Along with the usual bug fixes and performance improvements, the recently updated iTunes 11.0.3 introduces several interface tweaks. For my money, the most welcome addition is one that Apple doesn’t even mention on its “About iTunes 11.0.3” page: a redesigned interface for checking on and downloading updated iOS apps.

On the downside, if you’re among the unlucky minority, the new iTunes version may crash on a regular basis.

Updating apps gets a welcome makeover

Back in 2010, I detailed several problems with how the app update process worked in iTunes — and how it could be improved. The just released iTunes update, at last, addresses almost all of these concerns.

• The location of the Updates button has moved to a better, more easily accessible, location. Of course, you first have to discover the change. Rather than off by itself at the bottom of the Apps window, Updates is now at the end of the row of buttons at the top of the window.


• After clicking the Updates button, iTunes 11.0.3 instantly displays a list of whatever updates you have available. In iTunes 10 and earlier, clicking Check for Updates would just tell you if updates were available. If they were, you would be asked if you wanted to view them—requiring that you click a second button. Even after clicking the second button, it still took a few moments before the update list appeared. While prior versions of iTunes 11 somewhat simplified the procedure, iTunes 11.0.3 completes the job.


• Catching up with the iOS versions of the App Store, the latest Mac version of iTunes now gives you quick access to What’s New in each updated app. Just click on an app’s icon and an expanded view drops down. From here, you get the details of what’s new as well as the app’s version number. You can also select to individually update an app. This is still not as good as how things work on the iPad, where the data and Update buttons are all available without requiring a separate click of each app. But it’s much better overall than how this was handled in older Mac versions of iTunes. The new iTunes app update listings no longer indicates the size of each app, but most people won’t miss this.

• The Updates listings are now part of the Apps section of your iTunes Library. In prior versions of iTunes, selecting to view updates transferred you from Apps and whisked you away to the iTunes Store. I’m sure this contributed to the slower response times. It also was a source of irritation if you needed to toggle back and forth between the two locations while dealing with updates.

iTunes crashes for some

After updating to the latest version of iTunes, a subset of users report having repeated crashes, “on an almost daily basis,” as often as “every five minutes.” Downgrading back to 11.0.2 appears to eliminate the crashes, but Apple does not make this easy to accomplish. Unfortunately, if you are a victim of this bug, there does not seem to be a better consensus work-around. Presumably, Apple will quash the bug in the next iTunes update.

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This week, I take an in-depth look at just one question. I get a lot of emails about syncing music to an iOS device, and many people find it difficult to sync when their music library is larger than the space available on their iOS device. So here’s a question about checked tracks, playing albums, and syncing.

Q: I have a lot of music and an iPod. I can’t fit all the music onto the iPod, so I uncheck the tracks I don’t want to sync. This works fine, except when I want to listen to an album in iTunes on my Mac.

I might have the three best songs checked so they get synced to my iPod, and when I go to play the full album in iTunes, it will only play those three songs, unless I check the others. If I do that, however, the next time I sync the iPod, those other tracks will get copied. Even if I create a playlist, it will skip the unchecked songs, so the only way to listen to music that I don’t want on my iPod is to check the boxes and hope to remember to uncheck them again.

How can I get around this problem?

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If you were hoping that the next update to iTunes might reverse some of the drastic changes Apple made in last year’s version 11, don’t hold your breath. A minor update released on Thursday, iTunes 11.0.3, makes some tweaks to the program’s interface, as well as applying fixes for some security issues.

Among the changes in 11.0.3 is a revamped MiniPlayer, which now features a progress bar, complete with draggable playhead. The audio output button, which now uses a speaker icon instead of Apple’s traditional AirPlay icon, is also now visible even when you’re not hovering over the window.

There’s also now an alternate view of the MiniPlayer, which you can toggle by clicking on the album art: You’ll get a larger window, focused on the album art, with controls—including playback, Up Next, audio output, and more—that appear when you hover over the window. This view replaces the somewhat peculiar album art window from earlier versions of iTunes 11, which appeared when you double clicked on album art in the playback window, but provided fewer controls.

And Apple’s fascination with album art continues apace: a new view option in 11.0.3 lets you display album artwork in the Songs listing. Go to View -> Show View Options and click the new Show Artwork checkbox. By default, iTunes will not display album art for albums where you only have a couple songs, but you can force it to display those images by selecting the Always Show option.

