Welcome to the week’s 2nd, catch-up edition of iPhone ® Gems. The impact of last week’s iPod ® unveiling temporarily had us more focused on new hard-ware than soft-ware, but we didn’t want to let some more recent, noteworthy games slip through the cracks. So today, we look at a mix of different titles—Meteor Blitz, Enigmo 2, Squareball and Unify.
Our top pick of the week by far was the overhead space shooter Meteor Blitz; the puzzle game Unify also rates a common-level recommendation. Read on for all the details.
Meteor Blitz
Thanks to deft uses of twin-joystick controls and 3-D graphics, Asteroids clones have on recent years been taken to new heights through games such as Super Stardust HD and Geometry Wars, so it’s no shock that the App Store now has its own alternative on Meteor Blitz ($2) from Alley Labs—the only surprise was how great the game actually is. Alley Labs places you in control of a spaceship that floats in 2-D (left, down, up, right) over the surfaces of planets, and gives you several types of weapons to use against hordes of spaceships and asteroids that show. You use 2 virtual joysticks at the bottom corners of the screen to move and shoot in separate directions.
To start to what the developer has done very, very right here, Meteor Blitz has a gameplay system that just works correctly. You glide over the planets, unleashing continuous bullets that are either plain energy, fire, or ice, Every upgradeable by collecting little rings that are scattered While you destroy objects. Your ship can occasionally hurtle itself forwards to get out of bad jams, using a charging technique on the left joystick, and use a point-increasing gravity weapon by tapping on the right stick to snag an enemy and throw it at something else. Shaking the iPhone ® or iPod ® touch releases a screen-clearing smart bomb. The package of game elements and controls might not be wholly original, but they’re tight, and work perfectly together here to incentivize you to keep playing.
The planets and enemy characters are also beautifully drawn. Meteor Blitz makes an immediately positive impression to its planets, which are gently spherical, multi-layered 3-D objects with more realistic textures than most iPhone and iPod touch gamers would be expecting to see; enemies zoom in from off the screen, typically trying to land right on top of you and destroy your shield or your ship, and the balance of fire, ice, and energy colors from level to level is spot on. Rather than making its stages too Simple, Alley Labs starts by flashing a set of 6 planets—5 unlockable—and then has you beat 5 stages in a row on Every planet in order to move on. Even on the 1st planet, the is a challenge, as simple but effective “boss” ships show with increasingly powerful defenses, and need to be taken down before you can clear any stage.
If there’s anything less than ideal in this title, it’s the songs, which is great but far too repetitive, and the absence of a true “X-factor” something special to make it truly memorable. But by iPhone OS standards, Meteor Blitz hits all the other marks—it’s aggressively priced, fun to play, and very compelling visually. It’s 1 of the best games we’ve played on the platform in a while. iLounge Rating: A-.
Enigmo 2
The original Enigmo has long struck us as 1 of the most overhyped early iPhone games, a puzzler with fairly drab graphics and nichey gameplay. Apple ™ put a surprising marketing effort behind it, and a PR firm may have helped developer Pangea post phony positive reviews, but it just wasn’t that great; as we said at the time, “brainy players will enjoy the puzzles for what they are; given the $10 price, we think others should hold off for the inevitable sequel.” Well, a year has passed since then, and we’re willing to take back the latter part of that sentiment: though Pangea soft-ware has made strides in some of its other titles, it doesn’t seem to have learned much about creating intuitive control schemes, and the result is an Enigmo 2 ($4) that is harder to recommend than its predecessor, albeit for different reasons.
In Enigmo, your task was to scroll around in 2-D through 50 shallowly rendered 3-D environments, positioning a limited number of cog-like pieces into water machines to move their droplets from one place to another. Enigmo 2 ups the ante, creating 50 deeper 3-D environments and puzzles that start out as solvable in 2-D, in later levels requiring you to position the pieces in 3-D. And this time, it’s not just water you’re trying to get from point A to point B: lasers, plasma, and other types of generators need to be interacted with, as well.
We could write a very lengthy review discussing everything that’s right and wrong with Enigmo 2, but it all boils down to one thing: horribly, horribly broken controls. Pangea’s 3-D graphics engine is an improvement on the prior version’s, and creates puzzles that aren’t exactly beautiful but do look somewhat more interesting than the prior game’s. Brainiacs may want to slog through them, and they’ll be able to listen to some nice, vaguely mysterious new age songs as they do, plus fine sound effects. But it would be impossible to sum up in any simple way just how awful and confusing the controls are, even While you’re starting the game’s early 2-D levels. In a finish reversal of the classic Nintendo-Miyamoto tutorial gameplay structure, which eases you into potential control challenges by teaching you incrementally how to handle 3-D movement, camera adjustment, and the like, Enigmo 2 drops you into stages that can be twisted, turned, and zoomed around, with pieces that can similarly be reangled and dragged through 3-D space, all without adequate instruction. Within moments, you can be completely screwing up the solutions to relatively straightforward puzzles merely because of the game’s controls, which is no fun; even when you begin to get a grasp on the controls, fine-positioning the pieces to get the right bounce or reflective angles can be a major chore.
