Apathetic Thursday

“Your application duplicates the functionality of the built in Iphone application…”

You know what? Apple has a really good point here. If you already have one means of doing something, why would you need another one?

I mean, Safari comes with my Mac OSX, so why would anyone want to use Firefox? Or Camino? Or Opera? That would just be silly.

Mail.app can check all my email, which means there isn’t a reason in the world for anyone to make, let alone use a different app for this.

TextEdit comes free with my computer, and there really isn’t any difference between it and Pages, or for that matter, Microsoft Office, so there isn’t much point in keeping those development teams around much longer.

It’s really ironic that a company whose most famous motto was ‘Think Different’ has decided that eveyone who uses their product will use it in the same way for the same thing.

I really wish I was making this up. Turns out 65% of they Google Keywords that lead to my site include “airtunes” or “airport”. (I guess I don’t really mind being a top hit for one thing, but there really isn’t a single solid solution to the problem, so I can’t really help anyone.)

All I have to say is that it’s about time. I’ve been saying they should do this for the past three years.

Apparently I am one of the top hits on Google when searching for a cure concerning AirTunes suddenly dropping off the face of the earth.

In the spirit of possibly helping out others who have this same problem I thought I would write up a post of my experience and complement it with links to other sites that might be helpful.

The Problem

My problem seems to be similar to most, but my situation seems to be different. I currently live in a dorm situation, meaning there are a lot of people in a relatively close location. My Airport is sitting about 7 inches away from my laptop. I always have 5 bars of AirPort connectivity. My problem is that “at random” my AirPort suddenly stops playing music and disappears from my list of available speakers.

AirTunes stops playing and won’t start up again until one of two things happens, a) I unplug my AirPort and let it “reboot” or b) wait for an unknown period of time until AirPort decides that it has speakers again.

I decided to purchase Airfoil, from Rogue Amoeba, which did nothing to solve the problem, but it does allow me to have a small little window that constantly shows me the status of my AirTunes speakers. I have looked for a pattern, and I can’t find one. It happens at different times of the day, for different lengths, at different intervals, with different programs running, etc.

People at various forums tend to say that this is caused by different phones or microwaves that are on the same or similar channel and cause interference. I have a feeling that in my case it’s probably a combination of the two, and possibly something else as well, simply because there are so many people who could possibly be calling or microwaving at any given time. (Although one would think the large amount of concrete in between rooms would help dampen things…)

Possible Solutions

I think this is a situation where there is one symptom for many problems. One person claimed to have solved the problem by turning on “multiple speakers” in iTunes. This apparently worked for a handful of people, but the comments to the tip make it clear it won’t fix everyone’s problem. And there are several other soultions suggested in the comments as well.

Macfixit suggests that turning the network to a 802.11b instead of an 802.11b/g will solve the problem. I tried this a week or so ago, and it didn’t change a thing as far as I’m concerned.

MacNN has a thread about this as well, and while it doesn’t offer much for solutions, the members do mention a few things worth looking into when trying to diagnose the problem.

Apple’s site describes the problem in their knowledge base, but their solutions don’t help me. The ones I have tried didn’t work, and the ones I didn’t try… well, they didn’t help me either. (Several of their solutions don’t apply to me, and I am not dropping my router’s security. I just don’t want to do it.)

Apple’s discussion forums is full of posts about this. One posting claims the new 802.11n no longer has this problem

The best summary in the discussions is this post by Henry B.

Dropouts or cutouts in the music stream going through an Airport Express is among the most commonly posted problems here. Sometimes the problem simply cannot be solved.

For everyone having the problem, there is a new set of variables. Even using XP and a brand new laptop, give a problem when a 5 year old laptop didn’t.

Conclusion

The more I look into this, the more I think it’s impossible to find one permanent solution. The general thinking is that this is an internal bug cause by some code, or some setting that isn’t quite right. In some cases, I think this may be true. Overall though, I think the problem comes from external sources. If someone in your neighborhood gets a new phone, it might interfere with your network. Not knowing everything your neighbor is doing a few houses away, it’s easy to attribute the problem to that new security update you downloaded a few days ago.