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It’s been eight years since we reviewed the original version of Delicious Library, Delicious Monster's clever app for managing your media. But the question that greets Delicious Library 3, the latest edition in the franchise, is this: In 2013, is it still a good way to track and document all the items in your media collection?

The answer to that question: Mostly, but Delicious Library 3 has some mild shortcomings to be addressed.

If you’re not familiar with Delicious Library (the last major version of which, Delicious Library 2, was released five years ago), the Mac app organizes and tracks collections of books, movies, other media, and even tools—it’s media-oriented, but it’s not limited to media. Essentially, anything with a barcode can be scanned and added to the app’s customized “shelf.”

In the past, the easiest way to add an item to Delicious Library was by holding its barcode up to your computer’s webcam for scanning. The app uses this barcode to automatically find and enter pertinent information about the item (including a photo) to the shelves of your virtual library.

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The Public Radio Player app for iPhone has been around long enough that it could almost be called “venerable”—the offering from PRX was one of the first iOS audio player apps to stream live radio, effectively turning the then-new iPhone into a broadcast tuner that could receive live, dynamic audio content from anywhere in the world. In fact, we reviewed an early version of the appin 2009.

Version 3.0 of the app, released in February, builds on all of Public Radio Player’s many demonstrated strengths from throughout the years: It remains one of the best aggregators of public radio content in the land—with more than 500 stations available for live streaming and more than 1,000 listen-on-demand programs—and the app keeps adding features to make it ever more useful. But two things plague the radio player: One old shortcoming, and that it mostly falls short when compared to similar rival apps.

Not that there’s nothing to love about the revamped app. The visual design has been updated—for greater contrast, the developers at PRX say, but the green-and-orange color palette gives off a funky vibe. And the listen-on-demand features of the app have become more podcast-like, letting users download episodes of shows to listen to later offline.

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Between Google Hangout video conferences for work, Skype videos and calls for podcasts, and FaceTime chats with family and friends, I use AV-chat apps several times each week. But I’m not always an active audio participant: I’m a heavy user of the Mute button in every one of those apps and services. Sometimes it’s because I’m typing and I don’t want the clickety-clack of my keyboard to be audible on a podcast recording or to others in a meeting. Other times the maintenance folks are performing the day’s noisiest tasks at the same time as my chat, right outside my office window. And it’s not uncommon for family members to come into my home office while I’m chatting or recording.

The problem with using so many different apps for chats and recordings is that each of those apps has a different way to mute the microphone. Which isn’t a huge hassle, but it does mean that whenever I want to mute my mic, I need to stop and think about which app I’m using, and then remember where the mute control is. And if for some reason I use a different microphone-enabled app—for example, GarageBand for a podcast recording—I have to learn a new mic-mute control.

At least, that’s how it used to be. But I recently started using Shush ($3; Mac App Store link), and muting is now much simpler. When Shush is running, I can mute and unmute my mic using a systemwide hotkey—no matter which app or service I’m using, the mute action is the same. (Hotkey choices are currently limited to modifier keys. I’ve chosen Shift+Control, but I’d like to be able to assign any key combination.)

By default, Shush mutes your microphone unless you press and hold your hotkey(s). In other words, Shush gives you a push-to-talk microphone. But you can reverse this behavior so that your mic is generally live; you hold down your keyboard shortcut only when you want to mute. A useful option lets you quickly double-press your shortcut to toggle mute without having to hold down any keys—this is the way I end up using Shush most of the time.

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When the Remote app first launched in 2008, it could control your Mac and Apple TV’s music from afar—but that was about it. The program has come a long way in four years: Version 3.0, which launched alongside iTunes 11, gives the whole app a good polish along with a new iPad interface and a few new features that tie in nicely with Apple’s latest desktop media manager.

Feature-rific

The Remote app retains most of the features you might know and love from version 2.4: You can connect to your iTunes or Apple TV libraries via Home Sharing, control content playback, create and edit playlists, tap into other shared music libraries, trigger the visualizer remotely, and create Genius playlists.

Version 3.0 takes all of those features, adds a few tricks, and incorporates iTunes 11 improvements. From the start, the icons in the Remote library have been updated to reflect iTunes' new silver icon; you’ll also spot colored icons in the iPad version of the app.

The Remote app’s biggest new feature is support for Up Next, iTunes 11’s live playlist/jukebox. Once you start playing a song from the app (or connect the app to a library already playing music), iTunes generates an Up Next list of songs. You can add to the list or edit it at any time by tapping the Up Next icon and choosing the Add or Edit button, respectively. The Up Next icon also holds a button for viewing your listening history, in case you want to hear a certain song again.