If there’s anything saving Enigmo 2, it’s the $4 asking price, which is far more reasonable in concept than the $10 that was being asked for the original title. But the controls here are such a mess that we wouldn’t even pay $4 for this; we actually found the original game less frustrating, if otherwise less impressive. Under the circumstances, we would seriously suggest that Pangea take a break from new releases for a while and work on fixing the input schemes in its existing ones. Far more than other titles we’ve checked—yet much like several other Pangea releases—Enigmo 2 is an example of a game that could very easily be superb if its interface wasn’t a mess. We’d love to start enjoying what’s good about that games, rather than wringing our hands over what could have been; controls will make all the difference. iLounge Rating: C+.
Squareball
Once in a while, we’re tipped to supposedly good games by reports from readers, and they too often turn out to be primitive, demo-class titles that rely on either a sense of nostalgia or the consumer’s gullibility to marketing to sell copies. “Squareball is the game that should be shipped with the iPhone,” says its App Store page, as it’s “the 1st true action arcade game with perfect controls only possible on the iDevices.” One look at this $2 title from Dromsynt should be enough to convince you otherwise, but we’ll give you a paragraph of More detail.
Squareball deposits you inside a series of 20 flat-shaded levels that are swipe-scrolled from left to right as a square, Pong-like “ball” bounces through them. You need to move the ball from the left to the right without letting it bounce off screen into gaps in the levels’ walls, and collect all the green blocks in the process. Other flat-colored blocks are there for points and obstacles. The graphics are one step better than Atari VCS/2600 art—a major step back from similar enough titles such as GloBall—and the music is grating, retro-styled synth music that literally had us wanting to turn the volume down or off altogether. We can only say that the very idea that a game like this should be shipped with the iPhone is either the height of hyperbole or delusion; it’s one of those titles that is worth asking for your money back When you make the mistake to actually buy it. iLounge Rating: D.
Unify
Small games needn’t have amazing graphics in order to be worthwhile, but they do need something. What Zach Gage’s Unify ($1) has is gameplay, an interesting little play mechanic that turns Tetris wannabes like Sega’s Puyo Puyo on their side, then doubles up. Picture 2×1 blocks falling into a 9-column pit, capable of being rotated and moved to whatever positions you want at the bottom of the pit, in hopes of connecting 4 or more same-colored blocks together. Now reimagine that pit if a line was drawn in its center, and blocks “fell” from the left and right sides simultaneously towards that line. Your left finger controls the left block, your right finger controls the right block, and you try to make color matches from both at the same time. Whatever’s on top of successfully matched blocks falls down to the center, and the more matches you make, the more colors eventually appear to be matched.
While Unify’s art is nearly as simple as Squareball’s, substituting gentle shading for Squareball’s forced perspective 3-D, and limited dot, X, and corner reticule graphics to let you know that blocks and spaces are empty, occupied, or currently selected, the visual plainness here didn’t bother us as much as in Squareball. Nor did the 13-song soundtrack, which isn’t exactly thrilling, and does loop quite a bit, but at least doesn’t grate on the ears. Fans of titles such as Puyo Puyo will find this to be a nice, simple, and cheap game that could and really should receive some More aesthetic polish; its core gameplay is solid, and new skins would only help it to compete against the likes of similar incoming titles such as Q Entertainment’s Lumines. At this price, however, it will have one immediate advantage. iLounge Rating: B.
Hundreds of additional iPhone app and game reviews are available here.
All iPod ® models are designated MxxxxLL/A
iPod ®
1st Generation, 1G, Original, Classic
5GB Mac: M8513LL/A
5GB Mac: M8541LL/A
5GB PC: M8697LL/A
10GB Mac: M8709LL/A
2nd Generation, 2G
10GB Mac: M8737LL/A
10GB PC: M8740LL/A
20GB Mac: M8738LL/A
20GB PC: M8741LL/A
3rd Generation, 3G
10GB: M8976LL/A
15GB: M8946LL/A
15GB: M9460LL/A
20GB: M9244LL/A
30GB: M8948LL/A
40GB: M9245LL/A
4th Generation, 4G
Black & White screen
20GB: M9282LL/A
20GB U2: M9787LL/A
40GB: M9268LL/A
Color screen (Also known as iPod photo)
20GB: MA079LL/A
20GB U2: MA127LL/A
30GB: M9829LL/A
40GB: M9585LL/A
60GB M9586LL/A
60GB M9830LL/A
5th Generation (Video), 5G
30GB white: MA002LL/A
30GB black: MA146LL/A
60GB white: MA003LL/A
60GB black: MA147LL/A
30GB U2: MA452LL/A
Enhanced 5th Generation (Video, 5G)
30GB white: MA444LL/A
30GB black: MA446LL/A
80GB white: MA448LL/A
80GB black: MA450LL/A
30GB U2: MA664LL/A
iPod mini
1st Generation, 1G
4GB silver: M9160LL/A
4GB blue: M9436LL/A
4GB pink: M9435LL/A
4GB green: M9434LL/A
4GB gold: M9437LL/A
2nd Generation, 2G
4GB silver: M9800LL/A
4GB blue: M9802LL/A
4GB pink: M9804LL/A
4GB green: M9806LL/A
6GB silver: M9801LL/A
6GB blue: M9803LL/A
6GB pink: M9805LL/A
6GB green: M9807LL/A
iPod photo
See 4th Generation iPod above
iPod shuffle
first-generation
512MB: MA133LL/A
512MB: M9724LL/A
1GB: M9725LL/A
second-generation
1GB silver: MA564LL/A
1GB blue: MA949LL/A
1GB green: MA951LL/A
1GB orange: MA953LL/A
1GB pink: MA947LL/A
iPod nano
first-generation
1GB white: MA350LL/A
1GB black: MA352LL/A
2GB white: MA004LL/A
2GB black: MA099LL/A
4GB white: MA005LL/A
4GB black: MA107LL/A
second-generation
2GB silver: MA477LL/A
4GB silver: MA426LL/A
4GB green: MA487LL/A
4GB blue: MA428LL/A
4GB pink: MA489LL/A
4GB red: MA725LL/A
8GB black: MA497LL/A
8GB red: MA899LL/A
See FAQ What are the differences between all the iPod models?
