The Tune Gardener

Up to about a year and a half ago, when my storage was somewhat limited, I chose to archive a number of episodes in order to free up space on my main drive and to reduce the number of records in the iTunes database, theoretically to improve iTunes performance. I have recently changed this approach.

I used to have a 10Gb monthly allowance from my ISP. Anything downloaded at the time was precious to me because I paid dearly for it. Thus I hoarded every episode that I downloaded. I filled the drive and archived onto DVD. That didn’t work because I felt compelled to modify some of the tags and before I knew it, I started to have differing versions. I scrapped the DVDs and used a small old external hard drive that was big enough to store the archives. This allowed me to modify the tags and overwrite the existing file. Multiple-version problem solved.

Ephemeral Podcasts

Now that I’m on a 30Gb monthly allowance, and even though I’ve got plenty of storage, I’ve decided that I am no longer going to keep everything. A number of podcasts, e.g. Geekbrief.tv, MacMost, The MacObserver’s Mac Geek Gab and Triple J’s Sunday Night Safran, are topical or ephemeral and I consider that they can be deleted after listening or watching. I think a copy of every episode should be retained, but the responsibility for this I leave up to the podcast producer. I certainly would hoard my own work if I were podcasting.

I’ve changed the podcast option to keep All unplayed episodes:

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Now every podcast episode with a play count of 0 will be retained, but anything with a higher play count will be deleted. The deletion occurs when the podcast is checked for updates.

Podcasts to Keep

There is another class of podcast which you will want to keep, due to sentimental, timeless or other characteristics. Examples of this for me are the first Ricky Gervais Show (this was produced shortly after podcast support came to iTunes and is significant to me because I really like him), Puffcast (unfortunately now defunct but awesome, timeless dub/reggae) and Scott Sigler’s first podcast novel Earthcore, which I not only enjoyed and would consider listening to again, but I could conceivably give to someone else so that they didn’t need to download it. All the episodes of a podcast can be protected from deletion by right-clicking the podcast title and selecting “Do Not Delete”:

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Note that you can selectively do this to individual episodes without affecting the other episodes of the same podcast.

The Problem

There is a caveat: while you can protect all the episodes of a podcast, this only applies to the episodes existing at the time you applied the command. Future episodes will not be protected and will be deleted if not individually protected before their play count reaches 1. This is a non-intuitive behaviour and should it offend you, you should complain to Apple about it.

My Workaround

Create a smart playlist called Podcasts to Keep. The criteria are as follows:

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You will fill in the album name for any podcasts that you want to keep. This keeps a running master collection of every episode you want to keep. You can add to this from time to time if you later subscribe to a new podcast that you want to keep.

Create a second smart playlist called Podcasts to Be Processed. The criteria are as follows:

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This playlist is the one you will work with. Every now and then (if you get new episodes daily like me, do this daily), click this playlist in the sidebar and see if there are any episodes in the righthand pane. If there are, select them all, right-click and select “Do Not Delete”. When an episode is played (i.e., reaches a play count of 1), it will disappear from the playlist but will remain in your Podcast library.

An Alternative Approach

There is another approach that works the other way around. The disadvantage is that you’ll be filling up disk space with played episodes you don’t want to keep unless you check it frequently.

Change the podcast option to keep All episodes:

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Instead of the Podcasts to Be Processed playlist, create a smart playlist called Podcasts to Be Deleted with the following criteria:

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Check this playlist from time to time. If you see any episodes, select them all and delete them.

Summary

Unless Apple solves the problem above, investment in podcasts can mean an investment in management, but I feel it is worth it. Use this as a guide to determine whether you are willing to make that investment.

If you read my post regarding my woes with upgrading Apple TV, you may have been put off on doing so yourself. Well, I rang Apple (I bought AppleCare for this privilege) and it was good to find out that I was in the minority with regard to video choking, which was my biggest issue. The suggested remedy was to restore, then upgrade again. Apparently, 1.0 (or whatever shipped with the Apple TV) is stored in a partition and is not overwritten by later versions, so that’s why mine was restoring to 1.0.