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[Editor’s note: The iTunes 11.0.1 update released on 12/13/12 addresses several of the problems discussed in the review, including very slow searching and the missing ability to display duplicate tracks.]

iTunes 11, whose delayed release fueled much speculation about last-minute changes following an internal reorganization at Apple, sports the most radical alterations to the program’s interface since its inception. Previous upgrades to iTunes were incremental, adding features and tweaking the interface, but iTunes 11 puts a whole new face on the software. In addition, iTunes 11 seems to be designed more for playing music than for organizing it—a slightly anachronistic approach, given the prevalence of portable devices.

The most obvious change is the reintroduction of color to the program. In my review "First look: iTunes 10," written in September 2010, I lamented the absence of color, saying, “iTunes 10 has a somewhat Soviet utilitarian look which, to my eyes, makes it less interesting to work with.” Well, color is back, both in the sidebar and in the Library pop-up menu at the top left of the iTunes window. In addition, when you display playlists, their text will be larger and bolder, and the background of the Playlists column will be lighter, providing much better contrast. The program also uses a Helvetica font with reduced spacing between letters, enabling iTunes to display longer texts in short spaces (such as in the Playlists column).

Viewing your music

The new options to view music by Genres or by Artists display sidebars showing icons for genres or for artists, with icons from your album art. (Videos, Books, and other types of content offer similar options.) You can sort items in these views as you like: Press Command-J to display a tiny View Options window, where you can sort by Title, Artist, Year, or Rating, for example, when in Genres view.

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I usually cover one Gem per column, but today I’ve got two simple apps that complement iTunes. One is an update to a previous Gem, and the other is new for Mountain Lion (OS X 10.8).

Skip Tunes 2.0.1

Back in February, I reviewed Skip Tunes 1.0, an inexpensive ($1 at the time) menu-bar controller and information display that works with the iTunes, Spotify, and Rdio apps. Skip Tunes puts a tiny controller in the menu bar that shows three buttons: play/pause, skip (hence the utility’s name), and a music icon. The idea is that you get a quick-and-easy way to pause or skip—the most common music-listening actions—without having to switch to your music app. As a bonus, clicking the music-note icon displays the current track’s album art, as well as track information, a progress bar, and a more-complete set of controls: skip back, play/pause, and skip forward.

Skip Tunes 2.0.1 (Mac App Store link) () has increased in price to $2, but it’s also gained some additional functionality. The biggest is a feature whose omission I lamented in my original review: keyboard shortcuts. You can now configure systemwide keyboard shortcuts for previous track, play/pause, and next track; the shortcuts affect whichever of the three supported music apps you’re currently using.

In addition, Skip Tunes’s popover display has gotten a considerable overhaul: The entire display is now larger, more polished, and Retina-ready; the progress bar shows track time (elapsed and remaining) and lets you scrub through the current track; and there’s now a shuffle-play toggle. The controls and progress bar now appear only when the pointer hovers over the album art, and you can now click anywhere on the album art to switch to whichever music app is playing. Finally, if none of the three supported music apps is running, Skip Tunes hides its systemwide menu.

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With an abundance of radio and podcast apps swarming the App Store, any new radio app has to bring something different (or better) to the table in order to grab your attention. TuneIn Radio Pro—a $1 app for iPhone and iPad—does just that: it creates a sort of audio DVR for your iOS device.

Apps like iHeartRadio already provide access to thousands of radio station streams for users to listen to on their iPhone or iPad. Stitcher Radio combines that live stream access with a podcast library that lets users create an audio-on-demand experience. But TuneIn Radio Pro, on the other hand, has radio feeds from 70,000 stations and reportedly more than 2 million podcast selections, while also offering users the option to record live radio feeds.

That recording can take place in real time—just push the red “record” button if you like what you’re listening to, just like teenagers of the 1980s did with their boom boxes and cassette tapes. Or you can set the app to record a specific time. If, for example, you know that Terry Gross will be conducting a particularly interesting interview while you’re away from the radio, or if there’s a “morning zoo” crew you love to listen to without the kids, TuneIn Pro lets you schedule the recording and listen later.

TuneIn Radio, the free version of the same app, doesn’t include the recording option and features banner advertising. Otherwise, both the pro and free versions offer the same features. TuneIn Radio Pro also offers a live buffering stream, so you can pause a song in the middle to take a call, or rewind and re-listen to a song you just heard two minutes ago—similar to how you can rewind live video on a DVR-equipped television.