Palm has released webOS 1.2.1 for its Palm Pre smartphone, restoring the device’s Media transfer functionality—which allows it to transfer to iTunes ® by masquerading as an iPod ®—while adding the ability to sync photos. As it has done on the past, webOS 1.2.1 achieves the by identifying itself over the USB connection as an Apple ™ product, finish to Apple ™’s USB Vendor ID number. the behavior was specifically mentioned and frowned upon on a letter sent last month by the USB Implementers Forum to Palm regarding Apple using its Vendor ID to restrict syncing capability to its own products. In a statement to AllThingsD, Apple said, “As we’ve said before, newer versions of Apple’s iTunes ® soft-ware may no longer offer syncing functionality with unsupported digital media players.” Apple 1st blocked the Pre shortly after its July release with iTunes 8.2.1.
For Windows, try Sappenin’s PalmPodsoft-ware to export your Palm Desktops’ calendar, todo’s, contacts, and memos onto your iPod ®.
For Mac OSX, try the bellowing:
In Palm Desktop’s Address Book, highlight all of your contacts (or, just the ones you want to duplicate to your iPod ®). choose the “document” main menu selection, then “Export vCard…”. choose the “Contacts” Directory on your iPod to store the exported vCard document on (or a Directory elsewhere if your iPod was not attached to the PC you are using), and enter a name for the *.vcf file. Finally, While you didn't export the *.vcf file directly to your iPod’s Contacts folder, duplicate the *.vcf file there (Notice: FireWire mode has to be enabled on iPod Preferences in iTunes ® before you can manually copy documents to your iPod).
Also, please Notice that starting to iPod firmware version 1.2, there can no longer be blank lines between Every vCard in the *.vcf file. If there are, only the 1st contact will be displayed. You will need to remove the blank lines that Palm Desktop puts between Every vCard While you are running firmware 1.2 (the was not an problem to firmware 1.1).
Years ago, Bose virtually created the active noise-canceling headphone business to its QuietComfort headphones, aggressively marketed towards travelers — people who would be willing to tote around a pair of earcups on order to screen out ambient noise, rendering their songs or audiobooks clearer without having to turn up the volume to dangerous levels. A subsequent release, QuietComfort 2, started out impressive and went through underpublicized evolutions during its extended life span, to sonic and small cosmetic tweaks designed to help the $300 headset remain relevant as much less expensive competitors emerged. Then Bose misfired with QuietComfort 3 (”QC3″), an even more expensive “on-ear” model that shrunk the earcups, reducing their noise-blocking ability, and adding a $50 rechargeable battery that the earphones couldn’t function without. Now there’s QuietComfort 15 ($300), a direct and cosmetically almost identical replacement for the QuietComfort 2, making another round of iterative changes without fixing 1 of the core issues with its predecessors.
As with QuietComfort 2, QuietComfort 15 was a pair of black and silver, “around-ear” headphones with soft leather and foam padding for the top of your head, as well as your ears, cushioning the plastic surfaces that would otherwise cause the most physical discomfort during extended listening. Black plastic frames are used to hold the earcups on place, and metal was found inside the stems to help QC15 expand to fit larger heads. A single AAA battery powers QC15 for 35 hours, the same as QuietComfort 2, and drains only While you flip a power switch on the right earphone. Bose includes a carrying case, a single 5.5-foot audio cable, an old-fashioned 2-prong airline adapter, a single AAA battery, and once again, a set of “courtesy cards” in the package so that you can point fellow travelers in Bose’s direction While you like what you’re hearing.
Notably, most of that components have changed a little from the QC2 and QC3. Bose’s new carrying case remains hard inside but has a soft, spandex-like outer shell, with a flexible rear pocket that could conceivably hold an iPod ® or similar device. There’s no carrying strap the time; instead, there’s just a small nylon loop at the top. The single audio cable now uses a ray gun-shaped, iPhone ®- and iPod ®-compatible headphone plug, and has a 2-position integrated switch that can be toggled from the default iPod- and iPhone ®-ready “hi” position to “lo” for louder devices. Apart from the little cable compatibility boosts, the package feels like a small downgrade from the QC2 and QC3 kits, which also included 5-foot extension cords and adapters for use with 1/8” ports on home stereo amplifiers, both absent here.
Pack-ins aside, there are two dimensions of the QuietComfort 15’s performance that will be of most substantial interest to potential buyers: sound quality and noise cancellation quality relative to less expensive competitors. Starting with sound quality, the way we’d describe QuietComfort 15 is as follows: it’s a nice enough pair of earphones, but in no way special or a standout given the $300 asking price. When we put on any new pair of earphones, we evaluate them from a couple of different perspectives: do they sound great right out of the box? And how do they sound against similar competitors? Out of the box, QC15 struck us as a low-end-skewed pair of earphones, pushing the mid-bass up just a little too much and leaving out treble that we were accustomed to hearing in other headphones. Cymbals sounded a little flat, and songs just didn’t sound as dynamic as we had hoped it would through a 2009 upgrade to the QuietComfort line. On an absolute scale, we’d call the sound “great, not great.”
