We have 3 dogs and 1 cat. The two smaller dogs and the cat don't shed much, but the larger dog (a lab) sheds like crazy. We have 2 Roombas that we got about 3 years ago when the 500 series started coming out. We no longer use them regularly because it's too much of a hassle.
First, they need to be cleaned at least daily with this much pet hair. Cleaning takes at least 5 minutes; if I just spent that time vacuuming normally for 5 minutes a day, the floors would be cleaner.
Often they won't even complete a single run without stopping and saying "Please remove and clean Roomba's brushes." That kind of defeats the purpose of having cleanings scheduled during the day (when we're at work) if it only gets 15 minutes into the scheduled 45-minute cleaning before stopping.
The Roombas will leave "Roombarf" - tufts of pet hair - on the floor when moving from hardwood/tile to carpet. Apparently the vacuum isn't powerful enough to suck all that stuff into the dustbin, so it just drags the hair along until the terrain change knocks it loose.
Every few weeks, we'd need to take the thing apart and do a really deep cleaning, as pet hair got everywhere inside. This would be a 30-60 minute job. One nice thing is that iRobot designed the Roomba to be very modular, so taking it apart isn't too bad.
One of the Roombas is completely out of commission right now because it has a faulty bump sensor. It thinks it's constantly bumping something, so it just spins around in circles trying to get free. I found a great web page somewhere (sorry, don't have the link handy) about fixing this with just a few bucks in electronics parts. I'll probably do it just for the fun of it, but that won't fix all of the above issues.
iRobot has a pet version of the Roomba which came out after we got ours, but from what I can tell, all they did was include a second interchangeable dustbin without the vacuum module that therefore has larger capacity. The normal dustbin combines the vacuum into one integrated part. I can't imagine this larger sweeper dustbin would do anything to pull the pet hair in without the vacuum to help.
For a household like ours, I would like to see a Roomba that's about a full inch taller, giving it room for a larger battery, larger dustbin, and more powerful vacuum and brushes. An added bonus for us is that since a couple of our couches are just the right height for the current Roomba to get under and then get stuck, a larger one wouldn't even go there at all.
I wholeheartedly recommend Roomba for a household without pets (or with very little shedding), but can't really recommend it with pets that shed a lot. Unless you have all hard flooring - it seems to do a lot better with the pet hair there.
The key to using pyTiVo with DVD rips is to simply extract the original MPEG-2 stream from the DVD without transcoding at all. pyTiVo will then send it to the TiVo (at least TiVo HD, probably Series 3 as well) as-is, and the result is exactly what you'd see (and hear) if you had popped the DVD into a DVD player.
On the Mac, I use RipIt to rip the DVD, followed by DVDRemasterPro to extract the main title as a single vob. Often this is enough, and the vob will transfer and play directly on the TiVo. Sometimes a pass through MPEGStreamClip is also necessary to clean up timestamps.
MacTheRipper is sometimes good on old titles that don't have all the new fair-use prevention measures - it can extract a single title from a DVD in a single step instead of the multi-step process above. But it doesn't handle about 90% of newer DVDs.
This works on probably 95% of the DVDs I've tried. Of the remaining handful, a manual pass through ffmpeg (using the "copy" pseudo-codecs) fixed a couple, but a few still are problematic for the TiVo's MPEG-2 decoder.
Thanks, that worked. But why? I see no reason to require IPv6 here. The same Airport Express works fine with iTunes 6 and IPv4. It's only the combination of iTunes 7 and IPv4 that seems to be broken. I can't imagine any reason why this should be. I specifically turned off IPv6 because I don't use it for anything. Bah.
And wouldn't you know it, just after posting this, iTunes pops up with the 1.2 firmware update for the 5th generation iPod. 1.2 does indeed remove the gap. Updated findings:
iTunes 7: no gap
iTunes 7 to Airport Express: could not connect (no error message)
iTunes 6, regardless of whether files were touched by iTunes 7: gap
iTunes 6 to Airport Express, regardless of whether files were touched by iTunes 7: no gap
1 GB iPod shuffle, firmware 1.1.4 (iTunes says it's up to date): gap
30 GB 5th generation iPod with video, firmware 1.1 (NOT the latest!): gap
30 GB 5th generation iPod with video, firmware 1.2 (latest): no gap
I seriously doubt the shuffle will ever support gapless, but I'm still wondering about the Airport Express problem. iTunes 6 connects just fine to the same unit that iTunes 7 won't talk to. iTunes 7 sees it, but nothing happens when you select it.
I've had a chance to play with this a bit, and here are my findings, using a couple of test files with a seamless transition in between. Previously, every method of playback produced a gap (or so I believed).
