Jasonified.

At home I have a fairly typical Apple media setup - iMac, external storage, Apple TVs dotted around the house + iPads etc.

When playing media across devices via iTunes, specifically films and TV Shows, you can “continue playing” or “start from the beginning” and iTunes will (sometimes) maintain the state across these devices for you.

It strikes me that with iCloud and the proliferation of “cloud services” for bookmarking and state management, this should be much easier, more reliable, and simply *better*.

I like the idea of playing a game on one device, moving to another (where I have the same app and iCloud state management selected) and picking up where I left off.

What about writing some markdown in Byword on the iPhone, switching to the iPad, opening Byword open and the cursor is where I left it (or even finding it open, ready an waiting when I slide to unlock).

Imagine writing a tweet in Tweetbot, opening the photo browser and realising the image you want to post is on your iPhone and hasn’t synced via photo stream. No problem, just unlock the iPad and there’s Tweetbot, not only open, but showing the photo browser with your tweet sitting, ready to post underneath.

We have “resume” for movies, tv shows and for books within apps like iBooks and Kindle.

Why not everything else?

Note: Credit to RazorianFly for note on this today - my version requires less steps and doesn’t require you to use the primary iTunes machine.

If you’ve just upgraded to iOS 4.2 on your iPad or iPhone and you’ve suddenly lost any videos or music from your Videos/iPod app then there’s a quick and easy fix.

For this to work you should have an iPhone/iPad that shows it has Videos and Music available (in the about page or via iTunes) but non-show up on the device.

1. Connect to ANY computer running iTunes 10.1 (so doesn’t have to be your main syncing machine) and ignore any sync/wipe options (hit cancel)

2. Click on the device name, expand it and go to Music/Videos

3. Double-click/play a track/Movie/TV Show

4. Now go back to the device, go into Videos/iPod and you should get “Updating Library”

5. Bingo, music and videos restored.

It’s been a long time coming but we can finally buy and rent Movies through the UK iTunes store. with rentals at £3.49 and purchases at £6.99 it’s still cheaper to buy from the US (if you can bothered to register your credit card to a US address) but at least we *can* rent and buy if we want to from the UK.

This little tip doesn’t need an unlocked or jailbroken iPhone. My only disappointment with getting the iPhone was that it *seemed* I had to sync with my laptops iTunes library to get my iPhone syncing with Outlook for Calendars and Contacts. This was achievable but was a pain because I would have to sync Videos/TV Shows from my iMac to my notebook external drive.

This has changed with the discovery that you can actually sync Contacts/Calendar, Photos, Music and Videos with different iTunes libraries because they are treated as separate syncable libraries.

So I have my master iTunes library as my iMac syncing Music, Playlists, Podcasts and Videos and my laptop is only used to sync Outlook Calendar and Contacts. It works flawlessly and means I can quickly sync new unwatched TV Shows and Podcasts and I don’t have to constantly be syncing my iTunes libraries. Nice!

I installed Leopard a few days ago on my iMac at home and tonight I tried to Sync my iPod Touch for the first time since the upgrade (which went smoothly).

The iPod charged but iTunes just wasn’t picking it up. I tried different cables, different iPods and quitting iTunes/restarting the machine to no avail.

Quick search on Google and was told to re-install iTunes which I did and now it’s all fine.

Apple ain’t all that perfect!

Got back tonight to find our Apple TVs telling us about an update. Seems like Apple are pushing the updates to existing devices. Around 5 minutes later and I can now:-

- Buy Music, TV Shows and Videos
- Rent Movies and HD Movies
- Download outstanding purchases
- Use Apple TVs as AirTunes speakers

The first three are significant and expected as this was all announced at MacWorld however the last option was a bit of a surprise. It seems the new software update has turned Apple TVs into remote speakers via AirTunes - nice!

This is actually a really significant feature because with the release of the official SDK we could end up seeing apps for iPhone/iPod Touch devices that would let you see and control what music is playing on your iTunes enabled computers/Apple TVs.

Sonos here we come (maybe) ;)

My new 32gb iPod Touch arrived today and the upgrade couldn’t have gone smoother. I had already synced my “old” 16gb model yesterday before wiping it to give to it’s new owner today.

So I was pleasantly surprised when I turned on the new unit, was pictorially told to connect to iTunes and on doing so it told me it was a previously unconnected iPod and would I like to restore from my last backup! Nice “touch” (groan)

So a quick zap and restarted and my favourites were back on the home page and seconds later iTunes picked it up as if it was the old unit and is now syncing. Very good.

Available disk space was 29gb which is acceptable I guess and I should have plenty more space for Unwatched Movies and TV Shows now ;)

If you are like me then you have your iTunes library on an external drive and from time to time this can cause problems when you’re running other external drives OR have re-configured your hard disk as your drive letter can change and this means iTunes can’t find your music.

There is probably a more permanent way around this via some file hacking or 3rd party tool but since I only sync occasionally I tend to use an old and sometimes forgotten feature of DOS to fix the problem. It’s called the subst command.

My current external drive letter is H: for my iTunes library but my library still has files for an I: drive (named after iPod and used sometime ago) and so the other day I hit this problem whilst synching some movies to my Touch. I could of rebuilt the whole library and reimported but I chose to use this simple fix.

Basically you run a dos prompt and in my case type

SUBST I: H:\

and this creates a new duplicate drive under my computer which is the same as the original drive. Now all you do is quite iTunes and restart it and all your music and videos will be found again.