Mac

I upgraded my MacBook Pro to the third-generation model so I can bump up my RAM to 4GB. Aperture and CS3 are very resource-intensive, and the 2GB upper limit of my first-generation MBP was somewhat constraining.

I just transferred my files over using Apple’s migration utility and target firewire mode. The process, while not 100% automated (it did not transfer X11, for instance, or some of the preferences), is far smoother than any Windows equivalent. Here are my first impressions on the new model:

• The new, environmentally friendly mercury-free LED backlight is definitely more blue in tone than the pinkish cold-cathode fluorescent backlight on the old model. The default ColorSync monitor profile does a good job of compensating for this, however. There is some vignetting on the 15″ screen (darkening in the corners). I wonder how the 17″ model fares, and whether they had to add additional LEDs for a more even backlight illumination.
• This machine is fast. It blows my dual-2GHz G5 PowerMac out of the water in all benchmarks other than disk I/O. Unsurprisingly, it is also much faster than the first-generation machine, specially on graphics but also on disk I/O.
• It does not heat up quite as much as the older Core Duo model, the heat level, while high, never reaches a potentially dangerous temperature. This is probably due to improved power management, as running two Parallels virtual machine will bring it up to the same pant-scorching levels as the Core Duo.

Ever since my Panasonic PVR died and I switched to an Elgato EyeTV 250 for my PVR needs, I hardly ever use my 32″ Sharp Aquos LCD HDTV, and do most of my watching on my Mac’s 23″ Cinema HD display.

To rectify this, I purchased an AppleTV yesterday at the San Francisco Apple Store, where they are prominently displayed, hooked up to Sony Bravia LCD TVs. While their choice of TV is questionable (remember, Sony is a four-letter word), the demo is effective for those who did not get to see it at MacWorld Expo 2007.

In all likelihood, I will cancel my Comcast cable subscription in a few days. The only TV shows I watch are:

• Battlestar Galactica (iTunes season pass: $34.99)
• South Park (iTunes season pass: $23.99)
• The Simpsons (not available on iTunes yet)
• Family Guy (although the show has become stale and probably on its way out)

I stopped watching live TV seven years ago when I bought my first PVR (a TiVo Series 1). My monthly Comcast bill is $56.20 (basic extended analog cable, no premium channels). Purchasing an iTunes season pass for Galactica and South Park would cost me just slightly more than one month of Comcast’s “service”. This also means the AppleTV will have paid for itself in less than 6 months (the famous “return on investment” or ROI metric used by IT departments to estimate whether a project is worthwhile or not). The Fox shows I can get over ATSC HDTV because I have an Elgato EyeTV 500 ATSC DTV/HDTV to Firewire tuner (broadcast flag free), and direct line of sight to Sutro Tower, where the San Francisco digital TV over-the-air signals are beamed from.

Of course, the satisfaction of firing the cable company, with its tendency to jack prices up much faster than inflation for ever degrading service, is in itself priceless. As a bonus, the iTunes shows are fully digital, and without ads.

The limiting factor is of course the abysmally slow standard of what passes for broadband in the US. Ironically, I left Europe for California in 2000 because I thought the epicenter of the Internet industry was here, but nowadays the US lags badly behind even formerly dirigiste France in terms of optical broadband and high speed DSL.

Broadband prices are much higher in the US — I pay $70 per month for 2.5 Mbps downstream and 384 kbps upstream, when in France I would get 18 Mbps for half that price (or 70 Mbps for the same price as in the US in the many areas that are getting optical coverage). This is despite the fact my former colleagues at France Telecom face labor costs and Internet transit costs double those of US carriers (the US’ central role in terms of connectivity means US carriers can impose peering terms where non-US carriers pay the lion’s share of the transoceanic cable costs, even now that Euro or Asian Internet traffic is beginning to eclipse US traffic). The reason for high prices is of course the coddling of the AT&T-Verizon-Comcast oligopoly by a FCC overly influenced by the doctrinaire Chicago School of economics, which refuses to accept even the theoretical possibility of a monopoly…

AppleTV is the second key product in Apple’s digital hub strategy, and like the iPod, it is also available to Windows users. Apple did learn from its mistakes in the 1980s, where it lost potential dominance of the desktop PC market to Microsoft by having unrealistically maximalist designs on the market. In some way, this is akin to the virtualization phenomenon shaking corporate IT: like the browser or Parallels, iTunes is another middleware layer that makes the operating system almost irrelevant – Windows users can switch painlessly to the Macintosh, once they realize the elegance and simplicity of the iPod and AppleTV also apply to the Mac and they do not have to settle for the inferior Windows experience.

