Tips

Lostify

If you are an educator trying to build a media library, a frustrating task can be batch changing the tags of a large number of videos that you have ripped from your DVD collection (for example, setting the information for title, video kind, genre, season, etc.). DougScripts has an AppleScript solution, currently called "Set Video Kind of Selected (v3.1)" or the more complete "Make Video Tags" (URLs may change). While these can work well, if painfully slowly, they periodically start timing out with a error messages. This may be function of a huge iTunes library, or some other issue with your Mac configuration, or user error, or... Just be warned: your mileage may vary.

The interface is simple and access is iTunes integrated in the Scripts menu item. Given its great price-point - namely free with donations accepted - it's definitely worth the first shot.

If this solution fails, another option is "Lostify" - as suggested by Doug Adams (of Dougsripts.com, not of Hitchhiker's fame) - written by Lowell Stewart. This option has yet to hang on an error message, and is highly recommended. It is also free.

Tags able to be modified:

Options for modifying the file, and adding to iTunes:

Simply launch Lostify, go to the File menu, and open the file(s) you need to modify.

One day, Apple will likely "adopt" these great ideas into iTunes itself. Until then, many thanks to Doug Adams and Lowell Stewart, who deserve many a round on the house from grateful iTunes users.

SoundSoap is an indispensable piece of software for the podcaster.

As brilliant, simple, and intuitive an interface as it is, save yourself frustration and take a little time to watch the video tutorial.

Spielberg, it may not be, but how many times has "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" really helped in post on your podcast?

It could be worse: I could be telling you to read the "Read Me", but, don't worry, even I have limits.

Essentially, when you copy text in OS X, Apple generously copies all the formatting along with it. This "feature" can actually cause all kinds of problems including mixed fonts, sizes and styles. Under the Edit menu, when cutting and pasting, there are built-in system-wide tools to remove and match text formatting in OS X to help with this issue (see above).

Lifehacker has an AppleScript to remove formatting and instructions on how to add it to your collection of scripts.

This solution is particularly geared at those who write code, such as html, but can be useful for all users, including educators trying to avoid gremlins in their word processing projects.

Unfortunately, this solution does not appear to remove invisibles like line or paragraph breaks. You can do this in Word or Pages using the "Show Invisibles" command under "View" and then using the "Find and Replace" feature:

Another solution is an online tool for removing paragraph and/or line breaks at TextFixer.com, a highly recommended site for online text formatting tools, called the Line Break Removal Tool.

Enjoy!

The bottom left corner of the Mac keyboard, is always a mystery. Everyone knows the clover/command symbol, but who remembers the others?

The May issue of Mac|Life provides a great explanation of digital video formats.

In short, digital video is made of "containers" or "wrappers" which contain separate video and audio file formats - which explains the problem of having a video file that seems to have no audio. The most common containers are MOV (Apple QuickTime, which can use H.264 for video and AAC or MP3 for audio), FLV (Adobe Flash), AVI (very popular Microsoft container, unfortunately, not very efficient), and WMV (Microsoft, again, which can be played using Flip4Mac and QuickTime on your Mac).

These containers can play a number of different audio and video formats.

Here's a great chart from the Mac|Life article:

My unscientific, but practical experience-generated recommendation is stick to H.264 MOV files. Properly encoded, these files can be played on almost anything with an Apple logo. For example, the Export feature of the new iMovie '08 gives a good chart showing possibilities at different sizes:

As always, the king of all Mac video conversion, VisualHub, is the way to go in virtually any situation. Just drag your video file into the window, click "Optimize for: All Devices" under the "iTunes" tab, and you'll never lose sleep over video formats again.

If you are having difficulty converting teaching resources in the .bin and .cue format, Kevin Donahue offers a great posting on How to Convert bin/cue files to mp4 for video iPod.

The technique involves the free VCDGearX:

For the second step of his instructions, I used my copy of VisualHub (the later incarnation of iSquint): a $25 application I cannot recommend enough if you'd like to avoid having a million different applications on your Mac to convert video files.

Life would be so much simpler if everyone just used H.264 mp4. Sigh.