how to transfer an iTunes library from PC to Mac

Having recently purchased a Mac (more on that later), we sought to migrate our iTunes library from the PC that had been replaced. Our music was, and is, stored on our HTPC, so it would be just a matter of leading iTunes to the proper directory. This sounded like a simple task, but a few Google searches on the subject told me that only the complicated ways of the Linux-like command line could help. Manually mounting the network share? CHOWN? You must be joking. This is a Mac, and operations are supposed to be made easy. I noted that none of the online guides referred directly to Leopard, and appeared to be written by those well-versed in Linux command line usage. There must be an easier way.

Being both lazy and stubborn, I copied iTunes Music Library.xml (found in My Documents/Music) from the PC to the Mac. Opening the file in a text editor revealed paths to music files, but they were obviously incorrect. To find the correct path, I imported a single mp3 file from the network music drive, highlighted it, and selected File > Get Info. Excellent! This revealed that the drive had automatically been mounted by Leopard, and with a quick Find > Replace All, every path in the XML file was updated. On the Mac, I deleted iTunes Library, iTunes Music Library.xml from username/Music/iTunes. Lastly, I simply imported the updated XML file from within iTunes.

Great! Now back to our regularly scheduled life.

iPhone in the workplace

My wife and I gave each other iPhones for Christmas, and we love them. As many others have already pointed out, the iPhone's innovation lies not in its functionality, but in its user interface and simplified multimedia experience.

Here's an example of why I love the iPhone:

I was listening to music through my phone, while repairing a computer at work, where phone use is officially prohibited (A rule which is consistently bent). It's an industrial environment, and I was using only one of the stock earbuds, in order to remain aware of my surroundings. My phone rang while I was in plain view of many people, but nearby machinery muffled the sound (Nobody recognizes 'sonar' as a ringtone, in any case). I quickly pressed the answer toggle button, and disguised my conversation by bobbing my head and pretending to sing along to imaginary music. When the call had ended, I continued with my work. Everybody knows that white earbuds mean music, but only two people at work have an iPhone, myself included.

That's all for now.

minimalism at work

Most people accept the bulky presence of A/V components as an unavoidable price for their entertainment experience. Component designers have always striven to beautify their creations, but no faceplate can compensate for space wasted in a small room. Having seen various hidden entertainment systems on HGTV, I was inspired to further decrease our A/V clutter. Our system is definitely atypical, and I wanted it to look the part.

That's easy, right? Simply place the ugly components into a pleasant-looking enclosure. Not so fast! Including connectors, our HTPC is over 20 inches in depth, fitting on only the largest of entertainment furniture. Further complicating its placement is the fact that it requires exposure to significant amounts of open air; it can't be hidden inside of a cabinet.

Unable to conceal the components, I explored the option of employing another HTPC case; one that would look as high-tech as the system it encased. Antec's then-new Fusion (pictured below) was the case that looked most like a traditional A/V component. It certainly looks great! With that realization, I explored I pondered this option further, and realized that, as stated above, no faceplate design can compensate for the fact that a component is a big space-wasting box. It didn't make sense to spend money, only to be stuck with the same box. It was time to think outside of the box; to break out of the box. Ouch!

How could we obtain the concealment that an armoire provides, without using an enclosure? We could make the components invisible! No, really. The TV coaxial cable and speaker wires were already routed to the basement through a hole in the corner of the living room floor. I widened the hole slightly to accomodate more cables, and placed the HTPC on a shelf about three feet below the living room floor. Upstairs, vertical cable runs were hidden inside of the TV wall, and horizontal runs were hidden in a paintable wall-mounted conduit.

The result is neat and organized, just as it should be. The clean lines of the components allow us to focus on the screen, and their reduced depths allowed us to recapture a significant portion of our living space.

I used two four-foot conduits, and as you can see, they weren't quite long enough. Our local home improvement stores don't sell anything longer, so I'll have to buy a full conduit in order to cover the last foot of exposed wire.

As you can see in the 'profile' photo, the center channel speaker isn't of the low-profile, on-wall variety. Somehow, Infinity neglected to include a center channel speaker in their on-wall line. This unit is from Infinity's 'Entra' series, and is resting on two conventional steel wall-mount brackets. It's not a perfect solution, but we already owned the speaker, and the brackets cost only $20 USD, versus $150+ for a new center speaker. At least everything's black.

