Well, that’s fun and interesting. Several attempts at removing / reimporting later, I found that results would not change. But in between importing and quitting, if I used “Show in Finder”, it decided to open one of the missing tracks–right out of the trash. Emptying the trash, deleting the album, quitting the app, relaunching, and re-importing seems to have worked. Watching the activity window, it even worked its way through sound check information.
So, I guess it can be made to work–Apple Music just can’t be trusted unless you’re prepared to quit app and review that every import matches what it should. ‘Cuz that scales so well \o/.
Yeah, my urge to press my old ThinkPad or Latitude into song management duty is rising.
Eons ago when I had first encountered iTunes, I will admit that I really hated it–but I will also admit that it *worked* which is ya know, like the most important thing ever about software? We just had a difference in opinion on how things should work, but it did work, and for that I respected iTunes despite the sour taste it left in my mouth. For friends, it was often the gold standard unless they were fellow unix nerds.
Importing music into Apple Music is mostly painless. Drag a folder of tunes onto the icon and boom, it’s imported. The tag editor even makes it easy to add album art and metadata, if so inclined.
And here’s the rub?
Drag and drop “Alan Jackson – 34 Number Ones” onto the icon, it imports, it plays, the files get organized into “$HOME/Music/Music/Media.localized/Music/Alan Jackson/34 Number Ones” by way of the default copy and organize settings. Yup. All good. Everything working perfectly! Now quit and relaunch Apple Music, and go open the album. Suddenly tracks 4, 20, 32, and 33 are present out of tracks 1 through 37 but here’s the real kicker: the files are still in Apple Music’s library on disk, they just are not in the database after quitting the app!
Now I know why the fucking hell partial albums were showing up on my iPod for some of my content that came from my old MP3 files rather than re-rips to fresh AAC/M4A generated in Apple Music. At first, I thought that it might have been because these are later 320 Kbit/s files encoded for quality unlike the 128 Kbit/s typical of older files. I considered those worth breaking out the stack’o’discs and external optical drive for ripping again, but these don’t need anything else.
Why is that a problem? Well, guess what: Apple Music just destroyed any faith or trust I have in its ability to _ever_ manage my music collection. Because if you can’t reliably import and database files reliably, you cannot be trusted to manage them safely. I could forgive throwing up your digital hands in horror with an error message decrying the files as unable to be imported; that would be fair because it’s descriptive if you encounter some kind of error. Silently flushing data into the aether on the other hand, not so much, even if you leave the files on disk.
For shits and giggles, removing the album removes the 4 tracks from its place on disk and leaves the other 33 behind. Which suggests that it really is a logic error somewhere, as if Apple Music imported the files but forgot to mark them as imported, so it doesn’t actually manage them. Trashing the entire folder on the other hand and re-importing, has a more interesting result. The GUI loads the entire set of files but only the same 4 tracks are copied into the library.
SMH, seriously what the fuck, Apple!
As far as I can tell, this occurs irrespective of the location of imported content. I’ve copied the file server’s master copies to my laptop, so that I could non-destructively sort them into imported and review folders after reviewing what’s ready to drag’n’drop as is, which will need updating metadata, and which require some thought (e.g. albums with mp3/flac and mp3/wav side by side), and so on. That eliminates any possibilities of the network or removable media, and ya know, checksums are kinda reliable at detecting oops a file is corrupt. I don’t think that I’ve had any problems with content directly ripped from disc, only with files imported.
Apparently, Finder’s Get Info dialog has support for some common multimedia metadata in the “More Info” section much like the “Details” section of Explorer’s properties dialog. Except when viewing network shares or external drives, in which case the More Info section will be pretty useless. Which makes it more grumble some to review such things before importing into Apple Music, and trying to decipher how the application handles various types of metadata on import.
On the flip side, ffprobe still works perfectly on Linux. Because between Linux and ffmpeg, if one isn’t the solution, often the other is, lol.
A profuse amount of profanity aside, we finally have an answer to a question that has been on my mind for several weeks now: who will surrender first, me or the iPod. And that answer is? The iPod gave up first!
