In Depth: How to dual-boot Linux and Windows
Many of us like to run more than one operating system on a single machine. It's a great way of experimenting with how the other half live, testing new distributions and even playing a few Windows-based games.
But dual and triple booting has always been considered something of a dark art. This is because it involves the double jeopardy of messing around with your disk partition tables and playing with a pre-installed operating system. If things go wrong, it can be a disaster. Or at least, that's the popular perception.
The reality is that dual booting needn't be a risk, and installation can be effortless. With the latest distributions, you might not even notice the process. All this means that if you've been put off by older installations and those old horror stories of things going wrong, it's time to try dual booting again, and our our aim is to demystify exactly what is happening and give you the confidence to delve into the world of dual boot.
But before we push off into the world of running Linux alongside Windows, and Linux alongside Linux, there are a couple of important considerations.
First, dual-booting still involves a lot of data shuffling, and while we've not seen the process go wrong for years, if your data is valuable, it's not worth the risk. If you've got anything on your system that you couldn't live without, make a copy of it now before it's too late.
Secondly, with multiple-boot systems, planning is everything. If you've got a blank system that you know you're going to install more than one operating system on to, you can save yourself a lot of time by working out how those systems are going to be arranged, how much space you'll need for each OS, and how you'd like them to be installed.
Partitioning your drive before you install the first operating system can save you tons of number crunching and the risk of repartitioning. If you do this, follow our partitioning guide, then install Windows first followed by your favourite Linux distribution.
Finally, as with all things Linux, the main thing is to enjoy the freedom of being able to dual boot, because Linux is the only mainstream operating system that actively encourages you to do so.
Install Ubuntu 10.04 alongside Windows with these three easy steps
1. First boot
There are two ways to dual boot with a Windows system preinstalled. The first is to add a new or spare hard drive to your system and use this for version of Linux you want to install. The second solution is to use the installer to automatically resize your Windows partition to make room for the new Linux one.
This works well, and it's the method we've used, but there is a slight risk that if anything goes wrong during the resizing process, you may lose all your date. Back up now! Insert the Ubuntu disc into your optical drive and reboot your machine.
If your system ignores the disc and jumps back to Windows, you'll need to either look for a BIOS boot menu key as soon as your computer starts, or enter the BIOS and change the boot order manually.
If the drive is successfully read Ubuntu presents the welcome screen, from where you can choose between running the CD in live mode, or proceeding directly to the installation. We chose the latter.
2. Get the balance right
You now need to answer a couple of standard pre-installation questions, including which time zone you're located in and the layout of your keyboard. After these you'll see the 'Prepare Disk Space' page. If your Windows installation has been detected properly, the first line on the page will explain that 'This computer has Windows on it', and the default option of 'Install them side by side' will be selected.
Keeping the options at their default value will create a dual-boot system. Use the divider in the horizontal bar at the bottom of the window to adjust the sizes of the Windows and the new Linux partition. The Ubuntu installer knows how much space is currently filled within the Windows partition, and it won't let you reduce the size of its partition to less that this.
Which partition you give the most space to depends on which you're going to use most, but we'd recommend at least 10GB for the Ubuntu installation, and much more than 10GB if you intend to make the Linux environment your main operating system.
3. Resize and migration
When you're happy with the division in space between the two operating systems, click on Forward. Resizing the Windows partition and creating new ones for Linux can take some time. In the background, Windows data is being moved into adjacent blocks of your hard drive before the partition table is rewritten to include the new Linux partitions and the resized Windows partition.
When the resize processed has finished, you'll see the user account settings page. Enter a username, password and a name for your computer and choose whether to log in manually. The next page is Ubuntu's Migration Assistant. This will attempt to import data from the Windows partition and move it to your new user account.
You can choose to import your bookmarks, wallpaper, avatar, music, images and documents, all of which will be placed in their corresponding home folders. Finally, click on Forward, read the overview and click on Install to create a new Ubuntu installation.
Don't be scared of carving up your hard disk – we know what we're doing
The biggest hurdle that most dual-booters have to overcome is their fear of partitioning. This is the process of splitting up your hard drive into chunks so that you can install more than one OS.
It's not so daunting if you're working with a new hard drive, as even if something goes wrong, you're not going to lose any data. But many people want to re-adjust an existing configuration to make space for a new one, and this is where things can go wrong.
