Macworld
ScriptPal Gets Macworld Gem Treatment
Macworld's Dan Frakes has a great review of ScriptPal. Thanks!
Jason Snell Tries Not to Gag
I think Macworld's Jason Snell did a great level-headed job responding to some pretty whacked-out questions in this Advertising Age interview with Simon Dumenco (who has all the misinformed media memes about Apple down pat).
Another Reprieve
Dan Frakes emailed me with a vote for maintaining Set Video Kind of Selected:
"One that I'd like to see kept alive, so to speak, in some
fashion is Set Video Kind of Selected. Although iTunes 8 does let you
bulk-edit many of these fields, Set Video Kind of Selected has one unique feature that's very
useful: sequential episode numbering."
I had forgotten about that feature. Make Video Tags also has sequential track, episode ID, and episode numbering.
Join Together Deemed Mac Gem-Worthy
Thanks to Chris Breen at Macworld for bestowing Mac Gem-ness on Join Together.
Plays For Sure Sure Won't
I am not a fan of subscription services, if only because the idea of paying and paying for music just doesn't make any sense to me. I just can't get over that hump, like Dan Frakes and Chris Breen have, for example.
Well now the chickens have come home to roost.
"Microsoft ends support for tracks purchased from MSN Music - Microsoft is once again causing problems for its customers, closing down support for tracks purchased under its failed 'PlaysForSure' campaign.
The company is warning customers - who paid good money for music using the now defunct MSN Music service - that it will no longer supply authorisation keys for the tracks they bought.
What this means is that after 31 August, music fans who want to shift their sounds from one computer to another will be blocked from doing so. It also means that once all five Windows PCs a user can have authorised for music playback have failed, they will lose their music."
Explain to me, without using the phrase "yeah, but", how any subscription service can work in perpetuity without either failing or costing its subscribers a boat-load of money.
NEW: Search CD Universe for Album
My friend Kirk McElhearn has a very fine article at Macworld on working with album artwork: where to get it, how to get it, and so on. He mentions that the CD Universe website is a good place to snag album artwork and so I thought I'd slap together a quick script to search the site. Search CD Universe for Album will use the album tag of the selected iTunes track as the basis for a "Title" search at CD Universe. You'll have to manually navigate the site once the search results page comes up, but at least the script gets you started.
Macworld Deals With Dupes
Nice blog-post mench of Dupin by Mr. C. Breen over at Macworld.
Control Remote iTunes in iChat
Macworld has a cool Leopard discovery about using iChat to remote control Bonjour-connected iTunes.
VoiceOver Accessible
From the comments at Chris Breen's What's new in iTunes 7.1 at Playlist:
One feature that undoubtedly escape[d] most peoples['] notice is [the] fact that iTunes is now accessible with VoiceOver. This is a major step forward for sight impaired individuals. In the past VoiceOver could not access anything within iTunes. Now virtually everything in iTunes can be navigated and controlled with VoiceOver....Kudos go to Apple for getting iTunes accessible.