Tag: itunes

No more hard drives for me!

Last week I noticed that the hardware store of my choice had these fancy new (and fast) Intel SSDs in stock – reason enough for me to go ahead and buy two to try them out in my two MacPro desktop machines. Kos-Mos, my home mac was the first to be converted.

But before that, there was this hardware problem to overcome. See: The SSDs are 2.5 inch drives whereas the MacPro has 3.5 inch slots. While the connectors (SATA) are compatible, the smaller form factor of the Intel drives prevents the usual drive sliders of the MacPro from working.

The solution was to buy one of these adapters for the SSDs. Before doing that, I read about other solutions, some of them involving duct tape, but this felt like it was the cleanest way and it was: The kits fit perfectly, so installing the drive was a real piece of cake.

The next problem was about logistics:

pilif@kosmos /Volumes/Macintosh HD
 % df -h | grep Macintosh
/dev/disk2s2   365Gi  319Gi   46Gi    88%    /Volumes/Macintosh HD

Whereas the largest Intel SSD available to date has just 160GB of capacity (149 “really usable”), so at least some kind of reorganization had to be done.

Seeing that the installation running on the traditional drive was ages old anyways (dating back to the last quarter of 2006), I decided that the sanest way to proceed was to just install another copy of Leopard to the new drive and use that as the boot device, coping over the applications and parts of the user profile I really needed.

Been there, done that.

I didn’t do any real benchmark, but boot-time is now sub 10 seconds. Eclipse starts up in sub 5 seconds. The installation of all the updates since the pristine 10.5.1 that was on the DVDs that came with the machine took less than three minutes – including the reboots (I’ve installed the 10.5.7 update this morning and it took around 10 minutes on the same machine).

And to make things even better: The machine is significantly quieter than before – at least once the old hard drive powers down.

I will never, ever, again use non-SSD drives in any machine I’m working at from now on.

The perceived speedup was as significant as going from 8MB or RAM to 32MB back in the days. The machine basically feels like a new computer.

Of course I ran into one really bad issue:

The idea was to symlink  ~/Music to my old drive because my iTunes Library (mostly due to Podcasts and audio books) was too large to conveniently copy to the SSD. I renamed ~/Music to ~/Music.old, created the symlink and started iTunes for the first time, only to get screwed with an empty library.

According to the preferences though, iTunes did correctly follow the symlink and was pointing to the right path (WTF?). I tried to manually re-add the library folder which did kind of work, but screwed over all my podcasts – completely.

This is where I noticed that somehow iTunes still found ~/Music.old and used that one. A quick ps turned out my best friend, the iTunes helper was running, so I shut that one down and moved ~/Music.old away to /, just to be sure.

Restarted iTunes just to run into the very same problems again (now, this is a serious WTF).

The only way to get this to work was to quit iTunes (that includes killing the helper) and to completely remove all traces of that Music folder.

Now iTunes is finally using the Music folder on my traditional hard drive. This kind of work should not be needed and I seriously wonder what kind of magic was going on behind the scenes there – after killing the helper and renaming the folder, it should not have used it any more.

Still: SSDs are fun. And I would never again want to miss the kind of speed I’m now enjoying.

celes in the office is next :-)

Listen to your home music from the office

My MP3 collection is safely stored on shion, on a drobo mounted as /nas. Naturally, I want to listen to said music from the office – especially considering my fully routed VPN access between the office and my home infrastructure and the upstream which suffices for at least 10 concurrent 128bit streams (boy – technology has changed in the last few years – I remember the times where you couldn’t reliably stream 128 bit streams – let alone my 160/320 mp3s).

I’ve tried many things so far to make this happen:

  • serve the files with a tool like jinzora. This works, but I don’t really like jinzora’s web interface and I was never able to get it to work correctly on my Ubuntu box. I was able to trace it down to null bytes read from their tag parser, but the code is very convoluted and practically unreadable without putting quite some effort into that. Considering that I didn’t much like the interface in the first place, I didn’t want to invest time into that.
  • Use a SlimServer (now Squeezecenter) with a softsqueeze player. Even though I don’t use my squeezebox (an original model with the original slimdevices brand, not the newer Logitech one) any more because the integrated amplifier in the Sonos players works much better for my current setup. This solution worked quite ok, but the audio tends to stutter a bit at the beginning of tracks, indicating some buffering issues.
  • Use iTune’s integrated library sharing feature. This seemed both undoable and unpractical. Unpractical because it would force me to keep my main mac running all the time and undoable because iTunes sharing can’t pass subnet boundaries. Aside of that, it’s a wonderful solution as audio doesn’t stutter, I already know the interface and access is very quick and convenient.

But then I found out how to make the iTunes thing both very much doable and practical.

The network boundary problem can be solved using Network Beacon, a ZeroConf proxy. Start the application, create a new beacon. Chose any service name, use «_daap._tcp.» as service type, set the port number to 3689, enable the host proxy, keep the host name clear and enter the IP address of the system running iTunes (or firefly – see below).

Oh, and the target iTunes refuses to serve out data to machines in different subnets, so to be able to directly access a remote iTunes, you’d also have to set up an SSH tunnel.

Using Network Beacon, ZeroConf quickly begins working across any subnet boundaries.

The next problem was about the fact that I was forced to keep my main workstation running at home. I fixed that with Firefly Media Server for which even a pretty recent prebuilt package exists for Ubuntu (apt-get install mt-daapd).

I’ve installed that, configured iptables to drop packets for port 3689 on the external interface, configured Firefly to use the music share (which basically is a current backup of the itunes library of my main workstation – rsync for the win).

Firefly in this case even detects the existing iTunes playlists (as the music share is just a backup copy of my iTunes library – including the iTunes Library.xml), though smart playists don’t work, but can easily be recreated in the firefly web interface.

This means that I can access my complete home mp3 library from the office, stutter free, using an interface I’m well used to, without being forced to keep my main machine running all the time.

And it isn’t even that much of a hack and thus easy to rebuild should the need arise.

I’d love to not be forced to do the Network Beacon thing, but avahi doesn’t relay ZeroConf information across VPN interfaces.

iTunes 8 visualization

Up until now I have not been a very big fan of iTunes’ visualization engine, probably because I’ve been spoiled with MilkDrop in my Winamp days (which still owns the old iTunes display on so many levels).

But with the release of iTunes 8 and their new visualization, I have to admit that, when you chose the right music (in this case it’s Liberi Fatali from Final Fantasy 8), you can really get something out of this.

The still picture really doesn’t do it justice, so I have created this video (it may be a bit small, but you’ll see what I’m getting at)  to visualize my point. Unfortunately, near the end it gets worse and worse, but the beginning is something of the more impressive shows I have ever seen generated out of this particular piece of music.

This may even beat MilkDrop and I could actually see myself assembling a playlist of some sort and put this thing on full screen.

Nice eyecandy!