Seifenschreiber

Für alle, das hier noch nicht kennen:
Cindy und Bert covern Black Sabbath - muss man noch mehr sagen?

Könnte irgend jemand Joachim Kronsbein von Spiegel Online sagen, dass die CD-Infos, die iTunes findet, wenn man selbst Lieder einliest, nicht von iTunes selbst kommen, sondern aus der CDDB? Und dass die von Nutzern selbst gefüllt und auch von anderen Produkten als iTunes genutzt wird?

Dann passiert es ihm vielleicht nicht noch einmal, dass in einem Artikel zeigt, dass er nicht eine Minute auf Recherche verwandt hat…

Alle Welt behauptet ja, die Ostbockländer schusterten sich beim Grand Prix die Stimmen zu. Was wäre denn dan gewesen, wenn diese Länder nicht mit abgestimmt hätten? Ich hab’ mal nachgerechnet und nur die Stimmena aus folgenden Ländern Zusammengezählt:

Andorra, Belgien, Dänemark, Deutschland, Finnland, Frankreich, Griechenland, Grßbritannien Holland, Island, Israel, Malta, Norwegen, Österreich, Portugal, Schweden, Schweiz, Spanien, Türkei, Zypern
Weiterlesen »

Nachtgedanke: Wieso handeln eigentlich fast alle Popsongs von Liebe? Ist Liebe so viel stärker als andere Gefühle? Gibt es auf der Welt so viele Menschen, die gerne verliebt sind oder es wären? Oder steigt der Popmusikkonsum mit dem Grad der Verliebtheit, sodass diese Personen, obwohl absolut in der Minderheit, eine Mehrheit der Zielgruppe stellen?

(Ursprung des Gedanken: Gerade hat mein iTunes-Radio-Setup eine alte Eurovisions-Schnulze namens “It’s nice to be in love again” rausgekramt, da fiel mir auf, dass ich schon seit Jahren nicht mehr verliebt war bzw. mich durch Verliebtheit oder Fehlen derselben zu zwingend erscheinendem Handeln motiviert sah. Bin ich jetzt anormal? Oder einfach nur aus der Zielgruppe von Eurovisons-Songs rausgeflogen? Und wieso schreibe ich, kaum dass es mal um große Gefühle geht, in einem so gestelzten Stil?)

Man mag es mit verzeihen, aber ich halte die bevorstehende Wiedervereinigung von “Rage against the Machine” für überflüssig. Das erste Album war seinerzeit guter Crossover - das zweite kam spät und klang genauso, musikalisch waren sie damit für mich zu eintönig.

Was die Jungs politisch so von sich geben, ist ja teilweise ganz interessant, aber deshalb muss ich die Musik nicht mögen. Auch Jan Delay gibt sich in Interviews ja gerne vernünftig, trotzdem geht mir sein Genäsel so auf den Sack, dass ich mir kein Stück von ihm zu Ende anhören mag.

Was braucht man für einen Spiegel-Artikel über das Eurovisions-Finale?

Ganz klar:

• Eine gehörige Dosis Häme: “zu Beginn sah die 51. Auflage des Athener Wettbewerbs wie eine Probe des Bielefelder Kinderballetts aus“
• Abfällige Vergleiche: “Grand-Prix-Egomane Ralph Siegel schrieb ihnen mit “If we all give a little” einen schlimmen Heuler auf den Leib -am Ende wirkte die Band wie eine Karaoke-Truppe auf einem havarierten Kreuzfahrtschiff“
• Die Lufthoheit in Geschmacksfragen: “Die Gruppe hatte bereits 2002 mit dem “Ketchup Song” abseitigen Geschmack bewiesen, dieses Jahr besangen sie eine “Bloody Mary”“
• Dazu eine milde Dosis Patriotismus: “Und dann die Deutschen: Als Texas Lightning mit “No, no, never” ins Rennen ging, wehte ein Hauch von Professionalität durch den Saal.“

Hingegen scheint es nicht nötig zu sein, sich die Show tatsächlich anzusehen — wie sonst ist es zu erklären, dass über diesen Herrn Folgendes geschrieben wird?

