minute

Apr 27 2009

Scheduling Your Mac

By: Jon Gales

Back in the OS 9 days it was pretty hard to put your beloved Mac on a schedule.
Now with OS X’s Unix underbelly, it’s easy as 1, 2, configure. The Unix utility
Cron is built into OS X, and can automate most anything. Here’s a quick intro:

Cron is a daemon (program that’s always running) that processes crontab files.
Each user has a crontab file. It’s a very simple format, but it has to be exactly
right:

minute hour day month weekday command

That’s not so bad is it? Put a * when you want it to occur every time. For
example, if we want a job to process at 1PM every day this would be the crontab:

0 13 * * *
command

Now, here is where it stars to get useful… Meet your new favorite command.

open => used to open applications or web URL’s. Here are some examples:

‘open
/Applications/’ opens the Applications folder in the Finder
‘open -a TextEdit /foo.txt’ opens foo.txt in TextEdit.
‘open http://www.macmerc.com/’ opens the URL in your default browser.

so if you have tab browsing and set new links to open a new tab, you can set
your computer to queue a few sites for you in the morning:

0 7 * * * open http://www.macminute.com
0 7 * * * open http://www.cnn.com
0 7 * * * open http://www.mobiletracker.net

At 7AM you’ll get met with three tabs of goodness. Fun! You can do more with
this though–it’s not just opening apps. Any command you can do in the terminal
can be put on a schedule. You can even run Applescripts by using the command
"osascript".

Now, how to actually write your own crontab file. You can do it manually from
the Terminal by typing crontab -e, but I suggest using the free Cronnix.
It labels what column is what which is really handy if you don’t do it every
day.

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Apr 27 2009

We got your iTunes covered

(from Episode #62 of The Lab with Leo Laporte)

iTunes may be the most popular music, movie and podcast organization tool, but that may only because it is a package deal with the most popular portable personal media device; the iPod. The software is good, but it’s not perfect.

You have probably noticed that the recent addition of “CoverFlow� to the iTunes interface isn’t nearly as exciting when the music you acquired from anywhere other than the iTunes store displays a blank black cover with a couple of beamed eighth notes on it. Sure iTunes will try to figure out what cover belongs on your music, but it’s still hit-or-miss… with a definite leaning toward “miss.�

Have you ever noticed, in the “Get Info� information for your music that there is a field in there for “BPM�? That stands for “beats per minute.� Have you ever seen a value in that field? Probably not. In an ideal world, every song would come with that information already on board. Then you could make Smart Playlists of a range of songs that, say, have a driving beat that helps your workout.

The software also is a bit desperate for attention. You get no way to control playback or search your music library unless you keep iTunes frontmost. It might also be nice to have a visual readout of how many unheard podcasts you have.

Let’s see what we can do about these “whines� while also revisiting a caller question from a few weeks ago.

CoverScout
coverscout 20070817 231032 We got your iTunes coveredFor $19.95, equinux’s CoverScout will scour the interwebs for cover art your music was intended to have. It searches international Amazon image catalogs, Google images and, if that doesn’t turn up your missing cover art, it even allows you to use your iSight camera to grab the cover art off the CD you ripped the songs from in the first place. (You did get that music from a legally purchased CD, didn’t you?)
Some “good news/bad news� with CoverScout is that it handles cover art differently than iTunes in that it adds the artwork to the music file instead of keeping it in an external folder. This means that anywhere you might use that music file, the artwork will follow. But it also means if you associate an exceedingly large image file with a song, the file size of that song will increase also.

Tangerine!
tangerine 20070817 230249 We got your iTunes coveredTangerine from Potion Factory ($24.95) analyzes your iTunes music library and determines the number of beats per minute for each song. Adding this information to your music files allows you to make smarter Smart Playlists that filter music based on the tempo of the songs.
iTunes can take care of making those playlists, but Tangerine can do you one better: it can assemble taylor-made playlists of a specified duration that consist of songs within a range of beats per minute and then it orders those songs so that the playlist increases in tempo with each song. There are actually 5 different variations on the tempo pattern that Tangerine’s playlists can follow. When played sequentially, a playlist can coincide with your workout’s warm-up and cool-down times.

DockArt and Quicksilver
DockArt 20070817 230614 We got your iTunes coveredWith DockArt, iTunes gains the ability to display album art in the dock and as your desktop picture (though, I’ve found that this bogs down your machine) and also shows a numerical indicator in iTunes’ dock icon showing how many unheard podcasts you currently have on file. DockArt is donationware. In this case, donations are to be sent to the Fidelco Guide Dog Foundation.
Quicksilver is a favorite of many Mac users, but few who use it even come close to taking advantage of its full power. For instance, by installing the iTunes module and configuring it in the Triggers menu, Quicksilver can give you full control of iTunes from any application on your Mac…for free! You can finally leave iTunes in the background and still have it at your command!

