Category: music

iTunes vs Swinsian

My nit-picking complaints about iTunes 12.7 (see here and here) have led me to start experimenting with Swinsian (on my Mac) and MediaMonkey (on my PC). I’ll get to MediaMonkey in a later post, but I thought I’d write up some notes on Swinsian.

As you can see in the screenshots below, Swinsian does fix my current gripe with iTunes: the browser at the top of the window shows a perfectly reasonable number of rows, by default (vs. iTunes: 3 rows). That browser is also very customizable in Swinsian: you can have between 1 and 3 columns, and you have several options as to what you display in them. The screenshot below shows two columns, for artist and album. You can easily change that to show genre, artist, and album, similar to iTunes.

Another thing I appreciate is that Swinsian has a “large text” option. The default text size was a little too small for my tired old eyes, so I turned that on right away.

Pulling in my music from iTunes to Swinsian was easy. It imported everything, including play counts and playlists. There are a few ways you can set things up, but (for now) I’m leaving my music in the iTunes library and folder structure, and letting Swinsian re-scan the library on startup. This allows me to add music in iTunes, which should then show up in Swinsian the next time I start it up. That arrangement probably makes the most sense for someone like me, since I still want to be able to sync music to my phone from iTunes. (Swinsian can sync to older iPods, but not to iOS devices.)

I only have a few issues with Swinsian, and they’re mostly related to the necessity to keep iTunes going. (If I could abandon iTunes and let Swinsian manage all my music, things would be smoother.) Probably the biggest one right now is that Swinsian doesn’t really distinguish audiobooks as a separate category, the way iTunes does. So all of my audiobooks are intermixed with my music. I’m not sure how to get around that one, or if it’s really that big a deal. If I was fully committing to Swinsian, I’d just leave the audiobooks in iTunes and move the music to Swinsian, and everything would be fine.

I’m also not sure that I like the way it handles “album artists” vs “artists”. It’s got some flexibility on that, but it’s not completely consistent. You can see the issue on the McCartney box set shown in the screenshots below. In iTunes, the track list correctly shows the track artist (sometimes McCartney, sometimes Wings), while in Swinsian, it’s always showing the album artist in the track list (though it does show the correct artist in the detail pane on the right). That’s not really a big deal, but it would be nice if they fixed that.

Going back to my gripe about the top browser view in iTunes, I found a discussion thread related to it on the Apple site today. It kind of sounds like they might recognize it as a bug and fix it in the next release. Here’s hoping!

Equifax, iTunes, and some alternatives

There are a number of links I could post as follow-ups to my post on Equifax, but I’ll stick with just one: You Can’t Protect Yourself from the Equifax Breach, from TidBITS. The headline pretty much sums things up.

And an unrelated article from TidBITS on iTunes 12.7. Everybody is talking about removing support for apps and ringtones, but nobody is talking about the annoying change to the genre/artist/album browser in the “songs” view, which I mentioned in a previous post. Since then, I’ve found that it’s happening in both the Windows and Mac versions of iTunes, so that pretty much confirms that it’s intentional, rather than a bug. (And I guess it doesn’t bother everyone else as much as it bothers me…)

This one little thing is finally pushing me to seriously consider iTunes alternatives. Which got me thinking about what my use case is for iTunes these days anyway, and how I could maybe rethink and rearrange things.

First, I do rely on iTunes on my Mac to sync my iPhone and iPad. It’s still useful to backup those devices, and to sync down a subset of my music library, some audiobooks, and other stuff. So I’ll definitely keep it around for that. I use it occasionally to listen to music or watch videos, but not that often really. I could consider installing a secondary app for playing music and managing my music library, like Swinsian, but it’s not really necessary.

On the PC, I keep what I consider my “master” music library in iTunes. It’s around 67 GB right now. (And the “TV Shows” folder in iTunes is 340 GB, while the Movies folder is 21 GB.) The Windows version of iTunes, for me, is slow to start up and a bit sluggish in general. Aside from using it to keep my music library organized, I also use it to play music (but only occasionally), rip CDs, and burn CDs. I rarely use it to watch video content; I generally use the Apple TV for that.

