I’ve created a little application in C# that transcodes almost any video into an MPEG-4 that can be played back on an iPod or streamed to an Xbox360. See here.

iTunes 7 was recently released and although there seems to be some negativity surrounding it, I’ve not had any problems after over a week of usage.

One of the features that I quite like - and one which hasn’t really been mentioned or signposted in any way - is the ability to use multiple libraries. You access this feature by holding down the shift key while iTunes is starting (I think’s it’s the command key on Mac). You’re presented with a dialog that gives you the option of choosing a library or creating a new one. Libraries are the .itl files that you find in the iTunes subdirectory of your My Music folder in Windows (no idea what the equivalent is in OS X).

What this allows you to do is to manage multiple music collections (and, therefore, iPods) without having to log out of your current user and then log in as someone else (in my case, my wife). I always found that this process tended to ‘confuse’ the iPod helper service (the Windows daemon that detects when an iPod is connected and causes it to show up in iTunes). Now there’s no need to do this: without having to log out I can just close iTunes, start it again with the shift key held down and when given the option, browse to the iTunes library file for my wife’s collection and when iTunes completes the loading process, it’s using her settings and presenting her music. Sync up her iPod, restart iTunes and select my own library again. No fuss.

It’s just a pity that iTunes doesn’t have an option to always prompt for the library. I wonder if it can automatically open the appropriate library for the iPod that has just been attached?

Cory Doctorow is reknowned across the net (and beyond) as an author of science fiction (you should check out his works, some of them are quite good and all are freely available - some as podcasts on his site). He’s also a well-known critic of DRM so it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise to read that he’s not too happy about the way in which Bob Dylan’s new album, Modern Times, has been released and packaged on iTunes.

The CD version of “Modern Times” comes as a 14-track disc that includes the audio of the four iTunes videos; also included with the CD is a DVD carrying the four videos. In other words, if you buy the packaged good, you get the audio and the videos for the final four songs, if you buy the iTunes Store version, you only get the un-burnable videos for them.

This is a fair criticism until you actually do a little research, which Cory plainly didn’t. The CD version of Modern Times comes as a 10 track disc. The special edition CD+DVD version is identical, but includes a bonus DVD with the four videos that Cory mentions - these four videos don’t feature in any physical package as audio-only.

… the whole Modern Times package defeats the simplicity of the iTunes pricing model — $0.99/track for any track. While the $14 price-tag gets you 14 “tracks,” it’s not possible to buy singles from the disc, nor is there any discount for buying the whole CD instead of a tack-by-track purchase. And since four of the tracks are not “music” in the sense of being burnable and rippable, you’re really paying more on a per-track basis.

This simply isn’t true and again a small amount of research would have proved this - firstly, it is possible to buy the audio tracks individually at the normal price of $0.99. The bonus videos are only available if you purchase the entire album and that costs $13.99. But since you can just buy all of the songs individually you could forgo the bonus videos and the digital version of the liner notes and get the album for $9.90. Given that music videos normally cost $1.99, you’re actually getting these ones cheaper by purchasing them with the album (and they are, after all, there purely as an incentive).

As for not being able to burn the audio portion of these songs to CD using iTunes - that bit I’m not sure on. I bought Hard-Fi’s Stars of CCTV last year on iTMS with three bonus videos. I created a playlist of the album with the three videos at the end and burned it to CD, hoping that iTunes would be smart enough to create an enhanced CD. Instead I got an 18-track audio CD with three duplicate songs. But that may have been something Apple have ‘fixed’ since then.

Despite having purchased numerous tracks from iTMS, I’m not entirely happy with the DRM aspects of the format either, but if you’re going to criticise, at least get your facts straight.

Update: this seems to be the catalyst for Cory’s post and it appears that iTunes doesn’t allow you to burn these particular videos to CD as audio files. I still have a hard time mustering any indignation about this though; they are, after all, sold as videos and it’s not like you can burn the audio from the DVD versions to CD particularly easily. It doesn’t negate the fact that much of what Cory wrote about in his piece was patently wrong either.

Seems like it’s been ages since I wrote anything about music. I may have mentioned this guy before, but solcofn is a really great DJ/Mash-up type bloke. Check out his website for tons of freely downloadable music - be warned though: there are some fairly hefty downloads because mostof the files are MP3s of entire mix sessions. My favourite is solcofn 09-12-04. Great for listening to whilst driving.

After a bit of experimentation, I’ve found some decent settings for converting video for my iPod. I typically convert with the intention of playing back on TV, so I ‘ve tried to find a nice balance between size and quality. I use Videora Converter on Windows and for Linux/*BSD, I use a small bash script I wrote (it just feeds filenames to FFMpeg):

#!/bin/bash

IN=${1}
OUT="${IN}.mp4"
LOG="${IN}.log"

ffmpeg -y -i ${IN} -r 29.97 -vcodec xvid -s 480x272 -b 900 \\
-bt 2 -acodec aac -ac 2 -ab 128 -f mp4 ${OUT}

That’s a video bitrate of 900kbps, audio bitrate of 128kbps; framerate is forced to 29.97fps in order to eliminate A/V sync issues and the encapsulation is set to MP4. It’s not exactly broadcast quality, but it does the job. An episode of Lost, for example, comes in at around 300MB and is perfectly acceptable, quality wise, when output to my TV.