With Snow Leopard Apple have made the pause button on the remote control ALWAYS start and stop itunes. This means if you are watching TV on your mac, and you go to pause it, iTunes starts playing! There is no way to disable this.

The best workaround it to open itunes, and go to the itunes store. From here the play function will not work. You can then minimise itunes and watch TV!

Apple had just released itunes plus which has two main benefits, both are great.

1. All the songs are now going to be DRM free, so you can play them with different software and players.

2. The bitrate has now doubled so that the music is better quality. (I suggested the itunes bitrate was too low here, and how to get round it, but now apple have ‘fixed’ it for downloaded songs.) 

There is a great feature on the itunes store home page that will automatically (for a fee) upgrade all your songs!

To find  it you go to ‘quick links’ on the right, and click on ‘Upgrade my Library’.

It will give you the option of deleting your old library or moving it to the desktop.  I suggest you keep it, because if you ever need the lower quality 128 kbps songs (eg to listen to on your ipod), the original downloaded ones will be better quality than if you re-compress the new 256kbps down to 128.

Thankfully I have only purchased 20 songs from itunes, so the fee was just $10.

How to import songs into itunes is easy. You just put the CD in, select it in itunes, and click on advanced – convert selection to MP3.

Easy!

But…
the default setting on itunes is not the best setting to use when importing songs. In fact, there is a better way to import songs that uses a program called LAME. This article describes how to import songs into itunes using the better quality of the LAME encoder.

If you want to skip the technical stuff and go straight to having good music, jump down to the ‘How to do it’ section.

Introduction
If you go to itunes:preferences and click on the advanced then importing tab you will see some options like Import Using: and Setting: This raises a few questions.

1. Why does Apple allow me to use different formats like AAC and MP3? Which one is better?

2. There are different ‘bit rates’. If a smaller bit rate uses less space, but has worse quality, and a higher one means better quality, how high do I have to go to get the best quality? How good is the default setting of 128 high quality (See picture below – click to enlarge).

Unfortunately I assumed the defaults were the best, so I used the built in defaults in itunes to import my CD collection. But if you listen carefully to your ipod through my stereo, and compare it to a CD you will see that at 128kbps there is a big difference in audio quality.

The bottom line is, if you want the best quality that still is compressed, use a little program called the ‘LAME encoder’ on the ‘insane’ setting. I have reimported all my CD collection using the LAME encoder set to the insane setting, and it sounds much better – I now cannot tell the difference between the ipod and the CD player.

What is LAME? What is insane?

Lame is an mp3 encoder that is open source, which means rather than being developed commercially, it was developed by unpaid enthusiast programmers. It was originally not as good as the commercial mp3 algorithm, but as many people worked on LAME, it actually overtook the original mp3 encoder and is now better, and free!

There are literally hundreds of possible settings to use with lame, regarding audio quality, there are lots of different ways LAME can encode. There are some standard settings, called standard (as good as the itunes defaults) extreme (better that itunes default) and insane (best possible quality). We are using insane, and even if you cannot hear the difference between extreme and insane, I would go with insane as the extra disk space used is minimal.

How to do it:

STEP 1. Download the itunes LAME Encoder.

Download the itunes-LAME Encoder from here (click on itunes LAME importer – download) and unzip it.

Download the Import with LAME script from here and unzip it.

Download the little iTunes LAME installer folder here and unzip it. This is a magic  folder and anything dragged onto it will automatically be installed into the itunes script library.

You should have three files looking like this:

STEP 2. Install the itunes LAME Encoder.

Drag the itunes-LAME icon (left fiel above) onto the |||Drag here to install||| icon.

Drag the iTunes-LAME script icon onto the |||Drag here to install||| icon.

In itunes there should me a new menu item between window and help.

Step 3. Import a CD.

Open itunes and insert a CD into your computer. Make sure the CD is selected in itunes.

Select the new itunes menu item Import with LAME…

A new iTunes-LAME window will appear that looks like this:

In the window type in –alt-preset insane as you can see above. Select prefs and select ‘cache tracks to hard drive’ also in prefs make sure destination is set to iTunes Music Library.
Click import, you will have a great quality CD in itunes, in a playlist called imported from LAME. You can delete this playlist, it is only so that you can see what you just imported.

Why trust me?