Ach ja, auch Logik scheint nicht zu den notwendigen Zutaten der Berichterstattung zu gehören, wie sich an folgendem Zitat sehen lässt:

“Für Litauen trat ein Männerchor mit einer Mischung aus Van Halen, grober Selbstüberschätzung und rudimentären Englischkenntnissen an. Die sechs Herren sangen in der Manier einer Fankurve, drei Minuten lang: “We are the winners of Eurovision”. Gerade die Osteuropäer reflektierten so die politische Öffnung ihrer Staaten. Belustigten sie vor einigen Jahren noch mit freizügigen bis bekloppten Folk-Pop-Einlagen, erstritten sie in Athen Respekt mit internationalen Standards.”

Herman van Veen - Ich weiß nichts über sie - sentimental aber schön.

(Und kurios, dass ich den Tipp für die CD ausgerechnet von einem Ex-Punk bekommen habe. )

Danke! Nachdem ja hierzulande Jugendschützer bereits anfangen, den Klingeltonwerbern auf die Finger zu schauen, regt sich nun offenbar auch in England der Prostest der Eltern.

Bitte, bitte - rottet alle verrückten Frösche, besoffenen Elche und was auch immer sich im Musikfernsehen an Viehzeug tummelt aus! Ich erkläre die Jagdsaison für eröffnet.

(Via: nicorola)

Okay, I’m going to write this one in English, because it’s probably useful for many people out there who don’t speak German.

Based on the “Smart Radio” playlist idea here, the (non-existing) ultimate iTunes script described here and using this script as a starting point, I decided to roll my own ultra-smart iTunes personal radio.

Some of the highlights:

• You don’t have to rate any music in advance - the script auto-rates the music as you play it - the more often you play a song, the higher its rating will be
• You can use your current ratings as a starting point if you want to.
• Recently added music is preferred
• It’s possible to exclude unwanted songs.
• Doesn’t rely on hard-coded playcounts, so it doesn’t require regular maintenance
• If you don’t listen to a high-rated song for awhile, its rating will automatically be lowered.

The caveats:

• It wonly works on Macs - sorry Windows folks.
• The script will change your music’s rating! Don’t use it if you don’t want that to happen.
• It’ll only be useful if you’re primarily using iTunes to listen to your music - if you’re more of an iPod person, this is not for you.
• You need to have an Applescript running in the background. (it doesn’t use much resources, though.)
• You need to install the Anacron package - the install is painless and IMHO Anacron should be installed on every Mac anyway.

And a last warning - this is a bit advanced stuff. You should be familiar with smart playlists, AppleScript and a bit of shell stuff if you attempt this.

Read more - a lot more - after the jump.

The setup
First a bit of theory: My script uses the ratings system as a way to measure how much you like a song at the moment - if you play it a lot, its rating will rise. If you’re getting sick of it and skip it, the rating will sink again.

How is this accomplished? I’ll walk you through it step by step:

1. Install Anacron
To make sure our regular task of downgrading songs we haven’t heard in awhile gets executed even if the system is not running 24/7, we use the wonderful Anacron package (which also makes sure that some imprtant OS X housekeeping jobs are taken care of). Grab it here for Tiger (10.4) or here if you’re still using 10.3 or below. It’s a simple install, come back when you’re done.

2. Create a core playlist
This is the master playlist - anything that’s on this playlist will be played, anything that’s not on there will be ignored by our radio.

Personally, I use a smart playlist that excludes anything shorter than 1 minute, anything longer than 10 minutes, any of the QuickTime moves I happen to have in my library (”Kind does not contain ‘QuickTime’”) and also exclused some genres - like “Spoken Word” that I just don’t want on my personal radio. You could go a completely different route, e.g. only include certain genres - it’s up to you. Don’t use selection based on ratings - that’d break the logic the script relies upon.