Now, AppleTV is a semi-closed environment like the iPod. I refuse on principle to buy low-quality, DRM-infested music tracks from the iTunes store. Switching to DRM-infested video tracks from the Apple store is not very consistent. For my defense, I must say:

• Unlike music, video is something you see once and usually never again. Thus, the DRM restrictions are less onerous (still outrageous, but less unacceptably so).
• There is no legal non-DRM alternative, unlike CDs for music.
• Cable companies are really, really evil…

Last but not least, just as you can load your iPod with high-quality, non-DRM music ripped from good old CDs and SACDs, you can load video into iTunes from various sources other than Apple, such as the excellent Elgato EyeTV PVR software, a DVD ripper like Handbrake, podcasts and probably all sorts of other mechanisms in the future (I would be surprised if YouTube did not come out with an AppleTV compatible service soon). Since Apple refuses to license its DRM, that effectively forces other players to use non-DRM video. Who said two wrongs do not make one right?

In any case, I fully expect the AppleTV to be reverse-engineered and alternative operating systems made available for it, just as Rockbox provides FLAC support and gapless playback on the iPod, or how people managed to get Linux running on the original Xbox. Apple is probably not subsidizing the AppleTV the way Microsoft does with its game consoles, so they probably do not have a strong incentive to prevent repurposing with mechanisms like the encrypted boot loader on the Xbox. Less than a week after initial availability, there are already reports of people upgrading the internal hard drive…

Flat-panel HDTVs were the star of the 2006 holiday shopping season, thanks in no small part to free-falling prices. There is now a critical mass of people in the US who are starting to realize just how lousy standard definition TV is, like my friend and colleague Frank who can’t bear to watch his TiVo Series 1 any more now that he has a humongous rear-projection 1080p screen, and is mulling building his own MythTV or Freevo box.

The iPod is already a mass-market phenomenon. I believe Apple has a real shot of taking a huge chunk of the cable companies’ business away from them. Hollywood will be cheering, because Steve Jobs is one of them, and they can make much more profit from iTunes Store sales than from the crumbs the cable distribution monopolies grant them. Of course, there will be collateral damage like TiVo (not that I would particularly mind), and possibly NetFlix. Presumably Microsoft will do the same by adding equivalent functionality to the Xbox 360. Sony will try, but will fail utterly because of its insistence on polluting everything with proprietary yet unusable pseudo-standards and unredeemably horrid software. All in all, the television industry is in for some mighty interesting times.

Update (2007-03-24 10AM):

I have just cancelled my Comcast subscription. The guy handling the cancellation was actually very friendly, and we talked a little about South Park, TiVo, digital TVs and DVR options. They did not put any hurdles or unnecessary hoops to jump through in the cancellation process, you have to grant them that. Contrast this with scumbags like AOL who have been repeatedly slammed by state attorney-generals for fraudulently keeping on charging users after cancellation. The cable company’s pricing policies may be evil, but their customer service seems pretty good.

One of the perks of living in San Francisco is easy access to MacWorld Expo. I can literally see the Moscone center a mere two blocks from my new office window. This year’s show spanned both North and South halls, but in some ways was a let-down compared to the last two.

Of course, all the buzz was about the iPhone. The amazing thing is not that Apple should make one, but rather that not a single cell phone manufacturer has a clue about design and ergonomics. Nokia used to, but they have backslid badly with their sluggish and over-complex Series 60 allegedly smart phones.

The prototypes were securely held under glass bells, presumably to preserve them from the salivating legions of the Mac faithful. From the demos, it looks pretty snappy compared to the incredibly sluggish Symbian or Windows Mobile equivalents, but I have serious doubts as to whether even Apple can make on-screen virtual keyboards work.

The other marquee product is the Apple TV, essentially a severely anorexic Mac mini without an optical drive or separate power brick, and running an unspecified embedded OS with the Front Row user interface. Pity it is limited to 720p (the 1080i support is interpolated). At a time when CompUSA sells a top of the line 42 inch Sharp Aquos 1080p LCD flat panel for under $2000, the lack of 1080p support is puzzling.