So I’m thinking about a few things on the PC side. First, I can probably just delete all the TV shows and movies in my iTunes library, if I want to clear up some disk space. In the old days, you needed to have a local copy of a video file to watch it. Now (for iTunes content) you can just stream it from the cloud to your Apple TV, and it’s fine. Second, I could probably remove some of the music from my iTunes library if I wanted to get that down to a more manageable size. I have a bunch of old tracks from these giant SXSW torrents that they used to do (about 3 GB from 2005 and 6 GB from 2009). It’s cool to have all those random tracks in my library, but it does make it a little harder to find the music that I’ve actually bought and paid for. So maybe cleaning up TV, movies, and some old music would help speed up iTunes.

Beyond that, if I want to try a different software program to manage my music on Windows, I could look at MediaMonkey, which comes in free and paid versions. It handles a lot of the stuff I need to do, like ripping and burning CDs, in addition to the main task of organizing and playing music. Or there’s MusicBee, which is free, and handles many of the same things as MediaMonkey (with the exception of CD burning). Or Clementine, which is free and cross-platform (but doesn’t have CD ripping or burning, as far as I can tell).

So MediaMonkey is probably my best bet. From what I’ve read, I can try that out without screwing up my iTunes setup at all, so maybe I’ll do that and see how it goes.

 

Paul McCartney, one more time

I went to see Paul McCartney last night at the Prudential Center in Newark. This was the fifth time I’ve seen him live (see here for a list of previous concerts). I bailed out early, so I could make the 11pm train back home. I guess there was a time when I would have stayed through the whole thing, taken the 12:30am train, and still made it to work the next day, but that’s not how my body works these days. (In fact, I’m pretty sure I’m going to be in some pain at work today…)

Looking at this set list, I see that I bailed out near the very end of the main set. Staying for the encore would have been cool, but I don’t see anything there that I haven’t heard live before.

The last time I saw McCartney (just last year), I assumed it was probably the last time I’d see him live. So I don’t want to say that this was the last time I’ll see him live. But it probably was. He’s got to stop touring at some point, right? I mean, Sgt Pepper came out fifty years ago! Honestly though, I think I’ll be too old to get out and see him before he’s too old to get on stage and play for three straight hours.

Stuff I wanted to mention

There are a number of things I kind of wanted to mention on this blog, but that I probably don’t have enough to say about to warrant a full post. And they’re piling up in my brain, so I want to jot them all down, then maybe I can relax a bit.

First, today is the 80th birthday of Sergio Aragonés. I’m having a hard time accepting that he’s 80. I know he’s older than me, but the last time I saw him, I wouldn’t have guessed that he was over 60 yet, and that wasn’t that long ago. (OK, maybe it was five or ten years ago, but still…) Anyway, I have a bunch of his comics in my “to be read” pile right now, including a Groo mini-series, some of the Sergio Aragonés Funnies series, and a few issues of Bat Lash. I should really read some of those.

Next, I have started getting into Pere Ubu again for some reason. Probably because they have a new studio album coming out, so I must have seem something about that, which triggered me to start thinking about them again. I spent a little time tonight digging up my old Pere Ubu CDs are ripping them to MP3. I have five of their CDs, which is a decent sample of their output, but not nearly everything. (They’ve been around since the 70s.) Their web site is a lot of fun to browse through. It’s mostly text, not the usual graphics-heavy band site. The organization is somewhat idiosyncratic, but there’s a lot there.

And a couple of recent deaths: First, John Ashbery. I first read him back in college, as assigned reading for a creative writing class (I think). He’s one of the few poets I’ve read who has stuck with me. I’ve been thinking that I should read more poetry. And there’s certainly a lot of Ashbery poems out there that I haven’t read yet, so maybe I should start with some of those.