This is why you should make a backup. It's also wiser to do all your partitioning before you get to the installation stage. You can then make a better judgment about how much space you need, and ensure that the drive is configured correctly before you reboot with the install disc.
Most distributions and installers use the same tool for partitioning: GParted. If you boot into the Ubuntu desktop from the CD by selecting the 'Try' option, you'll find GParted in the System > Administration menu.
You first need to select the drive you want to edit from the drop-down menu in the top-right. This will fill the graphical display with the layout of that drive and a list of partitions in the lower panel.
Each partition looks like a horizontal block, with the space used within that partition indicated by a block of colour. To resize a Windows partition, look for a block formatted as either NTFS or FAT32 and select it. Right-click on the partition and select 'Resize', and in the window that appears, use the arrow on the right to reduce the size of the Windows partition and free up space for new installation. Click on Apply to make the changes permanent.
Create a new partition
You should now have a large block of unallocated space. Right-click in this space and select 'New' to create a fresh partition. You should select ext4 as the filesystem and click on 'Add' to make the change permanent. You can do this as many times as you like, depending on how you want to configure your new system and the limitations of your hardware.
A SATA drive will only let you have a maximum of four partitions for example, and you will also need to create a small swap partition. When you come to install a Linux distro, make sure you select the manual partitioning option.
From there you will need to select one of your spare partitions and assign a mount point of /, as well selecting and assigning the swap partition. Your distribution will then be able to install the files to the correct place and add the appropriate boot menu entry for when it's time to reboot.
Make space for new partitions
1. Launch GParted
Boot into live CD mode from the Ubuntu disc and launch GParted from the Administration menu. Select the drive, right-click on the existing partition and select Resize. Use the small window to reduce the main partition.
2. Create partitions
In the newly released space, right-click and select New. Create one or two new large partitions alongside a smaller partition, which will be used as Linux swap space, then click on the 'tick' mark.
3. Use the partitions
After the partitions have been created, you can install a new distro. When you choose the 'Custom' partition option, you'll be able to use your new partitions by assigning them to the / mount point and swap space.
You can get the best of both worlds by running the two side by side
With Windows and Linux together, you'll be able to choose between them from the boot menu that appears when your machine restarts, and the next step is to help them both live together in harmony.
Despite Windows and Linux being two completely distinct operating system, where almost everything that can be different is different, there's a lot you can do to help the two work together.
The first problem that most users encounter with a dual boot system is file sharing. When you first boot into Linux from the dual-boot menu, it's likely that you'll need to access files within your Windows installation, and when you switch back to Windows, you'll probably want to be able to read the files that you were working with.
The reason why this is a problem is because both operating systems use different filesystems. This is the indexing system used to save and retrieve files to your storage medium, and without a bit of outside assistance, neither Linux nor Windows can read the other's formatting.
Sharing data
Fortunately, the people who build Linux distributions mostly provide this help for you, and this should mean that you'll be able to read Windows partitions from your new Linux installation without too much difficulty.
The easiest way to check is to launch the file manager and see if your Windows storage device is listed in the device panel list on the left. It's unlikely to be labelled clearly, and it might just be named after its size, but if you click on it you'll be able to see the files of a standard Windows installation.
Personal files can be found by clicking on Documents And Settings, followed by the username of the folder you want to access.
Linux can load and save many of the most common files in exactly the same way that Windows does. JPG images from digital cameras, for example, can be viewed with a simple double-click, and you'll find the same level of integrated support for text files, many music files and most open document formats.
Mounting your Linux partition from within Windows isn't quite so easy and not as convenient as the in-built ability you'll find in most Linux distributions. The best solution we can find is to download and install a Windows tool called Explore2fs.
Explore2fs
This is a Windows application that enables you to choose your Linux partitions from a drop-down list in the top-left of the window, and display their contents using an old-style Windows explorer view in the main window. This means you can drag and drop files to and from this window just as you would with any other directory on your Windows operating system.
You can find your personal files within a Linux installation by clicking on the Home directory followed by the folder named after your account name. Distributions will normally place files within either the Download directory, or the Desktop directory.
It's worth noting that Explore2fs is also quite capable of reading Linux-formatted USB, floppy and external drives.