I haven’t seen that much innovation among the third party vendor stands either. Here is what I did find at least somewhat noteworthy:

• Fujitsu came out with a new model of its ScanSnap document scanner line, the S500M, the only document scanner with official Mac OS X support. They claim the new model is slightly faster, and has a much improved paper feed. Indeed, the 5110EOX2 I have is annoyingly prone to double-feeding. The new model is also bundled with ReadIRIS Pro and Acrobat 7 Standard, a pretty good bundle all in all since those two programs together retail for nearly the same price as the scanner.
• Speaking of PDF, viewing the PDFpen demo makes me regret even more shelling for that piece of bloatware that is Acrobat. Simple, inexpensive software to manage and edit your PDFs. They have a show special, 20% off if you follow the link www.smileonmymac.com/macworld.
• Invisible Shield was demonstrating its self-healing protective plastic film for various gizmos by shaking an iPod mini in a box filled with screws and bolts, and showing how it survived unscathed. They also make protective films for digital camera LCDs, this looks like an interesting option since DSLR LCDs are very easily scratched.
• A number of stands were using the Logitech 3DConnexion SpaceNavigator controller. Ovolab (makers of the excellent Phlink answering machine peripheral, were demoing a photo geocoding application Geophoto, with lightning-fast Google Earth style navigation (oddly enough, the Google stand did not use this nifty human interface device). The controller has six degrees of freedom and is remarkable easy to pick up.
• Logitech has a fairly subdued stand. There were no real demonstrations of their NuLOOQ controller for Photoshop users, nor of their newly acquired SlimDevices Transporter, or Harmony programmable remotes. The emphasis was on their laser mice. SlimDevices was a popular draw at previous MacWorlds, I am not sure whether Logitech has gotten a grip on how to market that product line yet.
• Infrant had a small stand with a ReadyNAS NV+. I had never seen this NAS before, it is much smaller, quieter and more solidly built than I expected. The rep at the counter was a new recruit and not all that knowledgeable about the product (I asked whether they expect to support iSCSI soon, which would make it a killer expansion option for my Solaris 10 home server with ZFS). Infrant has a partnership with SlimDevices, and the bundle of a Squeezebox with a ReadyNAS is one of the most attractive networked digital music options available, far superior to the flashy but ultimately unsatisfying Sonos.
• Matias was demonstrating a prototype of their new TactilePro 2.0 keyboard. They now make their mechanical keyswitches by themselves instead of buying them from Alps (as with the version 1.0 Tactilepro I am using to type this blog entry). I like the original version so much I bought a spare when Alps announced it was discontinuing the keyswitches. The feel of the 2.0 is slightly different from the old one, but it still has that honest-to-goodness clickety-clack feel, albeit with a more subdued sound. The other differences involve upgrading the built-in hub to USB 2.0 and adding the Optimizer feature, which turns the useless Caps Lock key into a shortcut key instead. I remap the Caps Lock key to Control anyways on Macs, Windows and Solaris, so this last feature is of dubious interest to me.
• Intelliscanner was selling rebadged Symbol CS1504 scanners for $250. Save your money, buy the OEM Symbol version for under $100 and use my free Python driver instead.
• Canon was out in force, as was HP. Nikon and Epson had smaller stands this year. I got to handle the excellent new Canon HV10 HD camcorder, the new 70-200mm f/4L IS lens (a version of the excellent 70-200mm f/4L lens I already own, with gyroscopic optical Image Stabilization added), and the upcoming new Pixma Pro 9500 pigment ink printer that should compete with the Epson R2400 and the HP B9810.

I upgraded to iTunes 7 yesterday. This new version adds a feature opera and classical fans were clamoring for, gapless playback. Often, two or more consecutive tracks must be played without interruption. CD players do that effortlessly, surprisingly few MP3 players can. A pause, however slight in the middle of an aria can be incredibly jarring. Apple took its sweet time, but they eventually delivered (although it is not clear if all older iPod models will support this beyond the 5G video-capable iPod). You have to explicitly flag albums that must be played without gaps by selecting the “gapless album” option.

I still have to get used to the cosmetic changes in the new version. I liked the green musical note icon better than the new blue one. The new style looks a little flat and one-dimensional, just like many Windows XP applications have a flat web page inspired look compared to the beveled buttons and controls of the CUA-based Windows 2000 interface.

iTunes 7 is also markedly different in behavior from previous versions in how it handles albums. To keep the user interface easily understandable for the general public, all tracks are shown as a single flat database, but behind the scenes, iTunes implicitly normalizes this into something that looks like the following relational data model:

iTunes 7 added a few new fields, including “Album Artist”, which seems to be of dubious utility. I described in a previous article my coding conventions to work around the fact iTunes was obviously designed by people with absolutely no clue about classical music. Unfortunately, iTunes 7 does not rectify this situation, but what’s worse, they also changed the key for the album to include both Artist and Album Artist:

I can understand why they did this – if you have several alternative versions of the same work by the same composer, but by different artists, they would be played in intermingled order, which is why I append (2), (3) and so on to multiple interpretations of the same work (by decreasing order of preference).

