TVSync 1.0 is currently in development and arriving soon.

1.0 is a complete rewrite in Objective-C/Cocoa, and will reside in the menubar. New features include easy destination machine selection using Bonjour, configurable video size and quality, easy configuration of shows, including 'next episode to transfer' setting with Spotlight and Quick Look integration, and the option to transfer a once-off video file.

Stay tuned.

After reading a hint on macosxhints on how to create an audio file from text, because I wanted to keep reading my book while I was driving, and figured that holding the book in front of me probably wasn't the best option, I figured the process could probably be streamlined a bit.

So, I've made a service which appears in the Services menu and operates on selected text. So, select it in Safari, or from an eBook in Preview (or Textedit if it's just plain text), and click 'Speak to iTunes Audiobook' to speak the text into a track in iTunes that will appear in 'Audiobooks'.

Just remember to set the encoder quality beforehand, because it's not configurable through Applescript (I recommend 'Spoken podcast').

Download the thing here.

I've got a bit of new music lately, and I've noticed that the genre is always a bit off. Genre is a pretty tricky thing to figure out for most modern music, as there's so much 'cross-pollination' going on in the music world. Additionally, over a single album, several genres may be visited (eg. folk, acoustic, pop).

There's no way anyone's going to go through every track independently and assign a genre (unless they're seriously O.C.D). So, automatic genre setting (a new AutoRate feature?).

It looks like there has been some work done in the field, although it looks like it's all still at the early-research stage; I haven't found any available software. So there's another possible project.

Another use could be to build a database of tracks in the local music library, and offer similar tracks when playing, constructing an automatic playlist. The same could be done with an online database, similar to Pandora.

Managing PHP debugging can be tricky as, by default, errors and test 'echo' statements can be lost along with all the other output. This problem is compounded when using AJAX, and errors can turn up in XML streams, causing all sorts of problems.

A better solution is to redirect all of that output into an external file, and use a tool like tail to monitor the log.

For printing debug statements, a debug function that shows where each statement came from (file and line number), and is capable of printing complex objects is useful too.

The following is the debugging code that's included in SiteComponents.

I've just created a glorified bash script that will intelligently (hopefully) synchronise downloaded or recorded episodes from TV shows with an iTunes library.

From the website:

This utility will automatically transfer video files of TV series (such as those downloaded from Bittorrent or recorded from TV) into iTunes for transfer onto an iPod/iPhone. It can import shows into a local iTunes library, or a remote iTunes library, over SSH.

Whenever the utility is run (automatically, every half hour), episodes from the configured shows will be converted to an iPod-compatible format, and imported into iTunes. The utility will do its best to set the correct metadata, including setting the items as type 'TV Show', and downloading episode titles from IMDB if it can't be found from the filename.

Install it with the provided package, and it automatically is registered with crontab, to run every half hour. It can be configured to run locally (syncing with a local iTunes installation), or remotely, over SSH.

It works with almost anything downloaded, and with EyeTV.

Check it out at the TVSync page.

There's been a bit of chatter about updates for AutoRate lately, and I think I'm sufficiently motivated to start attacking version 2. If all goes well, AutoRate 2 will be an iTunes plugin, and will run invisibly in the background, updating ratings as tracks are played (with the option to 'guess' ratings using the current algorithm, for new installs).

I'm interested in interacting with Last.fm, too. I suppose AutoRate is a little like a much simpler, 'offline' Last.fm, so it makes sense to take things a bit further and start taking advantage of the awesome stuff they do. Some brainstorming -

• Upon new installation, use information from a Last.fm account to set initial ratings
• Perform scrobbling when playing tracks (performing the same function as iScrobbler)
• Offer an interface somewhere to list similar tracks to the one currently being played (perhaps a menu somewhere?)
• Some hooks into Last.fm functions, like recommendations, and showing what friends are listening to (hooking into the local library too, so you can listen too if you have the track).
• How about copycat playback? Select a friend to follow, and tracks they are listening to are played locally at the same time (or as close as is viable, anyway).
• Smart playlists, where you start playing a track, AutoRate finds similar tracks in your library using Last.fm, and adds them to the playlist. So, say you have a certain kind of music that you feel like listening to, you start playing a song, and the rest is added for you, just like magic. Like Party Shuffle, but smarter, and a lot cooler.

Anyone have any other cool things they'd like to see over the next release or two? Leave a comment.

I used to manually choose the tracks to sync to my iPod Nano, but now I have 7-something gig to play with on the iPhone, it's a bit too much. Instead, I use smart playlists to select which tracks to carry with me.

Two standard playlists, 'iPhone Selections' and 'iPhone Exclusions' allow me to specifically choose or disallow tracks to go onto the iPhone. Then, a smart playlist called 'iPhone Inclusions' looks like:

Watch that 'any' selection in the top drop-down - a bug in iTunes resets it to 'all' every time you bring up the dialog, so you gotta reset it every time.

Finally, a smart playlist called 'iPhone', which is the one that is selected to be sync'd, looks like:

That makes sure that tracks I manually choose are copied over, and the rest is automatically selected by rating and the date added (ideally).

Ratings, of course, are automatically set using AutoRate.

The one caveat is that because you can't select more than one sorting criteria when limiting to a certain filesize in the smart playlist, you can just choose either to sort by add date - which means you're guaranteed to get that great new album copied over - or by rating, so that you're gunna get the best tracks. Not both, unfortunately, unless you limit the 'iPhone Inclusions' smart playlist too (but that means you won't necessarily fill up the iPhone if you have lots of exclusions that would otherwise be included).

Other than that, it works quite well - I haven't yet had a moment when I've missed anything on the iPhone.