Author: Kirk McElhearn

It was either mighty nice of Apple, or a big marketing gamble, to give everyone in the world a copy of the new U2 album. But not everyone likes U2.

Apple has added this album to everyone’s iTunes library, whether you want it or not. The thing is, there are a lot of people who don’t want it.

Depending on your iTunes and iOS settings, you may or may not see the U2 album. If you use iTunes Match, or have Show iTunes in the Cloud purchases checked in the Store preferences of iTunes, you’ll see the album.

I’ve been getting lots of questions about lossless music files recently, and in this week’s column I answer another one. I also remind you that you can’t re-download audiobooks purchased from the iTunes Store, show how you can find songs that aren’t in any playlists, and look at a question about offline storage of Netflix videos.

Lost and not found: audiobook library

Q: I had a hard disk problem, and lost my iTunes library. I went to re-download my purchased music and audiobooks, and found that I couldn’t download the audiobooks at all. All the music was available, but not the audiobooks. Does this mean I’ve lost the more than 200 audiobooks I bought from the iTunes Store?

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

I have reviewed lots of microphones for use with speech recognition software for Macworld: wired headsets, wireless headsets, a handheld microphone, and even a microphone that sits on your desk. If you dictate a lot, you need two things from a microphone: good accuracy and comfort. Many people prefer wireless headsets because they allow you to move around more. A microphone that sits on your desk can be more comfortable, since you don’t need to wear anything on your head. But wired microphones can be more accurate, and you never have to worry about charging their batteries.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

It may be the dog days of summer, but questions to the iTunes Guy are still coming strong. This week, I look at three questions. I explain how to move an iTunes library to an external hard drive, I look at how to tag Christmas specials of TV series, and I discuss the pros and cons of ripping CDs in WAV and AIFF formats.

Move an iTunes library to an external hard drive

Q: Is there a way to move my iTunes library to my external hard drive?

Yes, indeed. And I’ll even give you two solutions to consider. Depending on the content in your iTunes library, you may prefer one or the other.

First, however, here’s an overview of the files that iTunes uses. If you go to your home folder (the one with the house icon and your user name) and then the Music folder, you’ll see that this contains an iTunes folder.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

I didn’t use to be a fan of Markdown, a plain-text syntax that’s designed to be easy to write and read while letting you easily publish to HTML. I write to HTML for several blogs and websites, but I’ve been fluent enough in that language over the years to be comfortable typing the code directly. (I also use a number of TextExpander shortcuts to handle some of that code for me, so I don’t need to remember the details of certain tags.) In addition, Markdown handles only a subset of HTML tags for styling text, and I often need other, more-complex tags. But if you’ve read my reviews of Mac writing apps here at Macworld, you may have noticed that I’ve slowly been coming around to Markdown—for much of what I write, it does what I need with little complication.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

When I looked at microphones for speech recognition a few years ago, Bluetooth microphones didn’t offer good enough voice quality for use with Dragon Dictate, the Mac benchmark for dictation software. Since then, advances have been made in Bluetooth technology, so it’s a good time to look specifically at wireless microphones that offer good enough sound and noise cancellation to use with Dragon Dictate. I tried two Bluetooth microphones and one DECT model. Note that I only discuss these mics for use with speech recognition, not other features such as using them with an iPhone, landline or Skype.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

In this week’s column, I examine an iTunes Match problem that happens to some people, where their music isn’t available from a Mac. I also look at two questions which can be resolved using AppleScripts: One about queueing playlists, and another about exporting playlists to listen to on a USB stick connected to a car stereo.

Where are my matches?

Q: I have over 12,000 songs stored in iCloud with iTunes Match. For some reason, I cannot access them from my MacBook Pro. I can access all of them from my iOS devices, so I know they’re all still there. Is there any way I can fix this so I have access to iTunes Match on my laptop again?

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

iTunes lets you control your music playback from its window, but if you don’t want the full interface visible while you listen to music, there are other ways to tell the app what to do. I’ll show you how you can control iTunes using built-in features as well as third-party apps, so that you can hide the iTunes window when you play your music.

Use media keys

Let’s start by looking at what you can do with built-in OS X features. The easiest way to control iTunes is through media keys; these are some of the F-keys found on the top row of your keyboard. Press the F8 key to play or pause music. Press F7 to skip back—either to the beginning of the currently playing track, if you’ve played less than 10 seconds of it, or to the previous track. F9 skips ahead to the next track.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

In this week’s column, I take a look at a number of questions covering the full range of iTunes conundrums. How do you mass-delete music on an iOS device? What playlist is a song in? Why aren’t my Harry Potter movies in order? And how can I find tracks where the Year tag is empty?

