The Archives
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07.02.07Give them an example…The title of this post refers to many things in life - teaching someone a skill, engaging with clients on work, incompatible file formats. Incompatible file formats? Yes. Over the weekend we bought a couple of new albums from iTunes. Obviously, they work all across the house where we have a shared iTunes library. But then there are portable devices. Alli (my wife) has a newish 2nd Gen iPod Nano, I have a 3-year-old Creative Zen Xtra (hoping for an iPod for my birthday in a few weeks) and our daughter has a Creative MuVo N200 that's less ...
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04.03.07RIP DRMRegular readers here will already be aware of my low opinion of DRM, not because I think the labels/distributors/evil overlords are on to a good thing but because: DRM restricts user rights post-purchase - the "I should be able to play this where and when I want" argument DRM hurts content creators - content creators invariably sign over a significant portion of their rights when agreeing to distribution through major distributors, money goes to the distributors rather than the creators DRM is invariably broken -some smarty always figures out a way to "route around the damage" and break DRM It's why I actively support ...
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08.21.06Icons make for good interfacesNever thought I'd prefer a feature of WiMP over iTunes, especially now I'm a dyed-in-the-wool Mac convert. However, good design is good design no matter where it occurs. Rich Ziade at Basement.org has a post discussing the intelligent use of iconography (more or less) as an aid to visual understanding and boosting of user experience. Smart stuff.
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02.14.06iTunes and Zen Xtra and Windows… Oh my!At home, on my PowerBook, I happily plug my Creative Nomad Zen Xtra in and iTunes picks it up as a device that I can work with; playing music from it and putting new music onto it. However, at work, where I am chained to a Windows machine, the same functionality isn't available. Does anyone know of a plugin for iTunes on Windows which will allow me this functionality? If not, I'm stuck with WinAmp Pro which is frankly, still a cooler multimedia player than iTunes (except for Smart Playlists, which are by far the best feature of iTunes).
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01.28.06The 4200My mp3 library of around 6700 tracks sits on a mini-NAS attached to a router on my home network. Since I got my Powerbook, I've used iTunes to manage and listen to this music; having been a die-hard Winamp user previously (it's still the best music software for Windows). On the Powerbook, every track is found and presented in iTunes, yet on the Windows machine we have, iTunes finds and presents just 4200 tracks. It simply will not detect any more... Is this a known bug? Any ideas?
