Category: Apple

audiobooks, comics, and iOS apps

It looks like we’re right in the middle of our second wave here in NJ. There are a few bright spots, but I think, overall, it’ll get worse before it gets better. So… happy Thanksgiving, I guess?

I spent my Thanksgiving alone in my apartment, but I probably would have done that this year, even if we weren’t in the middle of a pandemic. I also spent Black Friday alone in my apartment, and will likely be spending today and tomorrow home alone too. If the pandemic was over, I’d probably have gone into NYC at some point this weekend, but that’s out of the question now. So I’m definitely feeling a bit of cabin fever. But I’ll get through it.

I managed to get the Audible app on my iPhone working, somehow. After last week’s trouble, I’d pretty much given up on it, but I decided to take another shot. I don’t really know what I did to get it to work, but, well, it’s working now. Though I should say that I haven’t actually tried to listen to anything yet, so I don’t really know if that’ll work. But at least I can launch the app and poke around in it without having it crash.

And I still haven’t decided what I want to listen to next. I started listening to a BBC adaptation of War and Peace some time ago, and I should probably get back to that and finish it, but I haven’t been in the mood for anything like that. I should probably listen to one of the Big Finish Doctor Who audio dramas instead. (Neither of those requires Audible, though, and I’d like to find out if the Audible app is really fixed or not, so I may try something from my Audible library instead.)

Meanwhile, on my iPad, I wanted to read a comic last night and tried to launch Comic Zeal, which is the iOS app i use for reading DRM-free comics. It crashed as soon as I opened it, and I couldn’t find any way to get it to work. I didn’t want to delete and reinstall it, since that would also remove the 4 GB worth of comics that I had loaded in to it. Comic Zeal hasn’t been updated in about four years, so I’ve been expecting that it would eventually stop working. I assumed that iOS 14 had finally killed it. But, then, after deleting it and reinstalling it, it does seem to work again. Of course, that killed all the comics I had in there, so I decided that maybe I should just try another app.

I’d picked up iComics at some point, when it was on sale or something, maybe last year, but hadn’t tried it out at all. I looked at the app store, and I saw that it was updated to work with iOS 14 a couple of months ago, so that seemed like a good bet. So I’m going to try to switch over to that. Dealing with situations like this always reminds me of how annoyed I am about the file system on iOS. On a normal computer, I would have been able to just drag and drop the files from Comic Zeal over to iComics. But, with iOS, if you can’t launch an app, then there’s really no way to get to that app’s files. So I had to go through the work of figuring out where the CBZ files were for the comics I wanted to load, pull them down from OneDrive to my Mac, then copy them over to the iPad. That took quite a while.

One nice thing about iComics over Comic Zeal is that it exposes its files via the Files app, so I think that means that I could access them even if I couldn’t launch the app. I’ve played around with iComics a bit now, and I think it’s good enough for me, but it definitely doesn’t have all the bells and whistles that Comic Zeal had. It’s a shame that the developer on that one seems to have given up on it.

I see that the developer for iComics started working on a new version in January of this year. But, of course the pandemic (and other stuff) got in the way, per this blog post from mid-year. He just posted a personal update a few days ago, coincidentally. He’s only written three blog posts this year, but they’re pretty lengthy and interesting. I, on the other hand, have written 93 posts so far this year, according to my stats. And most of them are probably dumb and boring. But that’s OK.

So, anyway, I guess I’ve got my audiobook and comic book situations figured out for now, so if I’m in the mood to listen/read this weekend, I’ll actually be able to do that. I have no clue what I really want to do for the rest of the weekend, though. I was pretty restless yesterday, for a while, and couldn’t decide what to do with myself, and started to get a bit annoyed with myself. Then, I didn’t sleep well last night. I guess I’ll get something for lunch soon. After that, maybe I’ll try to settle down and read something. Or take a walk. Or a nap. I guess it’s good that I have options.

audiobook management madness

Since I recently finished listening to Invisible Man, I thought I’d look into starting a new audiobook. I blogged about my issues with Invisible Man here. In a nutshell: it’s an Audible book, but I couldn’t get the Audible iOS app to work. I wound up listening to it through the Kindle iOS app, which was workable, but not great.