Wait a minute! What are those unsightly BOXES, to the right of the TV?! Unfortunately, you can't hide from your subwoofer. The necessary A/V receiver is next to the sub, on its end, with the IR remote sensor on top of it. Again, at least everything matches. Behind the subwoofer and receiver are a wireless mouse and keyboard, a USB extension cable, and the input break-out box for the HTPC's capture card. The only thing missing is an optical drive, but the need for one hasn't yet presented itself.

Don't mind the kilt-inspired carpet; we'll do so on your behalf.

sony sucks

Since January 31, our Sony Wega has refused to turn on. The power LED blinks red instead of the usual green. So much for Sony's legendary reliability. We had researched this model for two years prior to purchasing it, and it was supposedly quite reliable. Current research indicates that others who purchased this TV around the same time (Jan. 2006) have experienced similar issues. Warranty? What warranty? Until very recently, Sony's standard warranty for consumer electronics was only 90 days. Sony's new standard warranty is one year, but that wouldn't have helped us, since this unit is just over a year old. We're kicking ourselves for not purchasing an extended warranty. We shouldn't have been so trusting of a corporation, even though we've seen countless other Sony products last many years without maintenance. Lesson learnt.

To repair the Sony, we were quoted approximately $300 for labour alone. It doesn't make sense to spend that much money repairing a TV that was made so poorly that it failed within one year.

A similar CRT TV (with a flat screen) now costs $650. Why the price has gone up in the past year, I cannot imagine. This option was tempting, and reasonably priced, but we'd be replacing the new set within two years. Also, we've been wanting more from our TV set (larger size, greater clarity, weight reduction), so it was difficult for us to justify spending $650 just to get back to the point of wanting a different product.

An ideal long-term replacement would be a flat-panel LCD HDTV, which could handle the requirements of television and media for years to come, while doubling as a proper computer monitor. The thought of having our ideal TV for the long-term (with an extended warranty) was tempting enough, so we purchased a 32" JVC LCD HDTV. I took it home, placed it on our entertainment center, and watched it disappear in the room. I hadn't realized that the large TV served as the room's focal point, and the 32" flat-panel was tiny in comparison. Back went the 32", and in came the 40"; a JVC LT-40X667 flat-panel. It's a perfect fit, and the black cabinet (as opposed to the 32" silver and black) matches the black of our Infinity on-wall speakers. As I deliberated in Best Buy for nearly two hours, the LT-40x667 was the TV that impressed me most, and it's even more impressive in our living room. Yes, we also paid for a 4-year extended warranty.

A few days ago, we sold our PS2 with all accessories on eBay. There is no more Sony in our house, except for an old pair of earbud headphones. Maybe in a year or three, if CRT parts drop in price, we'll get the 32" Sony TV repaired, and use it in our basement.

media pc, part 8: drawbacks

Remote Buttons
The Streamzap remote does many things very well, and is very responsive, but there aren't enough buttons to accomodate every function of a multi-purpose media PC. In practical use, though, I haven't found it to be much of an issue. Because of the button limitation, watching DVDs is a bit different. DVD main menus work well through SageTV, but most DVD sub-menus (such as scene selection) don't work at all. Luckily, you can skip through movies in up to 10-minute increments. If I ever cared to watch anything aside from the main movie, this would bother me. I could map the correct Sage commands to the remote, but I don't have spare buttons. It's worth noting that, for DVDs, SageTV provides its own menu for subtitles, audio settings, and aspect ratio. This menu consists of a slim line across the top of the screen, and can be accessed while watching a movie. It's cleanly integrated, and very convenient.

Rather than running on about the obvious inconvenience, I say only that the Streamzap remote doesn't control anything outside of your PC.

Sage Itself
SageTV doesn't support closed-captioning. If captioning is important to you, don't use SageTV. The default SageTV interface is functional, but ugly. I installed an additional .stv (SageTV), called SageMCE. It's available for free through SageTV.com's forums, and as the name indicates, it mimics the MCE interface. It's a much more elegant approach, and it alone increased WAF by 30%. The additional package also provides commercial skipping, which I haven't tried. Advertising is an important part of my bubble, though I do watch only about 3 seconds of each ad. SageTV has an overly complex command layout. For example, instead of requiring one button for each aspect ratio, you should be able to cycle through aspect ratios using a single button. There exists third-party software (e.g. Girder) which allows you to overcome this obstacle, for around $60 USD.