Phase I was largely a head scratching affair, never having owned one. Nor in fact an Apple anything until my iPad Pro 2018. After much waiting on shipping however, I found the device to be a progressively hackwittery filled experiment.
First, the dandy screen that iPods apparently give when the battery is so dead that it has to charge before you can actually do anything at all with the iPod. But hey, that’s not so obscure that you can’t STFW to learn about it, so sure. Later, I would also learn that this screen occurs if you power up an iPod without the battery connected, but that’s getting ahead of my tale.
Secondly, while the device did eventually power itself up there was no stability. Attempting to connect to any machine including an equally old PowerPC system was met with failure, and PCs declaring that it failed to enumerate. That was a pain, but of course the damn thing would boot loop for about 10 to 20 minutes whenever turned on until eventually getting to the menu. Getting into the diagnostics mode to check hard drive info would only spew gibberish! Even when left running with the handful of songs it came with running, I would come back later to find it boot loopy in the morning.
An iFixIt tool kit, a torn up halberd, and a new love for plastic guitar picks and my pocket knife later, I managed to get the device open. But unfortunately the read the instructions first instructions for the SD card adapter it came with actually have fuck all info, and I had expected the board’s ribbon connector to be a pop top like most ribbons connectors I’ve ever seen in electronics (and apparently the original iPod hard drives as well). So I ended up damaging the connector on the board.
Several days and a new iFlash Solo in the mail later, I finally was able to try again only to get nothing, even after reseating the ribbon cable which was original and glued down at the motherboard end. A week of waiting for that in the mail aside, and still gibberish reading from the SD card adapter board. It only showed 96 GB and random stuff, along with locking the device so hard that a power pull of the battery connector was required. Well, at that point it’s either got to be the board or the card, so let’s reach for the collection of SD cards.
Sure enough the moment I replace the SanDisk 128GB card it came with, I can read hard drive data from diagnostics mode! It read the Transcend 64 GB card from my old Samsung tablets just fine and dandy. For shits and giggles, I used the 1G PNY card that was like the first or second SD card that I ever bought almost 15 years ago–worked just fine! Reaching for the various Samsung cards (2GB, 64GB, 512GB) in the spare cards bin, the only one it wouldn’t read was the 512. Okay, so either the board doesn’t handle larger SDXC cards or the motherboard is a model that uses wonky LBA addressing.
Big whoop there because I can probably melt the device’s database before a 64 GB card is filled up, and part of the point to this experiment is the lack of storage capacity left on my phone 😗. Key the next problem: nothing will actually recognize the phracking thing! I tried a bunch of different things with the SD card, trying to format it APM/HFS similar to the card it came with and trying dd recovery with MBR images still widely available, but nope. Ironically, when I dd’d a mounted disk utility image of the old card to the new card over /dev/rdiskN it booted perfectly despite the 128G image -> 64G card lobotomy, but still nothing would recognize it. The most that I could get with various dd and disk utility fun times was for the iPod to boot to the recovery screen or the ready to disconnect screen.
If I could just get it recovered, I knew it would be a win at that point.
I can’t say that I expected my M2 MacBook Air or the new Apple Devices app on Windows 11 to recognize the device, which they do after solving the problem. But I had expected that my iBook G4 running Tiger would work, especially after rolling it up to iTunes 9. Nope, nope, nada and the horse I rode in on. That was the point where I figured the only things left to putz with were the generic iPod sync and charge cable the device came with, and replacing the motherboard. Replacing the motherboard or something else to try the cable with would mean acquiring another, and opening this 5th gen made me glad that I didn’t buy one of the metal ones!
Queue the final count down: use an Apple branded 30-pin iPod cable, and everything works. Even more concerning than the amount of time and effort sunk into this project is that Apple still sells these cables. Another two days and a delivery later–the moment I plug it in, guess what? It’s recognized. SMH, greedy fruit companies and their MFI cables I suppose.