I did this and it appears to have resolved the choking issue, plus a similar issue with audio choking when syncing was being done concurrently.

Podcasters may not be aware of why they should not be posting video podcasts in the .mov format. .mov is a software “wrapper” that contains a minimum of two components: video and audio. The components can be in different codecs. So even if you believe that you are doing the right thing by using H.264 and AAC (you are), there are implications in using the .mov wrapper that you should be aware of.

.mov cannot be tagged. Well, a number of tags can be assigned in iTunes (notable exception being album art) but this only writes the tags to the database, not the file. This means that as soon as the episode is moved out of iTunes, it loses all the tags. In the case of podcasts, this includes, most tragically, the podcast flag and the long description. The only “tag” remaining is the title name and the disc and track number (if set), and this is only stored in the form of the file name. When you bring those episodes back into iTunes, they appear in the Movies library as 01 Episode 1.mov, etc, with no other tags. All that hard work from your RSS feed is wasted and is not recoverable.

A podcastee may have archived past episodes and want to reconstitute them into iTunes, or, as I have done in the past, handed them on to others so that they don’t have to download the episodes themselves. This saves lots of bandwidth. In either case, the results will be disappointing.

The MPEG 4 file format (.m4v or .mp4) is a wonderland of tagging possibilities. Cali and Neal, of Geekbrief.tv, for example, have recently started using one of my favourite tools, Lostify, to tag their .m4v (H.264/AAC) files as TV Show so that, in addition to all the embedded podcast tagging that iTunes does when the file is downloaded, they can be found in both the Podcasts and TV Shows libraries. Copyright, explicit, short description, etc. can also be tagged.

So my appeal to podcasters is to be aware of this and not to use .mov. The software you are using to create your files might be able to generate .m4v files. iMovie 08 will do it. Personally, I use QuickTime Player Pro to export MPEG 4 video (MPEG 4 or H.264) from .mov to MPEG 4 with the Passthrough option for both video and audio. This preserves the full quality of both components but regenerates them as a .mp4 file, the name of which is simply changed to .m4v prior to tagging (if H.264).

Last year I upgraded my G5 to improve iTunes performance. As noted in that post, I achieved only moderate performance gains. The G5 was always pretty good at encoding with Handbrake, but now that I have added a number of tweaks to get better quality output, it was taking a very long time to encode video (about 18 hours for a 22-minute TV episode). That’s a little non-viable.

I was impressed that my MacBook Air was ripping video slightly faster than the G5. It’s Apple’s slowest machine, at 1.6GHz. I started to think that a Mac Mini would give me modest improvements on that, and because I appeared to have some hardware issues on the G5 with USB ports going offline, system lock-ups, etc., I decided to replace it now with a Mac Mini rather than wait for the next update to the line.

Given that I have plenty of external storage and an external DVD drive, I decided to save a little money and bought the entry-level 1.83GHz model, with 80Gb hard drive and combo optical. This is the slowest desktop Apple currently produces, so I wasn’t expecting it to be much better than the G5. It turns out that with most operations (opening windows, navigating through iTunes, etc.) it isn’t much different. I was starting to get a little buyer’s remorse when I ripped a TV episode to test it.

I had to check very carefully that it had produced a playable file of the entire episode because it ripped it about 5 times as fast as the G5! I was astonished at the difference, so impressed in fact that I considered buying another one just to rip video. It turns out that the MacBook Air was turning off one of its cores under the load of ripping, thus accounting for the lacklustre performance compared to the only slightly faster Mini.

Of course it comes five years of development time after the G5, so that dampens the surprise a little, but I think this proves that the Mac Mini is a pretty good performer despite its position in the product hierarchy, and you should consider it.

I was excited about this possibility when 2.0 came around but could not buy anything from the iTunes Store. I would get to the point where the Apple TV should be buying the item and I would get an error saying the iTunes Store could not be contacted. I gave up after strenuous effort.

