NVinNYC

This American Life is moving to NYC and making a version of the show for Showtime.

TAL & Ira Glass are simply amazing. I was worried it might mess with the formula of radio (I once ‘saw’ Ira talk in a pitch-black theater for 10 minutes and it was awesome) but I have confidence that they can make it work.

But if the shows are on Showtime, they won’t be free on the internet like the radio program, I guess? Damn. Well there’s always BitTorrent or iTunes.

(Via Kottke.)

Apple updated most of the iLife ’06 Suite today with bug-fix level patches for iDVD, iMovie, iPhoto, iTunes and iWeb. Apple doesn’t list specific patch areas for any of the applications but I found that it does fix the jumping star-rating in iTunes smart playlists issue that I mentioned in an earlier post.

Apple’s been going a bit patch-happy lately with 10.4.5 landing yesterday so run Software Update or check the links above to get all the patching goodness.

As you may (or may not) know, iTunes has always supported rating songs on a 100 point scale (at least since version 3, where song ratings were introduced). However, until now, it has never supported displaying anything other than ratings of 0 through 5 stars (which it records as numeric values between 0 and 100 in increments of 20). Other ratings are rounded down to the nearest multiple of 20 for display.

With the 6.0.2 update, iTunes has added the ability to display ratings in increments of 10 instead of 20, in other words, a half-star. However it offers no interface for setting such ratings. This information sprung up on Mac OS X Hints a few days ago, but Andrew Escobar makes it even easier with a tutorial that has step-by-step instructions with pictures on How to Set Half-Star Ratings in iTunes. It’s a cinch to set up your own half-star system now.

One warning though, iTunes 6.0.2 has a bug when editing star ratings on Smart Playlists. I posted a comment at the end of the tutorial that explains partially what was happening. If you plan on editing your Smart Playlists based on rating be sure to read it first (and have a copy of iTunes 6.0.1 for backup). Since it’s documented in Apple Support I’m sure it will be fixed with the next iTunes iteration tough.

Update: I found some other scripts to change ratings for the currently playing song by half-star increments and then used the venerable Quicksilver to assign them to global hot-keys so now I can change ratings for the current song even when iTunes is running in the background. For you other QS/LB/Butler jockeys out there it’s the only way to go…

A while back, some guy named Tristan figured out how to extract the album artwork from iTunes. This actually is really nice for two reasons. First of all, iTunes has a very large catalog of music, it’s not as large as Amazon, but, unlike Amazon, and every album is associated with artwork. The second, and possibly more important, factor is that most items in the iTunes music store have high-resolution 600×600 artwork, which is much larger than you can usually find on the internet, Amazon or otherwise.

Back to Tristan for a moment though… he actually figured out how to do this extraction back in August. I’ve been using it since around then and I’ve always meant to link to it on this site but never got around to it. Recently however, his website got linked to from a few of the more high profile Mac news sites and, since then, I’ve had my searches fail occasionally. According to the announcement on the site, “the scripts seem to be stressing from the load, if a search fails please try again later.”

This prompted me to do a bit of poking around on the PHP source code that he provides and adapt it for use on my own site. I don’t really know PHP very well but after a bit of tinkering I came up with this: iTunes Art Search. It’s faster and more reliable for me because it’s local and this way Tristan doesn’t have to pay for any bandwidth costs. Feel free to use it at your leisure. Just right/control-click any album link in iTunes music store, copy the URL and submit it. Assuming the URL is valid, you should get a page with the high-resolution artwork that you can then copy back into iTunes to serve as the artwork for your songs.

PS: For you power users out there I rigged it to accept arguments as part of the URL string too. This is handy for QuickSilver-based searches. Just use: http://nvinnyc.no-ip.org/itunes/index.php?*** (where the *** is your query).

Update (5/30/06): Apple’s iTunes team seems to have changed some syntax and added an authorization string to the art URLs in a way that breaks the scripts I had been using… This probably means the game is up but if you want the full technical details check out this digg post.

Crazy Apple Rumors: Apple Launches iPod Site For Idiots. It’s so true, but sadly it really is needed. I know from experience all too well. You wouldn’t believe how many times I’ve shown people how the scroll wheel works or how to change the volume. By the way, this is the site in question.