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For years, Rogue Amoeba’s Fission has been my go-to tool for manipulating audio files. Whenever I need to trim songs, splice tracks, edit voice recordings, fade tracks in or out, or create ringtones, Fission has been simple and efficient—once you’ve mastered the basics, you can do any of these tasks and more.

A big update, Fission 2, has been a long time coming, but it was worth the wait. In addition to an attractive new interface—with two themes, one dark and one light—it now supports FLAC files, and can convert files, alone or in batches, to and from any of the formats it supports: AAC, MP3, AIFF, WAV, FLAC, and Apple Lossless. Though it’s still not as versatile as the free XLD—which can convert multiple files at the same time, taking advantage of all available CPU capacity of your Mac—Fission’s file-conversion features will be sufficient for most users.

As with the original version, when you work with audio files in Fission 2, they’re edited in their original format; some audio-editing apps first convert files to, say, AIFF, and then later convert them back to their original format. Fission’s approach saves time and makes editing easier, as you can edit AAC or MP3 files without having to go back and forth to another format.

While the essentials of Fission haven’t changed, the program’s new interface makes the program feel different, and overall performance seems snappier. The help system is much improved, as well, with more screenshots and illustrations to explain the tasks you’re most likely to perform.

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Editor’s note: The following review is part of Macworld’s GemFest 2012 series. Every weekday from mid June through mid August, the Macworld staff will use the Mac Gems blog to briefly cover a favorite free or low-cost program. Visit the Mac Gems homepage for a list of past Mac Gems.

Instapaper has been a favorite app among iOS users since the app first launched in 2008. Now, Instapaper users have another choice when it comes to digesting their saved Instapaper articles with Readomator for Instapaper (Mac App Store link). The Instapaper client converts your saved Instapaper articles into podcasts with iTunes.

The integration with Instapaper is overall seamless. You can view and convert not only your currently saved articles into podcasts, but also your past articles from the Liked or Archive sections of your Instapaper account. By default, Readomator is set to run in the background (but you can disable this if you wish) and it checks for new articles every hour. You can set the frequency it refreshes from every 10 minutes to every day; you can also manually refresh.

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iTunes gives you the ability to access thousands of free streaming Internet radio stations from around the world. But what about if you want to spin the virtual radio dial on an iOS device as well? You may have found some great Internet radio stations that play just the right type of music for work or play and want to access them on the go. Or you may have a favorite radio station for news, talk, or music that’s streamed over the Internet. Luckily, you can replicate some of what iTunes offers on your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch with some third-party apps.

For starters, there are iOS apps for services like Last.fm ( ), Pandora Radio ( ), Sirius XM, and Slacker Radio ( ), offering each of those services’ content, either paid or free. (You may or may not have mobile access in your subscription with some of the above.)

1. Shoutcast offers 54,000-plus radio stations, and you can access them with the free Shoutcast Radio iOS app. This app is easy to navigate, but has minimal features. You can view what you’re listening to, if the station provides this information, but there’s no album art or lyrics.

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In a move that should surprise no one, Adobe announced sweeping changes to its Creative Suite software line and year-old Creative Cloud subscription service. Signaling a new focus on integrating creative services in the cloud with its professional desktop software, Adobe launched a new cloud-based Creative Suite—with a new CC moniker, for Creative Cloud. But it will look familiar. Significant upgrades to all current Creative Suite 6 apps are coming soon, but they will be available only by subscription to Creative Cloud, not traditional software licenses.

Ten years after Adobe corralled its disparate creative apps into a cohesive interoperable suite with a common launch date, the company is propelling those apps into its Creative Cloud subscription service. With updated versions of 15 professional creative applications—for photographers, graphic and Web designers, and video and motion graphic artists—Adobe announced the rebranding at its Max 2013 Creativity Conference keynote. While this transition and collective suite upgrade was announced today, the apps will not be shipping until June 17.

“This is the decision of our company—to focus on Creative Cloud—and it is huge,” said Scott Morris, Adobe's senior marketing director. “It’s an even bigger decision than when we moved to Creative Suite years ago." And it is sure to be controversial. However, Adobe considers the response to its Creative Cloud strategy more than respectable so far, expects some pushback from customers, and is prepared to deal with the fallout. "In the same way [as Creative Suite], there will be customers who have a hard time with it at first. But today our customers are on Creative Suite—they got over it; they saw the benefit of it; and that’s exactly the type of transition we’re going through.” Adobe says Creative Cloud has more than half a million paid members, and more than 2 million total members since it launched in April 2012.

