Overseas Chinese Web Guide

Tag: itunes

  • iTunes Full-Screen Panic

    I was trying to look up my iTunes purchase history and even arrived at the correct support page. Unfortunately, I could not find the “Purchase History” link to click on. In a bit of frustration, I turned to the reliable keystroke for looking up all sorts of stuff on the Mac. ⌘+F triggers the find dialog in Safari, Finder, and a bunch of other apps.

    But, in iTunes, it triggers the Lion full-screen mode. So, I was left with iTunes in full screen without the horizontal traffic lights–red, yellow and green buttons–to minimize my window. I scanned around the keyboard and was able to escape back to the desktop via the Expose function key.

    To revert iTunes back to window mode, I had to move the cursor to the top of the screen to trigger the menu bar. In the upper right-hand corner, there’s a blue icon with arrows pointing inward to switch iTunes back to window mode.

  • iTunes Audiobooks Do Not Show Up in Books

    iTunes had stored some of my audiobooks under Music instead of Books. Actually, I had not realized that these were mutually exclusive lists under I wanted to transfer some audiobooks to an iPhone and realized certain titled did not appear under the Books tab.

    All this time, I had been flagging titles as Audiobooks under Genre, not realizing that I needed to change additional settings to move them over to Books. First off, if your audiobooks are in MP3 format, you should convert them to AAC so that iTunes can remember the playback position. In the Music tab, you will be able to see all versions of your audiobooks. However, under the Books tab, I think iTunes consolidates the listing so that if you have both MP3 and AAC versions, you will have a difficult time deleting the MP3 version. Before you convert the MP3 to AAC, remember to visit iTunes > Preferences and adjust your Import Settings under the General tab. If you are regularly encoding as iTunes Plus, your AAC audiobook will end up much larger than the original MP3. So, selecting Spoken Podcast under Import Settings fixes this problem.

    Next, select the AAC version of the audiobook press command + i to summon the information window. Under the Options tab, selecting Audiobook under Media Kind will then move the audiobook from Music to Books.

  • Jackie’s Chan: The Myth

    iTunes is selling Jackie Chan’s: The Myth for $9.99. However, a better deal is watching the film on Hulu for free. Preferably sometime within the next 48 hours because streaming rights expire on 12/31/2009 at 11:45 PM PST.

    Sure, Hulu can run its Cadillac ads, but I think something is missing in the equation. Why isn’t Hulu selling complementary products like the soundtrack from the movie? I’m looking for a copy of Endless Love (美麗的神話):

    If you are going to let me watch your movie for free on Hulu, at least let me pay you for a copy of this song on iTunes or Amazon.

    Apple launched iTunes back in April 2003. 6 1/2 years ago. Why isn’t every song in the world already on iTunes? Totally frustrating.

  • iTunes is Annoying Me

    I rarely listen to the radio. When I do, I almost listen exclusively to KQED, which is not the best source for hearing new or old Chinese music. So, I pretty much depend on the Genius Just For You feature in iTunes to discover new music. iTunes seems to handle English artists and songs quite well; however, it experiences difficulties when dealing with Chinese artists and songs.

    If I search through my own music for 王菲, iTunes will only return the songs by 王菲. If I search through the iTunes Store for 王菲, iTunes will return the songs by 王菲 as well as the ones by Faye Wong. Curiously, iTunes will return the songs from Zhi Mi Bu Hui from the artist Faye Wong, but not the ones from Wang Fei. So, when iTunes recommends Chinese songs, I have to make sure that I don’t already have their recommendation in my collection. And, this double-checking is not a straight forward process because I have to search through all permutations of a song’s or artist’s name: English, Pinyin, Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese. Ugh…

    The other issue that troubles me is that some song titles are obviously incorrect, like 桃花开, which was inartfully translated to Peach Bloddom Come Out. If this was Wikipedia, some of these errors would already be corrected.