I have a pretty random collection of audiobooks. Some are from Audible, some are from Apple, and some are DRM-free books that I’ve gotten from Humble Bundles, or ripped from CD, or whatever. In trying to organize things a bit today, I wound up stumbling across a number of different issues, so I thought I’d write up some notes.

I started out by trying to get a handle on which audiobooks I have, which I’ve already read, and where they are. I have some notes about that in Evernote, but they were a little out of date. So I pulled up the Books app on my Mac to see what was in there.

I already vaguely knew that, in Catalina, books and audiobooks had been moved out of iTunes (obviously, since iTunes is no more), and into Books, but I guess I hadn’t looked at it too closely and realized how clunky that was and how much functionality has gone missing. First of all, the books are now stored in “~/Library/Containers/com.apple.BKAgentService/Data/Documents/iBooks/Books”. And there’s no right-click “Show in Finder” option like there used to be in iTunes. So finding the actual book files isn’t easy. And the folder doesn’t retain user-friendly names for the books; it just uses numbered folders. So that’s all a bit annoying. And, beyond that, there’s no ability to edit metadata for your books in the Books app the way there was in iTunes. So, overall, I guess Books is OK if you’re only using it to manage books/audiobooks bought from Apple. But if you’re trying to use it to manage random DRM-free files, it’s not optimal. So I spent some time puzzling through that, and realizing that there really isn’t a better alternative for managing audiobooks on the Mac.

I was also wondering if, now that I’m in Apple Music, there was a way to sync my audiobooks up to the cloud the way it works with Music. If I could do that, I’d be pretty close to having no further need to sync my iPhone to my Mac. But there’s really no way to do that. You still need to sync books to your iPhone the old-fashioned way. (That doesn’t really bother me too much, but if you’re going to push everybody to the cloud, maybe add that functionality to the Books app too?)

So, overall, Books on macOS was a bit of a disappointment, but I cleaned things up a little, updated my Evernote notes, and removed a few completed books from my iPhone.

Then, I went over to my PC to see what my iTunes audiobook library looked like over there. Apple hasn’t done much with iTunes on the PC lately, so the audiobook stuff still works fine. I did find one book that somehow accidentally migrated into my music collection, but I got it back into the audiobook section, and everything else seems fine.

Next, I decided to try installing the Audible app on my iPhone again, and see if the issue I was having back in July had sorted itself out yet. And the answer is: nope. I can get as far as launching the app and signing in, but then it just spins for a few seconds and crashes. It’s actually even worse that it was back in July. I tried a few hints and tips I saw online, like trying to launch it with wi-fi turned off, but nothing helped. The app just crashes, no matter what I do. The whole thing is kind of puzzling. There have been a bunch of updates to the Audible app between July and now, so if it was a common bug, they’d have fixed it. And I’ve updated from iOS 13 to iOS 14 since then, so if it was an iOS bug, you’d think that would have been fixed too.

I’ve got some stuff bookmarked related to the idea of keeping audiobooks in Plex and listening to them with an app called Prologue. It sounds promising, but I’m not ready to start messing with Plex again. It would only be useful for the DRM-free stuff, and not for stuff bought through Apple or Audible (unless I stripped the DRM, which is yet another step to go through).

So, around two hours after I started, I still haven’t picked out a new audiobook to start, and I’m more annoyed and depressed about the state of audiobook management and playback on the Mac and iOS that I was to begin with. Oh well.

 

sick again

So in yesterday’s post, where I was talking about all the stuff I did on Saturday, I said “I’m hoping that doesn’t result in me getting another cold, or even worse.” Well… I started feeling like I was getting a sore throat last night, and this morning I had all my usual cold symptoms: sore throat, headache, and low energy. This is, I guess, the third cold I’ve had so far this season. It seems like any time I leave my bubble for any activities that involve moderate human contact, I get sick. I got sick pretty frequently before the pandemic, but I was kind of hoping that all of the mask wearing and social distancing would keep me healthier this year. I guess it did, up to a point, but now, it seems like I’m getting sick every other week. Oh well.

