Broadfoot

SunI’ve just had five days of holidaying in Coffs Harbour. The weather wasn’t as nice as I was hoping, but at least it was warmer than Newcastle. One of the unexpected highlights of the trip was at the Coffs Harbourside Markets last Sunday. Visiting markets are not anywhere near the top of my list of favourite things to do, but on this occasion I had the pleasure of sitting down and spending an hour listening to the three piece band “Broadfoot“, who hail from the Mullumbimby area. I had a chance to chat with the guys after their set and buy their CD “The Sun Warms The Sea”. Fantastic.

Shufflendipity

AmericaShufflendipity. noun. The amusing juxtaposition of two otherwise unrelated tracks when playing your music in shuffle mode.

Example: I was listening to my music in shuffle mode in the car earlier this week when I heard “America” by Simon and Garfunkel, immediately followed by “This is not America” by David Bowie.

 

Prog rock tragic

This week I watched an interesting documentary on the British Prog Rock movement and then followed that up by listening to classic prog rock albums in my collection from the following artists …

  • The Moody Blues
  • Emerson, Lake and Palmer
  • Pink Floyd
  • Manfred Mann’s Earth Band
  • Rick Wakeman
  • Jethro Tull
  • Yes
  • Mike Oldfield
  • Sebastian Hardie (not British.but Australia’s pre-eminent and unsurpassed prog rock band from the seventies)

 

What’s wrong with the iOS 7 music app (Part 1)

IMG_1471[1]Previously in iOS 6 if I wanted to listen to a particular album by a particular artist I could tap on “artists” and see a list of artists going down the page. In iOS 7 I can still do that, but because of the album art, the screen only shows 4 artists at a time, so it takes a lot more scrolling to find the artist I want.


IMG_1472[1]In iOS 6, having opened an artist, I saw a list of albums to choose from. Now in iOS 7 I see a list of every song from every album from that artist, which means that if the album I’m looking for is down the bottom of the list and requires lots of scrolling to get to.

Also the albums are sorted by release date, not alphabetically, so if the release dates are not set in the metadata or are set incorrectly then who knows what order the albums are in. If the release dates are set correctly, you have to know the release dates in order to know where in the list the album might be.

 


IMG_1473[1]Then, in IOS 7 to play an album I can’t just tap on the album cover or album title (which would seem logical), I have to tap on the first track title, and then instead of playing just that album, the music app enters a playlist of every song by that artist, so that when the album finishes it just goes on to the next album. Also if I turn on shuffle, instead of just shuffling through the tracks on the one album, it will shuffle through all tracks by that artist.

 

 

 


IMG_1474[1]The workaround seems to be, just forget that the Artists view exists, and use the Search bar in the music app to find the album you want to play.

iTunes smart playlist syncing

I had a problem today with smart playlists in iTunes with multiple rules not syncing properly with my iPhone 5. Thanks to a tip in an Apple forum I found that the problem was fixed by adding the rule “Playlist–Is–Music” to the smart playlist rules. Bizarre and makes no sense, but it fixed the problem.

[This content was originally posted to Google+]

iTunes 11

Apple has released iTunes 11 and are loudly proclaiming it as “simpler”, “easier” and “more intuitive. Is it?

No. Just one example in the screenshot below. In iTunes 10 there was one place (the left panel) where you could find everything you wanted (iTunes store, podcast lists, device sync screen, playlists etc.)

In iTunes 11 there are three different spots you have to go to depending on what you want, and then after navigating to that spot there may be additional clicks to get to the view that you want.

itunes11

[This content was originally posted to Google+]

Spotifail

Spotify. Big fat FAIL.

Someone told me that the Spotify music streaming service is now available in Australia and I thought I’d give it a try – BUT it turns out that you must have a Facebook account to sign into Spotify. Ridiculous. Goodbye Spotify.

Update 31 Dec 2012: Just found out that since September Spotify no longer requires Facebook to create an account, so now I can give it a spin.

[This content was originally posted to Google+]