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A podcast about all things Macintosh. For Mac geeks, by Mac geeks. Show 389. iPads after launch. The next iPhone. New Macbooks. Webkit URL addressbar spoofing exploit. Where do you buy your phone? New Apple TV UI rejected by Jobs. Apple plans new Austin campus. iOS 5.1 breaks podcast chapters. Troubleshooting Wi-Fi issues. Extract image from PDF in iOS. Elgato Thunderbolt SSD review. iCloud and Apple IDs still confusing.
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For podcasts on iOS, I’ve been using iCatcher! for about nine months. It’s a universal app and has most (maybe all) of the features you mentioned in this episode. There are a few, minor bugs; but the app has worked well for me in general.
http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=414419105
I switched to Downcast right after that “Music” app came out, replacing the iPod app on the iPad. I haven’t bothered to complain about “Music” to Apple, but I suppose I should. I’m sure they know what they are doing. The new name suggested to me that they made the decision to push (paid) music on iPods and (paid) video on Apple TV. In the process, they seem to have thrown the podcast community under the bus. It’s a hint that podcast fans should support 3rd-party developers, especially when Apple steps on their market niche with an inferior product.
I also have iCatcher!, but Downcast is my choice. iCatcher is also a quality product; either is vastly superior to “Music” and deserve our support.
I also tried Instacast HD (iPad only) over the weekend and found that its UI is all messed up. It might grow into a competitor, but right now it seems to be unduly influenced by the “minimal” philosophy of Music. I hear that Instacast for iPhone is different and much better.
Adam, I’m not sure I understand the cover art problem you are having with Downcast. Try “The 10-Minute Test”, VB-H’s auto review podcast. It’s a narrated slide show and it plays correctly in Downcast on iPad. You must mean something different.
A few weeks ago I was having a problem with the names of the ripped files from an audiobook. They were mp3 and I had named the files in sequence. When I imported them into iTunes I was shocked to find a list of chapter 1, chapter 2 etc for each disk. So a five disk book had five chapter 1s, five chapter 2s and so on.
I discovered that iTunes did not use the file name but a metadata field called (song) name, Other than editing this field one by one I could not find an application to rename this field.
I contacted the developer of “A Better finder Renumber” but they could not help. This is some of my correspondence to them:
I have the latest version of renamer and have been using it to rename some audio files. Unfortunately iTunes does not list the file name, only the title. I would like to have the file name and the title to be the same but cannot find a batch method of doing this. Am I missing an option?
The reason I need to edit the song name is because iTunes appears to sort the songs based on that name and not the file name. I have ripped some books on audio DVDs. Each disk has multiple chapters named Chapter 1, Chapter 2 etc. WIth multiple disks the book order gets scrambled. I rename each file with the Book name, Disk number and Chapter number before I use the script to change the song name.
I did find a solution to the iTunes song name problem. I used Better Finder Renamer to create the file name I wanted for the song name. Then I found a script on the Doug’s Applescript web site
http://dougscripts.com/itunes/scripts/ss.php?sp=filenamestosongnames
This copied the filename to the song name and I had what I wanted.
According to your iCloud and iTunes Account setup, is it true that you can’t share calendars because you have different iCloud accounts?
My wife and I really need to share some of our calendars, but if there was a way to share some calendars with your suggested setup for a family (multiple iCloud accounts and 1 iTunes account) that would be great!