Back on the subject of my new Apple Watch: I’m fairly disappointed with the handwashing feature. I had it enabled over the weekend, but I’ve turned it off now. It had a tendency to get activated every time I was washing dishes in my kitchen, but only sporadically when I was actually washing my hands in the bathroom. I think that might be due to the noise from my bathroom fan. It’s pretty noisy, and I can’t turn it off without also turning off the light. And I guess there’s no easy way for the watch to distinguish between washing out a coffee mug and washing my hands. (I guess I could also commit to always washing my coffee cup for at least 20 seconds.) Other than that, it’s a great watch and I like it a lot.

I have a few random articles bookmarked that I kind of wanted to link to and blog about, but I’m too tired now to do that. I’m hoping I can get through this cold without taking yet another day off from work, but I will if I have to. I still have a few days to burn before the end of the year.

A Weird Week

Well, that was a weird week, wasn’t it? In addition to the election, I was supposed to go back into the office last week, on Thursday. The plan was for normal employees to start coming back one day a week. But we had a couple of COVID cases at the office, plus with New Jersey’s increasing number of cases overall, that plan got altered, so now I can continue working from home for the foreseeable future. So that’s good, I guess. (I mean, it would better if we didn’t have any cases at the office, and if NJ overall was doing better, but given the circumstances, I’m glad the company adjusted the plan.)

The big news this week of course is Biden being declared the winner over Trump, finally, yesterday. A lot of people were very happy about that, judging by my Twitter and Facebook feeds, and also judging by some of the activity out on Main St yesterday. I’m glad, and relieved, but only just barely optimistic. (I could probably write at length about that, but I probably shouldn’t. Let’s just say that a lot can still go wrong, and that a lot needs to be done before we can get back to anything resembling normal.)

It was a beautiful day yesterday, which probably helped everyone’s mood. A lot of people were out on Main St., and there was a lot of music and noise on and off throughout the day. (The annoying guy who plays saxophone outside my apartment was back yesterday, and played until after 10 PM, so that kind of sucked, but I guess I can’t blame him for trying to make some money while the weather was nice and everyone was happy.)

My friend Paul stopped by yesterday, and we went out for dinner, eating outside at a Korean restaurant on Main St. That was the first time I’ve eaten at a restaurant since the pandemic began. It was pretty weird, but it felt really good to do it.

I also ordered a new Apple Watch this week, and picked it up at the Apple Store at the local mall yesterday. I’d been thinking about getting one, and finally talked myself into it. I bought a new Series 6, to replace my Series 3. I got the Series 3 a little less than two years ago, for Christmas in 2018. So I feel a little bad about replacing it when it’s less than two years old. But, still, I’ve skipped the 4 and 5, so it’s a big enough jump that I don’t feel too bad about it. I’ll probably post more about the Watch later, after I’ve had it on my wrist for long enough to form some opinions.

Overall, yesterday turned out to be a fairly hectic day, with much more time spent outside the apartment than usual, and a lot more human contact than usual. I’m hoping that doesn’t result in me getting another cold, or even worse. We’ll see. My plans for today are not terribly ambitious. It looks like it’ll be another nice day, so I will probably go for a walk after I’m done with this blog post. Then maybe I’ll just relax and do some reading, and maybe watch a movie.

Evernote, and Apple, and other stuff

In my last post, I mentioned that I had not yet upgraded to the new version of Evernote on iOS, Windows, or Mac, nor had I been prompted to upgrade. Yesterday, the iOS client got pushed down to my iPhone. And I was prompted on my PC to upgrade to the new Windows client. (I skipped that and stuck with the old version for now.)

The iOS client is fine. I don’t have any issues with it. It looks good, and it’s no less functional than the old client, as far as I can tell. It’s not particularly fast, but neither was the old iOS client. So I went ahead and updated it on my iPad too. It works fine there. So no problems with iOS.

For Windows, I decided to upgrade it on my Lenovo laptop and play with it a bit. I’ve honestly barely used that laptop since I bought it back in June. So it seemed like a good place to try out the Windows client without having to worry about messing up my regular setup. The new client works fine, and I think I like a few things about it more than the old client, but I’d need to work with it some more to be sure. It seems to be a little slower than the old Windows client. And the font looks a little weird, but that might just be that I need to tweak the display settings on the laptop. There’s a dark mode, and I’ve found that it works better for me than the light mode. Overall, it definitely seems to be less configurable than the old version, but there’s nothing in particular that I want to change, and can’t.