Within iTunes 7: no gap
iTunes 6: gap
1 GB iPod shuffle, firmware 1.1.4 (iTunes says it's up to date): gap
30 GB 5th generation iPod with video, firmware 1.1 (iTunes says it's up to date): gap
iTunes 6, outputting to Airport Express: NO GAP! Huh? I did not expect this at all. The same files always have a gap when outputting to that computer's speakers in iTunes 6. I tried old backups of those songs that hadn't been touched by iTunes 7, still no gap for the Airport Express, gap for the computer speakers. Weird.
iTunes 7, outputting to Airport Express: could not get iTunes 7 to connect to the AE. Anyone else have this problem?
For the people who've reported gapless playback in existing generation iPods, can you double check? Any further details? Firmware versions? Won't work for me. I guess I'll have to listen to one of the new iPods in store before purchasing.
No, iTunes has never had true gapless playback. There's always been at least a slight hiccup in between tracks, no matter how you set it up. The old crossfade set to 0 trick also wasn't a complete solution - if you had a transition with a fast tempo, you'd hear it screw up a beat or two.
I'm really eager to try this out and see if they truly fixed it.
Yes, this is the biggest news as far as I'm concerned. I've been bitching about this since I got my first iPod. I've looked at alternatives, and nothing came close in overall features and seamless integration with the music library. The few gapless alternatives were pretty crappy otherwise and left out major features I'd grown accustomed to. For the last year, I've held off replacing my iPod that was stolen just because of the lack of gapless playback. I refused to give them any more money for a seriously flawed product (for my needs, not for most people's needs, obviously). The fact that it should have been easy to fix always bugged me.
Did Apple finally listen?
I'm going to have to play around with this soon to see if it's truly up to par. If it works on 5th gen iPods, then I can test it on my wife's iPod before buying one of my own. This is exciting, because it was the last feature I've been wanting for my music listening experience. If it works as advertised, the experience will finally be as close to perfection as it can get for me. Can't wait to try it out...
First of all, the iPod adds a much larger gap than can be attributed to MP3/AAC frames alone. This is shown quite nicely in the AC's first link. This is poor programming and/or design by Apple, plain and simple.
Second, why should I care about an inherent limitation in the format? As a listener, I want the music to sound just the same as when I play it on a 20-year-old CD player. The iPod is far more powerful than a CD player, so why is its playback so much poorer?
Finally, there are many possible ways to eliminate the last-frame gap problem:
Import gapless albums as single files, like the Join CD Tracks feature, but use chapter markers to indicate individual tracks within that file. Have iPod/iTunes treat individual tracks (really just sections of the larger file) the same as they do for separate-file tracks now. This means individual tracks can be part of playlists independently of the rest of the album contained within the same file, and metadata is still kept on a per-track basis.
Detect silence at the end of the last frame of data and eliminate it. Very easily done.
When importing as individual files, store as metadata the exact sample number of the last real audio sample, and honor that during playback. The is probably the easiest solution.
Given how simple this problem is, it's ridiculous that Apple has ignored it for going on 5 years now. Steve Jobs isn't the perfectionist that urban legends say he is, because this is precisely the sort of thing that should drive him nuts. Apparently it doesn't, and he's just happy with a crappy player as long as 99.99% of buyers never listen to gapless albums.
It wouldn't bug me at all if the rest of the experience weren't so far above the competition. Bah. Thanks for getting me going on that rant again...;)
Terminal is certainly better than cmd.exe or straight xterm. However, it doesn't do tabs or any of the really whizzy stuff that you expect on your Linux/BSD box's kterm/gnome-terminal. Incidentally, what do other slashdotters reccomend as a replacement?
Not a true replacement, but I swear by Terminal + screen (included with OS X). The major advantage is that you can attach to the same screen session from anywhere in the world, resuming exactly where you left off. You can even be attached from multiple places at once (work, home, etc). This is also handy for viewing multiple screen windows at once by simply opening multiple Terminal windows and attaching them to the same session.
The keyboard shortcuts for managing "windows" are also quite handy, easier than clicking a mouse. I can't imagine why anyone would use anything else, but I guess that's just me.
Anybody have any other good Mac OS X "gotchas" for the average technically competant switcher that I've forgotten?
A couple off the top of my head:
If you're doing serious administration, learn niutil and its gui sibling, NetInfo Manager. User account settings, groups, NFS mounts, etc, are all stored in the NetInfo database. Learn it and love it.
OS X's built in fsck is crap. If you're ever unfortunate enough to get a corrupted HFS+ filesystem, invest in a copy of DiskWarrior. It's fixed everything I've thrown at it that wasn't a hardware failure, where most of the time fsck (also wrapped in the Disk Utility gui) gave up. I still don't understand why Apple doesn't just buy it and bundle it with the OS.
External disks are mounted by default with permissions such that the currently logged in user owns everything on them. This is not always desirable (when backing up files that should retain owner/permissions). To disable this behavior for a volume, either use vsdbutil -a/Volumes/diskname or in the Finder, right-click the drive icon, Get Info, uncheck "Ignore ownership on this volume" (not sure of the exact label, not in front of a Mac now!).