SageTV crashes when new Windows updates are advertised. Thankfully, this doesn't happen too often. The media PC is rebooted every week or so, but it's always on otherwise. When I forget to reboot it for a few weeks, the remote might stop responding, but nothing else happens.PatienceBecause TV files are so large (1GB per 30 minutes), SageTV can temporarily freeze if you delete files too quickly. By this, I mean faster than the on-screen image refreshes. If you wait even a few seconds between files, SageTV will be able to keep up with the deleting.

Monitor
As I noted in an earlier post, standard-definition TVs (SDTVs) aren't the best choice if you want to browse the web, or read substantial amounts of text. Their viewable resolution is limited to 720x480 pixels, and standard cable TV is broadcast at that resolution, so it works well for that purpose. However, 720x480 doesn't give you much on-screen space, and everything becomes enormous. Text on most web sites line-wraps, and tends to be a bit blurry. The text can be sharpened so that it becomes legible, but that adjustment can detract from the picture quality of TV and DVDs. In my video card settings, I created separate presets for web/text and TV, but it's too much trouble to access that menu to switch back and forth. Once again, a button on the remote could make the difference here. MaintenanceYou don't have to maintain component A/V equipment, but you have to maintain a computer; especially one that runs Windows. After the first few months of heavy use, we began to experience audio and visual stuttering while watching TV shows. Coinciding with this, the hard drive's seek noises were growing louder each day, and at one point, the hard drive actually failed (it recovered after a reboot). DVD playback was unaffected, so I checked the file fragmentation on the TV drive. It was ugly; the files on the TV partition were 90% fragmented. Defragmenting took over 12 hours, and created permanent video and audio stutters in some of the files. Since then, I have defragmented the TV partitions every month or so. It now takes only as long as one might expect, and the files have not been compromised.

media pc, part 7: upgrades

The P4 2.66GHz Prescott wasn't quite fast enough. We experienced slightly choppy TV when burning DVDs, and that was simply unacceptable. Did the super-hot Prescott teach me that I should listen to popular opinion, and upgrade to an AMD processor? Of course not. I upgraded to an Intel Pentium D 805 2.66GHz (Smithfield); a dual-core CPU that's something like two Prescotts stuck together. I also doubled the memory, settling on 1GB. The new processor idles in the mid-30s, but still doesn't exceed the low 40s. Now the media PC is as fast as it should be; we can burn DVDs while watching full-screen TV and streaming music over our network, with no slow-down.

As I said previously, a 90GB partition isn't much for TV, and we filled ours within a week or two. We then added a 250GB (232 actual) Seagate Barracuda 7200.9, but we filled that as well. After several months of diligently deleting watched shows, and being unable to archive everything that we wanted to keep, we realized that we were spending too much energy in maximizing free drive space. Buying for the long-term, we added two 250GB (232GB actual) Samsung Spinpoint drives to the system. Now, space is no longer a concern, and we can archive as many shows and DVDs as we like. A gigabyte is nothing to worry about, and when the minimum file size is 1GB, that's the way it should be. We also created enough space to grow our music collection in a care-free fashion. Our current partitions look like this:

Media PC
OS & Apps - 40GB (on original 160GB Seagate)
Music - 90GB (on original 160GB Seagate)
TV 1 - 232GB Samsung
TV 2 - 232GB Samsung

Kitchen PC
OS & Apps - 40GB (on 80GB Seagate)
Misc File Storage - 40GB (on 80GB Seagate)
TV 3 - 232GB Seagate

We had to move the 250GB Seagate drive to the kitchen PC, since the media PC case only holds 3 hard drives. Although the 250GB drive raised the kitchen PC's temperatures by a few degrees, it has many degrees to spare, and it's no louder, thanks to the sound-dampening qualities of solid wood. This configuration will work well for the foreeseable future.

Note: Our network is wired.

The wireless mouse and keyboard are not used at all, and I've disconnected them from the HTPC altogether. Instead, we use RealVNC (www.realvnc.com) to control the HTPC from the kitchen PC, which allows us to listen to music without turning the TV on.

media pc, part 6: the initial result

The media PC has been an incredible asset to our family life. It's satisfying to know that we are watching every TV show that we pay for monthly. It's even more satisfying to be able to watch any show whenever we want. We no longer miss shows because we're too busy; we just watch them when we're not busy. If that happens to be two weeks after the original air date, it doesn't matter. Our kids can watch their shows when school is over. We can browse our entire music library (30GB+) effortlessly, and everything plays through our 5.1-channel speaker setup. We watch photo slide shows on the TV with friends and relatives. If we're feeling lazy, we can shop online from our couch. TV shows are recorded as separate .mpg files, so we can transfer them, or burn them to DVD. It's everything that the hype promised it would be.