On another subject: I’ve upgraded both my iPhone and iPad to iOS 14. I waited for 14.1 to come out before upgrading. I’ve had no issues on either the iPhone or iPad. I’ve messed around with widgets a bit, but I haven’t gone nuts with them. For now, I’m just leaving them on their own screen. There’s not much else in iOS 14 that I’m really interested in, but I do want to try out the “headphone accommodations” feature at some point, given that I’m partially deaf in my left ear, but have (fairly) normal hearing in my right ear. Maybe it’ll help.

Upgrading the iPhone triggered the notice to upgrade my Watch to watchOS 7. That turned out to be quite a problem. The update needed 3.1 GB of free space, and I didn’t have that much. In the past, rebooting the watch would often clear enough space to run an update, but this time I had to go as far as un-pairing and re-pairing it. That basically wipes it and leaves you with a fresh OS install, so I then had to go back and reinstall apps and redo my watch face customizations and reset all my preferred options. And it turns out that watchOS 7 doesn’t really do much for you if you have a Series 3 watch, like I do. I was hoping for at least the handwashing timer, but you need a Series 4 for that.

So that’s got me thinking about picking up a new watch. And, of course, with the iPhone 12 out, I’m a little tempted to trade in my phone too. Both my phone and watch are a little less than two years old, and I like to hold on to these things for three years minimum, if I can. So I probably shouldn’t be thinking about buying new Apple gear. But, hey, in a year when I couldn’t travel at all and haven’t had to spend hardly any money on gas or car maintenance, why not blow a few bucks on unnecessary Apple hardware?

And on one last Apple-related note: I got a lot of enjoyment out of my Apple Music subscription today. The new Bruce Springsteen album came out, and I listened to that twice. And there’s a video interview with Bruce that I watched. (Or mostly just listened to, since I was working at the time.) And a new Jeff Tweedy album came out today, so I listened to that too. And I discovered the “My New Music” mix today. Apple already knows enough about my musical taste to put together a pretty good mix, including new AC/DC, Elvis Costello, John Cale, Pixies, and Bob Mould. So I’m feeling pretty good about Apple Music right now.

Evernote changes

Evernote has been going through some changes lately. They’ve introduced new client software for iOS, Windows, and Mac. I haven’t updated to any of the new programs yet though. I assume the iOS one will get pushed down automatically at some point. For the Windows and Mac clients, I don’t think they’re pushing them out automatically, so I can probably keep using the old software until they’ve worked out the bugs in the new stuff.

The new Windows and Mac clients have gotten a lot of bad reviews, from what I’m seeing on reddit and elsewhere, so I’m a little afraid to try them. I’ve been actively using Evernote since 2014, and I’ve got a lot of notes in there. I realize that the folks complaining on reddit are probably a small subset of total Evernote users, and the new clients are probably fine, but I want to be careful.

Evernote’s CEO, Ian Small, has been doing a bunch of interviews with productivity YouTubers recently, to promote the new clients and to answer questions and concerns about Evernote’s direction. Here are links to three recent interviews:

It’s kind of interesting to see how much effort he’s putting into this, and how he’s approaching it. Evernote is big enough that he could probably be giving interviews to (for lack of a better term) more mainstream tech journalists, but he’s going with random productivity YouTubers instead. It seems like he’s trying to really reach out to the serious productivity nerds.

One thing he’s had to defend is his choice to rewrite the clients in Java Script, using Electron. That’s actually a pretty safe choice for a cross-platform app right now, but it does leave you with an app that’s probably going to be slower than an app written in, say, C# on Windows or Swift on Mac, using native libraries on each platform. But Electron apps don’t have to be slow.

With all the uncertainty around Evernote, I spent a little time recently looking at the possibility of moving to OneNote. Microsoft has an importer that you can use to make the move. I haven’t tried it, but it’s good to know that it exists. I use OneNote at work (since that’s our standard), and it’s fine, but I like Evernote a lot more.

So hopefully, they’ll keep iterating on the Windows and Mac clients, and by the time I switch over to them, they’ll be fast and reliable.

still fiddling with Apple Music

I spent some more time today fiddling with Apple Music. (I may have even let myself get a little too distracted from work today. I’ll have to be more careful tomorrow.)

