Posts tagged as:

itunes

iTunes & Nokia Music has a serious competitor – Spotify

by Geekboy on 7 August, 2009


Earning LifeHacker’s “Best Desktop Music Player” post.. I had to give Spotify a try.

It’s free and easy to use.. with looks borrowed from iTunes Media Player but better, simplified interface..
There’s loads of music.. if you type an artist, they will listen EVERYTHING they have and you’ll be surprised (especially if you like remixes). It’s fast and all these are done via cloud computing, which means, nothing is really residing on your computer.. So you can go into any computer with Spotify’s program, log in and get all your favourite tracks!


Even though its streaming music, Spotify does support offline (no internet access) play by storing the songs you played last.. how much is stored, depends on how much disk space you give it. [Check Menu \Edit\Preferences on the program]

You may get the ‘Not available in your country’ notice, because of the various tracks’ copyrights restrictions.

So if you’re in Singapore or any country outside the UK or supported countries… you can try this.

1. Go to http://www.daveproxy.co.uk
2. Enter ‘www.spotify.com‘ into the URL (bottom of the page)
3. You can use ‘A9 9AA’ as the postal code
4. and sign up for free!
5. Download the application and enjoy!


You may need to sign in every 13 days to prevent them from locking you out (because you’re not in the UK). Or try using one of the many available free UK proxies. [Menu \Edit\Preferences]

Spotify is available for Android phones already.

They are working on other mobile platforms, so Blackberry users got to wait some more.

So far it’s been good :)

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Clear missing tracks from iTunes

by Geekboy on 11 June, 2009

itlulogoIf you used iTunes long enough, (its still one of the best music organisers/players, especially if you have one of those obscure things called an iPod), you will most likely have music tracks missing after you try to organise your library a little.

iTunes, would prompt you and indicate an exclamation mark next to the missing song, and ask if you would like to try to locate the file.

If this is just 1 or 2 songs, it’s fine.. but for an entire album?? or more? It’s a real pain very quickly.. Isn’t technology supposed to be easy??

I had recently moved all my music from different computers into my Synology 209+ NAS and added them to my iTunes in a hurry.. not realising I haven’t ‘cleaned’ up the songs yet.. duplicates especially.

So here’s a free program for Windows, I used to help clear the missing tracks.
It’s iTunes Library Updater.


iTunes Library Updater UI

Download it from here.

After you installed the program, here’s what to do.

  1. Run the program (look at your Start/Programs)
  2. Locations – Click on the box and select where your iTunes library is stored (not necessary where your files are, just the iTunes .XML file)
  3. Usually this is ?:\My Music\
  4. Check – Search Subdirectories and Clean Orphaned files.
  5. Click on the ‘Start’ button on the bottom right corner.

The program will read the files and remove the entries.. it will also display what entries are removed.

When its done, welcome to your cleaned iTunes..

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