Second, Holger Czukay. I’m not sure where I first learned about him, but it was probably in a Matt Howarth comic book. I don’t actually own much (or any?) of his recorded output, as part of Can or elsewhere. I should fix that.

Voyager Golden Record

I was just watching a documentary on PBS about Voyager, and the bit about the golden record that was placed on Voyager got me thinking. I wondered if the audio from that record was available online somewhere. Well, it turns out that someone just did a Kickstarter to produce a fancy new version of the record. I really don’t want the fancy $100 box set, but maybe I’ll pop for the $15 digital download via Bandcamp.

It’s Voyager’s fortieth anniversary, hence the new documentary and the record Kickstarter. Also, there’s an article in The New Yorker about the record that looks interesting (though I haven’t read it yet). And, now that I’m looking, I see that there’s a slideshow article about Voyager’s 40th anniversary at The Atlantic site, and a recent article from the NY Times too.

I need to set up my TiVo to record the next showing of the PBS documentary, since I came in to it late, and I’m not going to stay up until 11pm tonight to watch the rest of it. So maybe I can watch the whole thing over the weekend.

total solar eclipse

I didn’t do anything really special for yesterday’s total solar eclipse, but I did get outside and take a quick look at it (using a pair of glasses I got from a friend). NASA has a good website up about the eclipse. And they have a nice photo group on Flickr, with user-submitted photos and their own photos.

I also like the idea of listening to some eclipse-related music. Mogwai’s new album, Every Country’s Sun, seems to be vaguely eclipse-related, based on the cover art. (But the full album isn’t out yet.) And Motion Sickness of Time Travel have released a track called Totality, which is obviously eclipse-inspired.

And I watched about half of the NOVA episode on the eclipse last night. (I would have watched the whole thing, but it got pushed back due to Trump’s speech, so it ran past my bedtime.) (Yes, I’m old, and I go to bed at 10pm.)

I feel like I probably would have been a lot more into this thing if it happened ten or fifteen years ago, when I was younger and more energetic (and could stay awake past 10pm). Maybe I would even have traveled somewhere in the path of totality and really had some fun.

Promised You a Miracle

I’m still working on the JavaScript project that I mentioned last week. I think I’ve nearly got promises figured out now. I’ve switched from using jQuery’s promises to using Q. I’m definitely doing enough weird stuff that the jQuery promise support was never going to work for me.

The documentation for Q isn’t bad. There’s a page on moving to Q from jQuery, and that was helpful, as is the API reference page.

This blog post on promise anti-patterns helped me figure out how to handle collections of promises. Q.all() and Q.allSettled() are very useful, once you figure them out. I get the feeling that, while my code works, I’ve probably still got a lot of anti-patterns in there, or at least some fairly sub-optimal constructions.

While working on this stuff, I found that the old Simple Minds song, Promised You A Miracle, started running through my head. I was really hooked on Simple Minds for a while there, back in the early eighties. I hadn’t listened to them or even really thought about them in years, so I’m enjoying a little nostalgia now, via YouTube. (Eighties music videos do look pretty cheesy now, though, huh?) Here’s a new version of the song, an acoustic version with KT Tunstall. It’s not bad.

Twitterrific, Overcast, and Ted Leo

Twitterrific is my favorite iOS Twitter client. (But also, honestly, the only one I’ve used other than the official one, so that’s not saying much.) I appreciate the fact that Twitter even still supports third-party clients. Facebook never really did, and Twitter’s support has wavered quite a bit over the years. But anyway, I get a lot of use out of Twitterrific. I bought it back when it actually cost money. (Now, it’s free with ads and various in-app purchases.)

I also used to use their Mac client. But they stopped development on it quite a while ago. I now just use the Twitter web page and occasionally the official Twitter Mac client (which really isn’t bad). But Twitterrific is looking to fix up their Mac client, and have put up a Kickstarter to fund new development. I’ve managed to avoid Kickstarter up until now, despite being tempted by a few things I’ve seen there in the past. But I finally gave in for this, and registered a Kickstarter account and pledged $30. That seems reasonable. The project isn’t fully funded yet, but it’s doing well, so hopefully they’ll actually do it.

