NZMac.com - Supporting the New Zealand Mac community

Resizing iTunes windows

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To quickly resize a window in iTunes 4 on an older Mac which struggles with the graphics power required for solid resizing, hold down the Apple key while changing the window's size as this reverts back to the Mac OS 9 styled outline resizing which is much quicker on older Macs, as well as newer ones.

Last Updated Sunday, 09 March 2008

Finding playlists for a song

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To quickly find out how many playlists a song in your iTunes music library appears in, simply control click on the song you want to know about and go down to Playlists.
Last Updated Sunday, 09 March 2008

iTunes extended playlist

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Because iTunes supports endless playlists, it makes a great jukebox for a barbecue or party. If you're compiling a playlist for such an occasion, and don't know if the music you've put in your custom playlist will last long enough, drag your favourite internet radio station from the Radio Tuner onto the end of the playlist you've just created.

That way, when your MP3s run out, the radio station will take over, meaning the music will last all night.

Last Updated Sunday, 09 March 2008

How do I listen to a New Zealand radio station across the internet?

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There are a number of ways that you can listen to audio streams. Before starting, it's probably important that you have the latest version of QuickTime installed as well as the free plugin for QuickTime on a Mac called Flip4Mac now licensed by Microsoft. This plugin replaces the Windows media Player that has been killed off on the Mac. Whilst there are some other formats that radios are streamed in, most will be in in QuickTime or Windows Media format. This 'Quick Tip' does not cover radio stations that stream their audio in Real Player format.

The following approaches are in order of the easiest/most effective to the more complex.

Approach 1 - The NZMac.com Radio Widget
Not to put too fine a point on it, but the easiest way to listen to streamed radio stations on your Mac is with the cool new NZMac.com Radio Widget, which you can download right here . Just download, unzip and install (just keep double-clicking on whatever file you see on your Mac until it asks you if you want to install the widget) and select the radio station you want to listen to from the pop-up menu. Help for the widget can be accessed from the back of the widget.

Approach 2 - Listen via their website
The second option is to use your web browser to listen to the radio station's audio stream. Let's use Safari and the Radio New Zealand website as an example. All you need to do with the Radio New Zealand website (www.radionnz.co.nz) is go to the site and look for the streaming audio icon.

When you click this section of the Radio New Zealand site, a small window pops up, letting you choose which channel to listen to. In the image below, you can see that we are clicking on the "National Radio" channel.

Provided you have QuickTime and the Flip4Mac plugin installed, Safari should load the radio station and begin to play it.

Approach 3 - Listen using VLC
VLC is a free cross-platform (Mac, Windows etc) multimedia player that can play the streams of many radio stations. The first thing you need to do is go to their website (www.videolan.org) and download and install the software.

Before you go any further, we need to take a step back to the last approach. Remember in the second suggested approach you ended up with the stream playing in your Safari web browser? Well, do that process again and this time, select the final URL (web address) that appears in the web browser (as shown in the last image of Approach 2) and copy the address. Now launch the VLC player and go to the "File" menu and select "Open Network..." In the window that appears, paste the URL mentioned earlier into the "URL" text area as you can see in the image below and click "OK".

You should find that VLC then starts to stream the radio station when you press the 'Play' button for you as you can see in the image below (don't be concerned if the web address displayed is slightly different to the one you entered).

Approach 4 - Movies for iTunes
All the approaches mentioned on this page came about through a discussion in the discussion forum. The NZMac.com Radio Widget is an attempt to making streaming radio for NZ Mac users as simple as possible, but one of the first topics of discussion was how to get radio stations listed in iTunes. The following process is perhaps the least easy of the recommended approaches. The short answer is that you can't have NZ radio stations listed in iTunes. But we discovered a workaround that allows you to make small reference movie files, which you can then drag into iTunes and play.

Although these movie files will not be listed in the radio section of iTunes they will be listed in the play area. By selecting one of the movies files (which we supply 4 files/stations for you) you should be able to listen to one of the stations within iTunes. If you want to have access to a different station, have a read of the discussion forum conversation, as it explains (via a link to another site) how to create these reference files. First, you need to download and unzip this file, which was kindly supplied by NZMac.com forum user Macron1. Once you unzip the files, you need to have iTunes open. Select all 4 files and drag these onto iTunes to have them imported into iTunes (note, you may need to set iTunes to import songs automatically for this to happen). They should now appear in iTunes, listed in the music section. You can see National Radio's reference movie in the image below.