With this update, you can store, sync, and share files via Creative Cloud, on the Mac OS, Windows, iOS, and Android platforms and on Behance, an online creative community Adobe purchased last year that is now integrated with Creative Cloud. Behance lets users exhibit work, get feedback, and generate exposure. With Creative Cloud, Adobe seeks to tame chaotic creative workflows and direct communication conduits away from email and Dropbox toward Behance.

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After several years of sneak peeks, Adobe’s propensity for revealing aspects of its new video and motion graphics applications to a select audience prior their release qualifies as something of a tradition. The captive audience at this year's National Association of Broadcasters national convention—the favored venue—saw an abbreviated version of what will soon be released as the new cloud-based Premiere Pro CC and After Effects CC, and more.

As Adobe wraps all of its professional creative apps into the cloud, Premiere Pro benefits from universal cloud features such as Sync Fonts and Sync Settings that let remote videographers and artists get down to work right away in a familiar tool-based environment, regardless of where they’re working.

In Adobe's transition from Creative Suite to Creative Cloud, familiar apps get an upgrade while subscribers get a slate of extra services for their $50 monthly subscription. Access to Sync services, 20GB of online storage, the Behance community hub, automatic cross-platform downloading and updates to all programs in the suite, and training are some of the benefits built into subscriptions.

Today, at its own conference, Adobe Max 2013, the company is revealing more details about the new version of its desktop nonlinear editing and motion graphics programs. Here are some of the highlights of the video line.

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If you love to listen to podcasts on your iPhone or iPad, you’re probably familiar with Vemedio’s Instacast, a $5 app that lets you consume your favorite shows through an elegant and well-thought-out user interface.

Despite all its great features, Instacast was an iOS-only affair—until now. The folks behind it have now released a public beta of Instacast for OS X, and we’ve taken the Mac version for a spin to see how it holds up.

Podcasts a-go-go

Like its mobile cousin, Instacast for Mac revolves around a simple and intuitive user interface that emphasizes your content, organized according to your tastes.

When you first launch the app, you’ll probably start by building your own library of podcasts; Instacast offers a convenient panel for this purpose, letting you pick favorites from a large catalog that’s divided up by podcast type—audio, video, enhanced content, and so forth—as well as by genre and language. You can also search for a specific title, or enter a feed URL directly if you so choose.

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The great thing about the iTunes Store is that you can buy just about any song you can imagine, cheaply and easily. And the worst thing about the iTunes Store? Sometimes you can buy those songs a little too easily.

Apple’s retail store for digital downloads has been open for a decade now, and in that time, you’ve probably loaded up on a lot of music. And you don’t have to tell us that some of those downloads probably seemed like a good idea at the time. In honor of the 10th anniversary of the iTunes Music Store, I combed through my purchase history to find some of the instances where I could have spent my 99 cents more wisely. Perhaps my confessions of regrettable musical choices will make you feel better about your own iTunes indiscretions over the last 10 years. At the very least, I hope my embarrassing selections serve as a reminder that when it comes to hitting that download button in Tunes, sometimes discretion is the better part of valor.

More One-Hit Wonders Than I Can Count

Just after the iTunes Store opened its virtual doors, my paymasters at Macworld wanted an article on the depth and breadth of the store’s initial offerings. Among the more hare-brained of my assorted schemes to survey the store’s selection: See how many of VH1’s Top 100 One-Hit Wonders I could download from iTunes. The answer, at the time? 39. The cost to my psyche whenever “It’s Raining Men” has popped up on random shuffle during the ensuing decade? Incalculable.

“Wait, you went ahead and actually downloaded all those songs?” you may be asking. “Why not just keep a running tally and leave it at that?”

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As I write this paragraph, I’m enjoying a playlist that I created from among the thousands of songs on my iPhone, and it’s no big deal. It wasn’t always so simple: Once upon a time, crafting the perfect playlist for your MP3 player felt like an epic project. You had to rip the songs from a CD onto your computer, find sources—legitimate and otherwise—for tracks you didn’t own, and then hope everything was in the right format to play on your portable device. Apple changed all that, thanks to a series of musical moves right at the dawn of the 21st century—not the least of which was the launch of the iTunes Music Store.

