On the face of it, the iTunes ‘remove duplicates’ feature sounds like a great idea as you may well have the same track on an artist’s album, a greatest hits album and a ‘various’ compilation album and this is needlessly taking up space on your hard drive. Unfortunately, the feature is rather crude as using it means that two of your albums will now be missing tracks when you come to listen to them as an album (yes people still do that sometimes).
A much more intelligent functionality (Apple please consider implementing this) would be for iTunes to discard two of the files (thereby saving space) but re-link the remaining file to all occurrences of that track in your library. Without this, the feature is next to useless.
Back in 2005 when looking for a ringtone for my mobile that sounded like the Trimphone from the 70s, the only one I could find was unfortunately an American style single ring version that someone had posted on a forum, but I have recently edited it in Garageband to shorten the ring and make it the proper UK style ring-ring.
I thought I’d share it so you have the choice here of an m4a version that will work on Sony Ericsson and Nokia, and an m4r version (essentially the same file but renamed) which will go straight into iTunes for syncing with an iPhone.
Trimphone image based on image from FunkyWorm on Flickr used under Creative Commons Licence
Following a Which? complaint to the EU in 2004, Apple have agreed to reduce the cost of tracks on the UK iTunes store from 79p to 74p (in line with pricing on its other European sites). (El Reg and BBC) While this is obviously welcome, one part of Apple’s press release gives rise to concern:
Apple will reconsider its continuing relationship in the UK with any record label that does not lower its wholesale prices in the UK to the pan-European level within six months.
So what happens, if after six months, these record labels refuse to lower their prices? Will Apple remove these labels from the store? If so, then isn’t that bad for the consumer? At least if they remained, the consumer still has a choice.
I still maintain that unless you are interested in single tracks, it is cheaper to buy from play.com or CDWow.
If you’ve added your CD collection to iTunes, but wish you could have the album covers displayed like tracks downloaded from ITMS, take a look at this site. Find your cover and (if you’re using a Mac) simply drag the picture from the browser to the CD cover window on iTunes.
iTunes occasionally throws up the following when accessing the iTunes Music Store:
Errr… it is the latest version.
It seems to do this when the store site is down, but it’s obviously the wrong error message.
Went to the Apple iTMS – it was empty.
So Apple have finally got round to opening in the UK, but where are all the tracks? 700,000 may sound a lot, but not when it’s full of dross from bands no-one’s ever heard of. Several artists are listed, but with no tracks, or a single obscure track. Where’s Madonna, Rolling Stones, Elvis Presley?
According to The Register, several record labels are holding out. Do these labels really prefer people to copy/download illegal CDs or are they going to realise that the rip-off years are over, and get with the future of music publishing.
We’ll see what happens in the next few weeks. At least it’s here now.