Tech Talk at ShieldsGroup

When you let iTunes completely restructure your music folders, you end up with a lot of duplicate files. If you have the harddrive space, that’s fine. If you don’t, then you’re going to want to delete some of those duplicates.

The question is, how do you do that without ending up with a lot of files with exclamation marks (!) beside them? They are not sorted, so you have to select them individually and delete them.

So it goes in the world of iTunes, the iPod, and the iPhone.

I found this solution worked for my iTunes library, but caused me to lose my playcounts and ratings.

1. Choose File / Library / Export Library. This exports your iTunes library database as an xml file.  Save it onto your desktop.
2. Select all entries in your iTunes music library and press the Delete key. Don’t delete the files themselves if iTunes gives you the option to do so. You simply want to clear the database of all entries.
3. Exit iTunes.
4. Navigate to the iTunes folder inside your user folder and move the iTunes Music Library.xml and iTunes Library files to the Desktop. You may want them later, but I didn’t.
5. Launch iTunes. The iTunes library will be empty.
6. Choose Edit / Preferances / Advanced / Change / and navigate to your music library location. This will keep iTunes from moving your songs to the folder it wants them in.
7. Choose File  / Add Folder to Library / navigate to the location of your music files (as in step 6), selecting the folder that holds all your music folders /click Choose. This will take a while — a long while if your songs are sitting on a server like mine are — so relax.
8. When that’s done, to restore your playlists, choose File /Import. Navigate to the Library.xml file you exported before and click Choose. Again, this will probably take some time.

There’s probably an easier way to do this. I found dozens of suggestions online. This is the one that worked for me. If you’ve suggestions, please comment.

As with everything, this information is provided without warranty, express or implied. Any loss that comes about as a result of this action is the responsibility of the end user and not ShieldsGroup. 🙂

It looks like a big iPod Touch (no phone) the big iPhone version will be out later.

I was surprised at some of the choices Apple made:

• No camera so no video chat.
• No flash, it is suppose to be an easy way to access the internet and it doesn’t support flash?
• No USB port, it has no camera and then no way to get photos from a camera, oh wait a minute there is an adapter to give it a USB port. That is almost as bad, it takes an adapter to connect USB devices?
• Only 64GB, and no way to add memory cards, even basic netbooks come with 160GB
• No user swapable battery.
• All applications have to come from the Apple App store.
• It doesn’t multitask, it has a big powerfull CPU and it can’t multitask?
• No HDMI out, you get a cool video on it (that doesn’t require flash) and you can’t show it on your TV?
• The version which supports cellular access will be unlocked, but it will only have a GSM radio which in this country is used by AT&T and T-Mobile. The only thing is that their 3G data networks are on different frequencies.  The iPad only supports AT&T’s 3G frequency. If you use it on T-Mobile you will be stuck at 2G speeds.

The market has been telling everyone that smaller is better, you don’t need a desktop, a laptop is better. You don’t need a laptop, a netbook is better. You don’t need a netbook, a smart phone like the iPhone is better.  Now Apple says we were wrong, you don’t want a iPhone, the iPad is better?

~alacy

I am using Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon) to try to boot a Mac iBook (’cause the hd in the mac is whacked). So far, it’s been a real challenge. I am learning that nothing is easy on a Mac when they are broken. It makes me chuckle, when people are asking for help in mac forums, there is inevitably someone who says, “Take it into Apple Care and let them fix it.” If someone was willing to pay for Apple Care, why would he or she be requesting help on a forum?

After a considerable time of searching, I found instructions on the Ubuntu Forums, but none of them worked for this Mac. Finally, adjusting the steps along the way, I found a procedure that works for me:

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