After you finised creating that playlist, call it @@core@@ (The @-signs put it at the top of the list in iTunes’ playlist display. You could call it anything else, but I’m sticking with “@@core@@” )

3. Create a playlist for recently added music
Fresh and unknown music should be preferred - that’s why we have a special area for it. I call it @@new@@ and it looks like this:

• Apply all rules
• Playlist is @@core@@
• Added within the last 2 months
• Playcount is 0

Later on, when we create the radio playlist, every song in @@new@@ will automatically be included.

4. Create a playlist for “semi-stale” music
The system’s design makes it possible for songs to be played once and then rot in some waiting place for awhile without being played. To counter that (and make automatic downgrading possible), we need a list for rated music that hasn’t been played in awhile. (Remember - our script is going to take over the rating, so basically anything that’s been rated must have been touched by it.)

@@old@@

• Apply all rules
• Playlist is @@core@@
• Playlist is not @@new@@
• Not played within the last 2 weeks
• Rating is greater than 0 stars

5. Create the ratings playlists
We want to have a Radio playlist that feeds off @@core@@, but it should honor the ratings system: Songs we like should be played more often, some new or forgotten music should be infused, as well, etc. To make that possible we need a filtering layer between the Radio playlist and @@core@@. We also want to exclude songs in the @@new@@ playlist, since those will be included within our master radio playlist anyway.

The first list in that filtering layer contains unrated music. In my model, unrated songs are either songs you never heard before or those you haven’t played in a long time. I call it @@0 Stars (a)@@ and it looks like this:

• Apply all rules
• Playlist is @@core@@
• Playlist is not @@new@@
• My rating is 0 stars
• Limit to 50 songs selected randomly

(You might want to tweak the limit number later on when the system is in use, but I found 50 to be a nice starting point.)

Why did I call it @@0 Stars (a)@@ instead of just “@@0 Stars@@”. Very simple: Because there’s a @@0 Stars (b)@@, as well.

iTunes’ star rating isn’t very fine grained, but it’s just the frpnt-end for a more sophisticated ratings system: You can rate a song anything from 0 to 100 - each star in iTunes corresponds to a 20 point increase. (1 star: A rating of 20 points, 2 stars = 40 points, etc.) iTunes will round the number of stars displayed: If you have song rated 44, iTunes will display 2 stars. That song, however, won’t show up in a smart playlist designed to show every 2-star-song, because iTunes’ filtering is designed to look for the exact number of points - so it’ll only display songs with exactly 40 points.

To be able to use the “fuzzy” ratings in between, we need to create a rather curious looking playlist: @@0 Stars (b)@@

• Playlist is @@core@@
• My rating is greater than 0 stars and less than 1 star
• Limit to 50 songs selected by least recently played

One would expect this playlist not to match anything, however it actually matches every song with a rating between 0 and 20 points - exactly what we need.
(Update: According to user feedback, this trick isn’t necassary any more in iTunes 6.0.3 since it’ll automatically include all numbers in the range in a smart playlist. I didn’t try it out myself yet, but if that’s true, you should be able to leave out all of the (b)-lists in 6.0.3 or above and still have the same functionality.)
Note that while the first playlist is odered randomly, this (and all subsequent) playlists are ordered by most recently played This - coupled with the numer limit - makes sure that songs have a small “cooling off” period before being played again. (Since the playlists for the higher ratings are larger, higer rated songs are repeated more frequently than lower rated songs.)