Extra Credit — iBeeZz
ibeezz 20070817 230427 We got your iTunes coveredOn one of my ealier visits to The Lab, a caller asked if there was some way to schedule iTunes to start-up in the middle of the night to download his podcast subscriptions. At the time, we recommended that he set up an event in iCal to launch iTunes every night at a certain time. The part we couldn’t help the caller with at the time was how to get iTunes to shut down again after it was done.
Enter iBeeZz.
For 12.50 Euro (about $17 US), you can program all kinds of sleep and wake-up times for your Mac as well as files and applications. It has a special setting for iTunes that allows you to schedule iTunes to startup at bedtime, lower the volume to a soothing level and start a playlist of your choosing (possibly a low-BPM playlist you made using Tangerine or a “nap� you saved out of Pzizz).

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Apr 27 2009

Smarten up iTunes’ Smart Playlists with nesting

This is one of those "here’s my situation and what I did about it, if you’re even a little like my, you might give this a try" kind of tutorials.

I drive a half hour to 45 minute commute to work and I like to listen to my iPod and sing along with the music as I go until someone notices and laughs (then I pretend I’m talking to someone on my hands free cell phone …poking at the imaginary buttons on my dashboard sells the illusion, I think). The problem I had was that my iTunes library, though rather modest, is diverse and not all of the content is even music let alone stuff I’d want to sing along to.

Like anyone in this situation, I set up a playlist to hold all the music I like to listen to while driving. That was fine for a while, but as you probably realize, a playlist never changes. When I added music to my collection, I’d have to add it to any playlists I wanted it to be in by hand. To have a playlist automatically grab newly added music, it would have to be smart…like a Smart Playlist.

Smart Playlists gave me another problem. Smart as they are, they’re not bright enough to know that podcasts like Jonathan Coulton’s Thing A Week and Geoff Smith’s Ones and Os are actually music delivered via RSS–they only let me listen to them with other podcasts. If Iwas going to be able to rock out to Re: Your Brains or Digg the Code on my way to work, I was going to have to educate my Smart Playlists. It was an arduous task and maybe someone out there knows a way that makes this system seem even more laughably over complicated (and I certainly hope there is) but here’s what I did: I nested them …and then I made them even smarter.

Teach iTunes to look for audio by file type

audiofiles 20080803 101049 Smarten up iTunes Smart Playlists with nesting

The first playlist, which I titled "___Just the Audio", searches my whole iTunes Library for MP3, AAC and "MPEG audio file" formats. You may have to add a few other file formats depending on what kind of audio you have in your collection, but this worked for me.

Narrowing it down to Music

justmusic 20080803 102143 Smarten up iTunes Smart Playlists with nesting

Next, I set up a Smart Playlist to weed out the Genres and other Playlists that I don’t want to listen to on the way to work. This Smart Playlist is a long list of "is not" rules that are ended with "Playlist is ___Just the Audio". I named this one "__Just the Music".

I was getting closer; I had all my music in one Smart Playlist. I still found that I was shuffling through to a lot of songs that I just didn’t want to hear. I was at a loss because iTunes doesn’t have a rule for "Kind is what I want to hear" …or does it?

Smarten up the Smart Playlist

skippedsongs 20080803 103018 Smarten up iTunes Smart Playlists with nesting

iTunes does keep track of the songs you skip–even on your iPod. So I set up this Smart Playlist (named "_Skipped Songs") that keeps track of the songs that I’ve skipped more than four times in the last four months. To get add a point to a song’s Skip Count, you must hit the Next button no earlier than 2 seconds into the song and no later than 20 seconds in.

The smart part of this Smart Playlist comes when I apply it to one of the other ones.

The Smart Smart Playlist

magicplaylist 20080803 103735 Smarten up iTunes Smart Playlists with nesting

This is the playlist I rock out to on the way to and from work.

Each file in my iTunes Library is first checked to make sure it is in fact an audio file, then it is compared to a list of genres and playlists that I don’t want to listen to with my list’nin’ music, and finally the song’s "permanent record" is checked to see if it is a "repeat offender" in that it has been skipped repeatedly in the last little while.

This keeps me from being bothered by music I always skip while not being so strict as to put a black mark on a song I just didn’t feel like listening to that day or one I skipped accidentally. It also gives every skipped song a bit of a probationary hearing so that they get another chance to win me over in the future.

Your milage may vary.

The audio file format types, the list of restricted genres and the "four skip/four month" thing will be factors that you will have to adjust to match your personal listening tastes, the size of your library and how fast you cycle through it. This works pretty well for me, but I expect I will be making adjustments to it in the future as new factors come to light.

The real lesson here is that Smart Playlists can be played off each other to make them smarter and to better suit your needs. It’s all good.

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