I noticed this article on MacRumors, about Disney adding some new content to Apple Music. And I remembered that I’d added the Legacy Collection version of the Fantasia soundtrack to my Amazon wish list some time ago. It’s a 4 CD version of the soundtrack. It’s actually not that expensive, only $20 from Amazon, but I’d never gotten around to ordering it. So I checked Apple Music, and it’s up there. So I started my work day listening to that.

Later, I started messing around a bit with the idea of replacing some old purchased and matched tracks with higher bitrate versions from Apple. I’d read this article some time ago, and found it again today, and thought it’d be fun to try it out. My first attempt was a bust. I had purchased the original version of the Allman Brothers At Fillmore East album years ago, from iTunes. So the files on my hard drive were .m4p files, encoded at a relatively low bitrate. So my hope was that I could replace them with 256k .m4a files. Long story short, I managed to accidentally delete them from my library, rather than just from my hard drive, and that apparently removes even the entry for the album in your purchase history. So that didn’t work out so well. But I had the original files backed up, so I just put them back. Meanwhile, I looked around in Apple Music, and I see that there’s a 2 CD deluxe edition, and a 6 CD super deluxe edition too. So I added the 2 CD version to my library and decided not to worry about the old one. (I might look at the 6 CD version at some point, but I don’t really need six hours of Allman Brothers right now.)

My second try worked out a bit better. I had an old Afro Celt Sound System album that I’d ripped a long time ago, at a low bitrate. All the songs on it had matched, so I went ahead and deleted them (from my drive this time, and not from my library), and re-downloaded them. Now I have a good 256k, DRM-free, version of it. I might have some more albums I could try that on, but I’m not sure it’s worth the effort.

One more thing I messed around with today was poking through my old iTunes wish list and seeing if anything on it was available in Apple Music. I hadn’t added anything to that wish list in a long time, but there were a few interesting things on there. One big one was Itzhak Perlman – The Complete Warner Recordings 1972 – 1980. I’m not even sure how many CDs that would be, but it’s 23 hours of music. And I see they also have his complete recordings for 1980 – 2002, which is another 44 hours of stuff! I didn’t add either of those to my library yet, but I’ve bookmarked them for the next time I’m on a big Itzhak Perlman kick.

And one very little thing I had on my wish list was the song Heart Grenade by Sean Lennon and Cornelius. It’s used over the end credits for the anime series Ghost in the Shell: Arise, and it’s just a great song. Unfortunately, while it’s available in iTunes to buy for $1.29, it’s not in Apple Music. I found that to be true for a few other oddball songs and albums I tried. Oh well, I guess you can’t get everything for $10/month. Anyway, when I want to listen to Heart Grenade, I can just find it on YouTube. Though maybe I should go ahead and shell out that $1.29.

So, yeah, I need to rein in my natural tendency to start poking around too much during the work day. Maybe I should listen to Ludovico Einaudi’s Seven Days Walking tomorrow, and just stick with that. That’s long enough to fill almost an entire work day, so if I can just commit to that, maybe I can avoid getting too distracted from work.

Con crud, NYCC, Picard, Apple Music, and other distractions

One of the good things about a virtual con is that it should be impossible to get the con crud when you don’t leave your apartment. But after NYCC last weekend, I woke up on Monday feeling pretty bad. I guess I caught a cold at some point over the weekend. I probably picked it up while out grocery shopping. So I was nursing a cold through the first half of the work week, and eventually gave up and took a half-day on Wednesday to rest. It seems like taking time off for a cold shouldn’t be necessary if you’re just working from home anyway, but taking an afternoon off to nap and listen to podcasts did help.

I may watch some panels from Baltimore Comic Con next weekend. They’re supposed to be streaming their panels live, unlike SDCC and NYCC, where most panels were prerecorded, and they have some interesting stuff on their schedule. Also, unlike SDCC and NYCC, nearly all of the panels are actually about comics books! (I’m not knocking SDCC or NYCC. They both did great jobs of putting on a fun virtual event on short notice.)

I’ve been continuing to overdo it on Picard, as I mentioned last weekend. I’ve now watched all the episodes of season one, all the Ready Room episodes, all of the extras on the Blu-ray discs, and listened to about half of the Greatest Discovery podcasts. I also watched the “Trek the Vote to Victory” Biden fundraiser event on Tuesday night, which was a lot of fun, and included a number of the Picard actors, including Patrick Stewart. I guess I’m almost done with Picard for now, though I may keep going through those podcasts. They’re enjoyable, though I’m falling behind in all my other podcasts.