I am an Electrical Engineer, I worked at ABC radio in audio electrical engineering, I have been playing with audio gear and electronics gear for over 20 years. I have read a lot of stuff from the net re the best way to import into itunes, and this is what I use. When I got my ipod there were literally hundreds of pages of information regarding which is the best format to store songs in. I have understood all the technical arguments, and apart from copying your CD into itunes with no compression (apple lossless encoder) which takes 650MB per CD, this is the best quality you will get in itunes. I have 2000 songs fitting on my 15G ipod. If you are low on space, I think you are better off deleting some less favourite CD’s than encoding at a lower quality.

If you are really short on space, then use ‘–alt-preset’ standard instead of ‘–alt-preset extreme’. But I would use insane and have less songs on.

Happy Listening!

These are the settings I use for good quality speech in itunes:

Stereo Bit rate: 80kbbps

Sample rate: 22.050kHz

Channels: Mono

NOTE: This results in a 40kbps file (the mono file ends up at half the stereo bitrate)
A 20 minute talk will be about 6Mb and sound good.

If I am ripping from CD for speech for my ipod, say a story, and size is not so important, I set itunes to:

96kbps,
44.1kHz,
mono.

Which gives an output of 48kbps.The place you put these preferences in is itunes:preferences and click on the advanced icon then importing tab then Setting:Custom you can set the various options according to what you want.

Click here to read how to make the filesize (and quality) lower using LAME.

Well you can do a google image search for your album and then drag the resulting image onto your empty ‘playing now’ artwork.

Or you might try these sites:

http://www.rateyourmusic.com (you will need to register)

http://www.slothradio.com/covers/

http://www.cdcovers.cc/

As soon as you plug your ipod shuffle into your mac for the first time, itunes will automatically open, and you will get a message that itunes has found your ipod, and what name do you want to give your ipod.

If this does not happen make sure you have itunes 7 installed.

Just found this software.

The Amazing Slow Downer

It’s great. It allows you to slow down music, keeping the pitch the same. There’s lots of software that will do this but this is well implemented with lots of nice features, and a good algorithm that sounds good even with big slow downs.

The new iTunes looks fantastic & has some great new features.
However any quick survey of forum discussions will show you that there are some bugs that people are discovering.

For me (imac G5 10.4.7) i installed it only to find that no songs would play!
its clearly a common problem which is easily fixed.

Its simply a matter of checking your plug ins… (~ / Library / iTunes / iTunes plug ins).
For me and lots of others the offending plug in was OSS 3D. But there could be others. Delete the plug in & iTunes 7 works great!

1. Record the speech using audacity. (Don’t use an mp3 player unless it records in aiff or you will lose quality when you re-compress to a lower bitrate mp3)
2. In Audacity, edit the bits out that you don’t want (like blank bits at the start or end of the recording)
3. In Audacity, I like to add some compression (this makes the louder sections quieter and the quieter sections louder to make the listening level more constant within the track and also normalise (this amplifies the whole track to the loudest it can be without being so loud it distorts. You should compress first (as this reduces the highest levels, then normalise. The following settings are a good start:
   Compression
   threshold -12dB
   ratio 2:1
   attack 0.2 secsNormalisation
   Normalise using default. (centre on 0 and normalise to -3db)
4. Next you need to edit the ID tags, which contain the information that is displayed in itunes. For our sermons at Church we do it like this:
   Song title = passage, (“1 Thess 1″)
   Artisit = preacher, (“Bryson Smith”)
   album = DPC (“DPC”)
   genre = speech
5. Finally, export. Firstly I would save as an Audacity file to keep, or as an AIFF, so you have a full quality version on hand, then export to mp3 for the internet.
   It’s a toss up between file size and quality. Anything below 40kbps, you start to notice ‘ringing’ (called aliasing) around the high frequencies. We used to record our sermons at 32kbps, but this has enough compression noise to be annoying. 40kbps is tolerable, just noticeable. You don’t need stereo for speech, so mono is fine. If you set itunes to 80kbps, mono, it will output a 40kbs file. I like to export from audacity to aiff, then compress with the itunes encoder. I don’t remember why I do this, perhaps the audacity mp3 encoder is lower quality at lower bitrates than the itunes one.

That’s it! Check the quality, upload it to your webpage, or download to your mp3. If you are just taking a file from the web, and just want to make it smaller for you ipod, you can skip all the audacity bits and just encode it with itunes at the lower bitrate.