Short list of helpful command-line utilities to look up:
ditto (copy files with metadata, etc -- though in Tiger, the standard file utilities finally handle resource forks)
open (open a document or application in the gui)
osascript (execute an AppleScript -- ie, osascript -e 'tell application "iTunes" to pause')
/Developer/Tools/SetFile (set obscure HFS+ file attributes -- only available if Xcode is installed)
softwareupdate (commandline version of -- you guessed it -- Software Update)
hdiutil (mount, unmount, and manage automounted disks and disk images)
A few people have said this here. Where is the evidence?
I initially thought Time Machine was utilizing a new versioned filesystem (perhaps ZFS). But unfortunately all evidence points to "No". It requires an external drive or server dedicated to backups and nothing else (great for laptops... NOT!). It only makes incremental backups once every 24 hours. Sounds very much like a Spotlight type of add-on, where the system keeps a list of the files that have changed since the last backup, then automatically backs up those files on the external drive. It's just an incremental backup scheme and little else.
Is there other evidence for a versioned filesystem? If so, why isn't Time Machine using this, dropping the requirement for an external drive (as well as the only once-daily backups)?
The up-to-date program has always been available only if you bought your Mac after the OS release date was announced. That's always been less than 30 days.
For reference, Tiger's release date of April 29, 2005 was announced on April 12, 2005 (18 days, inclusive). Macs purchased on April 11, 2005 or before were not eligible for Tiger's up-to-date program. Panther's release date of October 24, 2003 was announced on October 8, 2003 (17 days).
30 seems to be a nice round number that's easy to remember, so people toss it around as fact instead of checking for themselves. I've seen a number of people on various forums get burned by this, assuming they'd be ok buying within 30 days of the rumored (but not yet announced) release date. If you want the next OS release for cheap via this program, don't buy your new Mac until the OS release date is officially announced. Let's debunk this myth!
I disagree -- Time Machine does not do it the "right way". According to what I've read so far, it's nothing more than a nightly incremental backup utility built into the OS. Limitations appear to include:
Backups only occur once a day. If you modify a file, then accidentally delete it before the next backup cycle, your modification is completely lost.
It must use a dedicated partition or drive for the backup. That volume cannot be used for anything other than Time Machine.
It's therefore almost completely useless for laptops, which typically have one drive with one partition.
My first impression when reading about this was that it must be implemented at the filesystem level, either as an addition to HFS+, or maybe as the incorporation of something like ZFS as an alternative. If a snapshotting capability such as ZFS's were introduced at the filesystem level, then an external volume would no longer be needed. This would make Time Machine many times more useful to the fastest growing segment of Apple's market (notebooks).
Was it too difficult to go this route for Leopard?
I'll admit I haven't tried iTerm, but the author's favorite iTerm feature is what screen users have had for well over a decade. From the article:
What I like most about iTerm is the "Tab" funtion. Instead of opening couple of windows, you can just work on one widow and switch to any Tab you want.
iTerm may have keyboard shortcuts for this (if it doesn't, that's a major deficiency), but I guarantee screen gets the job done better. I got hooked on the remote detach/attach feature of screen about a dozen years ago, and I absolutely can't do without it to this day. I constantly have a screen session running on my home machine with a dozen or more shells. Throughout any given day, I'll attach to it from wherever I may be - the laptop at home, the desktop at home, my office at work, the lab at work, a friend's house, etc. Everything is preserved just as it was last time I left it, so I can resume any one of many tasks anywhere, anytime.
If I need to see multiple windows at once (major development with multiple files, etc), just open up multiple terminal windows and have them all attach to the same screen session simultaneously. Works beautifully. Does iTerm do any of this better?
Panasonic BL-C10A (Amazon note: they like to tinker with the price of this camera; I bought mine when they were $165)
I've got four of these setup at home to monitor the dogs while we're out of the house. They're not wireless (I have them mounted in fixed locations so I just ran Cat5e through the attic to the cameras) but I believe Panasonic makes a wireless version. Things I like about these cameras:
Best image quality I found at the price - nothing spectacular, but you'll pay several times more for anything better.
Decent low light images with an acceptable amount of noise. Again, much better than others I tried in the price range.
Remote pan and tilt.
Easy web interface for viewing single or multiple cameras at once.
Motion sensor that'll email or ftp images when triggered. Excellent for the camera I have watching my front door.
It's not customizable in the sense that the embedded software is open source (at least I don't think it is -- probably the customized Linux they use is available somewhere, but I doubt the web service stuff is). However, they provide very thorough documentation (pdf) of the camera's cgi interface, so you can easily roll your own front end that talks to it. I had plans to do this, but I've found that their own front end works well enough for most accesses.
One thing that I have done is write a little perl script that uses wget to grab a still image every 6 seconds from each camera while we're gone. These are saved and later combined via an AppleScript that I wrote to create a movie of each day's activities. I've found all kind of interesting stuff by reviewing these movies after the fact -- like one day we got a mouse in the house, which the cat subsequently chased off.