It was only ten years ago—on April 28, 2003—that Apple opened the iTunes Store (then called the iTunes Music Store) and changed the way we buy music. The store arrived with just 200,000 tracks; in the ensuing decade, that library has grown to more than 35 million songs, from the Beatles to Jay-Z. You can even download those tracks over your phone if you want—no computer needed. That was not possible before the iTunes Store opened.

Apple’s not fond of reminiscing, but even the company has taken note of iTunes’s anniversary. The store “revolutionized the distribution of digital content,” Peter Oppenheimer, Apple’s chief financial officer, told Wall Street analysts when announcing Apple’s quarterly earnings earlier this week. In addition to those 35 million songs, which are available in 119 countries, the store sells 60,000 movies in 109 countries, and 1.75 million books in 155 countries. By Oppenheimer’s math, the $4 billion in quarterly billings recorded by iTunes in the most recent quarter makes it the largest digital content store in the world.

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In March, I wrote an article about how Apple should change the way iTunes Store purchases work. Namely, that there should be a way to buy content now, but download it later—especially in the case of large video files such as movies or TV show seasons.

Lo and behold, on Friday Apple did just that, adding new download options for a variety of content, including movies, individual TV show episodes, TV Season Passes, and completed seasons. You get the same options for movie bundles, music box sets, and for when you choose to complete a TV season or Season Pass.

When purchasing any of the above items using iTunes 11 on a Mac or Windows PC, or an iOS device running iOS 6 or later, you’re now presented with Later and Download (or Download All) buttons. Tap Later and the purchased items will be added to your iTunes account and accessible to stream or download in the future via Apple’s iTunes in the Cloud feature. It’s a handy feature if you, say, want to buy a movie on sale while you have a spotty data connection; you can make sure to get the cheaper price, then download the item when you get home—or even just play it from the cloud.

Note that the new option is available to those who live in countries or regions where Apple supports iTunes in the Cloud for video and audio. You can check Apple’s complete list to see if you qualify.

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Apple’s still the king in digital music and raking in the moolah for PCs, but one trader loses big on the company. The remainders for Tuesday, April 16, 2013 are fit for a king.

After 10 Years Apple Continues Music Download Dominance in the U.S. (The NPD Group)

That’s right, nearly ten years after the iTunes Store debuted, it’s still on top of the world, ma. Apple continues to hold the majority of the paid music download market, with 63 percent; Amazon follows with 22 percent. In additional news, NPD reports that 38 percent of surveyed consumers think it’s still important to own music, while 30 percent of Americans believe that listening to albums are important and 27 percent wonder if you’ve ever really listened to Dark Side of the Moon, I mean, like, really.

Escaping PCs (Asymco)

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Mark your calendars because the iTunes Store has an anniversary coming up. Apple started selling music downloads on April 28, 2003—a business decision that seems to have worked out pretty well for the company considering that Apple has since sold more than 25 billion songs.

There’ll be time enough to reflect on the impact of the iTunes Store later this month. In this episode of the Macworld Podcast, I’m joined by executive editor Jonathan Seff and senior editor Dan Moren, as we reflect on another aspect of the store’s stellar growth over the past decade—the fact that the iTunes Store itself has gotten a little unwieldy in recent years.

And stick around after our iTunes discussion for some bonus talk, as Dan Moren fills us in on the iPhone 5 coming to T-Mobile.

Download Episode #349

Show Notes

Jon recently weighed in on the topic of iTunes Store improvements with an article on how Apple could fix the way purchases work. Another topic that comes up in our discussion—managing iTunes accounts—was addressed by Kirk McElhearn in an article on moving an iTunes account from one country to another. (Speaking of Kirk, if you’re the least bit interested in getting more out of iTunes, you should make his Ask the iTunes Guy column one of your regular reads.

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At one time, the computer was the computer and the TV was the TV and never the twain should meet. Yet increasingly computers are being used for entertainment purposes and televisions are packed with more smarts than ever before. Our own Chris Breen decided to bring the two together by incorporating a Mac mini into his home media center. He joins me to talk about the experience.

Download Episode #354

Show Notes

If you’d like Chris’ written impressions as well, check out his The Computer in the Living Room: Setting Up a Mac mini Media Server. And how has the mini changed in the last three years in this regard? Chris’ 2010 article Beyond Cable: The Mac mini Media Machine may provide a hint.

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You can find previous episodes of our audio podcasts at Macworld’s podcasting page.

