can’t be too hard. Make it easy for me to watch video on my iPhone like all the hype tells me I should do.

• Network shares. I’ve got a Network Attached Storage (NAS) device, with shares for files, music, and photos. I spent the better part of an hour trying to get these shares remapped. I could do "Connect To Server.." in Finder and the share contents would be displayed, but I’d get no icon on the desktop or in the Finder window to show that the drive was actually mapped. For some reason, about 50% of the time, I couldn’t connect to the share anyway – I’d get a message saying that the device could not be found. Strange and annoying behavior.
• Backup. I have several backup jobs that run and archive to the NAS. Since the upgrade to Leopard, all of the backups that have run have failed. I had to go into the configuration for each backup job and make sure that the correct share was specified. This is where it got confusing – apparently there’s some subtle difference between smb://nas/files and smb://nas/files. The destination that was specified before the upgrade failed, while the destination created after the upgrade works. I have noticed that SMB shares now use a different icon, so there may be something happening behind the scenes that’s not obvious.
• Bootup. On my MacBook, Leopard takes about 3 times as long to boot as Tiger did. Not a big deal, considering I rarely reboot, but still annoying.
• The dock. I don’t have the issues with the updated dock that others have complained about. I do miss the little black arrow telling me which applications are running – the little white blob is much harder for me to see, so I can’t tell at a glance what’s open. I’m sure somebody will come out with a utility to fix this soon.
• Java. Where is Java 6? I had been under the impression that Java 6 was coming with Leopard, and was sorely disappointed when it was missing. This means that I’m still going to be stuck loading up a virtual machine to develop, since the apps I work on rely on Java 6. Not a show-stopper, but still a pain.

The only issue that is really a problem is the network drive issue. I’ve been able to get the shares to map on my notebook, but the shares absolutely refuse to show up on my mother-in-law’s Mac Mini. This means that her data isn’t getting backed up at all right now. Am I missing a setting somewhere to make mapped network shares visible/hidden? I looked but I couldn’t find anything that looked promising.

The main window is easy to navigate. Clicking on the spinning tangerine in the lower right corner shows the status of the BPM/intensity determination.

Yes, it says there’s an hour and 33 minutes left. It’s not as bad as its sounds. Given that I had 9600+ tracks to analyze and that my music is on a network attached hard drive, and hour and a half is pretty darn good.

Once the analysis is complete, the fun begins. Tangerine lets you specify a beat range and an intensity range for a playlist. It also lets you decide how to organize the songs, length of playlist, etc. Here’s one I created for my higher BPM songs:

I’m not entirely sure, but I think the width of the image has to do with the intensity of the beat. The height of the image is proportional to the track’s BPM.

If you’re paying attention, you should have noticed some issues with the above playlist. Sure – Queen, Orbital, and Marilyn Manson make sense for having high BPM tracks, but Roger Miller? And not just any Roger Miller song, but "My Uncle Used To Love Me But She Died"? (Which you can tell with nifty tooltip-type popups.)

Tangerine is in beta, so I’m not too surprised that some songs seem to have their BPM calculated a bit "off". Fortunately, the app will let you pick a track and either halve or double its BPM, so the problem entries can be weeded out. I have over 9600 tracks in my library, so I haven’t done too much of that legwork yet – I’m hoping that a subsequent release will be a bit more accurate.

I’ve already used Tangerine to make a couple of high speed playlists for my workouts, and its integration with iTunes works like a charm. You can tweak a playlist all you want in Tangerine, but it doesn’t exist in iTunes until you specifically tell it to. Likewise, the discovered BPM info is only stored in Tangerine until you tell it to store that data to iTunes. It’s a great way to mess around without worrying that you’ll mess up your iTunes library.

technorati tags:mac, itunes, music, playlist

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