There’s no way of being aware of what all is going on around you and it’s sometimes hard to keep track of what’s going on in your machine. Many of us are probably experiencing several different problems that all result in one thing: AirTunes cutting out or dropping off.

My Current Setup

I can’t help but add in this little anecdote here at the end. It’s impractical for most people, but it’s my current solution.

I usually have iTunes running and playing music, but with iTunes and Airfoil running and playing music, my processing power is usually at 50% percent with just those two applications alone. Adding in, say, Photoshop or iMovie or another heavy program causes a huge slowdown in my system. I finally had enough, and decided to move the majority of my songs to my Windows XP box that I don’t usually use anyway. I then hooked my stereo directly to the computer and hit play. No more going through AirPort and thus, no more drop outs.

Unfortunately using Airfoil does not solve the problem on the dropping out Airtune speakers. However, I have noticed several things about the issue:

First off, I always thought it was iTunes that was causing most of the problem. I can now see that this isn’t the case. From what I can tell, something happens, what this something is, I don’t know. I don’t know if it’s a microwave or a cordless phone or a computer or a solar flare or what, but something happens. This interrupts my Airport Airtune signal and it drops off the face of the earth. (Maybe it’s being moved to an alternate dimension.) Sometimes it pops back quickly, other times it takes a few minutes, and I assume that sometimes it never comes back at all.

During this time, full signal and internet capabilities exist between my computer and Airport Express, it’s just like Airport said “Oh, hey, I changed my mind. There are no speakers here.”

Unplugging and replugging the Airport resets everything (including the internet connection) and the remote speaker comes back.

What Airfoil IS better at than iTunes is finding the remote speaker again after it is gone. When using iTunes I would find often that restarting iTunes was the only way I could make it see the remote speaker, (barring a several minute wait for iTunes to look around again and actually find it.) But with a 25 Gig iTunes library this is no simple task.

The nice thing about Airfoil is that if the remote speaker cuts out my iTunes music continues to play through my computer speakers, so there is less stoppage as things go from working to not working and vice versa.

What I would really like to find out now is what exactly Airport is fighting. If I knew what it was that was giving Airport speaker amnesia I would be much better equipped to combat it. I know some things about it already, such as it’s more likely to occur in the afternoon or evening, while mornings seem to be relatively immune to this behavior. It never just happens once and it’s done. If it happens, it happens every x number of minutes, with x not necessarily being the same for each interval. (I haven’t timed it out yet, but I think it needs to be done.)

One way or another I would really like to get to the bottom of this, I’ve already invested enough money into it. (iTunes = Free, Airport Express = $129, Airfoil = $25, [AirClick = $50]*) So if anyone knows anything more on the whole dropout issue, drop me a line, I would like to hear your experiences.

* AirClick wasn’t specifically purchased for this purpose, but I use it to control iTunes quite a bit.

UPDATE: I tried it out and it still doesn’t solve the problem. Read about it here: http://apatheticthursday.net/2008/02/23/the-verdict-is-nay/

I think I have just discovered a possible solution for my ever cutting out AirTunes from my Airport Express.

My setup is ideal (mostly.) My Airport Express is sitting not 8 inches behind my laptop on my desk. I am never more than a foot away from my Airport Express. Signal is always great, but for some reason iTunes usually tells me that it can’t find any speakers on the network after only a few minutes of streaming music via AirTunes.

Today, I think I may have a solution, but sadly it is not free. I have not had ample time to test this, but if anyone else is having problems I thought I would throw this out there and see if anyone has given this a shot yet.

I (re)-discovered Airfoil today while reading through some RSS feeds.

After thinking for a bit I decided that I needed to give this a try. Instead of having iTunes look for the Airport Express I would have a different program, namely Airfoil do it. I have a feeling iTunes is the program that keeps looking the Airport Express anyway.

I haven’t bought a license yet but for several 10 minute stretches I was able to play iTunes without having any major glitches. (I did notice one small cut out, but I think it might have been my computer slowing down for a second or so.)