Maximise efficiency by using the same software on both operating systems
If you want to ensure that the files you create within the Windows and Linux environments are equally compatible, you'll ideally need to use the same cross-platform applications on both.
If you use an office suite, for instance, using the free and open source OpenOffice.org suite instead of Microsoft Office will guarantee that files you save in Windows will look identical on Linux.
If you need to stick with Microsoft's tools on the Windows platform, OpenOffice.org will still do a good job at opening them and converting them within Linux, but you may run into problems with more complex documents, especially spreadsheets.
You can also mitigate any internet browsing pain by using either Firefox or Chrome. Both are cross-platform and share almost exactly the same features, enhancements and plugins. You should be able to recreate exactly the same web browsing environment from both.
Bookmarks can be synchronised across platforms using the XMarks add-on in Firefox, or through Chrome's ability to sync browsers through your Google account. The manual option is to use the bookmark browser in either application to export your lists of bookmarks and import into the other.
It's the same strategy for email. Most people who have been using Windows for a while will be using a variant of Microsoft's Outlook email client, and downloading their email using the POP3 protocol.
While Linux-based applications like Evolution and Thunderbird claim to import email archives from Microsoft's widely used Outlook series of applications, we've had little success using them to import our email.
There are third-party tools, most notably the commandline tools you can find hidden within the readpst package, but your best option is usually to run Thunderbird from Windows at the same time as Outlook and use its import function to grab a copy of your email database while both applications are running. You could then use Thunderbird on your Linux installation to move the mail database from Windows to your home directory.
But the best option for email is to switch from using POP3, where email is downloaded and saved locally, to IMAP, where email is usually kept on a mail server and synchronised with your email client. In this way, both Outlook and Thunderbird can access the same server and the state of your email is preserved.
There's no reason to limit yourself to just one flavour of Linux
Running Linux alongside Windows isn't the only reason for dual booting. Many of us also like to run Linux alongside Linux, enabling us to try new distributions and keep old ones running without having to resort to a complete system overhaul.
You should also encounter far fewer problems with running Linux alongside Linux, as most distributions know how to recognise one of their own and will adapt accordingly. They should be able to sidestep any currently used partitions and neatly add themselves to any existing Grub menu configuration.
As with Windows, the biggest consideration is always going to be the arrangement of partitions on your hard drives, and where you're going to find the space for a new Linux installation. If you can allocate space for a new Linux partition before installing a new one, the process is going to be easier than wrestling with your new distribution's partition manager, if it has one.
You can also make sure that any data you need is backed up at the same time, because resizing partitions always has a degree of risk. But even if you've got the space organised before you install the new system, it still might be worth taking a look at the custom partition configuration.
Unlike most versions of Windows, Linux doesn't require a 'Primary' partition to be able to boot. This isn't going to be an issue if you only intend to run Linux, but if you ever do want to add Windows to your partition table, you should try to make sure that the partitions used by your Linux distributions are configured as 'Extended' rather than primary, as this will leave space should you wish to add Windows later on.
Swap and share
Normally, a standard Linux installation will require a minimum of two partitions – one for the root partition that holds all your files, and another smaller one that's used as a swap partition.
A swap partition is basically an overflow area that's used to cache larger items from your RAM, as and when your system needs to. As a result, it's not used when the distribution isn't running and you can safely share the same swap partition among several Linux installations.
But there's one important exception to this rule, and that's hibernation. This is the power-saving ability that some configurations have where you can put your machine into a save-state, where the contents of memory are written to the swap partition and restored when the machine is turned back on. This can be quicker than a fresh start, and your machine will be in exactly the same state you left it.
If you share the swap partition with another Linux installation, that copy of what's running will be lost in exactly the same way it would be if there were a power outage. With many distributions, this won't be an issue.
If you install Ubuntu 10.04 alongside the 9.10 release, for instance, the installer will inform you that it has detected the previous installation in the 'Prepare Disk Space' screen. This is very similar to the Windows dual-boot view. Use the horizontal slider in the partition strip at the bottom of the window to alter the space allocation on your drive between the two distros in just the same way as Windows resizing.
You might also notice that the two distributions will be sharing a single swap space, just as we created manually. After you click on Forward, the existing partition will then be resized accordingly, hopefully keeping your data intact.