I've been through two different 3rd generation iPods with dying/dead hard drives. The second, a 40 GB, was acquired, used, to replace the drive in the first (a 30 GB). That means I popped them both opened and did a drive swap, being extra careful to make sure all connections were properly seated.
The first drive was still dead in its "new" enclosure. The second drive still worked -- but only for a few weeks. After that, it exhibited the same symptoms of clicking and slowly dying over time. No amount of reseating helped.
The hypothesis given in the article may very well apply in many cases, but it is notthe cause of all the click-of-death "sad iPod" failures users are seeing.
Oh yeah, I didn't mention that because the post wasn't supposed to be about gapless; that was just a side issue. But yes, I've known about the join tracks feature for a long time, and it's simply no good to me. When you do that, you lose the ability to skip around among different tracks like you can on a CD. You also lose the ability to track per-song metadata, which is absolutely a must for smart playlists to be of any value to me. And of course, you can't drag individual tracks from a "joined" CD into various playlists. It's truly all or nothing. No good.
Some people have suggested ripping gapless CDs twice: once as tracks and once joined. While it gives you more options, it's a terrible workaround to a problem that shouldn't exist in the first place. Not only does it waste twice the space, but metadata is not shared between the different copies of the album. When I play the joined version, the individual song versions don't get updated play count and last played time. Same the other way, obviously.
Look at it this way: a 20-year-old CD player is ancient in technology terms. It can play gapless albums with seamless audio transitions between tracks, and it can also skip around among tracks at will. iTunes and iPod are light years ahead in overall complexity and capability, yet neither can do both at the same time. You either get gapless and no skipping (join tracks), or skipping and gaps (normal import). Pretty ridiculous when the ancient technology performs this aspect of the common task so much better. Even more so when you realize how easy it should be to have proper gapless support, given a half decent design. Either Apple's team is incredibly lazy, or it's incredibly incompetent to the point that the design totally precludes the tiny amount of buffering that would fix this forever.
The thing that kills all the "iPod killers" for me is the lack of integration with your music library, as compared with the iTunes/iPod combo. Nothing else comes close. Smart playlists, automatic sync when you plug in, two-way sync of metadata like play count and last played time (the iPod updates that data in iTunes after you've played songs on the go), etc. I use smart playlists in particular to give myself a level of control over my music listening experience that isn't remotely possible with albums and songs, or simple static playlists. I couldn't imagine doing back to that.
Every competitor I've looked at is sort of hit and miss, and none provides all of these features with such seamless integration. Many present only the simplest interface to the computer - drag and drop music files to the device as a hard drive. That's probably great for many people here, and before I used iTunes, I would have joined in saying it's all anyone could ever need. But the fact is that iTunes provides so much more to enhance the listening experience. I guess it's all in the bundled software, and who provides anything approaching the iTunes functionality?
The article says "Like almost all non-iPod music players, the Z5 is based on Microsoft's music-player software. That is, it doesn't work with the Macintosh." Well, that probably means it's definitely out for me. But out of curiosity, does anyone know how Microsoft's software stacks up against iTunes in the features I've listed? I've been on the lookout for a non-Apple alternative for a long time due to the ridiculous lack of gapless playback in the iPod. I know Apple has no intention of fixing it because their customer base doesn't care (and isn't even aware of the problem). I can find gapless alternatives, but none that give me the overall experience that iPod/iTunes does. How close is this one?
The guy doesn't say specifically, but it sounds to me like he simply stumbled upon it by accident. I don't get the impression at all that he's some super-hax0r looking to exploit a flaw.
No kidding. This is the one and only feature I want that the iPod lacks -- and has lacked for 4 1/2 years since its introduction. I refuse to buy a new one until Apple fixes it, but I realize that they probably won't ever do so because 99.99% of their customers don't care or even realize what the issue is. Too bad.
Unfortunately, the few competitors with gapless simply don't get it when it comes to the rest of the package. No smart playlists, no on the fly metadata updates, no easy synchronization both ways, etc. I don't just want my music to be played, I want it managed so that I can have an even better, optimized listening experience. No competitor comes close to iPod/iTunes in that regard, and that's why I just bought a used iPod on eBay to replace my dying one. Apple doesn't get the benefit of my dollars in that sale without gapless, but other competitors with poor management features don't get them either.
FM tuner, stopwatch, video, games, WMA, etc? Heck, even stylish design? Fluff I don't need. Just give me a small, well-managed solution that plays music as accurately as my CD player does (no gaps between tracks with skip ability), inaudible encoding loss notwithstanding. ANYONE who does this will get my business. Apparently nobody wants it.
I always used to say that SGI was the Apple of the unix world. That was before Apple became the Apple of the unix world.;-) Back in the 90s, SGI was leaps and bounds ahead of any other unix vendor in terms of desktop usability and media/content creation support. That's why it was the gold standard in Hollywood (besides the industry-leading graphics).