By click on this station listing in your playlist and then pressing the 'Play' button in iTunes, the radio station should stream through iTunes.

If you want to make sure that on other occasions when you are listening to music, that iTunes doesn't suddenly start playing a radio station, just untick the track in the playlist screen as you see here below.

Last Updated Monday, 10 March 2008

How do I import album art into iTunes 7?

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Here are four ways that you can add artwork, with explanations as to the advantages and disadvantages of each. Note that I've ignored programs such as Clutter, which are a variation of the artwork collection and display approach. They are listed from the most recommended approach to the least.

Approach 1 - iTunes itself
iTunes 7 and above feature an option to import album artwork. This can be done on the basis of importing an entire library of songs artwork or on an individual song-by-song basis. The good thing is that if you have a number of songs from the same album in iTunes, it should figure this out and apply the same artwork to each song.

The advantage is that it can work through songs quite quickly and there is an easier way to change or remove artwork (right or control-click on a song and choose the option from a pop-up menu) making it easier to fix up mistakes. The disadvantage is if you have somehow manually added songs and their title and album cover names into iTunes, it may not find the right match.

Approach 2 - Widget search
The superb freeware dashboard widget Amazon Album Art Widget is specifically designed to try and track down album covers for you, usually offering many cover alternatives. If you see the right one, just click the widget to have it add the art to the current song playing in iTunes.

Approach 3 - Corripio
Corripio is a freeware/donationware program for fetching artwork and lyrics for songs from a number of sources. It is currently at version 0.7.2 which means the author still considers it under development and not worthy of being listed as Version 1. This is generally seen as acknowledgement that the software needs improving and you'll find that Corripio is a little buggy and there are some areas of the software that need improvement.

Using Corripio is very easy once you get the hang of it. Open up the application and it will load a list of your songs. You then select a song that you want to find the album artwork for (you can see an example in the image above) and then indicate how you want the program to search for a good match. In the example above, I've told it to search by album name for a Coldplay song.

Corripio has now searched for artwork and has shown me the various options that I have (in the example in the above, it's found the prefect match) so you just click on the image and click on the "Select" button. It will then assign that image to the song in iTunes.

But wait, if you've got a whole album in there, list them in order in Corripio, click the first song and then shift-click the last (in other words, select all the songs in that album) perform the search again and it will assign the artwork to all the songs.

 

Approach 4 - Search, drag and drop
The final suggestion is the most time consuming, but can solve the issue if the methods earlier can't find artwork for you. Go and find it yourself using your favourite search engine (such as Google)!

Then once you've saved the artwork image from a website to your Mac, start iTunes up, get the song playing (this is just the easiest way to indicate what song you are choosing in iTunes), from the "View" menu in iTunes make sure that "Show artwork" is selected and then drag the image file into the small window where the artwork is displayed.

In the example on the above, I've actually selected multiple songs that I want the same album image applied to.

Convinced you're not going to be able to find all that album art? Well one neat way to try and find as many matches as you can, is to upload your music list to this site (art4itunes.com) and get it to try and find the artwork for you. I was moderately pleased with the results.

Last Updated Monday, 10 March 2008

Is there a way to re-download just one episode of a podcast in iTunes?

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Sometimes a podcast episode comes through faulty. It can be for many reasons and often you'll find the person producing the podcast realises there is an issue with a file and uploads a new version into their podcast feed. That's OK for those yet to download that podcast episode...but for you, does it mean you have to trash the entire podcast series and start all over again? Answer: No :-)

Simply delete the most recent episode that is causing the issue. In the example that we are going to show you here, we're going to re-download "Webnation Episode 7".

Next, click on the name of the podcast series in iTunes and at the bottom of the iTunes window, click on "Unsubscribe"

 

Now that you've unsubscribed from the podcast, just click the "Subscribe" button to subscribe again as shown.

 

Last Updated Tuesday, 11 March 2008

Getting audio from an MPG file

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If you ever wondered how to decode the audio part of a .MPG file, here's one method:

• Try to open the movie with iTunes
• Select the file in your iTunes library.
• Choose Advanced -> Convert selection to AIFF or Advanced -> Convert selection to MP3
• What iTunes actually displays in the menu depends on your selection in Preferences -> Importing.
• After converting, you can import this audio file into your preferred video application.

Don't forget to delete the file from your iTunes library if you don't intend to use it again in iTunes.
Last Updated Tuesday, 30 November 1999