macJasp

Sonic T-Amp and Airtunes

After hunting around for a while I've finally managed to get hold of a Sonic T-Amp for an upcoming DIY project of mine to extend my Airtunes music streaming in the home.

These amplifiers are no longer sold or manufactured but I've sourced one on eBay for around £35 and the plan is to get this up in the loft attached to some ceiling speakers, plug a spare Airport Express I have into the T-Amp's 3.5mm jack and start piping music via iTunes into the bathroom. I can't wait to get started.

iTunes 9 Media Organisation

When looking for a solution to the Time Machine backup problems I have been experiencing lately I came across an option in iTunes 9 that was asking me if I wanted to 'upgrade to iTunes Media organization' (in iTunes 9.x, selecting File->Library->Organise Library gives you this option).

After some digging around to find out more about what this option actually meant it seems that iTunes 9 has finally got it's act together in terms of how it physically stores different file types in the file system. Once the option is ticked there's no going back but it's worth doing (after backing up your iTunes folder beforehand) as the new folder structure it creates is a lot neater and certainly more sensible, no longer do you have TV Shows and Movies etc tucked away with all your music in the iTunes folder.

It does leave a few remnants of files behind but out of my 5000+ music files and movies, I only had around 4 or 5 folders to check and then delete once I knew iTunes had also moved them to their correct and proper new location but now it puts TV Shows, Movies, Ringtones and everything else in their own top level folder within the iTunes Music folder.

iTunes 9 – resolving crash issues

The recent iTunes 9 upgrade has been giving me constant problems, continually crashing and getting the ‘hanging balloon’ every 2 or 3 minutes. I couldn’t get the problem to go away even after  re-installing iTunes 9.

There’s lots of reported issues of iTunes 9 corrupting people’s xml databases over on the Apple forums so there does seem to be a problem with this new version, however i have managed to resolve it by going back to the older version of my iTunes xml library, letting iTunes 9 upgrade the library once again and now everything seems good.

Do this at your own risk, i won’t be held responsible but if you are faced with the same issue and want to try and resolve it then in your home folder in /Music/iTunes/ – there is a folder called ‘Previous iTunes Libraries’ – this is where iTunes stores a copy of the library prior to any new iTunes update.

Shutdown iTunes 9, delete (or better still move to your desktop) your iTunes Library.xml and then copy your older library (named iTunes Library 2009-09-09 in my case) back into the /Music/iTunes/ folder, rename it as ‘iTunes Library’ and restart iTunes 9.

At this point it will either update the library successfully or (in my case) it hung at around 90% complete therefore another force quit and restart and this time iTunes 9 is stable

Hopefully a permanent fix by Apple will be with us shortly