But then PCs came along and caught up, then surpassed SGI's capabilities in their core strengths for workstations. And then Apple came and released a unix that was light years ahead of IRIX in terms of usability, application support, and content creation. I've been amazed at how long SGI has hung on with very high end I/O intensive servers being the only strength they have left. The industry caught up and they were unable to adapt. Too bad, they made nice machines back in the day (I'm typing this on a 4 1/2 year old O2+; even that was a pretty poor bang/buck compared to its competition in 2001, but it's still a solid machine).
The only thing I can think of that Apple might benefit from with SGI's technology now is stuff like guaranteed rate I/O that's in IRIX. Macs do pretty well with stuff like that and probably don't need it, but the IRIX tech was the best I've seen. A ridiculously loaded, slow machine wouldn't miss a beat when capturing realtime data like video or whatever. Good stuff.
Other than that, why would Apple want SGI? They have no interest in the super high end multi-million dollar server business, and I can't see them buying SGI just to get into it.
One application, however, constantly disappointed us during our testing: iMovie 6. Not only was this brand-new version of Apple's video-editing application equally buggy on both platforms, but it was dramatically slower at compressing and exporting video on the Intel-based system than on the G5--so much so that we suspect iMovie's poor performance is the result of a bug within iMovie rather than any intrinsic failure of the iMac.
Sorry, you were right, someone please mod me into oblivion.
(though my point about more thorough testing still stands)
Apparently many Windows users do too. I can't tell you how many times I've seen people fork over $600 or so to get Photoshop, only to use it for the occasional web graphic. Nothing they do ever uses a feature that's not also in Photoshop Elements, which is vastly cheaper. It's that whole mentality of "gotta have the best" or if it's cheaper it must be inferior. Adobe must love people like that.
Elements is a pretty good deal, even if you only use it occasionally. 95% of my image editing is done in Gimp, but for the 5% of the time that Elements does something much better, it was worth the mere $50 (edu) I paid for it.
Slashdot Mirror
We have 3 dogs and 1 cat. The two smaller dogs and the cat don't shed much, but the larger dog (a lab) sheds like crazy. We have 2 Roombas that we got about 3 years ago when the 500 series started coming out. We no longer use them regularly because it's too much of a hassle.
First, they need to be cleaned at least daily with this much pet hair. Cleaning takes at least 5 minutes; if I just spent that time vacuuming normally for 5 minutes a day, the floors would be cleaner.
Often they won't even complete a single run without stopping and saying "Please remove and clean Roomba's brushes." That kind of defeats the purpose of having cleanings scheduled during the day (when we're at work) if it only gets 15 minutes into the scheduled 45-minute cleaning before stopping.
The Roombas will leave "Roombarf" - tufts of pet hair - on the floor when moving from hardwood/tile to carpet. Apparently the vacuum isn't powerful enough to suck all that stuff into the dustbin, so it just drags the hair along until the terrain change knocks it loose.
Every few weeks, we'd need to take the thing apart and do a really deep cleaning, as pet hair got everywhere inside. This would be a 30-60 minute job. One nice thing is that iRobot designed the Roomba to be very modular, so taking it apart isn't too bad.
One of the Roombas is completely out of commission right now because it has a faulty bump sensor. It thinks it's constantly bumping something, so it just spins around in circles trying to get free. I found a great web page somewhere (sorry, don't have the link handy) about fixing this with just a few bucks in electronics parts. I'll probably do it just for the fun of it, but that won't fix all of the above issues.
iRobot has a pet version of the Roomba which came out after we got ours, but from what I can tell, all they did was include a second interchangeable dustbin without the vacuum module that therefore has larger capacity. The normal dustbin combines the vacuum into one integrated part. I can't imagine this larger sweeper dustbin would do anything to pull the pet hair in without the vacuum to help.
For a household like ours, I would like to see a Roomba that's about a full inch taller, giving it room for a larger battery, larger dustbin, and more powerful vacuum and brushes. An added bonus for us is that since a couple of our couches are just the right height for the current Roomba to get under and then get stuck, a larger one wouldn't even go there at all.
I wholeheartedly recommend Roomba for a household without pets (or with very little shedding), but can't really recommend it with pets that shed a lot. Unless you have all hard flooring - it seems to do a lot better with the pet hair there.
The key to using pyTiVo with DVD rips is to simply extract the original MPEG-2 stream from the DVD without transcoding at all. pyTiVo will then send it to the TiVo (at least TiVo HD, probably Series 3 as well) as-is, and the result is exactly what you'd see (and hear) if you had popped the DVD into a DVD player.
On the Mac, I use RipIt to rip the DVD, followed by DVDRemasterPro to extract the main title as a single vob. Often this is enough, and the vob will transfer and play directly on the TiVo. Sometimes a pass through MPEGStreamClip is also necessary to clean up timestamps.
MacTheRipper is sometimes good on old titles that don't have all the new fair-use prevention measures - it can extract a single title from a DVD in a single step instead of the multi-step process above. But it doesn't handle about 90% of newer DVDs.