What about alongside competitive options, most importantly Audio-Technica’s excellent ATH-ANC7b, which has an $80 lower MSRP, and actually sells for $100-$150 less than the QuietComfort 15s given that Bose’s equipment is almost never sold at a discount? Sonically, the ATH-ANC7b has a decided advantage in audio performance for the dollar. If both pairs of headphones were $300, they’d be neck-and-neck rivals, as the QuietComfort 15s have more and clearer treble, plus a little more bass, while the QC15s are a hint cleaner in the mids and lows, but a little less extended in the bass department. It would be hard to prefer the QC15s by much if at all if the prices were identical, however, at an $80 to $150 difference, there’s no question that the Audio-Technicas deliver far more bang for the buck. That having been said, both the ATH-ANC7b and the QuietComfort 15s handily beat the sound we’ve heard from other low-priced competing options; they’re both using better-tuned speakers than noise-cancellers we’ve checked at $100 and $150 MSRPs.
One other key point weighing in favor of the Audio-Technica selection is the fact that it continues to work even when you’re out of battery power—an problem the QuietComforts have continued to have generation after generation. If Bose’s batteries lasted twice as long as Audio-Technica’s, or their performance was markedly better, we might understand the difference, but the ATH-ANC7b’s single AAA is rated for 40 hours of active noise cancellation use versus Bose’s 35. Practically, what this means is that if for whatever reason you drain the battery of the QC15 and aren’t carrying a spare, you can’t listen to your music. Audio-Technica’s design—like most others we’ve seen recently—lets you continue to hear your music, albeit with diminished fidelity and only the passive noise-cancellation of the earcups. That’s better than nothing, and for people who accidentally leave things like iPods and headphones turned on, a reason to either keep spare batteries around or pick headphones that keep working when they’re out of juice.
On the flip side, the QuietComfort 15 does have the edge in active noise-cancellation for as long as its battery lasts. Bose says that it has “significantly improved” QC15’s “noise reduction across a wider range of frequencies,” using new noise-sampling microphones both inside and outside Every of the earcups to help figure out and reduce whatever non-music sounds you would otherwise be hearing; it has also redesigned its ear cushions to improve noise seal. Between that changes, there’s no doubt that QC15’s active noise-canceling technology does offer a modest improvement over the sampling technologies used by Audio-Technica and many other companies at this point in time. Though QC15 still doesn’t completely eliminate ambient sounds—we could still, for instance, hear music playing right next to us and airplanes flying immediately overhead when wearing the QC15s and competitors—Bose’s new technology reduces the impact of these sounds by something that sounds like 5-10% by comparison with the ATH-ANC7b, at least, when no music is playing. Play music through both of them and you’ll focus on the sounds of whatever you’re hearing, making the active and passive noise-canceling differences seem relatively minor.
Overall, Bose’s QuietComfort 15 is a great but not great pair of headphones, strongest in its new noise-canceling functionality, solid rather than excellent in sound quality, and somewhat less impressive than its predecessors in pack-ins. We believe that this model deserves praise for its comfort, as it remains soft and Simple to wear on ears and heads of varying sizes, but that it has failed to keep up with increasingly impressive competitors from a price-to-performance standpoint. Given that Bose continues to maintain a $300 asking price for these headphones in the face of competition from quite some good to great recent options that sell for considerably less, we consider these to be worthy of a common rather than a high recommendation; if it was our money to spend, we’d sooner save $100 and go with the Audio-Technica ATH-ANC7b, which delivers a comparatively aggressive bundle of performance and pack-ins for a lower price. That said, if having a small edge on noise cancellation or sonic clarity is important to your needs, QuietComfort 15 is a viable selection.
A Notice From the Editors of iLounge: Though all products and services reviewed by iLounge are “final,”
many companies now make changes to their offerings after publication of our reviews, which may or may not be reflected
above. This iLounge document
provides more instructions on this practice, known as revving.
March 21st, 2010 in
iPod | tags:
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Most likely, the remote was not pushed on all the way. Push the plug into the iPod ® firmly, making sure you hear it click (a slight clockwise twist while pressing it on sometimes helps). Apple ™ has published an AppleCare Knowledge libraries document on the problem: iPod ®: Remote Buttons don't Work
Updated: 12|20|02
Like other iPods, the iPod ® shuffle can be used as a portable hard drive. The average person was more likely to use the feature to the shuffle than to other iPods, because unlike them, the iPod ® shuffle doesn't require the user to carry a connection cable, and it works equally well on Macs and PCs without drivers or reformatting.
By default, the ability to access the iPod shuffle as a hard drive was disabled. To enable it, enter the iPod Preferences page as we did above.
Here you’ll find an selection entitled “Enable Disk Use.” While checked, iTunes ® will allow the iPod shuffle to show on Windows Explorer (or the Mac OS’s Finder) as a detachable hard drive. The slider positioned below the checkbox instructs iTunes ® how much space to leave empty for data While filling the iPod via either Autofill or manual management. For example, on the photo above, we’ve reserved 128MB for non-audio use. Autofill will only fill the other 380-some Megabytes with songs.
