The Silicon Valley Geek

I mentioned in a previous blog entry that the iTunes store is a great way for Apple to lock in iPod users and make it costly to migrate to competitors’ MP3 players.

When you have bought hundreds of songs (or content) from the iTunes store, you will limit yourself to iPod or iPod-compatible devices (like the iPhone) otherwise those hundreds of songs will become unusable bits.

Devices from other companies will not play back this content because of various copy protection schemes (aka Digital Rights Management).

This scenario, however, only applies to less savvy consumers.

There are programs out there (both on Windows and Mac) that will allow you to convert M4P-encoded music purchased from the iTunes store to MP3, which can then be played back on any other MP3 player.

I just evaluated one such software, called “M4P Converter for MAC”, which I will refer to as M4PConverter.

M4PConverter emulates a writable CDROM drive. You use iTunes to create an audio CD using the emulated CDROM drive. M4PConverter will capture the audio data sent out from iTunes and encode that into MP3 format.

The software works. I just converted most of my purchased songs to MP3. However, the software is not that easy to use. This is especially if, like me, you don’t like to read the manual…  I was especially confused by the appearance of a little disk eject icon on the Mac menu bar which is actually a drop down list.

I hate to say this, but Microsoft got it right in Windows XP when the Start menu pops up a bubble to tell you that a new program was installed. At least, if the new program doesn’t install a shortcut on the desktop, you are reminded as to where to look for it. With OS X, you are expected to go to the Applications folder to look for any newly installed software. That, IMHO, is not exactly user-friendly. Mac gurus will doubtlessly say: “why don’t you spotlight it?”

You have to first start the M4PConverter program (it is installed by default in the Applications folder as M4PConverter).

Then you start up iTunes and burn a playlist to CD.

M4PConverter will then convert songs in that playlist to MP3 files.

QED

Readers of my previous blog entry will know that I recently upgraded from a MacBook running Tiger to a MacBook Pro running Leopard.

The upgrade has not been as smooth as when I upgraded from my 12″ PowerBook to the MacBook or from an iBook to the PowerBook. I admit that some of the problems may have been due to the fact that I am now running with 4GB of RAM instead of 2GB (on the MacBook), 1.25GB (on the PowerBook) and 1.5GB(on the iBook).

I have encountered several problems, all of which have necessitated a re-installation of applications.

Parallels

Parallels ran fine on Leopard with 2GB RAM but did not run with 4GB. Solution: re-install Parallels.

Yahoo! Messenger

YIM crashed big time with 4GB of RAM. Solution: re-install with the latest version.

HP Print Tools for 2710 All-in-One

While the printer worked fine, I could no longer connect to the scanner. Solution: re-install with the latest version from HP’s website.

VZAccess Manager

One of the tools I have is a USB Broadband modem on the Verizon Wireless network. The modem settings were not transfered over from the MacBook. Solution: re-install with the latest version from Verizon Wireless’ website. To get the installation package, I had to do a Google search to find the download page. Verizon’s website was completely useless.

Parallels

I don’t want to second-guess Verizon’s business decision making. However, one of their policies appear to be preventing people from using a broadband modem to share a connection to the Internet with other PCs. So when the USB broadband modem is up and running, all other network connections (LAN, Airport) are disconnected. The policy appears to extend to the virtual networks that Parallels set up for guest virtual machines. So re-installing VZAccess Manager WIPED OUT all the Parallels network adaptors. Solution: re-install Parallels and curse Verizon.

Final Cut Express 4

FCE is transfered to the MacBook Pro, but I had to re-enter the serial number. That’s fine.

Applejack is a utility that scans your OS X system and fixes things like permissions and file system errors.

It has a mode called “deep scan” mode that seems to break Parallels Desktop’s SmartSelect mode.

With SmartSelect, you can right-click on a file on the OS X desktop or file system and open it with an application running on the Windows virtual machine.

After running Applejack’s deep scan, I found that this feature no longer worked.

The solution was to re-install Parallels Desktop. Fortunately, this was a non-destructive install as it does not require you to remove the previous installation.