And, since I have a Kickstarter account now, I’m tempted to go in on the Kickstarter for Ted Leo’s new album too. He’s one of my favorite artists, and it’s been a while since his last full album. I am worried now about getting sucked into the whole Kickstarter thing and spending money on stuff I don’t really need. There’s no reason that I can’t just wait until Ted Leo’s new album is out, read the reviews, then make an informed decision to buy it or not. And that’s probably what I should do in most cases.

Getting back to the subject of iOS & Mac software that I use a lot, Marco Arment has just released a new version of his podcast player, Overcast. This is another iOS app that I paid for the old-fashioned way at some point, but is now a free app with ads and in-app purchases. The new version is a pretty major redesign. I was pretty happy with the previous design, so I wasn’t really looking forward to this. But it’s a pretty good redesign. I’m getting used to a few things, like swiping left (or is it right?) to get to the episode notes instead of swiping up. Reading through Marco’s blog post on the redesign, it’s clear that he thought about it a lot and put a lot of work into making it as easy to use as possible. So it’s still my favorite podcast player out there. (I kind of wish he’d create a Mac client too, but I can understand why he hasn’t.)

Waiting for the Miracle

Well, it’s Saturday morning, and I’m really hoping next week is better than this week. I’m listening to Leonard Cohen’s “Waiting for the Miracle” right now. This live version is pretty good. I never got the chance to see him live, and now I really regret that. Hearing of his passing right after the election news was a bit of a one-two punch.

I’d been listening to The Essential Leonard Cohen a lot recently, so he’s been on my mind. I got on a Cohen kick a couple of months ago, after reading a book called A Cold and Broken Hallelujah, by Tyler Dilts. It’s not a book about Cohen, rather a police procedural that references Cohen (and Springsteen, and some other interesting music and books).

I didn’t really intend on writing another blog post touching on the election, but I’ve got a lot of stuff swirling around in my head, so maybe letting some of it out might help.

I was going to link to one or two articles on Quartz, but there are so many random post-election articles on there that picking out one or two seems pointless. Oh, heck, I can’t resist the temptation: here’s their two most popular articles right now (from the “popular” link at the top of the home page):

  1. A playlist of Leonard Cohen’s songs to help you make sense of the world
  2. Want to understand how Trump happened? Study quantum physics

The first one is just a list of YouTube videos (including some pretty good ones). I’m not even going to try reading that second one. From the headline, it seems like it would be fairly similar to a whole host of media stories about how we can “understand” the election through the lens of one particular viewpoint or another (math, physics, history, art, etc.). At this point, I think I’ve decided to opt out of reading any more of those.

Here’s another bit of media overload I hit this morning: Yesterday, I saw an article somewhere about a hiker running into Bill and Hillary Clinton while out for a walk. The hiker got a selfie with Hillary. Minor, innocuous, story, right? The kind of thing that wouldn’t even be a story, if we still got our news printed on dead trees and delivered daily. But on the web, it’s worth writing up and posting, because it’ll attract a few clicks, so why not? Well, this morning, in the infamous “trending topics” sidebar on Facebook, I see a link to an article with this title: “Was the Hillary hiking in the woods photo staged?” (I’m not linking to this article, for obvious reasons.) First: a generally good rule of thumb for any article whose headline is phrased as a question is that the answer to that question is always “no.” If it was “yes,” the headline would have been a statement instead of a question. (This is apparently Betteridge’s law of headlines.) Second: who cares? Hillary has already lost the election. Why would she be “staging” photos? Why would anyone care if she did? I think this article is basically the result of a process that got started at the beginning of this election cycle and is now stuck on auto-pilot, and nobody knows how to turn it off. The day after Hillary passes away, years from now (hopefully not any time soon), there will be an article titled “Did Hillary fake her own death?” (The answer will, of course, be NO.)