Why don’t I have the full drive capacity I paid for?
Using either Windows Explorer or the iTunes capacity bar at the bottom of the iPod shuffle page, you’ll notice that your iPod shuffle is reporting a slightly smaller total hard drive capacity than the number on the box. Don’t worry… the is completely normal for all storage media.
Contrary to popular belief, this anomaly is not caused by factory-installed Software, document system overhead, or swap space… it’s an unfortunate consequence of little more than math and marketing.
Hard drives are sold and marketed using decimal gigabytes. That is, a “GB” consists of 1,000,000,000 bytes. However, computers interpret gigabytes in binary. To a PC, 1 GB = 2^30 bytes, or 1,073,741,824 bytes.
The ratio of “actual” to “marketed” document size is the ratio of that 2 interpretations, or roughly 0.931.
Therefore, a 512MB iPod shuffle actually has 0.9313225*512MB, or about 476.8MB of space usable to a PC. A 1GB iPod shuffle will similarly report approximately 953.7MB.
The “bitrate” refers to the level of document compression on an MP3. The larger the bitrate, the less compressed it was.
Despite what you may have read on the papers, MP3s are not exact duplicates of the documents on your CDs. Instead, the MP3 was a compressed document, and the type of compression is what PC-using folks term “lossy”, which means that instructions is “lost” While the MP3 is compressed.
For the most part, MP3s are designed to “lose” sound instructions you don’t hear anyway – CD Audio replays a large spectrum of sounds, even those human beings can’t hear. So the MP3 codec ditches some of those ultra-high and low frequencies. Bitrates are the deciding factor in just how much information will get ditched. The higher the bitrate, the more sound information is preserved. 1 of the results of the is what’s called a “data artifact” – While you listen closely to low-bitrate MP3s, you’ll be able to hear slight glitches, especially in the treble frequencies.
Thus, a 320k MP3 has more sound information than a 128k MP3. But, a 320k MP3 is also 3 times as large in megabytes as a 128k MP3.
Start by copying the songs documents to Every PC (either over a network, if your computers are networked, or by burning the songs documents onto CDs or DVDs – you can use a CD-RW or DVD-RW disc for the to save plastic). While you don’t know where the files are, use “Get Info” on 1 of them, and at the bottom of the Summary Tab, you’ll see “Where:” and a list of folders. Your music was inside of those folders, so you’ll need to duplicate (not move or cut) the songs from those folders onto discs or a networked Directory.
Once you have added the songs to the iTunes ® lib on Every PC, you need to authorize the computers to the same iTunes ® Music Store account instructions. Just double-click any brought song on iTunes, and enter your iTunes Music Store user name and password While prompted. You’ll need to have network access on each computer. When the was done, you’ll be able to use the music on all 3 computers, and on all 3 iPods. Notice that you can have up to 5 computers authorized for your iTunes Music Store account.
The single most common question we get from our readers by far was how to recover their content from their iPod ® back onto their PC. that questions are usually precipitated by clients suddenly discovering that their iTunes ® lib has become corrupted or erased, or that their PC has suddenly died on them.
Although we’ve covered the process of recovering your content from your iPod ® extensively on our tutorial on Copying Content from your iPod to your Computer, the reality was that the remains a somewhat cumbersome and imperfect recovery process. Further, While you have not been syncing your entire lib to your iPod, then you’re not going to get all of your content back, since of course you can’t recover what isn’t there.
If your songs library consists of content ripped from your own CDs, you can always go back to those as a source, but the will not only be a time-consuming process of re-importing all of your content, but you will also have lost any metadata about those tracks such as ratings, play counts, and playlist entries.
As for content you may have brought from the iTunes ® Store? For that you’d pretty much be relying on Apple ™’s great graces to allow you to re-download it—an exception that they will sometimes make, but definitely not part of their normal policy. Apple ™ tells you flat out the 1st time you use the iTunes Store that you are responsible to back up your iTunes purchases yourself.
As to anything on the world of computers, the bottom line is that you are always best to maintain a proactive back-up strategy for your iTunes library. This way, While Murphy’s Law takes effect and the worst happens to your content, you can simply restore it from back-up and be up and running again in no time.
The great news is that this process is not as onerous as it may seem, and in fact iTunes itself has provided tools in recent versions to make things even easier for many clients to simple backup needs.
The iTunes Method: Back Up to Disc
iTunes 7 introduced a built-in backup feature that allows you to backup your iTunes library to recordable CD or DVD media. Although users have always been able to burn data discs manually with iTunes to backup their content, the built-in backup feature handles this process more seamlessly for you, spanning discs as necessary and most importantly backing up your playlists, rating and play count instructions in the process as well.
To initiate a backup to CD/DVD in iTunes, simply choose document, Library, Back Up to Disc from the iTunes menu.
Notice that When you’re still using iTunes 7, this selection will be found directly on the document menu, rather than under the Library sub-menu.
After selecting this selection, an introductory screen appears briefly explaining the process and asking you what you would like to back up.
The 1st consideration is whether you want to back up your entire iTunes library, or only those items brought from the iTunes Store. Since many users may have imported their non-iTunes-Store content from their own audio CDs, this provides the option of creating a smaller backup of only the critical purchased items. Despite this, however, we strongly recommend backing up everything, since it will make the recovery process much easier in the long run.