I don’t know if this stops all drop outs, because every 10 minutes I had to hit turn the remote speaker off and turn it back on again to get rid of the major static that comes in, but if I have some free time tomorrow I’ll purchase a copy and see if it solves my problems. If it does, it will be well worth the $25 purchase fee.

If anyone has had some experience with this already, let me know. Otherwise check back in for an update tomorrow.

I have decided that an iPod touch could replace my iPod Nano and my Palm Zire 31. It would also allow for me to check my college email account via the web. With the addition of Mail.app I could also check my Yahoo and Gmail accounts as well.

I decided, however, that I must wait until the SDK comes out. I am doing this for a few reasons:

• Practice waiting. I feel that as a person I am far too impatient with my expensive purchases.
• Pay off current debt. I need to save up a bit of money first.
• When the SDK comes out there are going to be some killer apps that I’ll be able to use.

When I have my iPod, I need to be able to do a few things with it, mainly check my calendar, change and add events, as well as add and check off To-Do list items. Until I have this functionality it can’t replace my Zire and it useless to me. I am not sure if the recent software update has fixed these requests, but I’m sure it won’t be long before it works.

What I’m really excited for, however, are the new apps that 3rd party developers start creating. Here’s what I think would be cool. I know some of these already exist, but I’m mentioning them because I’d like to use them when I get my iPod.

• Skype  App. Turn your iPod Touch into a VOIP phone. I already have $10 toward my Skype account, on the days I forget my cell phone I can still call people. Also the voice over internet chatting is free, so yippee for that!
• Adium App. If someone could get Adium running on an iPhone that would be sweet.
• IRC client. I know this one exists.
• Twitter Client. This one must exist.
• VNC App. Don’t think this one will happen any time soon, but wouldn’t it be cool to VNC to your computer if you needed access to a file?
•  Alternative web browsers? How long will it take before FireFox is running on the iPod Touch?

I’m really hoping that the iPod touch will be able to be my computer away from my computer. Right now my Zire is doing a great job syncing up, (it wasn’t a few months back.) But the lack of internet and mail is really the killer. We’ll see in a month when I have my new toy.

I love SuperDuper. I’s a great application for backing up, and well worth it’s price tag. When I heard about Time Machine, I thought it sounded like a really neat feature, albeit one that I would probably not use very often, but one can never have enough backups.

When I use SuperDuper, I usually try to close as many apps as I can, and leave my computer alone. Every now and then, however, I find that I need to check my email or quick view a web-page or listen to music while I am backing up, and I can do this with relatively no problem at all. When SuperDuper backs something up, it says: “Want that backed up? Okay, let me get on that. We’ll just plug away at it while you do something else. I’ll let you know when I’m done.”

Time Machine has a different philosophy. When the computer starts up or is plugged back into the Time Machine external drive, Time Machine says: “It’s time to backup data! STOP EVERYTHING! GOOD HEAVENS MAN!! IT’S BEEN 60 MINUTES SINCE THE LAST BACKUP!! DO YOU KNOW WHAT’S AT STAKE HERE!!! THIS SHOULD HAVE BEEN DONE YESTERDAY!!! BACK UP DATA NOW!!!”

And Time Machine hijacks the computer throwing every available resource at backup up, almost giving the impression that this event is bigger than a national disaster.

To say Time Machine is a resource hog would not be adequate. Time Machine is a resource tyrant. For me, there’s nothing more annoying than logging into my computer, and suddenly having my computer grind to a screeching halt for 3 to 5 minutes while my machine merrily backs up all of it’s data from the past several hours that I haven’t been using my computer. (Even if I did make a few changes the night before.)

I did a clean install of my hard drive, I don’t have a whole lot on my computer right now. I have about 5 document files and I have added maybe a dozen of my necessary programs, there isn’t a whole lot that needs to be backed up. I imagined that Time Machine would do a slow backup in the background,  to me, that would make sense, but that apparently isn’t the goal of Time Machine.

