Life and Times

Apple Airport Express & O2 Wireless .....

Having upgraded my hi-fi I wanted to stream music from iTunes on my MacBook, iPhone & iPad and the Aitport Express seemed to fit the bill. I could also get Spotify to stream with the addition of Airfoil from Rogue Amoeba.

I bought an Airport Express and tried to set it up by linking to the O2 wireless router and spent a painful 2 hours struggling  get the two devices to communicate - the AE kept timing out when trying to link.

After a bit of research I found that the WEP encryption was the culprit and after changing to WPA the AE and router got it together and everything went green.

I'm pleased with the result and after selecting the AE from within iTunes I can stream music to the Marantz ..... result!

Cheers for now,

K

iTunes Match Sorted

My previous post was about the frustrations I was experiencing with iTunes Match, especially where it would re-run the matching process every time I started iTunes.

I'm pleased to report that this has now stopped. I think it was caused because it had to upload some songs and that was causing it to re-match the library. All of my non-matched songs have now been uploaded to Apple's servers and so the matching process appears to have finished & I can start iTunes without it attempting to match the library.

I've downloaded 256kbs versions of all of the songs that were ripped using a lower bit rate so my library is squeeky clean. However, this has caused a problem that I wasn't expecting, in that my 160Gb iPod is now too small to hold my entire library ......

I've had to develop a strategy to store the music I listen to most on the iPod and keep everything else on the MacBook.

Cheers for now,
K 

iTunes Match is Driving Me Mad!

As a card-carrying Apple fan I signed up for iTunes Match as soon as it was available in the UK. I expected it to take a while as my music collection is around 23k songs but I was pleasantly surprised and thought it did a reasonable job.

There were some "funnies" where it matched most of am album apart from one or two tracks, which I can't solve at the moment and it's very slow uploading the unmatched tracks.

But what is really annoying is that every time I start iTunes it has to go through the matching process again, which takes an age. I've Googled extensively to try and find a solution, but the only thing I've come up with is to turn Match off. It'd be great if you could schedule the match process or have to specifically request that it run an update.

Anyone else experienced this?

Cheers for now,
K 

Stereogum & team9 Present .....

Go check out one of my favourite music news sites Stereogum & make sure you check out their downloads.

Here's a taster ....

Cheers for now
Keith

A Good Music Site

I was pointed at this music site today: stereogum.com. Worth a listen.

Here's a taster of the sort of stuff they have.

Cheers for now,
K