On the other hand, the new behavior means that if you assigned different artists to tracks in an album (in a classical piece or an opera, you seldom have all the tracks played by the same artists), iTunes mistakenly thinks you have several albums, one for each possible value for artist, and this breaks libraries that worked with previous versions. iTunes 6 and earlier would not care and play them all in the order implied by the Track# field. iTunes 7 will see them as different albums and you will get a nasty surprise when you play the album in shuffle mode, as it will skip to a completely different album halfway through.

Let me illustrate with the album I first encountered the problem with. The last two tracks have Peter Seiffert credited, whereas the first two do not. The list view shows the albums sorted properly, like previous versions of iTunes:

The album view makes it clear what iTunes thinks is happening:

The only work-around this today is to force all tracks in an album to have the same Artist field. I will need to write an AppleScript to identify all tracks that need to be normalized thus, even if this means a loss of information. A further quirk is that the implicit normalization is apparently done at iTunes startup, so you need to restart iTunes for the changes to have an effect.

Update (2006-11-03):

I auto-updated to 7.0.2 today and finally figured out something that has been puzzling me for a couple of weeks now. My copy of Poulenc’s Stabat Mater (Battle/Ozawa/Boston/Tanglewood) would not play as a single album, even though it is displayed as such in the album view. I have “shuffle by album” activated, and it would skip from any track in that specific album to a completely unrelated one. Even if I pinned it down by entering “poulenc stabat” in the search box so no other album could be selected, iTunes would skip from track 1 to a completely random track, instead of moving on to track two.

Apparently iTunes shuffles using a different algorithm than the album grouping. I have another album that has the exact same title “Stabat Mater”, albeit one by Pergolesi, not Poulenc (and four others by Dvořak, Szymanowski and Vivaldi, but the opus or RV number differentiates the album titles). Having two albums with the same title seems to confuse iTunes no end. I don’t want to mangle my album names just to appease iTunes 7, but I found a work-around: just change the mostly useless “Disc Number M out of N” field so the two albums with conflicting titles have different disc numbers, and they will collide no more. Better yet, use the CD number field to uniquely identify each CD in your collection, instead of just within a boxed set. Once again, you need to restart iTunes for this to kick in.

I finally completed my CD ripping project and now have lossless copies of all my CDs (and the CD-audio layer of my SACDs) on my Mac.

As I mentioned before, the bulk of the work is tagging the music with correct metadata, locating cover art when the majority of my CD jewel cases and booklets are moldering in a cellar in France. (Amazon is helpful, specially now that it allows users to upload their own scans of cover art). Doug’s AppleScripts for iTunes make short work of normalizing CDDB metadata like correcting the people who stuff the composer name in the title or vice versa.

I wrote my own scripts to tackle these common operations:

1. Strip numbers from titles. That’s the “Track #” field’s job. This script requires the Satimage AppleScript Regex OSAX plug-in to work.
2. Renumber a selection sequentially, so I can split a CD into its constituent parts and renumber them independently from each other or the original CD track order.
3. Strip prefix strings from titles.

This does not mean I am finished, however. About 3/4 of the way through, I realized iTunes is far from perfect at extracting CD audio. For various reasons related to how the Redbook CD audio format was designed without computers in mind, it is very hard to get a perfect, repeatable rip from one attempt to the other. iTunes has an “error-correction” option that seems not to have any effect. For reliable ripping, you have to use specialized programs like EAC on Windows and a cdparanoia-based program like Max on OS X. This complicates the workflow as Max is slightly buggy, and nowhere as good at managing metadata as iTunes is, so the one-step import in iTunes becomes a less streamlined affair:

1. Rip the CD to AIFF in Max
2. Import the AIFF into iTunes
3. Number the tracks (very important!) using my “Renumber tracks” script
4. Convert to Apple lossless
5. Copy the metadata from CDDB using Doug Adams’ Copy info tracks to tracks script.
6. Add album cover art and mention the track was ripped with Max
7. Backup to another hard drive!

The good thing is, now that I have collected the metadata and cover art, I can rerip trouble tracks with clicks or pops, and copy the metadata in one step using Doug’s action, so re-ripping won’t be as much of a hassle as the first time. The next step is to convert everything to FLAC so I have a non-proprietary library that works with SlimServer on my Solaris home server.

If you are not as obsessive about your music metadata as I am, the process will be much easier if you just use whatever CDDB supplies you. In any case, remember, just say No! to DRM-infested lossy-compressed tracks from the iTunes Music Store.