Yet another iTunes related death

I really have had a bad run with iTunes. After resisting months constant prompting to update, I gave in yesterday and updated the one version of iTunes (version 11) that I still run on my older studio laptop (still running Vista). I only have it to manage my old iPod nano, and specifically so it can manage podcats. For a long while I could not find any other easy way to do that. Now mainly because of previous disc crashes I don't let iTunes near my music collection any more and I have discovered stitcher radio.

True to form I had just downloaded and installed the update (iTunes version 12), which involved restarting the computer. It restarted once but crashed within a minute and this repeated about 3 times then I got the warning that my system was unable to start (well that's stating the obvious). After about 2 hours of repairing this morning and restarting I did get my system back, albeit without the update to iTunes. So the first thing I did was delete any trace of iTunes.

I wonder how my iPod will go as an orphan, and I'm again reminded why it is so important to keep good archives

Hard Lessons on the Importance of Backups & Archiving.

In addition to the picasa database mix ups, which may or may not be related, I have suffered three external hard drive crashes, or malfunctions, in the past year, All of them contained photos but fortunately I didn't loose anything! I have been very regular with creating backups and maintaining at least 2 archives.

As all three of the drives were also holding my music library which iTunes was using at the time of the crashes AND there are so many hits on the net offering advice about recovering your iTunes library when you disc crashes (more often than not in iTunes 10). I started to get suspicious about iTunes 10 being actually responsible. No music was lost but I now rely on windows media play to listen to my music and just use iTunes 11 (which I really don't like) on an old machine to get podcasts and manage my old iPod Nano (which I still like)

Photo Connections across the connected world

I must admit I have largely ignored (there are a few isolated posts) the many integrations of photo viewers and managers across the many and rapidly changing mobile phones, iPod/MP3 players and other personal devices. They generally had seriously small screens, For example an iPod Nano that takes movies sound like a great idea  till you realise it only takes movies that are240 by 373 pixel, undersized even for you tube. That is this small. However if you are only wishing so share with your friends also on nanos or simpler phones, even for a blog post, it is probably fine.

I also find I have a deep loathing of iTunes, its a dog of a system once you get a fair bit of stuff and truly uncooperative if that stuff is spread across a few computers. Its saving feature was podcasts, it seemed for a long time the best way I could reliably and automatically get podcasts updates to my iPod. With my smaller and lighter sony walkman MP3 player now always in my camera bag, I’ve been looking at Juice (formerly IPodder) and double Twist as ways to do the podcast thing and listen on the walkman. The simpler but still iTunes-like interface and the addition of a picture library in double Twist took my eye and I thought it was time to reinvestigate portable device interconnection and wow a lot is happening there. double Twist also works with android phones, and proclaims itself “iTunes on steroids”, the cure for iPhone envy. Its is, or at least was, an open source project, and is in public beta  and free to download. Its real power relates to how easy it is the share media (Photo and movies as well as audio) across a wide range of USB devices and share them with friends (it has a upload to flickr button built in and a web album).

So then I had a look at nokia’s OVI Suite, yes it has a decent upload, download and management of media files as well, but focused on noika product.

Not to forget picasa, it will read photos from a wide range of inputs including mobile phones and there are nice free Picasa web using IPhone App and Android Apps.

The reach of digital photography is ever widening and making those photos easy to upload and share needs to be the first photography lesson these days.