• January 8th, 2008
• Filed in
  • Apple
  • Music

If you hold all of your music on an external drive and move it around a bit to keep it organized like me inevitably you will get broken/dead/missing tracks in your iTunes library. It’s not a big deal to neglect instead of say when you plug in you iPod and that track is needed when syncing and you get this annoying prompt.

I used to use the Super Remove Dead Tracks v2.0 applescript to cure these ailments, but with iTunes 7.5 the applescript breaks and it hasn’t been updated since April 2007 so for all intents and purposes it is dead.

With some research I found Paul Mayne’s solution which involved a mashup of smart and static playlists and removing the remainder, but this didn’t work for me either because the process that should have filtered out the missing tracks just didn’t happen, but it did grease the wheels.

So I put my thinking cap on and found this ghetto-savvy way of doing it.

1. Go to your full library and select all of your tracks.
2. Get Info - CMD I
3. Set all of your files to have an obscure ID3 tag that you never use - say BPM to an arbitrary number.
4. Wait for all the tags to process - this may take a while depending on the size of your library.
5. Go to Library > Music
6. Sort by BPM (or your chosen arbitrary ID3 tag) - Change view options to add that (BPM) column if it is not showing: CMD J
7. Select Tracks with no BPM set
8. Remove them from your library.

This is a pain in the ass I know, but like I said it’s a ghetto solution. Hopefully Doug will update his Super Remove Dead Tracks script for 7.5 - but if you ask me this is something that Apple should handle on their own.

Does anyone have a better way of cleaning out the junk?

UPDATE Looks like Doug has updated Super Dead Tracks to ver 2.1. Grab it - it’s the best method.

Popularity: 19% [?]

• December 28th, 2007
• Filed in
  • Apple
  • Rants

I got a new HP C4200 printer this Christmas and I was pretty excited because I haven’t owned a printer for a long time. This printer was pretty cheap and I got it for free w/ a reimbursement from Apple. It is one of those AIO deals.

Leopard recognized it right away and I was on my way, then I ran into issues..

The main issue here was HP and Apple didn’t join forces to make sure that the OS and printer played nice. If you assumed that Apple would make sure that their “bundled” printers would work flawlessly with their operating system, you would have assumed incorrectly.

Drivers for the C4200 were in Leopard, but the packaged CD that came with the printer was pretty much useless. See this a printer that also scans, but you wouldn’t know it by the software that HP bundled with it.

GRIPE #1 - I’m lucky I could even use it right out of the gate because it didn’t come w/ a USB cable - was this why I got it for free? If I dropped $99 on it I wouldn’t be happy.

GRIPE #2 - I could print, but I could not scan and Photoshop had no TWAIN support for the printer thus rendering 1/2 of it’s functionality useless. I was sans-scanner before I did some sleuthing.

Luckily there was some action on the Apple Forums with people as bullshit as I was with the driver situation. The HP Beta Drivers: Scanning Galore Thread on Apple Forums (seems to be someone who works at HP) provides some Beta Drivers for download. These drivers finally gave me the software I needed to make some scans and also added TWAIN support for Photoshop. Supposedly the drivers when finalized will be packaged with a system software update from Apple when the time comes but there are a lot of other people out there whose HP printers still do not work with Leopard.

Now all I need is for this “USB not connected” message to go away. Yes HP my USB cable is not connected even though I am printing off reams of paper and scanning whatever my heart desires… sure.

This is why I avoid printers. They kill trees, the ink is a rip-off, and they take up too much desk space.

Here’s a quick tip for Leopard Users out there that want to save some disk space: Wipe out all the files in

/Library/Printers

Popularity: 46% [?]