This works on probably 95% of the DVDs I've tried. Of the remaining handful, a manual pass through ffmpeg (using the "copy" pseudo-codecs) fixed a couple, but a few still are problematic for the TiVo's MPEG-2 decoder.
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=301 711
Thanks, that worked. But why? I see no reason to require IPv6 here. The same Airport Express works fine with iTunes 6 and IPv4. It's only the combination of iTunes 7 and IPv4 that seems to be broken. I can't imagine any reason why this should be. I specifically turned off IPv6 because I don't use it for anything. Bah.
I seriously doubt the shuffle will ever support gapless, but I'm still wondering about the Airport Express problem. iTunes 6 connects just fine to the same unit that iTunes 7 won't talk to. iTunes 7 sees it, but nothing happens when you select it.
For the people who've reported gapless playback in existing generation iPods, can you double check? Any further details? Firmware versions? Won't work for me. I guess I'll have to listen to one of the new iPods in store before purchasing.
No, iTunes has never had true gapless playback. There's always been at least a slight hiccup in between tracks, no matter how you set it up. The old crossfade set to 0 trick also wasn't a complete solution - if you had a transition with a fast tempo, you'd hear it screw up a beat or two.
I'm really eager to try this out and see if they truly fixed it.
Yes, this is the biggest news as far as I'm concerned. I've been bitching about this since I got my first iPod. I've looked at alternatives, and nothing came close in overall features and seamless integration with the music library. The few gapless alternatives were pretty crappy otherwise and left out major features I'd grown accustomed to. For the last year, I've held off replacing my iPod that was stolen just because of the lack of gapless playback. I refused to give them any more money for a seriously flawed product (for my needs, not for most people's needs, obviously). The fact that it should have been easy to fix always bugged me.
Did Apple finally listen?
I'm going to have to play around with this soon to see if it's truly up to par. If it works on 5th gen iPods, then I can test it on my wife's iPod before buying one of my own. This is exciting, because it was the last feature I've been wanting for my music listening experience. If it works as advertised, the experience will finally be as close to perfection as it can get for me. Can't wait to try it out...
Whoops, forgot to uncheck "Post Anonymously". Doh!
First of all, the iPod adds a much larger gap than can be attributed to MP3/AAC frames alone. This is shown quite nicely in the AC's first link. This is poor programming and/or design by Apple, plain and simple.
Second, why should I care about an inherent limitation in the format? As a listener, I want the music to sound just the same as when I play it on a 20-year-old CD player. The iPod is far more powerful than a CD player, so why is its playback so much poorer?
Finally, there are many possible ways to eliminate the last-frame gap problem:
Given how simple this problem is, it's ridiculous that Apple has ignored it for going on 5 years now. Steve Jobs isn't the perfectionist that urban legends say he is, because this is precisely the sort of thing that should drive him nuts. Apparently it doesn't, and he's just happy with a crappy player as long as 99.99% of buyers never listen to gapless albums.
It wouldn't bug me at all if the rest of the experience weren't so far above the competition. Bah. Thanks for getting me going on that rant again...
Not a true replacement, but I swear by Terminal + screen (included with OS X). The major advantage is that you can attach to the same screen session from anywhere in the world, resuming exactly where you left off. You can even be attached from multiple places at once (work, home, etc). This is also handy for viewing multiple screen windows at once by simply opening multiple Terminal windows and attaching them to the same session.
The keyboard shortcuts for managing "windows" are also quite handy, easier than clicking a mouse. I can't imagine why anyone would use anything else, but I guess that's just me.
Anybody have any other good Mac OS X "gotchas" for the average technically competant switcher that I've forgotten?
A couple off the top of my head:
If you're doing serious administration, learn niutil and its gui sibling, NetInfo Manager. User account settings, groups, NFS mounts, etc, are all stored in the NetInfo database. Learn it and love it.
OS X's built in fsck is crap. If you're ever unfortunate enough to get a corrupted HFS+ filesystem, invest in a copy of DiskWarrior. It's fixed everything I've thrown at it that wasn't a hardware failure, where most of the time fsck (also wrapped in the Disk Utility gui) gave up. I still don't understand why Apple doesn't just buy it and bundle it with the OS.
External disks are mounted by default with permissions such that the currently logged in user owns everything on them. This is not always desirable (when backing up files that should retain owner/permissions). To disable this behavior for a volume, either use vsdbutil -a
Short list of helpful command-line utilities to look up:
Finally: macosxhints.com.
versioned filesystem
A few people have said this here. Where is the evidence?
I initially thought Time Machine was utilizing a new versioned filesystem (perhaps ZFS). But unfortunately all evidence points to "No". It requires an external drive or server dedicated to backups and nothing else (great for laptops... NOT!). It only makes incremental backups once every 24 hours. Sounds very much like a Spotlight type of add-on, where the system keeps a list of the files that have changed since the last backup, then automatically backs up those files on the external drive. It's just an incremental backup scheme and little else.
