-
Downloaded iTunes/Music track is twice as long
If you’ve downloaded music tracks from a video source, there is a chance that your software did not pass the correct parameters to the audio converter. This is the case with a certain Firefox extension YT downloader that passes the files to ffmpeg. The music track contains extra space for the non-existent video and the track time is twice as long. iTunes/Music.app has a bug where it will play the next track during this blank time, therefore, the CoverArt and Title will not change while the next song plays. You will need to reattempt to convert the files from MP4 to M4A manually or some kind of automated/batch method.
The correct parameters are:
~/foo/bar/bin/ffmpeg -i %input -acodec copy -vn %outputYou can set up an Automator process as a Service so you have it under the Contextual menu when you Right-click, or you can set up the download folder for YT Downloader to be the target for a Automated process where the MP4 is converted to an m4a, then added to the iTunes/Music.app directory automatically.
-
iOS 14.x Duplicate Songs in Downloaded Music
If you see a bunch of duplicate songs in the “Downloaded” playlist in your iPhone Music.app, then there is a chance that you have manually dragged music files to your iPhone icon in iTunes or Finder to add them to the Library before Apple made a change in how these music files were marked. You will need to delete these music files from the iPhone to get rid of duplicates. This can be done by un-sync-ing your Music, deleting all Downloaded music, then re-sync-ing.
- Connect your iPhone to your Mac
- On the Mac, open a Finder window, select your iPhone from the left pane
- In the right pane, select the Music pane
- Un-check “Sync music onto… iPhone”
- Click “Sync” on bottom right; All sync’ed music should disappear from your iPhone
- On the iPhone, Go to Settings > General > iPhone Storage
- Swipe “All Music” to the left and delete all the music that is Downloaded to your phone; Now you should only have music tracks you’ve purchased from the iTunes Music store that are on the cloud
- On the Mac, go back to the Finder window with the Music pane
- Check “Sync music onto… iPhone”
- Click “Sync” on the bottom right; All or Selected music will be transferred back to the iPhone
Now there’s going to be a problem if you downloaded music to the iPhone from another source, like another Mac. But if you were smart enough to do that, you can probably think of how to get around it.
-
Things you MUST DO before upgrading/updating to Mac OS Big Sur (11.x)
Ever since the beta versions of Mac OS Big Sur was introduced, there were a few dozen complaints of the installer not functioning properly at a catastrophic level. The problem happens particularly often with recent Macbook Pro models (Intel & M1), where the installer is stuck in a loop or bricks the computer completely. There is no way to cancel the install once the installer restarts your Mac, and no way to restart from your internal drive because the installer erases the Boot partition and replaces it with an Update partition.
You can check out Mr. McIntosh’s blog for some details on the kinds of installation failures.
If we take the statistic of “how many people report crimes” or “how many people get duped by spam”, we can estimate that the angry posts on the Apple Discussion Forum is only about 1.6% of actual Macs being affected. That means, if 10 people complain, there must be 625 affected machines out there. So far, I’ve seen about two dozen users (developers, mind you) so that’s 1500 Macs affected. Not a HUGE number but significant – especially if they are developers, beta-testers, pro-users, and early adopters.
Anyways, long story short, here are things you MUST DO BEFORE upgrading to or updating Mac OS Big Sur. If the installation fails and your internal drive gets screwed or bricked, this will save you.
- BACKUP – complete cloning of the internal drive is recommended
- Enable at least one Admin user on the local drive
- Enable booting from an External Drive – do this through Recovery Mode
- Install Big Sur on an External Boot Drive as a production drive, if possible
- Migrate Users to the External production drive
- Make sure you have at least 35GB of available space on your internal drive
Yes, yes, that means you have that same data in 3 different places. But you’ll thank me later.
-
No sound from Macbook Pro built-in speakers except for Siri
and… How to unstick software audio using Audio MIDI Setup
This has been a recurring problem with Macbook and Macbook Pros ever since Apple added the digital audio output to these portable Macs. The D/A converter is software controlled and occasionally will not bring audio back to the built-in speakers after a) headphones are unplugged from the computer, or b) an app takes over audio output and does not relinquish control after quitting.
-
If you got a SPAM text from me, it wasn’t me.
If you’ve received a SPAM text message from me today, it wasn’t me. Somebody is spoofing my e-mail address and has found a security hole in a device in Italy. That Italian device is sending out messages via a SMTP server in Singapore to the text messaging servers at AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon in the United States.
Currently 50% of those messages are failing and are being bounced back to me instead of the machine in Italy! This is because the SMTP server in Singapore does not know that mail for celiamania.com should not originate from fastwebnet.it.
I’ve sent a quick e-mail to the admins at fastwebnet.it, but I don’t know if they have the ability to block the offending machine without taking down a whole bunch of other customers.
In the meantime, just ignore the SPAM message. Thanks.
Construct – Deconstruct