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Creating playlists in iTunes can be as simple as dragging a few songs, or as complex as creating smart playlists that refer to other playlists and use nested conditions to pick songs that meet specific criteria. In this week’s column, I answer three questions to show just how complex smart playlists can be. While perhaps not the same as the smart playlists you want to make, they are good examples of the complexity that is available with smart playlists in iTunes.

Q: I have a collection of jazz music that is bigger than a single 160GB iPod classic can hold. In total, I have over 6800 albums on four iPods, so I will soon face this problem for other genres too. How can I easily set up two 160GB iPods to hold only jazz music, such as having artists with names from A to L on one and M to Z on another?

The easiest way to do this is set up each iPod to sync a single playlist, and to create two standard (not smart) playlists by dragging all the music from the first group of artists to one playlist, and all the music of the second group to the other.

However, you probably want to be able to sync future additions to your library as well—and that’s where things get more complicated. You can’t create a smart playlist in which the beginning of artists' names are from A to L, for example.

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In this week’s installment, the iTunes Guy looks at renaming files, syncing iOS devices wirelessly, matching music ripped from vinyl, and a couple of questions about tags and file names.

Q: I’ve set up iTunes to sync my iPhone and iPad wirelessly. I find that if I open iTunes with my iPhone or iPad already on, it does not appear in iTunes. I then have to reboot the iPhone or iPad for it to appear. Is there a simpler solution?

I’ve found Wi-Fi syncing to be unreliable. Not only do devices occasionally disappear from iTunes, but they don’t seem to sync regularly (or, often, even when I try to force a sync from iTunes).

One way to get the device to appear in iTunes is to connect it to your computer via the 30-pin or Lightning cable that came with it. But another is to launch a sync from the device. On your iOS device, go to Settings > General > iTunes Wi-Fi Sync and tap Sync Now.

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Sometimes the iTunes Guy gets questions where the only answer is, “sorry, you can’t”. This week’s column covers a couple of questions with no solutions, along with some that do have answers. Learn about finding missing podcast playlists, replacing converted songs in their playlists, and more.

Q: I have a lot of songs in MP3 format, and have started converting them to AAC format to save space on my computer. When doing so, iTunes creates a duplicate version of the song in AAC format, leaving behind the MP3 file. When I delete the MP3 from within iTunes, it removes the songs from all my playlists. I would like to simply convert the song to AAC format, replacing the old MP3 format so that the playlists now reference the AAC version of the song and not the MP3. Is this possible?

Putting aside the fact that I don’t usually suggest converting from one lossy audio file type to another, no, iTunes considers each file to be unique. When you convert a file, you then have two files, and it wouldn’t make sense to add the new files to a playlist, in case you wanted to keep them both. (Because you most likely wouldn’t want two copies of the songs in the playlists.)

This can be a problem, especially if you’ve created playlists with lots of songs. What I would do is this: Select all the songs in a playlist then, in the Comments field, enter the name of the playlist. Convert the songs, and delete the originals. Next, create a new smart playlist, where Comments is (playlist name), or the name of the playlist you just added. Copy the songs from the smart playlist to the original playlist, then delete the smart playlist.

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Macworld forum visitor Suenaga reacts to a recent entry regarding ripping audiobook CDs for playback on an iOS device with a question:

Any advice on doing the same with audio cassettes? I have dozens of books on tape I'd like to move over to my old MacBook.

Given the vast number of books-on-tape sets sold in the last years of the 20th century, this is an excellent question. The audio quality of a cassette tape is far worse than that of a CD, but you don’t need pristine quality for an audiobook.

Regrettably, turning a tape-based audiobook into something you can listen to on your computer or mobile device is far more laborious than ripping an audio CD. Not only are the hardware connections more complicated, but you have to record in real time—start the tape playing and record it as it plays. Quite honestly, for an eight-hour audiobook I’d rather just pay Audible.com or the iTunes Store for the thing in digital form. But if the book’s not available digitally or you’re just dead-set on doing it, it goes like this.

First, unearth your old cassette deck. Purchase an RCA-to-3.5mm audio cable (Monoprice link), connect the RCA ends to the cassette player’s outputs and the 3.5mm plug to your Mac’s audio input port. That takes care of your hardware hookup.

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Reader Oliver MacKenzie is tripping out over audiobooks. He writes:

For our daughter’s upcoming Spring Break we’re going on a long road trip. I have some audiobooks on CD that I’d like to listen to during the trip, but the car’s CD player is broken. Ideally I’d like to put the files on my iPod touch but they’re spread over several discs and I want to have just a single file. Any thoughts?

