IT Werkz Sometimes

I sync’d my iPhone with iTunes, version 9, and all of a sudden a whole load of free space appeared. Then I noticed that all the music had been removed.

When I checked the Music tab for the iPhone the radio button for ‘Selected playlists, artists and genres’ was checked and below that was displayed two columns one for the playlists and another for the artists. These had checkbox’s and none were checked, hence no music on the iPhone. Checking on any of these playlists or artists means that those songs will be sync’d. That’s OK for the playlists as that was how iTunes sync’d with iTines version 8. But checking an artist means that everything by that artist will be sync’d, you can’t select individual songs by an artist. Great.

Seems that iTunes ignores any rules you have set by checking individual songs or albums on the Music window. I did check some artists on the iPhone’s Music tab and they were sync’d to the iPhone OK. I then tried checking the radio button for ‘Entire music library’ and that does remove the playlist and artists displays. I hoped that rather than trying to sync the ‘Entire music library’ it would sync just those individual tracks checked on the Music tab. Even that wasn’t straight forward as iTunes then unchecked the the ‘Sync Movies’ checkbox on the Movies tab but did leave the ‘Sync Podcasts’ checkbox checked. I suppose it unchecked the ‘Sync Movies’ checkbox because movie files are so large and they are the prime culprit for filling up an iPhone and iTunes was trying to be helpfull, or it’s a bug.

By the end of that sync the movies I’d checked were sync’d correctly as were the podcasts but the only music that was on the iPhone were by the artists on the three playlists I’d checked when I’d selected the ‘Selected playlists, artists and genres’ checkbox and which wasn’t currently checked – ‘Entire music library’ was checked. This is a bit confusing. By the end of the day I’ll have figued out how to get my iPhone sync’d like I want but this new functionality in iTunes 9 is way too geeky for most people and they’ll just have the feeling that they aren’t in control of their iPhone or iPod.

What is this a once a month new entry kind of blog. It must be that I chuck up all my snippets to Twitter instead.

I’ve been learning Dreamweaver CS3 for the last 3 months. Well, 30 minutes here and there and I wasn’t getting very far so this week I have been hitting DW with a vengence and have just about got my head around a lot of it. It’s a big jump from using Frontpage 95 all those years ago and as for CSS, I knew what it was going to do, but working your way round that very busy screen was confusing for a while. Better finish off my DW learning exercise this week or when I come back to it in a few months I’ll need to start again. Shudder. Anyway, I’ve managed to generate a new resume with DW and just to confuse the IT agents I’ve stuck adverts for Dell, Tom Tom and Photoshop on it.

Just seen Steve Jobs on stage at the Apple show and he was thin and had an old mans voice. Dunno if thats got anything to do with his liver transplant.

I redownloaded this blogs database the other day and managed to load that into a local version of MySQL and have been messing around with the tables with a MySQL version of TOAD. I’ve also downloaded and installed the express version of Oracle as well as its version of TOAD and also SQL Developer so that if a miracle happens and I can load the MySQL database tables, via an SQL file, into Oracle I can then interrogate that stuff with TOAD and SQL Developer. That might fall at the first fence.

I downloaded version 9 of the iTunes software and afterwards iTunes didn’t recognise my iPhone, but did after a reboot. On the Summary screen it shows that 95% of the iPhones capacity is taken up with ‘Other’ displayed in orange and it thinks that there is no music on the iPhone at all, but there is. I hope when I’ve got installed version 3.1 of the iPhone software everything will work OK.

I noticed several months ago that iTunes couldn’t connect to Apple when the Windows Live Onecare forewall is running. When you switch off that firewall then iTunes can connect to Apple. I tried messing with this several times and noticed that iTunes was supposedly allowed through the firewall but it was still stuck. Eventually I switched off Onecare’s firewall and reverted to the Windows firewall which does allow iTunes to connect to Apple. The other day I checked the Windows firewall and that was turned off. I tested it a few times recently and when I switch off the PC the Windows firewall is running, when I reboot it’s switched off again as is Onecare’s firewall. Not much use in that. No doubt there’s one tiny, iddy-biddy little thing I have to do to get it to stay running or, even better, that will allow iTunes to connect with Apple with Onecare’s firewalll switched on, but I can’t be bothered right now.

I tried using Windows Easy Transfer with a Belkin cable, which I have successfully used before, but yesterday it just wouldn’t connect the two PC’s.

I eventually bought another cable and installed a driver for that and after messing about for a while got it working. One of the transfers I had started I realised was wrong, in that I was sending to the Vista PC something I didn’t want to, so I cancelled the transfer. After that when I plugged the cable back into the XP machine and the WET software started I got an error message that said ‘Failed to initialize the logging system’. I spent some time uninstalling, reinstalling and rebooting but made no progress. Did a search on Google which didn’t come up with much though one person said to rename your profile. Not quite clear enough. Gave up for a while and thought about it and came up with no eureka moments. Hmm.. different profile, maybe me cancelling a transfer has left something lying around that is stopping WET from working.

Rather than amending my profile, erm how, I created a new admin user and tried that and it worked.

Installing iTunes on Vista though is turning out to be a right pain (How come you have so much trouble with all this stuff, works OK for everyone else? Ed). I have installed it OK but when I click on the icon to run iTunes it wants to run some kind of setup and specifically associate music files with iTunes, which stalls. A window opens and nothing happens. I have manually associated .mp3 files with iTunes but nevertheless each time I click on the iTunes icon we’re back to the associate music process. I’ve had a look on Google and there are a lot of possible work arounds including making amendments to the registry to amend some keys. I did try one but it made no difference. Someone posted that there are twenty keys to amend.

By coincidence this afternoon I was near an Apple store so I asked them whether they had any ideas but of course they are all mac guys so they couldn’t help. They did give me a number to ring for windows & iTunes technical support so will call them if I can’t sort this out myself.