Don't worry if you lose your boot menu or partition name – we can help…
All this messing around with partitions and boot blocks can cause problems. So it's worth remembering that even if things look bad, there is usually something you can do to recover lost data.
If you realise you've made a mistake in re-partitioning a drive before you get to the point where those partitions are formatted, for instance, there may be a way to save your data. When a new partition table is written to your drive, none of the data is affected; only the part of the disk that indicates which partitions are where. There are a few tools than be used to trawl through this data and can recognise and log the changes between your files and the previous partitions boundaries.
We've found the best tool for the job is called TestDisk, which can usually be installed through your distribution's package manager, and on the command line with apt-get install testdisk on Debian and Ubuntu systems. Typing sudo testdisk on the command line will launch the menu-driven utility, and you'll need to select the log option you need followed by Proceed on the partition you're interested in.
The tool will run its magic. Then select Write and give a few confirmations that you're happy with the potential hazards that the tools could reap upon your data. But with a bit of luck, a single reboot later should see your partition table restored, along with your dual-boot abilities.
Come back Grub!
Similarly, losing your Grub menu can feel equally catastrophic, but you should be able to restore your system to full working order. For pre-Grub 2 installation of around a year old, boot the machine off an older live CD, open a command line and type sudo grub.
This will drop you into the command line mode of the Grub boot loader, and from there you need to type find /boot/grub/stage1.
The returned output will show you the location of your boot partition, and you'll need to replace hd0 with your own drive in the following commands – root(hd0,0) and setup (hd). Finally, type quit and reboot your system. You should find Grub re-installed.
For Grub 2-based systems, you should be able to just boot off a live CD and type sudo update-grub to restore the boot loader and get your system running again. This should leave you with all bases covered.
You can create partitions with confidence, install Linux alongside Windows and other Linux installations, and troubleshoot all the most common problems if anything untoward should happen. You can now sit back and enjoy the benefits of your new multi-booting system.
 |  |
Read More ...
In Depth: 18 ways to do things Apple doesn't want you to do
Apple produces incredibly capable computers, but with a little tweaking, you can boost their functionality further still. If you have a video format you wish you could play in QuickTime, sound files that are beyond iTunes or a peripheral that doesn't work under OS X, there might well be a means of getting around the problem.
Here we look at 18 interesting ways of taking control of your Apple device, giving it exciting new capabilities that aren't available out of the box.
1. iTunes FLAC and Ogg
Natively, iTunes is capable of playing five types of audio file: MP3, AIFF, WAV, AAC and Apple Lossless. But what about FLAC and Ogg files?
To play FLAC files in iTunes, you need to download an app called Fluke, which installs new components for QuickTime. After installing, restart iTunes and you can import FLAC tracks without converting them; just follow the instructions here.
To play Ogg Vorbis files, download a QuickTime component from here. Installation is manual, but simple. Just drag the bundle into your Components folder, as instructed in the Readme file downloaded with XiphQT.
2. Terminal tips to lift restrictions
There are several Terminal commands that lift Apple-imposed restrictions on how you can use your OS X applications. Just go to Applications > Utilities, launch Terminal.app and type in one of the following codes.
There are hidden debug menus in several applications that come bundled with your operating system. They're meant to be for developers only, but you can open them with these Terminal commands:
Safari defaults write com.apple.safari IncludeInternalDebugMenu 1
Address Book defaults write com.apple.addressbook ABShowDebugMenu -bool YES
iCal defaults write com.apple.iCal IncludeDebugMenu YES
You may need to relaunch the app. The debug menu shows in the menu bar. To hide it, repeat the command replacing 1 with 0 or YES with NO.
This next code introduces a new stack into your Dock, showing recently used apps. To remove it again, just drag it out of the Dock.
defaults write com.apple.dock persistentothers -array-add '{ "tile-data" = { "listtype" = 1; }; "tile-type" = "recents-tile"; }'; killall Dock
Finally, if you want to increase the magnified size of your Dock icons, you can enable magnification in the Dock's System Preferences. Simply try this code:
defaults write com.apple.dock largesize -int 512; killall Dock
The icons are now up to 512 pixels large. You can substitute 512 with another figure if you wish, but don't go any higher than 512. To turn off this effect, go back to the Dock's System Preferences and move the Magnification slider. These tips all work with Snow Leopard and Leopard, but cannot be guaranteed to function with older versions of OS X.