My main takeaway from the paragraph above is that I should really spend less time on Facebook. One of my Facebook friends recently linked to F. B. Purity, which is a Firefox add-in that cleans up Facebook a bit, allowing you to hide some of the more annoying bits, like that “trending topics” section. I went ahead and installed it this morning, so we’ll see if that helps. Of course, it’s only useful on Mac and Windows, and not on iOS. I’ve fallen into the habit of checking Facebook on my phone a lot at work, and I should really stop doing that. Sometimes, it’s a nice little break, if I hop on there and see something funny, or a nice photo of a friend’s kids. But generally it’s just a time sink, and I shouldn’t be bothering with it at work.

I think I might want to revisit the Bored and Brilliant series of episodes from the Note to Self podcast. When it first aired, I thought there were a few really interesting observations and ideas in there, along with a bunch of stuff that seemed either really obvious to me, or that didn’t really apply to me. Right now, though, rethinking how I use my phone and how I consume news and social media seems like a really good idea.

Working my way back around to something that actually relates a little more directly to the election results, rather than how the media is reacting to the results, and how I’m reacting to that, here’s a link to a blog post by Marco Arment on the election results.

Most people in the world are good, and want to be good to each other. Whether they vote that way or not, far more Americans believe in progressive, liberal, inclusive views than regressive, aggressive, conservative ones.

He relates this election to his feelings during the George W. Bush years. I’m apparently a good bit older than him, so I’ve been thinking back to the Reagan years, which correspond almost exactly to my teenage years. So thinking about the next four years as “probably not much worse than Reagan or Bush” is… a little comforting?

I remember a lot of Reagan-related black humor from my nerd friends in high school. I suspect there will be a lot of black humor over the next few years. I just recently finished reading a book of Hunter S. Thompson essays from the Reagan years. I think we really need a find a new Thompson for the Trump years. Maybe Matt Taibbi? Not quite, but he’s usually worth reading. Of course, he rejects the comforting idea of comparing Trump to Reagan or Bush:

Trump enters the White House as a lone wrecking ball of conspiratorial ideas, a one-man movement unto himself who owes almost nothing to traditional Republicans and can be expected to be anything but a figurehead.

So now my panic pendulum is swinging back from “this is kinda bad” to “this is a disaster”. I don’t know. I should just stop reading all these think pieces, right?

I was kind of hoping I could go see Fantastic Beasts today, but it doesn’t open until next week. Here’s an idea: get on the train and go over to the Met Breuer, and see the new Kerry James Marshall exhibit. And, hey, the Paul Klee exhibit looks pretty good too!

Weird Al and Weird Art

My weekend didn’t go exactly as planned, but it went well. I skipped the Star Trek thing, and instead went to MoMA and saw the new Kai Althoff exhibit. It was interesting, but easy to make fun of, if you’re the kind of guy that likes making fun of modern art. The NY Times review is a bit harsh, I think, but, yeah, it would have been fine to see the paintings without having to step around an old suitcase full of dirty dishes.

The Weird Al concert was as good as I expected, with a few fun surprises. I’ve seen Al twice before, so I was already familiar with a lot of the stuff he typically does as part of his stage show. There was a brief guest appearance by Lin-Manuel Miranda, which I wouldn’t even have known about if I didn’t see it on Facebook the next day. (At the time, I didn’t catch his name, and I wouldn’t have recognized him, even if I was seated close enough to see him clearly, which I wasn’t.)

I stayed overnight in an embarrassingly fancy hotel, and went home Sunday morning. Then, after I got home, I drove down to south Jersey to visit a friend. Normally, I would consider that to be a bit too much activity for the weekend, and… I would have been right about that, since my neck hurt quite a lot on Monday. I managed to get through it all without any migraines, at least, but I was definitely in some pain yesterday. And today, the neck pain is gone, but I feel like I might be coming down with a cold. So I’m limping my way through this week, and hopefully I’ll get myself back on the straight & narrow soon enough.