Using Quicksilver with iTunes

I tend to play a fair bit of music while I’m working; sometimes I want to hear something in particular, and sometimes I’m happy to just let the shuffle do it’s thing (although some tracks I’ll skip).

Quicksilver makes all this really easy when used in combination with iTunes’ Party Shuffle. Firstly, I have the iTunes module installed in Quicksilver. Then, I’ve set up the hotkeys Ctrl-Shift-Left/Right for prev/next track, and Ctrl-Shift-Space for pause, first, for quick skipping of tracks, mostly. Also, I have Ctrl-Shift-Up for Search Artists, which lets me quickly select an artist/album/track to play.

I get iTunes playing the Party Shuffle playlist, which does nice things like plays more popular tracks more often (although you have to rate tracks to make that work – try AutoRate).

When I want to hear something specific, I press Ctrl-Shift-Up, type an artist, select an album, perhaps, and hit enter – my default action is ‘Play in Party Shuffle’, which puts the selected tracks at the start of the shuffle playlist and starts playing. So, that music starts playing immediately, then, once it’s finished, iTunes goes back to shuffling tracks, so the music keeps coming without further intervention.

If I wanna just cue tracks, I can select music, then tab to the next field and press ‘n’, which jumps to ‘Play Next in Party Shuffle’ – that cues up the selected tracks for play after the current track finishes.

I can select more than one track using Quicksilver’s ‘comma’ trick, selecting an item, then pressing comma to add it to the list. If I’m searching for a particular track by name, I bring up Quicksilver the normal way (Ctrl-Space), type ‘tr’ to ‘Browse tracks’, right arrow, then type the track name.

Thus, I never have to do any mucking around searching through music using the mouse, and I can concentrate on whatever I’m doing, not selecting music.

Optimising performance for OS X

A seemingly unavoidable trait of all operating systems is the notorious slow-down – it doesn’t seem to matter how nicely you treat the system, after a few months it’ll start grinding to a halt (or is it just me?). This has happened to me in Windows, Linux and OS X, and it drives me absolutely crazy. The only way I knew to go back to a zippy system was to reinstall the whole system, which is pain, pain, pain.

An operating system divides the filesystem up into fixed-size blocks, which it reserves for storing files – as many blocks are needed to store each file. When you delete a file, it clears the associated blocks for later use. However, this inevitably leads to free blocks being located all over the drive, not in one contiguous segment, and that means that for the next file, blocks have to be selected that are located far apart on the drive. That means when that file is read, the hard disk has to seek all over to be able to gather all pieces of the file – slow.

A popular maintenance task for Windows users is defragmentation – this takes all the used blocks on the drive, and clusters them all together at the start of the disk, so that blocks containing data for the same file are located together, and the free space is all together. That means the system has less work to do to read files.

I’d read in several places (including Apple’s documentation) that defragmentation (otherwise known as ‘disk optimization’) isn’t really necessary on Mac OS X and probably won’t make much difference. Bollocks!

I just performed a defrag using the excellent Tech Tool Pro 4, which took around 24 hours (yikes); it made a huge difference to the snappiness of the system, though – comparable to when I entirely reinstalled the OS.

So, I highly recommend it – don’t listen to the nay-sayers, this makes a big difference. Just make sure you have the time to let the machine chug away for a day. Alternatively, just do a few hours at a time – you can stop it, and continue later.

Multiple email aliases in Mail

I’ve always wanted to be able to send email from several different addresses – for official university stuff, I want to send from my Monash address; for personal mail, from my personal address. For Tzi Software-related stuff, from my Tzi Software address. Until now, I thought one had to create a separate account for every address. Not so!

Daniel discovered this tip from Craig Swanson: Use multiple email aliases in Apple Mail. Nice!

MacBook Pro (first ed) refusing to eject CD

I have a first edition MacBook Pro (asking for trouble), and I just had an interesting run-in with the optical drive. I put in an old burned CD with a paper label (stuck all the way down, mind you – no bits sticking out), and it was making some very odd noises, although it was recognised as a valid CD.

I thought I’d just eject it and take a look, to make sure the label was stuck down, etc – it ejected, and all looked fine. I put it back in, and then the drive just made odd noises, and tried to eject again.

This time, however, it started ejecting, then got stuck and swallowed the CD again – I didn’t even see the thing poking out of the drive. This process repeated several times before I restarted the computer, holding down the mouse button. That was no help, and just continued the same process all through the boot, and continued once the machine was finished booting – it would make odd grunting noises for about 20 seconds, then attempt to eject, obviously fail, then swallow the disc again and repeat the process.

This had happened before, but not nearly as bad – sometimes the drive won’t eject a cd; strangely enough, if I squeeze the CD tray (hands on top and bottom of the MBP and squeeze together), sometimes it’ll help the CD out. I was doing this for the 15th time or so, and finally about 5mm of the cd stuck out of the drive – before it sucked it back in (which it was going to do), I grabbed it and unceremoniously yanked it out of the drive.

Just to make sure all was well again, I put in another cd, and ejected it successfully.

So, if this happens to you, try squeezing the drive. Some other suggestions are here and here.

So, what is the deal with this? How is it that a supposedly high-quality piece of machinery like the MBP can so frequently choke on fairly inoffensive-looking discs? Ridiculous.