I've been listening to music before going to bed (and using music as an alarm clock). Last night I used iTunesShut, which lets you set a number of songs or a number of minutes for iTunes to play before it slowly fades out the music over time and stops. See the Macworld review for a longer explanation.

The songs? I just bought Feist's "The Reminder" and Mathew Good's "Hospital Music".

I installed an iTune's Alarm Clock last night, and was woken this morning by some electronica: Rising High Trance Injection: Perry and Rhodan - The Beat Just Goes Straight On & On.

Have a good day, all.

An article I wrote on Sharing iTunes and iPhoto libraries between users is consistently one of my most popular pages here. iPhoto's most recent versions has photo sharing on the same machine using the network capabilities, but the iTunes "solution" has always had major problems: you end up sharing the same ratings, play count, etc. etc.

Additionally, since I recently had some hard drive corruption (this has happened more than once...) we lost a big chunk of music: backing up 80GB of legitimate music is *hard* (never mind consistently keeping an offsite backup up to date).

Lastly, I've long kept a "subset" of music on my laptop (e.g. no country, no opera, no Ani DiFranco). I haven't been great about keeping this up to date, but using rsync basically works. 

I recently rediscovered MP3Tunes and the concept of a music locker. It's only $40US/year for an unlimited size locker and syncing between unlimited computers (there is a free 1GB account that you can experiment with). This was a Flickr-size investment, so I decided to just go for it. On paper, it seems pretty perfect. Here's what MP3Tunes does:

• It keeps your playlists and music in sync with a desktop sync client
• You can selectively sync subsections (solution for my laptop!)
• Sync can be bi-directional or uni-directional 
• You can access/stream your music from the web
• There is talk of a mobile client for Symbian Series 60 

Sounds pretty much perfect. The *only* downside is that protected/DRM'd music can only be played on authenticated devices -- i.e. no streaming of DRM music. That's fine, I'm mainly interested in the sync/backup functions anyway...I'm not sure if I'll use the streaming function (although it will mean that I likely put a lot less music on my laptop).

I suspect that this is actually a "Part I" type of post. It took the Oboe Sync client something like 24 hours to just scan my music directory, and the actual sync has been running for 1.5 hrs. The projected total is ~340hrs (!! -- seems to run at about 60KB/s).

In closing, let me link to Streampad. I was checking this service out and it integrated with MP3Tunes lockers. Doing a little more investigating, it might going somewhere interesting. Here's what Fred Wilson had to say about it:

The primary objective of Streampad is to build an iTunes like service in the browser. Not as a browser (like Songbird is doing which is also a neat idea), but in a browser.

You can go to Streampad at any time and listen to services like hypemachine, internet radio, etc. But if you install the Streampad server on the computer where your music library is, you can listen to your entire music collection anywhere, from inside a browser.

Music anywhere is definitely an idea whose time has come. More interesting things to come, I'm sure (Last.FM integration to show what music I actually own?).

Wouldn't it be great if you could get the original video files back out of YouTube? Wouldn't it be great if you could just upload videos to YouTube and have them automatically appear in iTunes, correctly transcoded as needed?

Yes, I was as surprised as you when I went poking around the YouTube developer section and found no methods to get back the original video files or to do any of these other things I wish for.

I still like Revver's "bolt ads to your videos" business model, and AudioBlog is still my choice for the most flexible commercial service to easily input/host/etc. all your audio and video service (including direct-to-iTunes support).

But where are people putting videos in order to get an audience? YouTube, of course. Let the chorus of "YouTube sucks" begins...until someone else manages to make something that is as popular.

The short answer: you can't. Actually, you can't even listen/view an enhanced podcast without iTunes or an iPod.*

What do I mean by an enhanced podcast? Check out such podcasts as the CBC Radio 3 show, Podguides.net, or the fabulous Montreal-based Vu d'ici for some examples of integrating music, time markers, pictures, descriptions, and even web links. Apple enables this with its crazy ChapterTool, but your best source of information on creating enhanced podcasts is the Voxmedia Wiki Podcast Chapter Tool page.

So...what's the big deal? Well, we need an alternate, open format, and we need alternate players. Microsoft is, in all likelihood, going to come up with something based around RSS and Simple List Extensions. Hmmm...wait...except for the part where all the data is actually bundled inside the audio file format itself. So, some sort of Windows Media strangeness? Or follow Apple's lead and use the MPEG-4 packaging format. Will this be open enough? Somehow, I suspect not.

Maybe Yahoo will come to the rescue; Bryan Rieger points to a brand new initiative called XIPF, or eXtensible Interactive Packaging Format. Actually, following that train of thought, XSPF, the XML Shareable Playlist Format might be trivial to use directly as the basis for an enhanced podcast standard, since it supports images, links, etc. already. Imagine every Webjay playlist as an enhanced podcast.

Rasmus has a short sample PHP script of how he keeps a Windows XP box in sync with an OS X iTunes library.

After I did some more searching, it turns out Mac OS X Hints covered this back in October 2004. Of course, it doesn't cover subsets, which is what I did with my Powerbook <--> Desktop.

Very much a work in progress. This took about 15min over a wireless connection, for 3000 songs on my Powerbook to the desktop machine. Shouldn't be used on anything other than 10.4 Tiger because the "E" flag is specific to that version, which keeps Apple resource fork information when copying.

rsync -rtE --progress iTunes/iTunes\ Music/ yourothercomputer.com:/Volumes/MaxtorBlue/Music

You'll be prompted for your password on the remote machine (assumes you have the same username on both machines).

So, I was completely wrong about Airport Express Video (but wouldn't be surprised to see it at some time in the future).

Thanks to the UK magazine Stuff, I was getting real time updates about the big Apple event today. The three announcements were:

• new iMacs, with built in iSight and Front Row app including remote: a 10ft UI for Macs; yes, I do want to get this for my home machine
• The video iPod: 30GB for $299, $60GB $399, comes with a video out port to connect directly to your TV; score one for my long-ago predictions
• iTunes 6, which includes for-pay video downloads: today this is only music videos and some short Pixar ones for $1.99; I expect licensing to be a real PITA for Apple, but I also expect them to announce other licensed video content over time. Would I pay $1.99 per TV show? Well, since I don't have cable, yes I would -- that would be 2 hours per week of only the shows *I* want to watch. And this makes easy, legal

Am I going to get a video iPod? Well, I'll be consuming video on my computer at home, with its big LCD TV screen. And, as Graham said, I actually don't find mobile video on the iPod compelling. Now, if they did a deal with Sony to have it on the PSP...

The iTunes support for mobile phones begins today, with Apple's partenership with Motorola's ROKR E1 and the US cell company Cingular.

The big question is of course...can we use it in Canada? Well, the Motorola ROKR is a GSM phone that also supports international networks. Being a GSM phone, it means it also uses SIM cards to activate the phone -- meaning you could use the card from any network provider. Cingular may be distributing the phones as locked, but it probably won't be more than a couple of weeks before a firmware upgrade will unlock it, making it capable of being used on any GSM network. Here in Canada, that's only the Rogers/Fido network.

Update: Mark Evans says the ROKR will be available through Rogers by mid-September, although he doesn't name a source.

Elsewhere, Michael Gartenburg covers the iPod Nano -- for us Mac folks, the Windows announcement might get lost in the shuffle: "With the integration with Outlook with iTunes 5.0 and the small size, I can even see folks using this as a personal information manager."