Here are the other ratings playlists:

@@1 Star (a)@@

• Apply all rules
• Playlist is @@core@@
• Playlist is not @@new@@
• My rating is 1 star
• Limit to 13 songs selected by least recently played

@@1 Star (b)@@

• Apply all rules
• Playlist is @@core@@
• My rating is greater than 1 star and less than 2 stars
• Limit to 12 songs selected by least recently played

@@2 Stars (a)@@

• Apply all rules
• Playlist is @@core@@
• My rating is 2 stars
• Limit to 25 songs selected by least recently played

@@2 Stars (b)@@

• Apply all rules
• Playlist is @@core@@
• My rating is greater than 2 stars and less than 3 stars
• Limit to 25 songs selected by least recently played

@@3 Stars (a)@@

• Apply all rules
• Playlist is @@core@@
• My rating is 3 stars
• Limit to 50 songs selected by least recently played

@@3 Stars (b)@@

• Apply all rules
• Playlist is @@core@@
• My rating is greater than 3 stars and less than 4 stars
• Limit to 50 songs selected by least recently played

@@4 Stars (a)@@

• Apply all rules
• Playlist is @@core@@
• My rating is 4 stars
• Limit to 100 songs selected by least recently played

@@4 Stars (b)@@

• Apply all rules
• Playlist is @@core@@
• My rating is greater than 4 stars and less than 5 stars
• Limit to 100 songs selected by least recently played

@@5 Stars@@

• Apply all rules
• Playlist is @@core@@
• My rating is 5 stars
• Limit to 400 songs selected by least recently played

Again - all the limit numbers are guesstimates - you might want to tweak them after using the script for a bit. The general idea is that there should be more room for high rated songs than for the lower ratings.

6. Create the master Radio playlist

Okay, this is our radio playlist, called @@@Radio@@@. (Note that it doesn’t access @@core@@ directly - it uses the “filtering layer” of our smart playlists.)

• Apply some rules
• Playlist is @@new@@
• Playlist is @@old@@
• Playlist is @@0 stars (a)@@
• Playlist is @@0 stars (b)@@
• Playlist is @@1 star (a)@@
• Playlist is @@1 star (b)@@
• Playlist is @@2 stars (a)@@
• Playlist is @@2 stars (b)@@
• Playlist is @@3 stars (a)@@
• Playlist is @@3 stars (b)@@
• Playlist is @@4 stars (a)@@
• Playlist is @@4 stars (b)@@
• Playlist is @@5 stars@@

Make sure you’re setting it to only match some rules, no song is ever going to match all of those rules.

7. Create Housekeeping playlists
Our script needs two playlists for internal use: A “recently” played smart playlist and a regular playlist to store the last song it caught:

@@recently played@@

• Playlist is @@core@@
• Limit to 1 songs order by most recently played

Next, create a regular (non-smart) playlist named “@@current song@@” and leave it empty. The script needs it for its own dark purposes.

8. Create the scripts
We have two scripts: One that’s running in the background, rating your music as you play it, and one that’s started once a week to downgrade the “semi-stale” music.

Here they come:

First our background rating skript - the brain of the operation:

Save this in script editor as an application called Rating and make sure you check the box that says “don’t terminate automatically” or something like that.

The second script is needed for downgrading stale songs. Every time it’s called, it’ll reduce the rating of all songs in your @@old@@ playlist by 1 star.

Save this as a plain application called “Purge”. (Don’t check the “don’t terminate” box.)

9. Make “Purge” callable
We want to call “Purge” via Anacron. Anacron runs as root, but we want our script to be run as out user. A small bash script does the trick:

#!/bin/sh

sudo -u <USERNAME> osascript /<PATH>/<TO>/Purge.app

(Substiute your username and the path to your Purge application in the indicated places.)

Save the script as purge.sh.

Now, open a Terminal window, and type sudo pico /etc/anacrontab.
Enter your password when asked.
In the anacrontab file, ass the following line:

7       10      purge.weekly    /<PATH>/<TO>/purge.sh

(Again, substitute the correct path to your purge.sh)
Press Ctrl-X to exit the editor. It asks you if you want to save the changes - press “Y” to save them.

From now on, Purge.app will be run weekly - downgrading anything in your @@old@@ list.

10. Start the Rating app
Just double-click your Rating.app - it shoud stay running. You probably want to add it as a startup item - make sure iTunes is started before the Rating script.