In my continuing quest to lose myself in diverting entertainment, I watched Weathering With You last night. It was almost as good as Your Name, though I think the general consensus is that it’s not quite as good. (Your Name has a 98% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, while Weathering With You has 91%.) For me, Makoto Shinkai still isn’t up there with Miyazaki or Satoshi Kon, but he’s pretty good. I have thoughts about Weathering With You, but they’re not terribly well-organized yet. In some ways, it follows a lot of pretty standard anime tropes, but it makes some really weird decisions along the way, and I’m not sure what kind of conclusions I should draw about those. I’m pretty sure that trying to analyze this movie too literally would be a mistake though.

And I’m continuing to play around with Apple Music. I think I’ve got my library in pretty good shape now. Everything on my PC and Mac has been either matched or uploaded. My iTunes/Music library now says that I’ve got 14,000 items taking up 95 GB. I guess that’s now showing the total size of everything in the cloud. I wish there was an easy way to see how much you have in the cloud vs local from within Music/iTunes, but you need to go into Finder/Explorer to do that. I still have about 44 GB on my Mac. At some point, I think I’ll start deleting stuff from my local library there, and just rely on streaming on the Mac. I’ll keep local copies of everything on my PC, in case I decide to discontinue Apple Music.

I spent a lot of time yesterday fiddling with my library, trying stuff out, and moving stuff around. I found that a lot of the stuff I bought via iTunes back in the early days confused Apple Music a bit. I had to delete some old files and replace them with new ones. And a bunch of files with weird characters in their file names needed to be cleaned up too. (Those might already have been broken, and I just hadn’t noticed before.)

Streaming from Apple Music to my Sonos works pretty well. I’m currently listening to Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde on the Sonos, and it sounds pretty good. This is a version that I ripped from CD and that isn’t available in Apple Music, so I guess I’m just listening to my own ripped version, but streaming from Apple’s servers. I’m curious about how that stuff works. How many other Apple Music subscribers have ripped that particular CD set? Any, or is it just me? If so, does Apple keep all the individual rips, or do they just point to a common base set? If two people encode different rips of the same album, at different bit rates, can Apple tell that they’re the same work, and just keep whichever one is the best rip? If I were to re-rip some of my old stuff to lossless, then re-match it in Apple Music, would Apple keep and stream my lossless files? Or would that be pointless? I’m probably spending too much time overthinking this stuff.

The general theme of this blog post, and honestly about 90% of my recent blog posts, has been distraction and self-absorption, generally in stuff that doesn’t much matter. But I think that’s OK. I voted. I’m supporting charitable (and political) causes that I care about. I’m staying informed on current events. I’m wearing my mask. And I’m showing up to work every day and doing my best. If I want to spend my Sunday morning thinking about doing a lossless re-rip of all my opera CDs, that’s fine!

Apple Music

I finally broke down and signed up for Apple Music today. I’ve been waffling back and forth as to whether or not to sign up for a streaming music service, and if so, which one, for some time now. The straw that broke the camel’s back was, I guess, a combination of a six month free deal that I got by signing up via Shazam, along with a desire to listen to the new Tom Petty Wildflowers reissue that came out today, plus a dash of good old boredom and restlessness.

The six month free deal is something that they did last year, around the holidays, and I guess they’re doing it again. I happened to be using Shazam recently and noticed it. The Tom Petty Wildflowers & All The Rest release is available as a 2 CD set for $20, a 4 CD set for $50, or a 5 CD “super deluxe” set for $150, if you buy it through the Tom Petty web site. Apple Music has the whole Super Deluxe version (though obviously just the music and not the extra stuff). And, yeah, I guess just general boredom and restlessness occasionally causes me to decide to sign up for something new that I probably don’t need.

I’m looking back through my blog, and I see that I bought my first song from iTunes in 2003. (I just checked, and that song is still in my library.) Apple Music has been around since 2015, and I blogged about it when it was first announced. At that time, I didn’t think I’d ever sign up for it. And I’ve been thinking about (and blogging about) streaming music a lot over the last year or two. (Here are three posts from 2019, from March, June, and November.)