3. Use almost any USB controller in OS X
01. USB Overdrive X
With USB Overdrive X installed, you can make full use of almost any USB mouse, trackball, joystick or gamepad. Programmable buttons can be used in OS X, even if the bundled software is Windows-only. The latest version (3.0.1) now offers 64-bit Snow Leopard support.
02. Controller configuration
Configuring your controller is easy, and you can assign an action to each of its inputs. Here we're configuring a gaming device, and assigning a key press to the controller. Pressing left on the gaming pad gives you the same function as pressing the 'A' key.
03. Application settings
You can configure your USB device for a specific application. Create a duplicate configuration setting for the controller in question, select the application you wish to configure it for and then set it up in the usual way. These settings only apply to that app.
4. Copy from iPod to Mac
By default there's no way of copying music from your iPod or iPhone back onto your Mac, but enterprising developers have found a way around this. Senuti lets you copy selected items or your entire music and video collection in this way, retaining playlists and track titles.
Alternatively, Clickfree Transformer for iPod lets you back up your Mac's data to an external drive, but can also copy from your iPod or iPhone back onto your Mac.
5. iPod without iTunes
If you love your music but can't stand iTunes, there are several third-party alternatives you could try.
Floola is free, and supports almost all iPods. You can play your media from within the application, copy from your iPod back onto your Mac, convert incompatible audio formats and even sync with Google Calendar. Floola runs on OS X 10.3.9 or later, which is great news for those using older Macs. It might look a little spartan, but it's just the thing for those who complain that iTunes is becoming bloated.
PixiApps Ecoute takes a similarly minimalist approach, but looks a lot prettier than Floola. If you're looking for a lightweight alternative to iTunes, Ecoute is definitely worth its $10 shareware fee.
6. A new OS for your iPod
There's a Linux distro for almost any electronic device, and the iPod is no exception. Installing Linux gives access to a wealth of open source applications created for the iPod.
You can get an installer that runs on the Mac and installs Linux on your iPod from www.tinyurl.com/666hu. There's also more information on iPod Linux at www.ipodlinux.org.
Also worth a mention is Rockbox, a free alternative operating system that works on a wide range of digital audio players, including many current iPods. Granted, it's not as attractive or instinctive as iPod OS, but it offers extra features such as an equaliser, visualisation and skins.
7. More movies
A couple of free components greatly increase the range of movie files playable using Apple's QuickTime framework. Perian supports numerous video formats. Flip4Mac offers WMV compatibility, and is completely free if you only want the Player version.
8. Magic prefs
By using MagicPrefs, you can greatly expand Magic Mouse capabilities, adding gestures such as swipes, pinches and Multi-Touch clicks.
9. Take photos on an iPad
Apple has come in for a lot of criticism for not putting a camera on the iPad, but believe it or not, there's a way of taking photographs with your shiny new tablet device.
Developer Yusuke Sekikawa has come up with an ingenious solution, but you need an iPhone as well as an iPad. Sekikawa's cunning fix involves two linked applications downloaded from the iTunes Store.
Camera-A costs $1, and runs on your iPad. Camera-B is free, and is for your iPhone. At the time of writing, both are currently US-only, but are bound to be released over here when the iPad makes it to these shores.
By running both applications and connecting your devices over Wi-Fi or with Bluetooth, the iPad makes use of the iPhone's camera. Just point your iPhone at whatever it is you wish to snap, and control the picture-taking process through your iPad.
10. Unsupported devices
Not every peripheral is Mac-compatible out of the box. IOXperts has years of experience developing Mac drivers for PC peripherals, including a series of paid-for driver bundles.
For example, IOXperts Webcam Driver 1.1 for Mac OS X offers drivers for well over a hundred cams, and there's a high-end version for industrial cameras too.
IOXperts hasn't updated its drivers in a while, so some cameras listed as 'supported' might not actually work with the latest version of Snow Leopard. But as the unregistered versions work for 30 minutes before asking you to register, you've nothing to lose by giving them a try.
11. Pimp your Dock
DockDoctor, gives you all sorts of customisation options for your Dock. You can go 2D or 3D, make the icons for hidden applications opaque and even disable the Dashboard to save resources.