Is there other evidence for a versioned filesystem? If so, why isn't Time Machine using this, dropping the requirement for an external drive (as well as the only once-daily backups)?
Again, 30 days persists as a completely false myth. With Apple, it's 14 days:
i cies.html
http://store.apple.com/Catalog/US/Images/salespol
The up-to-date program has always been available only if you bought your Mac after the OS release date was announced. That's always been less than 30 days.
For reference, Tiger's release date of April 29, 2005 was announced on April 12, 2005 (18 days, inclusive). Macs purchased on April 11, 2005 or before were not eligible for Tiger's up-to-date program. Panther's release date of October 24, 2003 was announced on October 8, 2003 (17 days).
30 seems to be a nice round number that's easy to remember, so people toss it around as fact instead of checking for themselves. I've seen a number of people on various forums get burned by this, assuming they'd be ok buying within 30 days of the rumored (but not yet announced) release date. If you want the next OS release for cheap via this program, don't buy your new Mac until the OS release date is officially announced. Let's debunk this myth!
My first impression when reading about this was that it must be implemented at the filesystem level, either as an addition to HFS+, or maybe as the incorporation of something like ZFS as an alternative. If a snapshotting capability such as ZFS's were introduced at the filesystem level, then an external volume would no longer be needed. This would make Time Machine many times more useful to the fastest growing segment of Apple's market (notebooks).
Was it too difficult to go this route for Leopard?
iTerm may have keyboard shortcuts for this (if it doesn't, that's a major deficiency), but I guarantee screen gets the job done better. I got hooked on the remote detach/attach feature of screen about a dozen years ago, and I absolutely can't do without it to this day. I constantly have a screen session running on my home machine with a dozen or more shells. Throughout any given day, I'll attach to it from wherever I may be - the laptop at home, the desktop at home, my office at work, the lab at work, a friend's house, etc. Everything is preserved just as it was last time I left it, so I can resume any one of many tasks anywhere, anytime.
If I need to see multiple windows at once (major development with multiple files, etc), just open up multiple terminal windows and have them all attach to the same screen session simultaneously. Works beautifully. Does iTerm do any of this better?
Panasonic BL-C10A (Amazon note: they like to tinker with the price of this camera; I bought mine when they were $165)
I've got four of these setup at home to monitor the dogs while we're out of the house. They're not wireless (I have them mounted in fixed locations so I just ran Cat5e through the attic to the cameras) but I believe Panasonic makes a wireless version. Things I like about these cameras:
It's not customizable in the sense that the embedded software is open source (at least I don't think it is -- probably the customized Linux they use is available somewhere, but I doubt the web service stuff is). However, they provide very thorough documentation (pdf) of the camera's cgi interface, so you can easily roll your own front end that talks to it. I had plans to do this, but I've found that their own front end works well enough for most accesses.
One thing that I have done is write a little perl script that uses wget to grab a still image every 6 seconds from each camera while we're gone. These are saved and later combined via an AppleScript that I wrote to create a movie of each day's activities. I've found all kind of interesting stuff by reviewing these movies after the fact -- like one day we got a mouse in the house, which the cat subsequently chased off.
I've been through two different 3rd generation iPods with dying/dead hard drives. The second, a 40 GB, was acquired, used, to replace the drive in the first (a 30 GB). That means I popped them both opened and did a drive swap, being extra careful to make sure all connections were properly seated.
The first drive was still dead in its "new" enclosure. The second drive still worked -- but only for a few weeks. After that, it exhibited the same symptoms of clicking and slowly dying over time. No amount of reseating helped.
The hypothesis given in the article may very well apply in many cases, but it is not the cause of all the click-of-death "sad iPod" failures users are seeing.
Oh yeah, I didn't mention that because the post wasn't supposed to be about gapless; that was just a side issue. But yes, I've known about the join tracks feature for a long time, and it's simply no good to me. When you do that, you lose the ability to skip around among different tracks like you can on a CD. You also lose the ability to track per-song metadata, which is absolutely a must for smart playlists to be of any value to me. And of course, you can't drag individual tracks from a "joined" CD into various playlists. It's truly all or nothing. No good.
Some people have suggested ripping gapless CDs twice: once as tracks and once joined. While it gives you more options, it's a terrible workaround to a problem that shouldn't exist in the first place. Not only does it waste twice the space, but metadata is not shared between the different copies of the album. When I play the joined version, the individual song versions don't get updated play count and last played time. Same the other way, obviously.
Look at it this way: a 20-year-old CD player is ancient in technology terms. It can play gapless albums with seamless audio transitions between tracks, and it can also skip around among tracks at will. iTunes and iPod are light years ahead in overall complexity and capability, yet neither can do both at the same time. You either get gapless and no skipping (join tracks), or skipping and gaps (normal import). Pretty ridiculous when the ancient technology performs this aspect of the common task so much better. Even more so when you realize how easy it should be to have proper gapless support, given a half decent design. Either Apple's team is incredibly lazy, or it's incredibly incompetent to the point that the design totally precludes the tiny amount of buffering that would fix this forever.