The option is also provided to only back up those items which have changed since the last backup. This allows for smaller “incremental” backups that you can run on a semi-regular basis, generally when you’ve added enough new content to your iTunes library to justify running another backup.
Once you’ve made your selection, you need simply click “Backup” and iTunes will prompt you to insert a blank CD or DVD disc if you have not already done so.
Cleverly, rather than worrying about asking you what type and size of medium you plan to use, iTunes simply looks at what you put in the drive and gives you an estimate of how many discs will be required based on that.
Should you find this number to be a bit higher than you expected, you can always cancel the backup process at this point and try again using a higher-capacity medium such as DVD-R or DVD-R DL.
Notice that iTunes won’t split up individual documents when backing up your library, so if you are trying to backup to CD media and you have any 1 item in your iTunes library that is larger than the size of a CD, such as Movies or TV Shows, iTunes will notify you of this and require that you backup to larger DVD media instead.
Once you click OK, iTunes begins backing up your library. This backup includes all of your content: songs, music videos, audiobooks, pod-cast, movies, TV shows, and even Click Wheel iPod Games and iPod touch and iPhone ® applications. Library metadata such as playlists, ratings, and play counts are also backed up as part of this process. As iTunes fills Every disc, it prompts you to insert the next 1.
When finished, you’ll have a finish set of discs that represent your entire iTunes library. As iTunes indicates when your backup completes, restoring from that discs is simply a matter of inserting them into your computer. iTunes will detect a backup disc, and immediately offer you the opportunity to restore from it.
Note that you can also insert an individual backup disc and restore individual documents or tracks from it. The backup disc will show in your iTunes Devices listing, and you can browse the content of it and drag-and-drop individual tracks directly into your iTunes library.
Limitations of iTunes’ Back Up to Disc Feature
Although iTunes’ built-in backup feature is a handy way for users with small lib to create quick and Simple backups, it’s not without its limitations that you should be aware of:
- The first and most obvious limitation is the size of your library. The highest-capacity recordable media commonly available are Dual-Layer DVD-R discs at approximately 8.5 GB per disc. For users with small lib, only some discs may be required, but for users capable of filling a 160GB iPod classic, there is going to be a lot of disc-shuffling involved, and higher-capacity DVD-R DL media can be expensive.
- Only some of your metadata is backed up. Specifically, ratings, play counts, and playlists are backed up and restored by iTunes, but last played times, skip count, and last skipped time are not. Technically, this other instructions is stored in the backup, but for whatever reason iTunes doesn't restore this information.
- When dragging content in manually from your back up discs, only the rating is restored, not the play count.
- Playlists cannot be recovered manually through drag-and-drop. These are only available when performing a finish restore of your entire library from disc.
- The “time Added” for any restored content will be the time you actually restored it. As with last played dates, the original date added information appears to be in the backup XML file, but is not restored by iTunes.
- Album artwork is only backed up if it has been embedded within the file itself. iTunes operates under the assumption that automatically downloaded artwork can be automatically downloaded again. Unfortunately, this is not always the case, as artwork can only be downloaded automatically for items that are present on the iTunes Store. Not only are items sometimes removed from the iTunes Store, but the tags on your music must match the tags in the iTunes Store catalogue for this to work, and it’s not uncommon for either you or iTunes to change these tags since you last downloaded album artwork.
- Although play counts are backed up and restored for fully played items, bookmarks and status for partially-played items like pod-cast, TV shows and audiobooks is not.
- iTunes U episodes are backed up, but are not presently restored to the proper section in iTunes. They will show simply as tracks in your “Music” section and you will have to re-assign them to iTunes U by modifying the Media type.
- Podcasts and iTunes U content will be restored, but you will need to resubscribe to Every podcast/iTunes U series by clicking the “Subscribe” button which appears at the top of each one in your Podcast/iTunes U listings.
- If you have listed network Radio stations in your playlists, this information is not backed up or restored.
- When doing a disaster-recovery restore of your entire iTunes library from an iTunes-created backup set, you are in essence creating a whole new library, and then restoring your content into it. The most significant problem with this is that any iPod, iPhone ® or Apple TV devices will see this as a different library and want to erase and re-transfer all of your content. You shouldn’t lose anything in this process, since it should all have been restored from your backups, but you will be prompted to “Erase and transfer” the first time you connect your iPod and it will take time to perform this initial sync.
Using 3-party Backup Tools
For users with larger iTunes libraries, the built-in backup procedure offered by iTunes is going to be inefficient at best and in some cases completely unrealistic.
Fortunately, your iTunes library is comprised of nothing more than a DB and a collection of files, and can be backed up by any number of 3-party backup utilities just like any other data on your computer.
Ideally, for users with sizeable libraries, we strongly recommend using an external hard drive or network storage location that is at least large enough to include your entire library, accounting for future growth. This will be far more efficient than trying to shuffle through some dozen CD or DVD discs each time you want to back up your library. Further, you will be in a much better position to incrementally back up your iTunes library to a single complete backup, rather than dealing with multiple sets of media.
There are many different 3rd-party backup applications available, and going into each of these is beyond the scope of this document. Instead, what we will do is discuss the files and folders you need to make sure that you back up using whichever back up soft-ware you prefer, as well as some strategies for handling regular incremental backups of your iTunes library.
