Jamie Thingelstad

Apple launched iTunes Match today and having all my music in iTunes, with three different computers, an iPhone 4S, iPad 2 and three Apple TVs I figured I could benefit from using iTunes Match for my music. I enabled it and it is still in the process of doing its first update. I was very curious about how iTunes Match dealt with certain metadata.

I’m a big user of Smart Playlists and many of them rely on song ratings, play counts and last played dates. I also often have Smart Playlists that reference other Smart Playlists. Some quick learnings from an hour of playing around.

1. iTunes Match synchronizes ratings within 10-20 seconds between devices. I was playing a matched track on my iPad 2 and adjusted the rating. Within 20 seconds iTunes on my MacBook Pro reflected the new rating. I changed the rating in iTunes and within another 20 seconds it was updated on the iPad 2 without any action being taken.

2. The play count for a track is updated promptly after the track is played.

3. Unfortunately the last played date is not updated. This is annoying for me since I routinely use last play date to manage Smart Playlists.

4. Smart Playlists that use other Smart Playlists as part of their criteria are not available in iTunes match. Simpler Smart Playlists are fine in iTunes Match.

Four of my friends from the B-Squad Softball team are in a band called the Good Commies. I was finally able to add some of these wonderful tracks to my iTunes collection. I insist on high resolution cover art so I fired up the scanner. Here are the files for anyone else who is looking for them. I couldn’t find anything other than thumbnails online.

I think I might be getting “over the hump” with nginx. Had to debug something in my config and it actually made sense. 🙂

Upgraded to iOS 5.0.1 this morning and have more battery at 5p on iPhone 4S than I’ve ever had. By a big margin.

The lua-nginx-module is very cool.

While doing our remodel we lost the use of our garage. We used it for storage and the contractors had a big dumpster in the driveway. For most of the summer there was also a small lumber yard in the driveway and a portable toilet. So we parked on the street all summer. Best time to do it but an inconvenience.

This last weekend we got the garage cleared back out and I was irrationally excited to park both cars in there again.

The other day the coffee maker in the office was out of commission. From this note you can see the situation was dire.

Just made my annual contribution to the EFF. You should too!