Posts Tagged
itunes
I know there are Mac users out there who still have hurt feelings, even after all these months, over the most recent iTunes redesign. Let me tell you, you’re among friends here, and I want to help. While it’s hard to replace iTunes, especially if you have to sync any iOS devices with your Mac, you can find alternatives to lessen the iTunes sting.
Music player app Pinna works with your iTunes library so you won’t have to give up iTunes altogether, but it’s a far sight better looking and easier to use. Will it have what it takes to displace iTunes, at least for pumping out your jams? (more…)
It’s been a busy one this week with app updates and the launch of Apple’s Best of 2012 for the best Mac applications in the store so read on for our full weekly news roundup!
Last month, Apple announced a 13″ MacBook Pro with Retina Display, an inevitability to replace the “previous-generation” 13″ MacBook Pro sans high-resolution display. While that old model remains available as a cheaper alternative for the holiday season, our guess is it will be completely removed from Apple’s lineup by the end of next year leaving not a single consumer-level Mac with an optical drive.
What started with the MacBook Air in 2008, and seemed like a crazy concept to an industry reliant on hard media, is now complete, four years later. With software distribution moving entirely to the web and entertainment increasingly being bought and stored in the cloud, the need for an optical drive is diminishing, right? (more…)
Winners Announced
Thanks to everyone who took part in the giveaway this week, and special thanks to the kind people at Algoriddim! I’m excited to let you know that the winners have now been chosen. Congratulations are in order to:
Julian Fricker
Bob
Dave M.
Well done to the lucky winners, and we’ll be in touch soon. Sorry to those who missed out, be sure to check back for more great competitions!
Old Competition Post
The simply superb djay for Mac has recently been updated to include Retina Graphics, I though it the perfect opportunity to look at what makes it so great — and give three readers the chance to grab a free copy.
Read on to find out how to enter…
If you’re an audiophile like me, you probably know the pain of trying to use high-quality music files with iTunes. Even though iTunes does a pretty good job of playing your lossless sound files, you’re always left wondering if you’re missing something, not to mention the fact that iTunes doesn’t support FLAC files.
If these things bother you on a daily basis, we’ve found an application that might be able to help you: BitPerfect. It’s an app that’s designed to help you squeeze the best possible audio quality from your sound system, according to its developer. Let’s take that claim for a test and see if it’s worth the price. (more…)
Poor OS X. It doesn’t have Siri, even though it does have Siri’s voice detection. It doesn’t support any Minority Report-style gestures like Microsoft’s Kinect, even though it does have great touchpad gestures. It’s filled with great features, just none of those headline-grabbing features that make it look like something from the future.
It’s the App Store to the rescue again, this time with a little free menubar app named Flutter. It promises to bring some Kinect-style gestures to your Mac’s music apps, so you can walk up to your Mac, motion to start the music playing, and silence all the doubters saying that OS X isn’t the cool kid anymore.
I have a lot of music, as most of us do, and I need to keep my music organized. I download and import music from lots of different places, so my music files end up tagged with all sorts of different genres, artist and song titles are garbled, and they get all kinds of comments stuck on them. It can be a burden to clean all that up.
Yate, an audio file tagging app, can edit metadata and get all your music organized the way you want it. We’ll try editing a few files, see if Yate stands up, and find out whether it can really clean up the mess of your iTunes library. (more…)
This post is part of a series that revisits some of our readers’ favorite articles from the past that still contain awesome and relevant information that you might find useful. This post was originally published on September 20th, 2011.
While I’ve used iTunes for the longest time, and it works pretty much as my media center; I have to come to terms with the fact that it isn’t as great as it could be. It’s heavy, slow, glitchy and at times I find it very annoying.
Ditching iTunes is especially enticing when you now have all these new options available: apps that go from streaming free music, to playing you a personalised radio with music that suit your musical tastes. iTunes is still my main music app, but it’s being quickly overtaken by some of these other options.
Most of my solo work time passes with music in the background. Sometimes I’m playing music from my iTunes library, and sometimes I’m streaming music from online radio stations or subscription services. Controlling it all can be a pain. Whether I’m writing a review for AppStorm or balancing Excel spreadsheets at work, I normally have to switch back to the music program to pause a song if someone walks in. If a song comes on that I’m not in the mood to listen to, then it’s even worse since I have to swap to the player to skip and then back to my work. Even this brief interruption can take me out of flow and require time to pick up where I left off.
Skip Tunes is a simple menubar app that offers a solution. It runs in your menu bar to let you control the your music from the menu bar or with keyboard shortcuts. How well does it work? (more…)
Our weekly sponsor this week is Onde iTunes Converter, a great tool to help you convert your DRM protected audio files so you can listen to them anywhere, on any device.
If you’ve purchased music on your Mac in iTunes for many years, chances are you have plenty of songs in iTunes that are still protected by DRM. You could listen to the songs on your iPod, iPhone, or Mac, but you couldn’t just put them on a generic mp3 player or different smartphone. You could burn them to an audio CD and then rip them as mp3, but that’d be a lot of trouble.
That’s where Onde iTunes Converter comes in. It makes it simple to make new unlocked mp3 and AAC files from the DRMed music you own, so you can listen to it anywhere. You can convert at up to 16x in a variety of formats so you can listen just as you want. It can even rip audio from your iTunes videos! All you’ll have to do is sit back while Onde iTunes Converter works its magic.
Go Get It!
If you’d like to convert your DRMed iTunes music easily, you should give Onde iTunes Converter a try. It normally costs $39.95, but if you enter the coupon code *ondesoft50* at checkout, you’ll get 50% off for a limited time!