The PC was very quiet and cool. You could barely hear the computer running at around 2:00AM, when all other sounds had ceased. Even then, it was much quieter than a whisper. The hard drive stayed under 36C, and the CPU never exceeded 42C, idling in the high 20s. Everybody was pleased.

media pc, part 5: cool and quiet

A media PC in the living room has to be quiet. It shouldn't intrude upon even the quietest sections of music, TV, or DVDs; or even quiet conversation. Knowing how loud PCs can be, I spent a lot of time online learning how to quiet computers. An honourable mention goes to Silent PC Review (silentpcreview.com), which is a very helpful site, explaining silencing theories and providing some practical examples. However, the majority of my education on the subject came from applying the afore-mentioned theories to my own HTPC. Within the entire HTPC project, cooling and quieting formed their own substantial niche, providing hours upon hours of fact-finding, tinkering and experimenting.

The Silverstone LC-13 case comes fitted with a 90mm front intake fan, and two 60mm rear exhaust fans. The front intake consists of two slots on the underside of the front bezel. It's well-placed, but it could be bigger. The rear fans are mounted inside of the case, and the air that they move exits the case through large perforations. I tried this setup first, along with the stock Intel CPU HSF. Operating temperatures were stable, but the computer sounded like a giant bumblebee, and my wife insisted that I put my newfound silencing knowledge to use. Oh, darn; forced to upgrade the computer!

Here's a summary of what I did:

Intake
I cut out the front fan grille using a Dremel, and I replaced the semi-loud 90mm fan with a 120mm Nexus unit, run at around 9 volts using a Zalman Fanmate 2. Fanmates are expensive for what they are, but not for what they do. I mounted the fan to the case structure using nylon zip-ties. It sits inside the case, a few inches from the front, to reduce noise from turbulence.

Exhaust
I used a Dremel to cut out the rear fan grilles, to increase airflow and decrease noise from turbulence. I then replaced the noisy 60mm fans with 90mm Nexus units, again run at 9 volts with a Fanmate. The 90mm fans were too large to mount inside of the case, so I mounted them on the outside using nylon zip-ties. They move the same amount of air as the 60mm fans, but with much less noise, and they're just small enough that they don't block any of the rear connection ports. CPUI installed the large and awesome Thermalright XP-90 (The XP-120 was too big), and bent the included fan clips to fit a 120mm Nexus fan on top of it, blowing downward. Yes, I employed a Fanmate here as well, at around - you guessed it - 9 volts. The XP-90 looks extremely cool, and cools extremely well.

Other
- The large video card acts as a baffle, so that air from the passive PCI-side intake vent will be directed towards the CPU before exiting the case.
- I used a rounded IDE cable (I should have used SATA), which cleaned things up considerably.
- I mounted the optical drive in the lower bay, since warm air rises, and I put slack cables into the empty bay above it. This looks messy, but it's better in terms of functionality, since cables are less susceptible to heat than are components.
- I cleaned up any remaining slack cables as best I could, using black electrical tape.

Considering the number of components installed, and the number of wires present, I think it looks decent.

media pc, part 4: installation and tweaking

All of the components fit nicely into the case, with room for expansion. For the initial software installations, I connected a wired keyboard and mouse, and a 15" CRT monitor. All of the cards, peripherals, and software were installed quickly and effortlessly. With the video card drivers installed, images on the 15" CRT were extremely clear and sharp, and I was excited to see what TV shows would look like.

Then I installed SageTV, and though it worked immediately, the picture quality sucked. My excitement transitioned into intense concentration as I worked to get the best possible picture from the video card, monitor (TV), capture card, video decoder, and SageTV. Each has its own settings which affect various aspects of the picture. Of course, some device settings conflicted with others, which didn't help to simplify the process. I found it best to first configure the devices which modify the picture in a broader scope, then work my way down to the fine-tuning devices. When two or more devices
modified the same settings, such as sharpness, I first configured the device which provided the highest level (as opposed to low-level fine-tuning), then worked my way down to the details.

Adjusting the settings alone was a lengthy learning process, and I spent about eight hours tweaking everything to be just right, which includes watching various sections of TV shows and DVDs to compare settings. It was worth the effort, though. The resulting picture quality for cable TV is better with the HTPC than without it. For DVDs, the HTPC looks much better than our Panasonic RV-32 stand-alone unit.