iPad "Remote" App for iTunes

Personally, I like Bit Perfect on the Mac. It's super simple, sounds great, gives you a fair amount of control and customization behind the scenes, and is way less of a PITA than setting up an alternate player to iTunes as far as I am concerned. It sits invisibly on top of iTunes, but essentially castrates it to take over all playback. There's a huge thread about it over at Computer Audiophile (which I can’t seem to link to directly, but worth a quick search of their forums) for anyone that's interested. Have to admit, though, that I've got relatively little experience with Amarra/Pure Music/Audiovirna/etc to know how it compares – but it is itself so useful and easy that I stopped experimenting with other stuff once I found it. Just my two cents.

Heh, iTunes. Since I have accrued some credit, seems also I deserve the blame… The new version of iTunes is definitely a pain in the ass. Still trying to dial much of it in as well. Far as I understand it, yes -- if you're getting the dreaded cloud icon beside a track, that means that iTunes is convinced it is not a local copy but resident off in Apple's proprietary ether and: (a) it is streaming it from this wherever, (b) it is NOT lossless, and (c) it very well may be further polluted by Apple's digital rights management (DRM) scheme. This third point, DRM, is where you can run afoul of BitPerfect, as it can't handle DRM material. Think it is supposed to hand playback back to iTunes when it encounters one -- so that it can actually go -- but in my experience, it just won't play the DRM stuff.

The more sticky question may be why iTunes has apparently “substituted” things that you previously had local copies of (presumably lossless local copies ripped from CD, for example) with “the cloud” copies. Hopefully, this isn’t the case. I understand that there is a new “feature” in iTunes that basically moves all of your stuff onto the cloud – so that all accounts have access to the same library. Fine, sounds super, in typical Apple faux-helpfulness mode. Trouble is, these cloud-resident copies will not be lossless (think they are AAC, not sure which bitrate). So, if you’ve started with a lossless copy and then moved to the cloud, Apple has kindly down-sampled and down-graded your software. Significantly. You would prefer to avoid this. And to further complicate matters, if you actually click on the “cloud” icon beside a track, Apple with kindly download this track from the cloud to your local drive. However, it will still be the lossy version that started on the cloud.

None of this, to the best of my knowledge, should replace anything that you have locally. For example, I don’t buy anything off of iTunes. And I have placed nothing on the cloud. However, my wife regularly does, and we use the same account (which is real convenient in every other way). But, this means that my iTunes includes all of the material she has purchased. In the previous versions of iTunes, all of the stuff she purchased was not visible on the Mini, because none of it had been downloaded there (but I could access her library, which is on a separate computer, through our shares network). However, in the new version of iTunes, EVERYTHING that has ever been purchased on the account is now visible on every instance of that account – and the ones that have not been downloaded on a particular local instance are shown as being on the cloud. Thus, my new version of iTunes on the Mini is now showing hundreds of tracks on the cloud. This is a “feature” of the cloud – Apply trying to be “helpful.” Further, many tracks in my main (previously entirely lossless) library are now duplicated – with both my local lossless version and a cloud version (presumably because I have a lossless rip from CD and my wife at one point bought a copy of the same track from iTunes). Hopefully, this is all that has happened. I think there is a way to convince iTunes not to show anything on the cloud. This would – should – revert you to exactly what was there before the “upgrade.” Personally, I’ve left all of the cloud (duplicates or otherwise) items visible so far. I am just careful not to use them, unless I mean to and there isn’t another lossless copy already there.

Hopefully that made some sense and was at least vaguely helpful. (And if not, you know where to find me… ;)

The new Microsoft indeed. Sometimes it seems like a full time job just staying ahead of Apple's apparently evolving efforts to break its own software. Lovely. I've said before, the new corporate motto seems sometimes to be "If it aint broke, quick break it. Apple smash." Now it seems that every time my system idles, iTunes helpfully locks all of the harddrives and crashes. Then there's no talking it out of it, and a hard restart is the only remedy. Very much the opposite of endearing. My love/hate relationship endures.

In terms of sorting, you can happily get iTunes to do that for you. May not be a default, but in the settings you can get it to show the "file type" column. If you then go to view by tracks and click on the "file type" heading, it will automatically sort everything for you. "AAC" and "Protected AAC" will be the cloud droppings from Apple. Everything else should be what you did on purpose, in whatever file type was your default for importing. Joy.

Follow up, the other day I broke my OS trying to sort out the permission issue. Who'd a thunk it was so blithely simple to casually break an OS. And I mean broke to the point of a burn down and clean install. Well, live and learn.

All that said, my relationship to Apple and audio remains the same as the old quote about the US government: it's the worst possible thing I can imagine, but it remains better than all the alternatives....