Geekularity

First and foremost, I suggest making a backup of your iTunes library before you upgrade to the newest version. You already have a backup routine that has done a complete system backup in the last week anyway… right!

That being said, you may experience some difficulties syncing your iPod with music that you ripped from a CD after you have upgraded to iTunes 7.2. Especially if one or more songs match music that you had also bought from the iTunes Store. The error message I received was as follows:

“While syncing to <iPod device name>, the file <song name> was not copied because the file type is not supported by the iPod”

After several hours of fiddling with the MP3 file’s ID3 Tags and trying to rebuild the iTunes Library, I finally found the following fixit solution.

1. For each song that shows up in the error dialog box, find it in your iTunes library and copy it to a new location (I used my desktop).
2. Once the file has been copied to a new location, delete the file which is in your iTunes library by clicking on it from within iTunes and pressing the delete key. If you are prompted to keep the file or move it to the trash, choose to move it to the trash.
3. Re-import that song back into you iTunes library by clicking and dragging the copy of the file back into the iTunes window.
4. Sync your iPod again to confirm that 1) the file does not show up in the error list and 2) you can see and play the song on your iPod
5. You may need to iterate through this process several times as the sync error log seems to only show 100 songs at a time. If you have more than 100 songs that won’t sync, you may not know it until your next sync.

I hope this little incompatibility or file corruption just applies to me. However, I suspect that the iTunes 7.2 upgrade might cause problems for more people in the coming days. Please leave your thoughts, complaints and suggestions in the comment section of this post. I’d like to know if this is a small problem or if it’s more wide-spread.

[UPDATE 2007-05-31 1:32 PM]

There’s a new discussion and several other solutions available in the Apple support forums:

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=4645674

[UPDATE 2007-06-01 9:42 AM]

Playlist Magazine has an article, in which they call this problem a bug. However, I’m still inclined to think that this was intentional behavior from Apple to test the waters on how many people had indeed burned their iTunes Store music out to CD and then reimported it.

http://playlistmag.com/weblogs/ipodblog/2007/06/itunes72gotcharedux/index.php

It’s Sunday night, and I thought that I would post a brief recap of my experience here at the 2007 RailsConf in Portland, Oregon.

I arrived in Portland on Wednesday night after a brief stop over at my alma mater, Oregon State University. I had not seen the campus since I graduated 10 years ago. Several areas of the campus have been completely renovated, but its character is still there including the smell; the pleasant aroma of the spring flower blooms, followed by the stench of the evening breeze that drifts into campus from the agricultural research areas to the West. It took me back to senior year. After two hours of touring the campus, it was time to head on to Portland.

When I got to Portland, I realized that I went a little too far in my effort to save money on my hotel. It was in an industrial area of Northeast Portland, sandwiched in between the horse track, the motor speedway and a shipping container storage yard. It was scenic Portland at its finest. Next year I will dollar up and stay at one of the hotels near the convention center. The only saving grace was the burrito place just up the street. I had one of the best chile verde burritos ever!

On Thursday, Friday, and Saturday I spent most of the daylight hours at the convention center where I, and 1600 fellow geeks collectively drank from the fire hose of Ruby on Rails cool-aid. It was yummy! As a rails newbie, many of the sessions were over my head, but I took fast and furious notes, hoping to revisit them soon once I have some projects under my belt and can put some of the finer technical details into context.

Aside from the keynotes and technical sessions, one of the highlights came at lunch on Saturday when the Extra Action Marching Band of San Francisco serenaded the crowd with several burlesque numbers. Apparently they were so loud and raunchy that the convention center got complaints from attendees at the AsiaFest conference next door and promptly shut the show down.

On Sunday, I attended the keynote in the morning and several of the sessions. At lunch however, I got a new toy work tool and proceeded to forget all about the afternoon sessions and the closing keynote. When I finally came to my senses, I packed up my stuff and spent a few hours exploring Portland between the rain showers.

Before I left, I had to make at least one pilgrimage to a geek mecca, Powell’s Technical Bookstore. I frequented the city block sized main store several times while I lived in Oregon, but I had never explored the technical satellite store until today. It was a religious experience and I can’t believe that I waited for so long! I spent an hour there just walking the stacks. Check out the photo above of old computers. The entire store is littered with collections of goodies like this. I didn’t want to leave!

Back at my hotel tonight, I spent some time reviewing my photos and was sorely disappointed in my collection. Sadly, the pictures that I have posted here were the best of what I had. The rest were blurry or just bad composition. I was a yearbook photographer for goodness sake, and this is the best I could do. I am SOOOOOO out of practice. I’d love to blame my equipment, but that would be foolish. I need to take a photography reboot course at my local community college or something. Anyway, I had a lovely time here in Portland. I’m going to get on the road at 0-DARK-00 hours tomorrow morning to drive home. So Long Portland and fellow railies, it’s been fun!

This is the signage that faces out to a busy street in my neighborhood. I couldn’t help but giggle when I was stopped at the light and finally read the sign!

So, if you are absolutely jonzing for milk tea and karaoke, bring your laptop along and get some work done between your encore sets.