More curiously, both the Apple Devices app on W11 and my Mac running Sonoma offered to restore the iPod. I kind of hoped for the former, assumed the latter wasn’t likely, and expected to be reaching for my old iBook G4 again. Turns out that even on an M2 with Sonoma, you can restore an iPod classic from Finder…it’s just a buggy wreck.
Having to pull the cable, replug, and insert a hard shutdown to get the Mac to kill the hung iOS sync services later, I was able to trivially hook up and sync purchased and imported music through Finder. Long as I used the bloody Apple cable.
Once my music was synced, I decided that my choice of “Test” song was emotionally a good choice:
P!nk – So What
Totally forgot how appropriate the music video was, but in the name of more fun I’ll be enjoying the rest of the Funhouse album.
One upside of sorting through old CDs, is the opportunity to restore files that kind of disappeared two or three laptops ago. Another, is content for a recent experiment but that’s still a work in progress :^o.
Something that I also find curious is how tastes have changed. Less so my taste in music, more so my taste in interfaces. The last time that I ripped and organized these CDs, I had my own fairly strong notions of how things should be organized–and it mostly pissed me off. It’s hard to have a very uniform, tightly organized music collection in my experience. And experience has shown that often one method is as good as another until you start to stress specific problems like the maximum number of files in a directory, so meh.
My archival structure is more or less based off Plex’s format with a relatively lax level of adherence, since it’s easier to just import things like a Steam soundtrack as is, and a stack of old CDs is too much effort to value to sit around writing scripts to munge into the desired filesystem structure.
Which kind of brings me to two things that surprise me. One is that Apple Music will happily import audio CDs despite the emphasis on streaming subscription, and it’s a pretty snappy decoder. MPEG-4 containers with AAC-LC is perfectly acceptable to me as a format today due to the level of openness and support, and the iTunes Plus profile of 256K is good as anything shy of giving me a FLAC file. The other thing is that I don’t hate how Apple Music munges my rips, so much as I don’t care how Apple Music munges my rips.
The last time that I really touched anything Apple and music ripping was probably iTunes 6 or 7, which at the time was ‘current’, and let’s just say that XP was still sexy back then. Most of my friends liked iTunes, and not to big a surprise since most had an iPod even if few had Macs. But I was very perturbed by how iTunes wanted to assert its own definition of how to organize my content instead of obeying my system. Combined with being more of an XMMS / Amarok / MPlayer kind of guy, suffice it to say that I was never a fan of iTunes as a media player nor a library manager.
Fast forward to today, and what’s the real big difference there? Well, honestly the way that Apple Music manages imported CDs seems about the same that I remember from almost 20 years ago. The difference? I don’t want to manage my music through a file system. It doesn’t do my life well to organize such things in terms of files and directories built around tracks, albums, and artists and any other hoopla–no, it’s about the data model not about fitting that model to the file system.
It’s actually a lot like my contemporary relationship to notes taking over the past decade, and Android/iOS software in general. I don’t really want a model built around files when a model built around data is more practical. The obvious consequence of course, is that means decent tools. If you can’t do better than find/grep and so on then don’t bother making a fucking interface!
If files are a natural model to a problem: good. At some level most things should be files because we have good tools for working with files and it’s a fundamental aspect of data storage. But raw files are bad at metadata, at search, at relationships, and a host of other things that are more database like or more structured in nature than a stream of bytes. Files are good at storing that information not expressing those concepts, even more so when portability is a consideration. So while I still don’t like the way Apple Music organizes content anymore than I did iTunes, I can appreciate that it provides a reasonable interface particularly for the import part.
And of course the archival path is still tossing the resulting files into my own structure, lol.
Various posts about the Google Anti-Trust ruckus and the question of whether the Big G is a monopoly occasionally provide nuggets of enjoyment. But I think my favorite is the quip that no price Microsoft could ever offer, because it’s pretty much true.
Having lived through the era that was MSN Search in the 1990s, I have a mostly negative inclination towards Microsoft as a search provider, although the times I’ve ended up using Bing (usually not willingly), I haven’t had any particular complaints about. Nor other major providers this side of millennium.