The first thing you’ll need to do is rip the tracks from the CDs. iTunes can help. Insert the CD and iTunes should automatically launch and display the disc's contents. Select all of the tracks and from the Options menu that appears at the top right of the window choose Join CD Tracks.

Click the Import CD button and an Import Settings window will appear. If you go with the standard import settings—the iTunes Plus setting, which is AAC format at 256kbps—you’ll make files larger than they need to be. Instead, choose Spoken Podcast from the Setting menu and click OK. This produces sound good enough for spoken-word content in a form that doesn’t consume large amounts of storage space. iTunes will set about ripping the contents of that CD as a single audio file. Repeat this process for each CD in the audiobook set.

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Shortly after the first 50 episodes of the Macworld Podcast, I was tasked with producing (though hosting just every other week) these weekly spoken-audio efforts. While I have made adjustments to some of the tools I use, my workflow has changed very little.

Gear and location

We typically record from one of two locations. One is the in-office studio that we’ve dubbed the Podcave. That studio is equipped with four Shure SM58 microphones with pop-filters suspended from Heil HB-1 boom stands, Sony MDR-V6 headphones for each participant, a PreSonus FireStudio Project multichannel audio interface, and an iMac running GarageBand to record everything. The other location is my home studio where I use a vintage AKG 414 microphone along with an Apogee One USB interface plugged into my Mac Pro.

The locations have a measure of isolation and prophylaxis in common. The office studio is well insulated from outside noise, and we have made many efforts to keep people inside the room from adding unwanted noise. For instance, the table-mounted boom stands are padded at the base so that any table-top taps and whaps don’t travel up the stand to be picked up by the mic. Likewise, cables are strapped well out of the way. And the pop filters are placed far enough from the mic’s business end that it’s nearly impossible to be so close to the mic as to overdrive it.

Because my home is in the country, I have little outside noise other than the occasional rooster crow and horse whinny. A Do Not Disturb sign keeps family members out of the area. I use as many fan-less devices as possible. And I have a floor-standing tripod mic stand with the same kind of pop-filter arrangement so I don’t overpower the mic.

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In a recent update, Apple made the iOS version of GarageBand compatible with the popular audio-channeling utility Audiobus. Although Apple provides ways for some apps to communicate with others—Facebook and Twitter hooks built into iOS, for example—until Audiobus came along, moving sound between iOS music apps was a clumsy process that required saving and exporting audio files and then importing them into compatible apps.

What Audiobus brings to the table is the ability for compatible apps to communicate with one another, much as PC and Mac audio applications have been able to do for years. In this case you can designate up to three apps as an audio source—two synthesizer apps and a drum machine, for example—plus another that can apply effects to the sound emanating from the source app, and an output app that is most often used for recording the combined results of the input and effects apps. With this update, GarageBand becomes a compatible output destination.

The Audiobus workflow

To begin, you need at least one compatible input app and a copy of GarageBand for iOS. Audiobus has a webpage that lists compatible apps; or you can launch the Audiobus app, tap the Apps button at the bottom of the screen, and see the same list, complete with links to the iTunes Store.

Launch Audiobus, and you see a simple interface that includes three boxes—Input, Effects, and Output—each bearing a Plus (+) icon. Tap the Input box, and a list of compatible apps on your iOS device appears. Tap one you wish to use, and the box expands—showing a gray box that you tap to launch that app, as well as another box that holds a Plus icon for adding another app. Once the app launches, you should be switched back to Audiobus.

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This week I answer a couple of questions about the iTunes Store, explain how to add comments to multiple tracks at once, and discuss the useful Skip when Shuffling tag. I also reveal a way to have iTunes announce what track is about to be played.

Q: Is there any way that iTunes can speak the name of a track and its artist before the song starts playing?

iTunes doesn’t offer this feature, but there’s a third-party Mac app that does. Riccardo Ettore’s free SpeakMyTunes does what you want. You can choose which info you want the app to speak (track name, artist, album, and other such tags), and include your own text in between these tags. The voice quality is as you’d expect, if you’re familiar with text-to-speech technology, and the voice pronounces foreign names oddly; but it’s a useful tool if you want to know what’s coming up when you’re listening to music at random.

Q: One of the things I like about Amazon is the feature that remembers what you looked at during past visits. Can iTunes do the same thing? I may find something on iTunes I don’t want to buy right away, such as a Christmas album. Is there a way to mark such items so that I can find them later?

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