Hopefully Apple will allow for some more customization of Time Machine, perhaps allowing a set processor usage cap, or allowing for a set time interval of backups (I’d do 12 or 24 hours.) Or perhaps just a simple check to see how much processor power the user is using at the time, and then taking half of what’s left. There are plenty of options, they simply need to be implemented.

Until then, I’ll just have to put up with my psychotic buddy and his hourly processor raids.

I received my copy of Leopard this morning and thus began my busy day of trying to fit in everything I needed to do to install the critter. Fortunately I have been preparing for this for the last few days so I was ready to jump into the install relatively quickly, but once the install was done the real work has begun.

Last year, about this time I decided that when Leopard came out in January (yes, I was dreaming), that I wanted to do a fresh install. Erase my hard drive, and start from scratch. When Leopard was delayed till October I said the same thing. Over the past few years my system had become cluttered with many an extra add-ons, programs (I had 250+ programs), hacks and un-used document. I wanted to start over completely from scratch, taking with me only my music to my new install.

I have SuperDuper, so my first step was to have a hard drive clone of my disk made. I’ve had a clone of my drive ever since I got my 250 Gig external drive a few years back. I used 100 gigs to clone my Laptop drive, and the remaining 150 to hold video editing files and use as a scratch disk for FCS as well as Photoshop and what-not. However, I knew that SuperDuper didn’t work well with Leopard yet, and I also wanted to be able to try out Time Machine, as it was one of the coolest hyped things Apple has talked about for the past year.

So the other day I copied all my video files I needed off the 150 Gig partition onto the spare space on my 300 Gig drive that I use for my large photo collection and panoramic work. I then completely zeroed my 250 Gig drive, (with Disk Utilite’s 7 pass zero feature,) and I repartitioned the drive into 3 sections. One section was about 5-8 gig larger then the current usage of my laptop drive, I called this “Tiger Drive.” I then made a 110 Gig partition called “Time Machine” for the usage of Time Machine, and I called the remaining space “Application Files” and dumped all the needed loop-files and other FCS things onto it.

Using SuperDuper to clone my laptop to my “Tiger Drive” I was now ready for the install of Leopard, whenever it was going to show up.

When I saw that my copy had arrived the first thing I did was do another SuperDuper copy to my external drive, which only took a short time, and then booted from it to ensure that it was working correctly. Next, I slipped in my Leopard DVD and restarted.The first step to install was to zero my laptop drive. I wanted to let my drive find any errors and do some cleanup, so I let it do a one pass zero of the drive before I installed Leopard. After it had finished that, I partitioned the drive to make a “Macintosh HD” partition, a “Music” partition and a “Documents” partition. I then installed Leopard to the Macintosh HD partition, and the fun had just begun.

Leopard has an awesome feature of letting you change the home directory of any user account, unfortunately, if you don’t do that right away you’ll have to go back and reset many of your preferences, including Mail and Safari and others. I didn’t realize this until after the fact, so I have a number of things I now have to re-do or fix again. Oh well.

As of right now I have copied my music over, and have set up an Administrator account (I don’t run as admin for security precautions) and changed my user icons back to how they should be. It feels really good to have a nice clean start, but I have a long way to go before I feel back to normal. I have many applications to download (hopefully with Leopard compatible versions), and then I also have to find my serial numbers for these apps so they’ll work properly. Also, I’ve started my calendars over completely, so I have to set up my new data and hopefully get my Palm Pilot to sync with it properly. (I was having issues before (with MarkSpace), and thought a fresh install might fix things.)

It is a weird feeling, to completely forsake everything you know and love in hopes to fully start a fresh. (Although the 2029 messages Mail downloaded from Yahoo isn’t very re-assuring for a fresh start.) But I hope that it will help me fully realize what it is that I need and what it is that I use. I’m hoping to hone in my computer using habits so that I can become a bit more efficient and a bit more tech savvy.

I just put the Metroid 3 Soundtrack on my iPod, and then this morning when I hooked my iPod up to my computer, iTunes said my iPod was Corrupted… coincidence?