I’ve been buying a fair amount of my music from Bandcamp this year, and I feel pretty good about that. I know that a reasonable amount of the money that I spend there makes its way back to the artists. But, for stuff like Tom Petty, or Bruce Springsteen, or for albums that I’m just curious about and want to listen to once or twice, I think Apple Music is a perfectly reasonable solution.

So, now, I might as well write up some notes on the process of pulling my giant music collection into Apple Music and letting it match stuff. I did that on the PC first, and it took about two hours to crunch through everything. (Though I think it’s still not actually completely done.) When Apple Music first came out, there was a lot of talk about it screwing up people’s local music libraries. I don’t think it does that anymore (if it ever really did), but it does definitely confuse things a bit, in some cases. (To be fair, my library might have already been a little messed up, and turning on the Apple Music sync may have just made existing issues more obvious.)

I have about 14,000 songs in my library, on my PC, taking up about 87 GB of space. When you first go into iTunes, after signing up for Apple Music, you get a prompt asking if you want to enable iCloud Music library. If you say yes, then it starts analyzing your library, matching songs with their cloud library, and uploading stuff they can’t find. You can get an idea of what’s going on there by adding the “iCloud Status” column to your “Songs” view. The values for that are (mostly) explained in this support document. I had a bunch of songs showing “Error”, which I managed to mostly clean up. Most songs were “Matched” or “Uploaded”. A bunch still say “Waiting” on them, which I guess means that they didn’t finish matching. I think I may have start another update (via File > Library > Update Cloud Music Library) to fix that. (I did that just now, and it’s crunching through about 3500 songs.)

I keep about half of my music library (about 44 GB) on my MacBook also, and I turned on the sync there too. That went faster and had fewer errors. I may at some point delete a lot of my music files from my Mac, and just stream them from the cloud. That would help clear some space on my hard drive, which is always a little cramped.

And I’m thinking about turning off music sync between my Mac and my iPhone. Right now, I selectively sync stuff to the phone that I want to be able to listen to offline. Of course, right now, I barely leave my apartment, so I don’t really need to listen to stuff offline that often. When I do, I can just download it from the cloud right from the phone. So I think I may just start managing things that way.

Another nice side-effect of having Apple Music is that I’ve connected my account to my Sonos, so I can now easily listen to anything in my library without jumping through some of the hoops that I have to jump through now.

My previous workflow for getting music into my “system” if, for instance, I bought a new CD, was generally: (1) rip the CD on my PC, (2) copy the MP3s to my Mac, (3) also copy them to my Volumio box, and (4) sync them down to my phone. Now I can just skip most of that and just add albums in Apple Music and listen to them wherever I want. I guess it takes some of the fun out of it, but it’ll be a little easier to manage.

So, yeah, I guess I’ve finally given in. I’m going to try to get comfortable with this whole “not owning my music” thing. I’m still not ready to give up my physical CD collection yet though. I probably should give it up, but… I guess that’s a step too far. (Old dogs, new tricks, and all that.)

COVID Alert NJ

I installed the new COVID Alert NJ app on my iPhone today. It’s been more than six months since the pandemic started, but hey, better late than never, I guess. NJ.com and NJTV have articles about the app, and ABC 7 has a write-up on New York’s app, which is basically the same as the NJ app, but with a different color scheme (purple vs. blue). The first state to release an app using the new Apple/Google API was apparently Virginia, which released their app in early August.

NJ’s app was apparently created by an Irish company, because I guess they couldn’t find any competent software developers in NJ. (I kid. There are plenty of competent developers in NJ, but we’re slow and expensive.) The company is called NearForm. They started with the app for Ireland, I think, then started rebranding and customizing it for other countries and for several US states.

I found a Guardian article from a few months ago indicating the the Ireland app had over a million installs at that time. NJ’s app is currently at just under 35,000 installs, according to the app itself. (I’m not sure if that’s just the iOS app or combined iOS/Android.)

The tech behind these apps is kind of interesting. Here’s a write-up on it, from Apple’s web site, and one from Google. This stuff is helpful, but only if they can get a lot of people to install the app and enable it. And, well, we know how much all the other stuff that only works if we all do it is working out here in the USA…