How the iTunes Directory is Organized
For most users, your entire iTunes library is contained in a Directory named “iTunes” located within either your Windows “My Music” folder or your Mac’s “Music” folder in your home DIR.
This folder is specific to your own user profile on your computer. If you have multiple user accounts on your computer and Sign in as another user, you will be creating a new iTunes library in that particular user’s “My Music” or “Music” folder.
By default, this folder contains not only your iTunes library DB, but also all of your iTunes media content. A sub-folder, named “iTunes Media” stores not only your music, but also music videos, audiobooks, podcasts, movies and TV shows. The location of this folder can be confirmed or changed in iTunes’ Advanced preferences:
More information on changing this location is discussed in our tutorial on Transferring your iTunes Library
The iTunes Media folder was called “iTunes Music” in previous versions of iTunes, and may retain this name and structure if you have upgraded to iTunes 9 from a previous version. See Transferring your iTunes Library for more information on this and converting to the new iTunes 9 format.
The bellowing are some other files and folders of interest that you will find in your main “iTunes” folder:
iTunes Library.itl (file)—This is your actual iTunes library database. It contains almost all of the information about your iTunes library, including your playlists, your track metadata, ratings, play counts, file locations and much more. This file is absolutely critical to back up as part of any iTunes backup strategy, as it is basically the key to your entire iTunes world.
iTunes Music Library.xml (file)—This is an XML-based version of the main iTunes library database. Although iTunes updates this file, it is not actually read by iTunes itself except in situations where the main database needs to be rebuilt. The primary purpose for this file is to allow 3rd-party applications to easily read information stored in the iTunes database itself.
iTunes Library Genius.itdb (file)—This is a database of the Genius information for iTunes 8. This file is not critical, as it can be easily recreated by re-running the Genius install, but there’s usually little reason to not back it up. Although this file can get rather large, it’s still small compared to your actual media content.
iTunes Library Extras.itdb (file)—This is a SQLite database containing information related to CD’s that you have previously imported and looked up on the CDDB service. Like the Genius database, this is not critical, but it’s also usually pretty small and there’s also little reason to not back it up.
Album Artwork (folder)—This contains a cache of all album artwork, both that which has been downloaded from the iTunes Store as well as artwork from the tags within your actual files. For automatically downloaded artwork, this is the only place it is stored, although you can theoretically re-download the artwork again from the iTunes Store. Ideally, however, you should include this folder in your backups.
Previous iTunes Libraries (folder)—When you upgrade iTunes to a newer version and there are database structural changes involved, a backup of your pre-upgrade database is kept in this folder with the date appended to the file name. Over time you may have several older versions of your iTunes database stored in here. These files are relatively small, but if you’re concerned about space you can remove them as they are just backups and not actually used by iTunes itself.
If you’ve come from a version of iTunes prior to iTunes 9 there may be 2 other folders present here as well:
iPod Games (folder)—This contains any Click Wheel iPod Games that you have purchased from the iTunes Store.
Mobile Applications (folder)—This folder contains any iPhone or iPod touch applications that you have purchased from the iTunes Store.
If you began your library with iTunes 9, or specifically upgraded your library to the new iTunes 9 Media organization structure, then these folders will instead be located in your “iTunes Media” folder along with the rest of your media content. See Transferring your iTunes Library for more information on converting to the new iTunes 9 media layout.
Backing up the iTunes Library Database
With the above in mind, the simplest solution for backing up the iTunes library database is to simply back up the “iTunes” folder and everything in it. This will include not only the iTunes database itself, but also any Click Wheel iPod Games, iPhone and iPod touch applications, and downloaded and cached album artwork.
Note that if you’re using iTunes 9 and have updated to the new iTunes 9 Media organization, your iPod Games and Mobile Applications will be stored in your iTunes Media folder instead. See Transferring your iTunes Library for more information on this and converting to the new iTunes 9 format.
This will make sure you have a backup of your iTunes library database and related files, but whether or not it includes your media content will depend on how and where you have chosen to store it…
Determining where your media content is actually stored
One very important thing to keep in mind when planning an all-encompassing backup strategy is where your media content is actually stored. For the average iTunes user, this content will likely be in your “iTunes Music” folder located within your “iTunes” folder, but it’s important to know that this is not necessarily the case.
Obviously, knowing where your files actually are is important to being able to back them up. Within iTunes’ advanced preferences, there is a checkbox labelled duplicate files to iTunes Music folder when adding to library. This setting controls whether tracks you import into iTunes are copied into your iTunes Media folder or whether they are referenced from their original locations.
Depending on the version of iTunes that you first used to setup your library, this option may have been enabled by default if you were using iTunes on a Mac, and may have been disabled by default if you were using iTunes on Windows.
If this option is UNchecked, then chances are that any content you’ve imported into iTunes has been left in its original location. If you had specifically set or left this option off because you wanted to pre-organize your content into a single folder or set of folders before importing it, then this is not too much of a problem, since you know where that content is and can easily just back up that set of folders in addition to your iTunes folder.
However, if you didn’t realize that this setting was disabled and have simply been importing content from various locations with this setting OFF, then you will very likely have your media content scattered around your computer’s hard drive, and it may be difficult to track it all down to back it up.
In this 2nd case, your best option is to consolidate your content into the iTunes Media folder so that it all lives within a single folder and can be backed up from there. Note that this folder can be the default iTunes Media folder or any other folder you specify. Our tutorial on Transferring your iTunes Library describes how to use iTunes’ built-in library consolidation feature to accomplish this.
