This version is a bit faster than the old one. It does the import in one batch so you get a nice progress bar in iTunes. Finally you can now edit the script to tell it where you store your music. This is the answer for people with complex music storage hierarchies that were not seeing new things being imported.

Download iTunes Folder Sync 0.2

Here is a link to how this script got started and how to use it. As always you need the Windows Scripting Host (aka wscript) installed and the .js extension set to be executed using \windows\system32\wscript.exe

These enhancements were made possible by Howard Darwin who did the beta testing and contributed ideas. He has a wish list for future enhancements that I would love to accommodate but I’m not sure that the iTunes SDK makes this practical with the WScript engine.

Its the first day of Fall in Melbourne. Its fairly easy to tell when this is if you have lived here for a while. The leaves don’t change colour here but the change is in the air. The leaves don’t change colour in Cayman either but there we only have 2 seasons, hot and windy. Here its fall when you get a suddenly cool and windy day that is in stark contract to the stale oppressive heat and afternoon showers of summer. Its good weather for being outside. The temp is ~82 and humidity is down to 67%. Yea thats still hot to some but its nice down here. Enjoy the day.

I’m looking at my folder of unfinished posts and there are some 12 entries in there that I haven’t finished editing. have something to say about BitTorrent + RSS and why that is not a maximally efficient combination, yet, and how to make it work. I just got my Tactile Pro keyboard in and I’m going to do a review of that. I’ve got some ideas to do with some very basic UI concepts and how they no longer make sense in a computer with multiple input devices, sound cards and video displays. I even have a recipe for Curry Chicken that i promised to Walton many moons ago. Look for these items coming this week.

I can no longer launch iTunes on my machine. It crashes on startup. I haven’t bothered to try any dirty tricks to make it work yet because I know its broken. I upgraded to 5.0 and Apple is saying its windows testing department isn’t that great and missed some sort of major bug that corrupts your library.

This really is too bad, I’ve been using iTunes and an iPod since Christmas trying to really evaluate iTunes as a replacement for Winamp. iTunes does some things well but not well enough to be stellar. Take party shuffle, that could be a killer feature, it could be some sort of kiosk mode that lets people at a party choose music without disrupting what’s playing. Instead its just a randomised playlist filter.

iTunes does not support the level of customisation I have come to expect from Winamp. You can’t write plugins for it. The scripting interface is there but you can’t build GUI components that integrate into iTunes itself. If they had some sort of widgets (DHTML + JavaScript) plugin architecture that would have been much, much cooler.

Then there is the DRM. I bought a few songs in the iTunes music store. Its convenient in so far as I can get a song quickly IF its offered by Apple. Its inconvenient for me in some major ways. I don’t like the idea that I am responsible for backing up my purchased music. I bought the rights to that song, if I loose my copy I should be able to get it back by logging in and pressing the sync button. I have already lost one purchased song when I moved my library from one place to another.

The other major problem is the player. You can only play that music in iTunes. Right now iTunes isn’t working so I can’t play the music and I’m stuck waiting for a patch. The player, the DRM and the store are separate entities in the digital music equation. If the DRM was built as a plugin then I could buy music from any store and play that music in my player of choice. This is as it should be, CD’s work in every CD player. DRM music wont be widely successful until DRM content plays everywhere. And I’m not talking about Microsoft’s bogus “Plays for Sure” campaign. It only plays on Microsoft gadgets and in the Microsoft player. It doesn’t play on Winamp, it doesn’t play on an iPod or on a Mac.

In short the only plays for sure scheme is MP3. MP3 is the technology that beat the CD. It traded some sonic fidelity for more flexibility and I’m OK with that. In short my music is staying in MP3 format. It plays for sure on any player, portable device or operating system. I won’t buy DRM music that I cannot break and convert to MP3 as needed. In the end the only people that DRM hinders are paying customers. The pirates haven’t stopped and they have freedoms that currently cannot be bought at any price.

That’s a nice segue to a discussion on black markets but thats another show. Besides the latest episode of Diggnation just came in over BitTorrent and I’m gonna go watch it.