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For want of a Play All button in Apple Music

As has probably most everyone else, I've started my three-month Apple Music trial. I listened to about an hour's worth of Beats 1 Radio on the first day, and found it basically forgettable. (All the "Beats 1 worldwide!" voiceovers during songs certainly didn't help—but I figure they're doing that to prevent people from recording the high quality stream.)

Anyway, I was most interested in the For You feature, as I wanted to discover music similar to what I liked, but that I may not have heard before. Using my iPhone, I went through the "tell us about your tastes" feature in Apple Music, then switched back to my Mac to look at the For You section in iTunes. There I found an assortment of playlists:

Some I wouldn't like, some I would, and (most interesting to me), there were some that had stuff I hadn't heard before. Unfortunately, this is where Apple lost me…

What I wanted to do, as I looked at this wide assortment of music, was just hit the Play button, and let iTunes navigate the entire selection. But I couldn't, because iTunes' playback buttons are all grayed out. Argh!

The only way to listen to these selections is one playlist at a time. But that's not how I listen to music. I enjoy a broad selection of music across many genres, and very rarely do I listen solely to one artist, one album, or even one genre. Why? Because when I do, I wind up getting burned out on that artist, album, or genre, such that I don't want to hear it again for a while.

Instead, I just play music, paying no attention to genre, artist, or album. And once I start iTunes playing, it's typically playing all day without any interaction from me. But if I want to use Apple Music's For Me, I'll have to return to iTunes to pick new selections as each selection finishes. Honestly, for something that's background as I work, that's too much effort.

In the end, as much as I'd like to use the For Me feature in Apple Music, I just can't see myself doing it unless Apple adds a Play All (random, of course) button. Please?



Fun with iTunes’ new math

Unlike my previous incidents with iTunes and iOS devices, today's report isn't on a sync problem per se.

It's more like a math problem which then leads to a sync problem. Here's the tl;dr version: I have an iPad with 5GB of free space, and I cannot add a 1.8GB movie to it, as iTunes eventually tells me it needs another 526MB of space in order to do so.

During the attempted sync of this movie, iTunes displays some horridly bad math skills; just watch the video to see.


Here's the video at its full size (1164x1056).

I have no idea how to resolve this, short of restoring the iPad, which I'd rather not do. (I've already unsynced and resynced everything, in an attempt to straighten out the math, but to no avail.)



Revisiting iTunes/iOS sync issues

After getting my iPhone 6 in early October, I was initially excited by all the cool tech in my new phone. Until I tried to sync it, that is. I eventually got so frustrated that I emailed Tim Cook for help. From that email, I wound up talking to Apple's engineers, who eventually solved my sync issues—it turns out they were related to duplicates of long-ago-purchased songs.

Welcome to
Sync Hell

And for a while, things were great in iPhone 6 land. Then I ripped a few new CDs, and noticed that they didn't show up on the phone. Uh oh. Even worse, when I looked at my iPhone in iTunes, the Music section contained hundreds, if not thousands, of the dreaded gray dotted circles.

This seemingly innocent symbol means that the indicated song did not sync—the information about the song made the journey to the phone, but the song itself did not. Argh! Read on to see how I muddled through this issue, with some advice that may, or may not, help you with your own sync issues.

If you don't want to read everything, here's a tl;dr version:

  • My iPhone sync issues returned, along with a huge-fake-but-limiting amount of data shown in Other.
  • There's a known-to-Apple "very slow performance" issue in iOS/iTunes that can make some iPhones sync very slowly (fixes have been made, but not yet released).
  • A factory restore failed to complete until I rebooted the iMac.
  • After the restore, the sync worked, but I still had a huge Other category.
  • After the iOS 8.1.1 update, the huge Other category vanished.
  • I had to manually unsync/resync a number of songs to clear their gray dotted circles.
  • It may help to do a voodoo dance, sacrifice three Nokia phones, and rub your stomach while patting your head before syncing.

Read on for the gory details…except maybe for that last item, which I totally made up.

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Use two CD drives to import multiple CDs into iTunes

I happen to have two external drives connected to my iMac—one that reads and writes the usual mix of CDs, DVDs, etc., and another that includes Blu-Ray playback (but not writing). Today I discovered that you can use both drives at once (sort of) to speed up multiple CD rips. Here's how it works.

When you have two drives in iTunes, you'll see one CD icon in the iTunes 12 bozo bar—that's my name for the row of device controller buttons seen at right.

Click on the CD icon, though, and you'll see both inserted discs are available:

There really isn't a trick to using two drives at once in iTunes, other than saying "Yes" when this dialog appears onscreen:

iTunes won't actually rip both CDs at once, but it will queue the second CD up, and start ripping it automatically when the first one finishes. As soon as you see that changeover, click on the CD icon and switch to the just-imported CD.