But I think it’s still a simple key fact that Google does dominate search. DuckDuckGo, for example, is rather successful. We even have several general search engines, and some (maybe even most) don’t suck. But there’s no chance in hell that most would ever stand a chance at unseating Google in monetary terms such as getting made the default engine. Nor, do I really anticipate them being unseated by simple technological advancement or their own ineptitude because unless Google Serious Fucks Up(tm) they will likely remain dominate.
So yeah, there may be more than one search engine, but good luck competing with that. Ya know, it’s billion with a B, right?
Encountering a nifty article on Robert Sawyer’s recent release of WordStar, I can’t help but think that by now, even the creators of WordStar would agree that it is abandonware.
Actually, just about any piece of software with its heritage in the CP/M era should probably be considered past its commercial viability. In the sense that if you’re still making a living off software that is over 40-years old, it may be time to encourage your customers to upgrade their software 😂. I’d be surprised to find many younger than myself who even know what the program is, never mind learning it today, because it’s been quite a freaking while since it was a popular program.
WordStar 7 at least is a version from a time where MS-DOS was mature, and still predates most of what people younger than me identify as a computer. Looks like Mr. Sawyer went full-tilt boogy with trying to make it a full release, if anyone is fond of old software, it’s probably worth a shot. As for myself, I’m more of a vi kind of guy once we start going down that hands on keyboard rabbit hole.
Reading a recent article on the 13th/14th Gen Debacle, I’m reminded of how problems with Intel typically roll:
There will be a microcode fix if people will shut and enough complain.
Haha, you think there’s really a fix for that!?
Please buy the next chips!
My mind kind of flashes back some years to the errata documents for various SoCs that I was working with, and deciding not only were there a scary amount of Won’t Fix and Even We Don’t Know What Will Happen items and other run-away-screaming level worrisome things mentioned, it made me rather start to wonder what does Intel ever actually resolve? Because quite frankly, my Latitude experienced similar issues to some of the errata items despite being 3 – 5 generations older than the SoCs that I was working with at the time.
Actually, that’s the main reason Zeta was built on an AMD platform. Having been an Intel brat since Tandy made computers (🤣), I’ve tend to prefer Intel processors over the years. Having to work more closely with hardware for part of my career, rather soured my relationship and goodwill towards Intel. What do I say that? Well, Zeta’s my first AMD machine in about 17 or 18 years….and that gives me the startling realization that it’s been almost two decades since my darling Dixie, my first laptop.
Experiences with Rimuru’s 10th generation processor and various motherboards, further exacerbate the feeling that it will either be my last conventional desktop PC, and that Intel Inside probably won’t be a boon when building or shopping for its replacement someday.
Dusting off the old iBook G4, I can’t help but wonder how the machine would behave with a solid state drive instead of its twenty year old 40G IDE drive. MacOS Tiger is surprisingly nimble except when it isn’t, and most of those involve impact to both the processor and I/O heavy operations. When I had ran OpenBSD on it, the key limits were the lack of SMP and modern javascript engines having moved on with a lack of 32-bit PPC support.
The ol’ PowerPC chip is about as impressive as a single core CPU can get, I suppose. But the hard drive is basically a potato. The trick however, is it would be a major pain in the ass to replace the drive even if one of my MicroSD to EIDE bridges would fit without a hub bub.
Ahh dang it, why is temptation such a problem when it involves old computers? SMH!
Now that’s kind of impressive. The main negatives of e-ink is that the refresh rate is generally trash and the resulting flashing during bigger refreshes can be quite jarring on the eyes. But they work really damn well as long as you don’t need things to move or change on screen, thus they’re excellent for reading but terrible for scrolling.
The trade off for a more LCD-like “It’s off” when the power is off versus how e-ink holds onto its image isn’t that bad, and for such high refresh rates it would be more than worth it for a computer not so much for things like price tags on store shelves.
It’s also kind of interesting what they might come up with by trying to reimagine human interaction with computers, but I’d expect that to be a lot less successful than the display technology, due to the crushing weight of established conventions. But just the same, I’m kind of interested in what they might come up with. Ironically, I’m reminded of the Think Different speech.
Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.