It turns out that 2.0.1 appears to have fixed it and I’m now the proud owner of this Goldfrapp track. I think I’ll be spreading my purchases among my computers, iPod Touch and my beloved Apple TV, just for fun.

Do you pause a video while playing just to see how much time has elapsed or how much time is remaining? I just noticed with 2.0.1, if you click the up button while playing, it displays the progress bar with the aforementioned times without interrupting playback. Small but nice enhancement.

Of course, I would prefer that the up and down buttons would change volume because my stereo remote is huge. I know why it doesn’t, though: it would require a variable line-out and volume is supposed to handled by the amp.

Update: I should have mentioned that if you’ve encoded your video with chapters using Handbrake, this tip will allow you to see the chapter titles, in addition to the times. It’s a small feature that DVD can’t match.

I am aware that many users don’t sync for days or weeks. I recommend to these users that they sync more frequently. Personally, due to the daily changes to my iTunes library (mostly new podcasts), I sync daily, or to be precise, twice daily.

I run three iPods each day. My “road” iPod is a 3rd-Gen Nano, which is my main podcast iPod, so it has every unplayed podcast and the rest is filled by the last-added music and unplayed audiobooks. I have all my music on a 160Gb Classic that I use to store absolutely everything music-wise (no podcasts and the only video is music video) and I play anything I want from this at work. Finally, I have a 16Gb Touch that I use for the video and sometimes internet activity.

First sync occurs when I get home from work. I run all three through the process, then force a sync on the Apple TV to remove any played podcasts from it. I then play content on the Apple TV during the evening. I don’t use my iPods at home. At the end of the evening, all three iPods are synced again to pick up any changes that occurred during the night (new podcasts, removal of played podcasts, music with altered tags and artwork, new music and video, etc.). In this way all the iPods are always ready with the right content, charged and ready to go.

Too many times have I seen iPodders run out of juice during the day, have content that they’ve played over and over until they’re sick of it and with out-of-date iPods. Frequent syncing is the answer!

I eschew this option for TV Shows because I want to watch episodes in sequence, not just the last ones added. The same goes for a large number of episodes of a single podcast. However, I’ve found a use for this option that makes sense.

I’ve got probably 10 movies that I haven’t watched. Most are old rips that I just haven’t been in the mood to watch yet. The more interesting ones happen to be the latest added, so for movies on my Apple TV, I’ve reversed my normal operation and now sync the last 3 added (or 3 “most recently unplayed”) movies. This is much better. Once I’ve run through them, the older ones will come back until I finally relent and watch them too.

I didn’t think I’d ever find a use for this option. It’s nice to see that it is workable in some situations.

It wouldn’t surprise me if later Touch buyers who got the software upgrade (mail, maps, etc.) included do not encounter this extremely irritating issue.

When 1.1.3 came out, I updated and found that it had wiped out my software upgrade. There were holes in my home page where the icons used to be. It puzzled me why this would happen, considering that I bought the upgrade. I thought each new update would contain these features. I managed to get the iTunes Store to give me a new download.

I’ve just applied the new 1.1.4 update and it happened again! I’m really mad about this. This is not how it should be. I’ve asked the iTunes Store for another download again.

So bear this in mind if your in the same boat. Personally, I use the mail feature to monitor work email, so it was pretty inconvenient timing.

Update: That’s weird. Now my software upgrade is back. I didn’t do anything except invoke a sync. Perhaps that was needed. It didn’t get fixed this way last time.

Here’s a quick tip that I was pleased to discover. QuickTime Player has, for as long as I can remember, never been able to export the audio from an MPEG1 video file. It can play it fine but if you convert to something else such as iPod, you got a video without audio.

I used to have to use MPEG Streamclip to rip MPEG1 to iPod as it handled the audio properly. Last night, for the hell of it, I tried it with the latest QuickTime Player (7.4.1) and lo and behold, Apple has finally fixed it and I have my video + audio iPod track! Very nice, even though it’s taken many years to come to this.