Eject the just-imported CD, insert the next CD to rip, and say "Yes" again when iTunes asks if you'd like to import it. Repeat as necessary, until you're done. I imagine that if you had three CD drives, this would work just as well—I can't test that assumption, though.

While not fully automated batch ripping, this process does let you make relatively quick work of a stack of CDs—for those of you who (like me) still prefer such relics of a prior age.



A nasty little iTunes/iOS bug may be causing media sync issues

November 18th update: My sync issues returned, but due to a different cause this time. Details in this post.

After complaining to Tim Cook, and separately starting a (now closed) support ticket, it appears that my iOS/iTunes sync nightmare has finally come to an end!

I have not seen a progress bar that busy since the day I brought my iPhone 6 back home. Whatever I tried, iTunes simply would not sync everything in my library. In the end, the problem turned out to be as simple—but as deadly—as this:

In the current version of iTunes/iOS, there's a bug that only appears when you have duplicates of purchased songs. When encountered, a duplicate of a purchased song will (almost always) cause iTunes to silently stop syncing.

This is a known-to-Apple issue, and it will be fixed in a forthcoming update. I'm fairly certain it's an iTunes bug, but as Apple didn't clearly state which it was, I'm calling it iTunes/iOS. Either way, until it's fixed, it's a really bad bug.

Here's what happens: If you have duplicates of purchased songs, iTunes simply silently stops syncing when it hits one of those duplicates. From your perspective, it will look like everything is working—iTunes never throws an error, and it proceeds through all six (or seven or whatever) steps of the sync process, as seen in the status window of iTunes.

But behind the scenes, nothing is happening—at least, nothing relative to syncing your files. As seen by my troubles, this can be incredibly frustrating and hard to fix.

Continue reading to see how I was able to finally (with Apple's help) get my devices syncing again—the tricky part is finding all the duplicates, because they're not all obvious. Also note that if you are not having sync issues, I wouldn't worry about duplicates—no need to endanger what's already working well!

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An iPhone 6, (no) movies, and me

On Friday, I received my new iPhone 6, which I really like—a lot, in fact. Over the weekend, however, I discovered that my new iPhone does not like iTunes—at least not syncing my movies via iTunes.

Things started great, with the arrival of the new iPhone 6 on Friday afternoon:

From there, though, things didn't go exactly according to plan…and I documented my progress (or lack thereof) via Twitter over the weekend. Read on for the full story, as told in 140 character increments.

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I asked Tim Cook for tech support…and you should, too!

Those following me on Twitter this weekend will have noticed that my (lovely, stunning, amazing, I am keeping it) iPhone 6 is not playing nicely with iTunes. I've invested over 10 hours—in one day—just trying to get music and movies onto my iPhone.

Frustrated as hell, I decided ask Tim Cook for some tech help, not that I have much hope of any sort of reply. Emails to his address, however, are apparently all read by someone. For those having similar issues, I think it may be useful to also send your feedback in Tim's direction; his email address (not a secret, published in many places) is tcook at Apple's domain. Perhaps if there are enough voices providing feedback in high places (not that Tim reads these himself), we might see some action.

Further update: I have now done two full system restores. I did the second just before bed last night, and let the iPhone sync overnight. On wake, everything worked! So then I added in a few more movies, and—of course—they failed to sync. So now I'm back where I started, oh so many hours ago.

Anyway, For the curious, here's the tech support request I sent to Tim yesterday.

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Search the iTunes Store from anywhere

This morning, I wanted to send someone an iTunes App Store search URL, so that when they clicked it, they'd see the list of matching apps in the iTunes App Store. There's no apparent easy way to do this within iTunes, but after much futzing about, I figured out how to structure a URL that will open to to the search results screen in the iTunes App Store.

Because Apple has separated iPhone apps and iPod apps in the store, there are actually two separate URLs, one for each type of app. The iPad version of the URL is:

itms://search.itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZSearch.woa/wa/advancedSearch?entity=iPadSoftware&free=0&genreIndex=1&media=software&restrict=false&softwareTerm=TERMS+TO+SEARCH+FOR&submit=seeAllLockups

And for the iPhone, it's identical except for the entity bit:

itms://search.itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZSearch.woa/wa/advancedSearch?entity=software&free=0&genreIndex=1&media=software&restrict=false&softwareTerm=TERMS+TO+SEARCH+FOR&submit=seeAllLockups

Hopefully obviously, replace TERMS+TO+SEARCH+FOR with the keywords you want to use for the search, separating words with the plus sign. You can then use the URL for whatever you like: send it to someone, add it to your bookmarks bar, whatever. When clicked, the search will run and the results will open directly in the iTunes App Store for either iPad or iPhone apps.

For example, iPad Apps related to the word foobar, or iPhone apps about hopping frogs.

You can further customize the URL to find anything you want—not just apps, and using additional criteria—within any of the various areas of the App Store. Read on for the details on how to do that.

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