If you don't like the Dock's default colour, you can rebadge it in various shades, or apply a custom skin such as a chessboard. Custom skins are bundled with the app, and more are available to download online. DockDoctor is free, but a $2 (about £1.20) donation is requested to help with hosting.
12. Revamp your Finder
TotalFinder brings a wealth of new features to OS X's Finder. This Snow Leopard-only application gives you window tabs similar to those found in Safari.
You can stop Finder littering shared storage drives with .DS_Store files, which are invisible to OS X but drive Windows users to distraction, and a dual-panel mode that enables you to open two folders in the same window. And there are more exciting features to come.
At the time of writing, TotalFinder is in Version 0.8 and free. When it reaches Version 1.0, however, beta copies will begin to expire and the app will cost $15 (around £9.75), which we think is well worth the money for what you're getting.
13. Hacking Apple TV
Out of the box, Apple TV comes across as a very limited device. For one, it's slavishly tied to iTunes. Not only that, it's very restricted regarding what video formats it can play. Also, the standard interface has been criticised for its lack of finesse. Thankfully however, there's a free, cross-platform home theatre application that's proving very popular with Apple TV users.
With Boxee installed, you can play just about any DRM-free video on Apple TV. Installing Boxee on your Apple TV is a straightforward task. Just follow the step-by-step guide on the application's website.
You begin by downloading an application called ATVUSB-Creator, which is available for both Intel and PPC Macs. This is used to turn a formatted USB flash drive (minimum size 512MB) into a Patchstick, a device used to hack your Apple TV. If your USB stick isn't being recognised, try pressing the Rescan button, or use another brand.
After creating a Patchstick, insert it into your Apple TV and switch on. The Patchstick runs the ATV boot loader, which gives you the option to install Boxee. Do so and restart your Apple TV.
For a comprehensive guide to everything you can do by hacking Apple TV, go to www.appletvhacks.net.
14. A better bin
Hyperbolic Software's Smart Trash adds a series of new features to OS X's Trash, the most important of which is the ability to empty it for selected volumes only; very useful if you want to clear some space on a flash drive without deleting items binned from your hard drive.
You can also set it up to delete locked items, keep a log of everything you've erased and sort trashed items according to the volumes on which they were stored. Smart Trash is $10 (about £6).
15. Smarter phoning
With its focus on the iPhone, Apple seems to have paid scant attention to helping OS X play nicely with other brands of mobile phone.
Thankfully, Nova Media has released several interesting applications that fill the gap very nicely. iSync Plugins brings sync capabilities to more than 270 mobile phones, enabling you to sync your contacts, calendars and more.
Phone Plugins gives you the option of typing an SMS message on your Mac, which can then be sent using your Bluetooth-capable phone.
16. Ripping DVDs
Watching DVDs on your MacBook takes its toll on the battery life, and any Mac with a fast optical drive is likely to prove too noisy for close and cosy movie viewing. Fortunately, there are a couple of applications that enable you to rip your DVD's contents to your Mac's Desktop, for viewing directly from the hard drive.
RipIt is incredibly easy to use, and bundles all the ripped files into a single packet, which can be viewed as if it were an optical disc. MacTheRipper is more versatile, but not as user-friendly.
Remember, ripping copyrighted DVDs that you don't own is illegal, and bypassing copy controls is a legal grey area, even if you own the disc. It's up to you to make sure you're acting within your country's law.
17. DiscRotate
As optical drives get faster, they also get louder. As mentioned in the last tip, this can be really irritating if you're watching DVD content on your Mac.
Luckily there's another solution available to you. It's called DiscRotate – a small preference pane that enables you to restrict the speed of your drive without interfering with the playback you view on the screen. It's accessible at any time through a handy menu bar icon, and you can reset it again when the movie's over.
18. Write to NTFS
Natively, OS X can read an NTFS-formatted drive, but not write to it. Paragon Software's NTFS for Mac OS X gives full read/write access, and fully supports OS X 10.6 in 64-bit mode.
| |
Read More ...
In Depth: Cool iTunes scripts you should download today
AppleScript is something of an unsung hero. It provides scope for automating repetitive tasks, but few users ever go near it.If you're an iTunes power user, scripts are a must, but you needn't hack away in AppleScript Editor — many pre-built iTunes scripts are available online. All you need to do is download them, plonk them in the iTunes Scripts folder, wait a second or two, and extra functionality is yours.