Can’t delete, won’t delete

Q: I use iTunes Match and I want to delete music from my iOS device to clear up space. I can’t seem to do it from iTunes, and on my iPhone I’m only able to delete one track at a time. It there a way to delete whole albums or multiple tracks?

iTunes is, in part, a database, and its smart playlists are just like database queries. In this week’s column, I look at an interesting question, which can be resolved with multiple smart playlists. I also discuss what happens when you break through iTunes Match’s 25,000 track limit, and answer a question about gifting content to people in other countries.

Smart playlists find unique tracks in two different playlists

Q: I have two very long playlists, and I want to find out which tracks are unique in each of them. In other words, I know that a number of songs are in both playlists, but I want to find the songs that are only in one playlist, without having to check each track individually. Is there an easier way to do this?

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

In a previous post, I looked at how to tag the media in your iTunes library. I discussed what tags were—metadata that describes your files and helps you find what you want to play. I also looked at which tags you should consider filling in for different types of music, movies, and TV shows.

Now I want to show you how to clean up tags you’ve already applied. And what defines a “dirty” tag? Perhaps you have random characters in song names. Or maybe words are misspelled or incorrectly capitalized, or tracks attributed to the wrong artist. Such errors can make it harder to organize your library and find the media you want. These tips and tricks will help you sweep out those cobwebs.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Imagine what your iTunes library would be like if all your songs just had random characters for their song, artist, and album names. You’d never find what you want to listen to. But even if your iTunes library’s tags are mostly correct, any erroneous tags may prevent you from finding your music. If an artist’s name is spelled wrong, for instance, or if there’s a typo in a song name you won’t find your favorite tunes when you search in iTunes. And if you’ve left some tags blank, some of your music won’t display in certain views.

For all these reasons it’s a good idea to take a look at your iTunes library and ensure that your tags are filled in and correct. To do that, simply select a track or video and press Command-I to bring up the item’s information window. The Info tab within this window contains many of the item’s tags, but other tabs carry additional tag fields—the Show and Episode Number tags within the Video tab, for example. Or, if you want to apply the same tag to multiple files, select all those files and press Command-I to produce the Multiple Item Information window.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

You know the one where you get a track from iTunes Match and it’s not perfect? How about the one where you’ve just got too much stuff in your iTunes library and it slows iTunes down to a crawl? Or that thing where there are numbers at the beginnings of track names and you’d really like to get rid of them? Well, read on to find out how to fix these problems.

Glitched tracks from iTunes Match

Q: I’ve found that some old purchased iTunes songs are glitching when played directly from iTunes Match. Have you come across this? How can I fix it?

I’ve come across a number of similar problems with iTunes Match tracks since the service went live. One of the most common is truncated tracks, where the tracks just cut off after a few seconds or a couple of minutes. But this also happens with iTunes purchased downloads, so it’s most likely just a server problem. I’ve found that redownloading those tracks resolves the issue.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

You can do a lot with smart playlists in iTunes, and sometimes the questions I get from readers make me discover ideas that I had never thought of. In this week’s column, I show you how to create a smart playlist with a certain percentage of songs from different genres. I also talk about organizing iTunes media files, slow syncing of iOS devices, and how to find a lost password for an Apple ID.

Keeping media files organized

Q: I just recently converted to the Mac world by buying a brand new Macbook Pro. So far, I absolutely love the machine, but one thing I liked about Windows and music management was Media Monkey. When I edited a song’s title, artist, genre, and so on it would automatically edit the actual files on my computer accordingly. So, for instance, if I deleted those songs from iTunes and reloaded them, they would be completely organized the way I intended for them to be. It gave me an easy way to edit multiple music files at once. How can I do this with iTunes?

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

In iTunes 11.1.4, Apple made it a lot easier to work with your Wish List, that virtual shopping cart where you can store items you want to buy in the future. That list had been available before from the iTunes Store, but now you can view it from your iTunes media library. Here’s how you can use it to manage all kinds of purchases from the iTunes Store.

Wish you were here

With all the different kinds of digital content you can now purchase through iTunes, it can be hard to remember what you want to buy: hence the Wish List. Anything you can buy via the iTunes Store, including music, movies, iOS apps, and audiobooks, you can save in your Wish List. You can not, however, add apps from the Mac App Store (at least not yet).

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

One of the best things about iTunes is the ability to make smart playlists to group content according to simple conditions. In this week’s column, I look at two questions about smart playlists: one about listening to different podcasts in chronological order, and another about the Category condition. I also look at how to redownload previous purchases, and how to fix in issue where the Apple TV won’t play surround sound from ripped DVDs.

Playing podcasts in chronological order

Q: I subscribe to multiple podcasts and can’t figure out a way to play them all in chronological order on my iPod classic. I can play each podcast in order, but not all of the podcasts in total in order. Say I subscribe to three podcasts, A, B & C, and I sync my iPod one a week, is there a way to play them in the following order?

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here