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As I listened to my iPod the other day, it occured to me that there was something wrong. The song selection was excellent, of course -- after all, I'd hand-picked every tune loaded into the library -- but there wasn't much excitement. Was I *gasp* getting tired of my iPod? No, the problem was the silence between selections. Sometimes songs would fade...
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In my last iTunes Tune-up post I talked about changing the import default to burn CD tracks at a much higher bitrate for better sound quality. Since that time, music I've added has sounded great. But what about all those songs I had already saved at 128kbps before I changed the setting? It wasn't possible to "upscale" those older iTunes files. If I...
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In olden times my parents kept the family's holiday music in a separate part of the record cabinet. The LPs came out in November, and went back in early January. We carried on the same tradition with CDs, until I ripped them all into iTunes. But changing the format brought a new problem. With a digitized music library, I can't physically place my seasonal...
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I recently moved my iTunes library to an external hard drive. While it meant I could greatly expand the number of songs I could have in my library, the primary reason for the move was so I could upgrade the sound quality of the music I stored. iTunes automatically compresses songs as they're imported. Compression helps fit more songs into the limited...
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Ripping a CD to iTunes is simple enough. But moving a large collection of music from compact disc to iTunes can be time-consuming. Here are three simple tips I've discovered to make the process go a little faster. It may only take a few seconds off the process when I'm transferring a selection of songs from just one CD, but when I'm ripping several...
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In my last post I talked about relocating my iTunes library from my PC's hard drive to an external drive. The process worked so well, I decided to do it to my laptop, too. My laptop serves as a portable office, and I have it with me just about all the time. While I usually leave it set up in the same place throughout the workday (unless I'm travelling...
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It didn't take long for the size of my iTunes library to start taking over my computer's hard drive -- especially once I started saving songs at a higher bitrate for better audio quality. Fortunately, it was pretty simple for me to move my cramped collection of tunes out of my PC and into a 250GB external hard drive where it has room to grow. Here how...
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I assembled my iTunes library of 4,000+ tunes from a variety of different sources. As a result, the volume levels varied greatly from track to track, making for a less-than-ideal listening experience. iTunes provided a simple fix that works for most of these problems. Inside the "Preferences" menu, under "Playback," there's a Sound Check option. When...
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Some of the music in my iTunes library isn't clean. No, not like that. I'm using the term in the broadcasting sense. Some of my tracks don't start clean, and others don't stop clean -- there's extra stuff before or after these songs that I don't really want to hear. The problem selections mostly come from live concert recordings, which sometimes have...
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In an ideal world, each song I add to my iTunes library would have all the appropriate fields filled out the way I wanted them. In reality, my library is now a few years old and many tunes were imported before I even knew I wanted certain information included. Adding that data after the fact can be time-consuming – especially without some way of noting...