All of the scripts mentioned are available for free from the Doug's AppleScripts for iTunes website. If you're using iTunes on a PC, check out these Windows Solutions at the same site.
Track management
If you've a pretty big music collection, keeping it in good shape can take time, and with thousands of tracks things can slip through the net. Scripts can assist you with management tasks, taking minutes or seconds to do what would usually take you hours or more.
One of the best 'house cleaning' scripts is Super Remove Dead Tracks. This finds songs in your library that are no longer available on your Mac. Every 500 tracks it throws up a dialog box to inform you of its progress, and you also get an optional text-based log file at the end, telling you which entries have been deleted. On our 13,500-track test library on a bog-standard 24-inch iMac, this entire process took under a minute.
Tracks Without Artwork to Playlist is in a similar space. It enables you to select a library, playlist or an arbitrary bunch of tracks and copy songs without artwork to a new playlist. On activating the script, all you need to do is click Proceed, choose a name for your playlist and wait for a bit. On our iMac, the script took about five minutes to churn through our 13,500 tracks, finding about 1,500 that lacked artwork.
With a 'no artwork' playlist in place, it's a simple process to send these tracks to Album Artwork Assistant in order to grab artwork online.
TAKE A SHORTCUT: If you regularly use a script, apply a keyboard shortcut via Keyboard Shortcuts in System Preferences
On the playlist front, another great script is Gather Up the One-Hits. It collects tracks where the artists are each represented in your library by just a single song. Chances are this will mainly comprise content from compilations, but we found a bunch of one-offs we'd grabbed from the iTunes Store and subsequently forgotten about.
Track info and playback
Along with rapidly cleaning up your library, scripts can be used to deal with metadata issues, without you having to open a single Get Info window.
Quite often, the data iTunes downloads when you import tracks from CDs by fairly obscure artists isn't accurate. A common error is the artist and track name fields being reversed. The Swap This With That script from the This Tag, That Tag Scripts compilation can deal with this.
Launch the script, select a tag to swap from and another to swap to, and your songs' data is amended. However, be aware that there's no undo.
If your niggles with track data are subtler, investigate Track Names to Sentence Caps and Track Names to Word Caps — both of which reformat cases in track names — and Remove n Characters From Front or Back.
The last of those enables you to remove a specific number of characters from the start ('front') or end ('back') of a selection of song titles. So if some song titles have track numbers at the start or the likes of '[disc 1]' at the end, this script helps remove that information quickly and easily.
Once your track data is in order, scripts can also assist with playback controls. Needle Drop enables you to audition a selection of tracks in automated fashion, after defining playback length and an intro point. For example, you can play ten-second bursts from two-minutes into every track from a specified playlist.
Another favourite is Make Bookmarkable, which attempts to turn the file type of selected AAC tracks into M4B, thereby making them 'bookmarkable', so playback resumes where you left off. Make UN-Bookmarkable reverses the process.
External considerations
Our final set of scripts involves taking your experience outside of iTunes in various ways. The first pair deals with discovering more about what you're listening to.
Search Wikipedia and Google Video Search work in similar ways: select a script and a dialog appears asking whether you want to make a search based on the currently playing track or currently selected track. You're then asked to select a category to base the search on.
INSTANT INFO: Search for an artist or album on Wikipedia directly from within iTunes simply by using a little script
For Wikipedia, you can select the artist, album or composer. For Google Video, you choose between song, artist and album. The dialogs aren't pretty, but they get the job done and save time.
Another set of scripts enables you to export track information from iTunes. Although this can be done using File > Library > Export Playlist, the resulting text file is complicated, huge and unwieldy. Instead, we recommend Album-Artist to HTML Table, which exports a list of your artists and albums (and, optionally, associated tracks, although processing that information takes a long time, so we don't recommend it) to an HTML document that you can open in a web browser.
The script has a couple of quirks: you need to reorder your track list to Album by Artist for best results, and don't let the script open a browser when it's finished or you'll likely get an error. Instead, click Done and manually open the file it outputs.
Another export option worth a look is Playlist to papercdcase.com. This enables you to export up to 28 tracks from a playlist to papercdcase.com (the site opens in Safari), which cunningly formats the data into a PDF file that can then be turned into a CD case, if you get your origami skills in order.
| |
Read More ...
No comments:
Post a Comment