The thing that kills all the "iPod killers" for me is the lack of integration with your music library, as compared with the iTunes/iPod combo. Nothing else comes close. Smart playlists, automatic sync when you plug in, two-way sync of metadata like play count and last played time (the iPod updates that data in iTunes after you've played songs on the go), etc. I use smart playlists in particular to give myself a level of control over my music listening experience that isn't remotely possible with albums and songs, or simple static playlists. I couldn't imagine doing back to that.
Every competitor I've looked at is sort of hit and miss, and none provides all of these features with such seamless integration. Many present only the simplest interface to the computer - drag and drop music files to the device as a hard drive. That's probably great for many people here, and before I used iTunes, I would have joined in saying it's all anyone could ever need. But the fact is that iTunes provides so much more to enhance the listening experience. I guess it's all in the bundled software, and who provides anything approaching the iTunes functionality?
The article says "Like almost all non-iPod music players, the Z5 is based on Microsoft's music-player software. That is, it doesn't work with the Macintosh." Well, that probably means it's definitely out for me. But out of curiosity, does anyone know how Microsoft's software stacks up against iTunes in the features I've listed? I've been on the lookout for a non-Apple alternative for a long time due to the ridiculous lack of gapless playback in the iPod. I know Apple has no intention of fixing it because their customer base doesn't care (and isn't even aware of the problem). I can find gapless alternatives, but none that give me the overall experience that iPod/iTunes does. How close is this one?
The guy doesn't say specifically, but it sounds to me like he simply stumbled upon it by accident. I don't get the impression at all that he's some super-hax0r looking to exploit a flaw.
Here's his page about it.
Here's a post he made on MacRumors.
That doesn't leave me with the impression of someone intending to do anything bad with it. I could be wrong!
No kidding. This is the one and only feature I want that the iPod lacks -- and has lacked for 4 1/2 years since its introduction. I refuse to buy a new one until Apple fixes it, but I realize that they probably won't ever do so because 99.99% of their customers don't care or even realize what the issue is. Too bad.
Unfortunately, the few competitors with gapless simply don't get it when it comes to the rest of the package. No smart playlists, no on the fly metadata updates, no easy synchronization both ways, etc. I don't just want my music to be played, I want it managed so that I can have an even better, optimized listening experience. No competitor comes close to iPod/iTunes in that regard, and that's why I just bought a used iPod on eBay to replace my dying one. Apple doesn't get the benefit of my dollars in that sale without gapless, but other competitors with poor management features don't get them either.
FM tuner, stopwatch, video, games, WMA, etc? Heck, even stylish design? Fluff I don't need. Just give me a small, well-managed solution that plays music as accurately as my CD player does (no gaps between tracks with skip ability), inaudible encoding loss notwithstanding. ANYONE who does this will get my business. Apparently nobody wants it.
I always used to say that SGI was the Apple of the unix world. That was before Apple became the Apple of the unix world. ;-) Back in the 90s, SGI was leaps and bounds ahead of any other unix vendor in terms of desktop usability and media/content creation support. That's why it was the gold standard in Hollywood (besides the industry-leading graphics).
But then PCs came along and caught up, then surpassed SGI's capabilities in their core strengths for workstations. And then Apple came and released a unix that was light years ahead of IRIX in terms of usability, application support, and content creation. I've been amazed at how long SGI has hung on with very high end I/O intensive servers being the only strength they have left. The industry caught up and they were unable to adapt. Too bad, they made nice machines back in the day (I'm typing this on a 4 1/2 year old O2+; even that was a pretty poor bang/buck compared to its competition in 2001, but it's still a solid machine).
The only thing I can think of that Apple might benefit from with SGI's technology now is stuff like guaranteed rate I/O that's in IRIX. Macs do pretty well with stuff like that and probably don't need it, but the IRIX tech was the best I've seen. A ridiculously loaded, slow machine wouldn't miss a beat when capturing realtime data like video or whatever. Good stuff.
Other than that, why would Apple want SGI? They have no interest in the super high end multi-million dollar server business, and I can't see them buying SGI just to get into it.
You did, but apparently I didn't. Doh!
Sorry, you were right, someone please mod me into oblivion.
(though my point about more thorough testing still stands)
Apparently many Windows users do too. I can't tell you how many times I've seen people fork over $600 or so to get Photoshop, only to use it for the occasional web graphic. Nothing they do ever uses a feature that's not also in Photoshop Elements, which is vastly cheaper. It's that whole mentality of "gotta have the best" or if it's cheaper it must be inferior. Adobe must love people like that.
Elements is a pretty good deal, even if you only use it occasionally. 95% of my image editing is done in Gimp, but for the 5% of the time that Elements does something much better, it was worth the mere $50 (edu) I paid for it.