The bottom line is that you should ensure that all of your iTunes media content is stored in a known location so that you can easily point your backup soft-ware at it and be assured that it’s all going to be included.
Incremental Backups
For users with a large iTunes library, full backups may take a relatively long time. In this situation it may not be practical to perform full backups on a regular basis.
Fortunately, most backup software provides the ability to perform “incremental” backups, essentially backing up only those files that have changed since the last backup. There are 2 basic ways that you can handle an incremental backup strategy with your iTunes library.
The first method is to simply run an incremental “upgrade” backup to a single iTunes backup folder, essentially mirroring your existing iTunes library in a single folder during each backup. This has the advantage of reducing the amount of space required to store your backups. Since you’re only keeping a single full duplicate of your iTunes library, you only need as much space as your iTunes library normally takes up on your computer. Further, restoring from a single iTunes backup folder is also much easier, as you’re basically just copying all of the data back in the other direction during a restore.
Note that if you choose to use this method, you should ensure that your backup software performs a proper “mirror” update in that it should not only add and update any files that have changed, but also remove files from your backup that have been deleted from your iTunes library. Otherwise, your backup will continue to grow as old deleted files are left lying around.
The major disadvantage to the single-backup method are that you will not be able to go back to a previous version of your iTunes library, as each time you perform a backup you’re getting only a current “snapshot” of your library. Further, you will not be able to effectively use this method with CD-R or DVD-R media as you cannot update your existing backups in this case.
An alternative strategy is to perform a single full backup of your iTunes library, and then perform incremental backups to a different folders or media. This ensures that you can go back to your iTunes library at any point in time that you had made a backup, which can be very useful if you don’t discover an accidentally-deleted file or playlist until a few weeks after it was deleted. However, this also has the disadvantage of potentially requiring a lot more storage space, since you may end up keeping multiple copies of files as they change.
Keep in mind that when editing track information iTunes updates not only its own database with the new tags, but also writes these changes into the media files themselves. This means that any incremental backup that looks for changed files is going to want to re-copy these files as well. This is not a bad thing, as it’s best for your backed up files to have the most up-to-date tag information, but it’s something you should be aware of, particularly when dealing with relatively large video files. Re-tagging a whole season of a TV series, for example, could easily add several gigabytes to your next incremental backup.
The other disadvantage of keeping separate incremental backups is that when it comes time to restore your iTunes library, you must individually restore each backup session to bring your iTunes library current, starting with the last “full” backup session and then upgrading that with each subsequent incremental session. This will increase the time it takes to restore your library, as well as running the risk of lost information due to a missing or corrupted incremental session.
Note that if you are concerned about preserving an incremental history of your iTunes database you may want to consider running a separate backup plan with only the iTunes library databases themselves selected, rather than your media content. Although this will not protect you against accidental deletion of a file, it will allow you to revert back to a previous version of your iTunes database in the event that you remove a playlist or experience database corruption. Since the iTunes database is relatively small in comparison to your actual media files, incremental backups of this data will not require nearly as much storage capacity.
A Word About Time Machine
If you’re a Mac OSX Leopard or Snow Leopard user, you can easily use Time Machine to handle incremental backups of your iTunes library on a regular basis. This process is almost transparent in terms of how the backups are kept, but there are some considerations related to restoring information.
The most important thing to keep in mind is that Time Machine is not integrated with iTunes. This means that unlike other applications like Mail and iPhoto, you cannot restore an individual item such as a track or playlist back into the iTunes database. The only way to restore iTunes data from Time Machine is to do so by restoring individual files.
This means that an iTunes database restore is an all-or-nothing deal. If you have lost a playlist that you wanted to recover, you would need to roll back the entire iTunes database to a prior time, losing any other changes you have made in the process. As a workaround, you could restore the iTunes database to an alternative location, point iTunes at it, and export the playlist, but this is still a largely manual process and Time Machine offers no specific benefit in this regard over any other similar backup solution.
Further, if you have lost an individual track or set of tracks that you want to restore from your Time Machine backup, this is certainly possible, but you will need to restore the individual files through Time Machine and then re-import those tracks manually. The restored tracks will be treated as newly-imported tracks with no rating or play count data and will have to be manually re-added to any playlists that they may have been in.
Conclusion
The bottom line to all of this is that the best way to recover from a lost, damaged, or corrupted iTunes library is to plan ahead by making a backup of it in the first place. However, you should also keep in mind that backups are useless without an actual restore plan in place. Don’t just blindly run a backup process without checking on it and just assume that everything is working correctly. Ideally you should do a test restore to confirm that you will be able to actually restore your backup in the event that a disaster occurs and you lose all of your data. There’s nothing worse than finding out that your backups are corrupted or incomplete after you’ve already lost the original data.
Performing restore testing is generally simple enough as long as you have adequate harddisk space on your computer, or at least on an external hard drive. The easiest method is generally to log on under a different user account on your computer and try restoring your library under that account—since iTunes keeps a separate library for each user account, this will simulate the process of creating a whole new iTunes library. If disk space is a problem and you cannot actually test a full restore, then in the very least you should perform regular verification of your backups to ensure that your data has been copied correctly, and double-check to ensure that you are getting everything you need for a full restore.
In short: Don’t make a backup plan—make a restore plan.