11. Test it
Play an unrated song from the @@@Radio@@@ playlist - wait until it finihes (or, if you’re impatient, jump close to the end of the track, but make sure it plays for at least 10 seconds.)
A few seconds after the next song starts, the previous song’s rating should change to “2 stars”.

If it doesn’t work, add a comment below, hopefully, we’ll figure it out.

12. Hints:

• It’ll take awhile to fill up all the lists - you can speed this up by pre-rating songs.
• You can change a song’s rating manually anytime - that way you can influence how often it’ll be played.
• I like to use the @@@Radio@@@ list with the “Party Shuffle” feature - just use @@Radio@@ as the source - if the script is running - the rating will take care of itself.
• If you know your way around AppleScript and/or smart playlists, Tweak the numbers to your liking - any numbers are fair game.
• You can create a dynamic “Top 20″ playlist:
  • Playlist is @@@Radio@@@

  • Limit to 20 items order by Ratings, highest first

  This’ll even sort by the “real rating, so a song with a rating of “40″ will always be below a song with a rating of “49″, even though both have 2 stars displayed.

13. The way of a song through all of this
Here’s what happens to a song within this maze of scripts and lists:

• The script polls iTunes every 10 seconds to check which song is playing. It remembers that song by putting it into the @@current song@@ playlist.
• As soon as it detects a new song, it checks @@recently played@@ to see if the previous song was finished or if the user skipped ahead.
• If the song was finished, the skript upgrades its rating: Unrated songs go straigt to 2 stars. If the song already has a rating, it’ll advance slower the higher the rating is. You need to really like a song to promote it to 5 stars.
• If the song was skipped, it is downgraded. If it has 1 star, it’s downgraded to “unrated”, if it has more, it’ll be downgraded 10 points (”half a star”).
  Exception:If an unrated song gets skipped, it is rated with 1 star. Why? If it stayed unrated, it’d never get out of the@@0 stars@@ playlist, therefore it’d stay in @@@Radio@@@ forever - not good if you don’t like it. By rating it with 1 star, it’s moved out of @@0 stars (a)@@, making room for a new song. It’ll either come up again in shuffle mode where you can either skip it again (demoting it to “unrated” a d banning it off @@Radio@@ until chance puts it back onto @@0 stars (a)@@ or - if you like it (and listen to it until the end, it’ll be upgraded, putting it into the regular cycle.
• If a song is rated with more than 0 stars but hasn’t been played for more than 2 weeks, it’s put on @@old@@
• Any song that was added within the last 2 months and has never been played, wille be put onto the @@new@@playlist, makeing it more likely to turn up in your @@@Radio@@@ playlist.

14. What’s left?
Well, that was my setup - there are a lot of things to tweak and change, so feel free to experiment and share your results in the comments.

Oh, and feel free to subscribe to my English RSS feed to receive future English language postings to the site.

Kaum hatte ich ein bisschen mit iTunes 4.9 rumgespielt, da hatte ich auch schon die ersten Fehlermeldungen beim Laden - es gong um ungültige URLs.

Aber siehe da: Das Unofficial Apple Weblog hat die Lösung:

I’ve been having difficulty subscribing to several of the podcast feeds available in the iTMS. I’ll click subscribe, then the dialog will pop up asking if I am sure I want to subscribe, I click yes, then the podcast appears in my podcast pane with a little ! next to it. I click on the !, and I am met with something like the following:

If this happens to you, here’s the solution: Go back to the iTMS. Instead of subscribing to the entire podcast, simply click the "Get Episode" button next to the podcast to which you want to subscribe. The episode will begin loading in your podcasts pane and the podcast will appear above the individual episode with a "Subscribe" button. Click on that Subscription button and now for some unknown reason, it works. Probably something to do with podcast feeds that aren’t properly embedded, but who knows?

Es gibt also offensichtlich noch Kinderkrankheiten - hoffen wir, dass die schnell ausgebügelt werden.