All right everyone, better get your Little Red Books out and handy because I’m off to China!!!

Uhh, say what?

Well, here’s the idea. My school’s band, choir, and orchestra (with me being a member of the latter of those three) has been invited to tour and perform in Beijing, China ahead of the 2008 Olympics (which seem to be on the news constantly these days, and not for good reasons). We were also originally going to spend a few days in Xi’an, but that canceled a week or so ago due to the recent earthquake and the declining political situation in that region. However, as it is, the trip will be an 11 day/9 night stay in Beijing (with one day lost up in an airplane or two), with a couple of concerts and a hopefully-not-too-overwhelming amount of sightseeing. But before I share my itinerary, how about a little peek at everything that I’ve gone through ahead of this trip, eh?
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Tags: Beijing, China, itinerary, music, Olympics, orchestra, tour, trip

Ugh, not another one of these:

Does Steve Jobs like making these big keynote announcements? Call me crazy (Hi, Crazy!), but didn’t he just do one of these last month? And then, another one like two months before that? And then, every time Steve plans one of these announcement keynote things, the rumor websites go wild trying to predict things, and looking at what Apple Legal has censored, etc. MacRumors’ rumor roundup has links to all of these places where the legal geniuses have triumphed. You know something, Apple? If you hate rumor websites that much, how about you stop with the keynotes and announce new products like everybody else does? Just randomly pop it on your website one day and issue a press release–it’s painless! You would totally catch the rumor websites off guard!

Okay, whatever, so it’s another big keynote coming up tomorrow, and this time it’s all about music again. And it’s right before the holiday shopping season again. This is starting to sound like a pattern, right? Apparently not, since everyone is complaining again that iPod updates are “overdue.” How long will it take these websites to figure it out–Apple sells most of its iPods during the holiday shopping season, which is why they annually revamp the lineups right before the holiday quarter starts. I don’t see what’s so hard to get here. This is a big reason why I continue to do podcasts: because a mainstream press can be very stupid a lot of times and I feel it’s my duty to get out some stuff that makes a bit more sense. *sigh*

But one of the things that I really want to remind the Apple/Mac news stream is that rumors are rumors. This means that they’re rumors, which means that they really aren’t confirmable, which is why I tend to make my predictions based upon what I’d like to see, not based upon what will happen, because if I say something “will” happen, and it doesn’t, I’ve now successfully reduced my credibility. That’s why I make predictions based on things that I’d like to happen, which means there’s no credibility involved whatsoever. How many times have you seen a rumor be right? You could probably count them on the fingers of one hand, with the last time that I can personally recall being the Intel Macs announcement from June 2005. And Apple always throws something out that you can’t predict. Who would have expected Apple to have ZERO Mac announcements at Macworld 2007? Who was thinking that Apple would do a .Mac Web Gallery–and that’s it? And nobody was ready for the announcement of Safari for Windows. Rumors are rumors, and not much else.

So with that downer, what would I think would be more likely to be seen tomorrow? Again, this is just personal opinion, with absolutely no factual backing. Let’s tackle the rumor roundup one by one:
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Tags: announcements, Apple, iPhone, iPod, iTunes, Keynote, music, rumors, Steve Jobs

One of the most overblown software/hardware categories these days are iTunes controllers: there’s thousands of them. I’ve already reviewed my favorite, but thought that I’d give mention to another one that I’ve tried.

Like I said, there’s a whole bunch of iTunes controllers out there, but one of the founding members of the iTunes Controller category was Synergy, which puts three little controls in your menubar for controlling iTunes, and also includes a number of other nice and interesting features. The downside to it though: it costs money. However, there’s another app out there which is fairly similar, called ByteController.

ByteController is actually fairly similar to Synergy: its main function, like Synergy, is to put the same previous/play-pause/next buttons into the menubar. It’s also skinnable, and comes with a number of skins which you can choose from to determine how the buttons appear in the menubar. Another Synergy feature here, it also lets you set hotkeys for controlling your iTunes from your keyboard, and ByteController includes Growl support. But what it doesn’t borrow from Synergy is its price tag: ByteController is 100% freeware.

All-in-all, ByteController works as advertised and pretty well, although I wish that it had an option to disable Growl notifications, as I’ve already got a few other things that gives me Growl notifications for my music. I ended up ditching it when I got the more powerful (but more costly) CoverSutra, but for someone looking for a free, simple way to control their iTunes experience from afar, ByteController is a very economical way to go.

Final Rating:

Tags: iTunes, Mac, menubar, music, review, Software, Synergy

From the Spike Jones show (of the 1940s era), guest violinist Wilbur Hall does an amazing performance, and yes, it’s all done in real time (see the speculators in the back to guarantee that this hasn’t been edited!). This is a totally jawdropping video.

Tags: comedy, music, performance, Pop Goes the Weasel, Spike Jones, violin, YouTube

A few years ago, if someone asked me what I listened to in iTunes, I would say that iTunes was one of my least-used applications. Now, it’s probably one of my most-used, as I’ve assembled a favorites playlist of over 3 hours of stuff (and that’s not even mentioning my holiday music collection). Therefore, one of the things that I experimented with in preparation of Webmacster87.info 5 was a way to share the music that I’m listening to on my blog. What was the tool I chose? Last.fm.
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Tags: feed, friends, iTunes, music, review, sharing, Software, Web 2.0, website, Windows Media

Delicious Library is one of those Mac OS X applications that you wouldn’t expect to find yourself using, however its wonderful combination of interface, ease-of-use, and its delectable Mac OS X integration make it a rather fun application to play around with. All the power behind it makes it by far the premier application for managing your library of books, movies, music, games, and more.
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Tags: Apple, Apple Design Award, barcode, books, catalog, games, iSight, library, Mac, movies, music, review, scanner, Software