by on February 13, 2011 Leave a Comment

The Secret to Troubleshooting with Console

OS X Console IconOS X is a fairly robust operating system. People that switch from Windows enjoy the fact that they no longer see the Blue Screen of Death. It’s far from perfect however and when things go wrong you want to be able to track down your problems. Today we’re going to look at one of the tools that is included with OS X that will let you do this. The Console.

When a program runs on OS X it will keep a log of it’s activity. This often happens when it encounters an error. These logs are written to a special set of text files on your Mac in the /var/log folder. Rather than force you to look at some of the UNIX underpinnings you can use the Console.

Launch the Console by opening the Utilities folder on your Mac. On start up, OS X will inspect your log files and present them in Console window.

What you are going to see will likely not make any sense to you. However, here is the secret to the Console. It doesn’t necessarily have to! Here is how I troubleshoot problems using the Console.

All of the entries in the Console are time stamped meaning that everytime the program writes a log entry the date and time of the entry are recorded. I look through the log files occasionally looking for messages that are repeated often and at a high frequency. Sometimes the log will tell you which program in particular is generating the log. Sometime it won’t.

In either case, if you see some entries which you think are questionable copy the entry and paste it into Google. If it is an error of any significance it’s likely that someone else has encountered the problem and found the solution.

I ran into this problem not too long ago with the program Carbon Copy Cloner. It’s a backup program I demoed and removed from my system. However there was no uninstall program so the Mac was trying to load the program every few minutes in order to backup my Mac. I would never of known this unless I looked at the Console.

Check out the Console even if you are not a very technical user. It’s a great way to get a handle on what’s going on under the hood. It’s also a great way to spot problems.

by on January 30, 2011 Leave a Comment

The Secret to Keeping Junk Out of Your Spotlight Results

Have you ever tried search for files using Spotlight only to get buried by a bunch of irrelevant results? If so, this quick tip should help you clean up your Spotlight results.

Spotlight has a handy feature that allows you to exclude certain directories from the Spotlight results. You can use it to exclude junk email folder, temporary directories and even Time Machine backup volumes. It’s pretty easy to setup.

First, open up the Spotlight Preferences Pane. Click System Preferences -> Spotlight.

Next, click the Privacy Button

This opens up a list of directories that you wish to exclude from your results. Choose them and click ok. You’ll see the directories appear in the Privacy list.

Hope that helps you keep your Spotlight results more relevant.

by on January 29, 2011 4 Comments

How to Convert FLAC and APE to iTunes and Maintain Your Sanity

Do you have a large collection of FLAC files that you want to use in iTunes or on your iPod? If you do, you’re out of luck because Apple only supports their own lossless format. Of course you know that already which is probably why you are here.

I too have the same problem as you. I spent hours scouring the Internet for instructions on how to convert my FLAC and APE files into something I could bring into iTunes. I found some instructions for doing this in Windows, some plugins that I could hack into Quicktime. Each solution I found seemed to be rather convoluted.

After spending a few hours on searching for this, I was resigned to write some of my own Apple Script to perform this process. Just before I started, I came across a tool that could convert all of my lossless audio files to Apple formats or MP3s. Incredibly, this program was free.

Enter XLD

XLD is an open source application Mac application that will convert audio file formats from one format to another. It’s really simple. It was written by a Japanese Mac developer so it was a bit of a challenge to find on the Internet.

Download XLD from this link and follow the instructions below.

Launch XLD

When you do, you’ll see that not much has really changed. You need to first setup XLD to convert to the format you’re interested in. Select XLD then preferences from the menu bar. This will open the following dialog

XLD Preferences menu

The default output format is WAV. This is another lossless format originally for Windows. We want to change that to either MPEG-4 AAC or Apple Lossless. Click the Output dropdown menu and select the format you want to convert to.

XLD output menu

I generally convert to MPEG-4 AAC. The default settings for this format are not that great so you may want to bump them up a bit. Select Option to the right of the output dropdown list and the make the following adjustments.

You also want to make sure that the track and title information or metadata is preserved when you convert the audio formats. This will ensure that the song titles show up in iTunes properly. Select the Metadata menu and make sure it is setup like the screen shot below.

XLD Metadata

Now you’re ready to convert. Select Open from the XLD File menu, select the File or Files you want to convert, then sit back and relax. It’s that easy. It’s also really fast. You should be finished in a few minutes.

At this point, you can copy the files into iTunes and you’re done.

There you have it a super easy way to convert FLAC files to an iTunes compatible format. You didn’t even need to get your hands dirty.

by on January 20, 2011 Leave a Comment

Save Spotlight Searches in the Finder Sidebar

This is a bit of a quickie Finder and Spotlight tip inspired by a comment I made over on the Cultofmac blog.

As you know you can use Spotlight from a Finder window to search for files. Here for example, I’m searching for all the Indie MP3s in my music collection.

So here is the cool part. If you click the Save button you are given the option to put the search into the Sidebar. Once you do this then anytime you need to run a search you can just click the icon in the side bar. Sweet.

by on January 15, 2011 8 Comments

Synchronize Two iTunes Libraries

iTunes Home Sharing feature is a great way to listen to content in other iTunes libraries around your house. It’s also pretty simple to copy individual songs. In my case though neither of these options are quite good enough.

I am a multiple Mac household. I have a MacBook Pro for work, my wife has a MacBook and my kids and I share an iMac as the family computer. I was keeping my iTunes library on my iMac but since I’ve begun using my MacBook Pro I’ve wanted to have my music there.

What I really want to do is have an easy way to keep both the iTunes library on my iMac and MacBook Pro synchronized. After doing some searching around I found that it’s pretty easy to do with some features built right into Mac OS X.

At the end of this article you should be able to sync your iTunes library from one Mac to another. [Read more...]

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