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

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.

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.

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.

LaunchBar, the super cool application launcher, has saved me hours each year in productivity improvements. At it’s simpliest LaunchBar lets you launch applications on your Mac without you ever having to lift the keyboard. However to call this program a mere application launcher does it a great disservice. Where LaunchBar really shines is in all of the things you can do in addition to launching applications.

I started thinking about all the cool things that I do with LaunchBar and the more I thought about it the more new ideas came my way.
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Below is a list of all the awesome things you can do with LaunchBar that you might not of realized. I describe each item along with the shortcut command to perform the action. Remember for each of these actions you need to first invoke LaunchBar (Option+Space).

Application Launcher

1. Ok, we’ll start with the basics. LaunchBar is an application launcher

If you are unfamiliar with LaunchPad it works like this. You type a keyboard shortcut to invoke LaunchBar, then in the LaunchBar window you begin to type a command. Press return and the command is carried out. So, in my setup if I want to launch Safari I would type:

• Cmd+Space
• Type Safari
• Press Enter

What’s cool about LaunchBar is that it learns which commands I use most frequently. After using Safari a few times from LaunchBar I will likely only need to type “S” rather than “Safari” to launch Safari.

If you are a heavy Spotlight user you might be saying “So, what. I can do that with Spotlight.” True, but LaunchBar can do so much more. Read on for the rest of the list.

2. In addition to Applications, you can launch System Preference Panes by invoking LaunchBar (Cmd+Space) and typing the name of the preference Pane

3. You can also run Terminal commands – Type Run and press SPACE then type the name of the Terminal command (i.e., top)

Control iTunes

LaunchBar is great if you use iTunes for your music library. Without your hands leaving the keyboard you can:

1. Start Playing iTunes – iTunes – Play
2. Jump to the Next Song – iTunes – Next Song
3. Jump to a Previous Song – iTunes – Previous Song
4. Rate iTunes Songs – Rate Song
5. Find a song in your iTunes Library – Type the name of the song
6. Then jump to the album that the song belongs to. – Type the name of the song then press the right arrow
7. Create a Genius playlist around the song that is playing – Type Genius
8. Increase your Mac speaker volume – Type Increase Volume
9. Decrease your Mac speaker volume – Type Decrease Volume
10. Mute your speakers – Type Toggle Mute
11. Unmute your speaker – Type Toggle Mute

Navigate Your Mac

LaunchBar makes it simple to move around the files and folders on your computer. The hyperlinks will take you to some 3rd party scripts that will perform the specified action.

1. Open a specific folder in Finder – Type the name of the Folder
2. Navigate that folder using the arrow keys
3. Switch between running applications – Invoke LaunchBar (Cmd+Space) then press Cmd+Space repeatedly and you’ll see it select each application
4. Open a specific folder in Terminal – Type the name of the Folder then Tab and Select Terminal
5. Add spotlight tags to files or folders
6. Look at your clipboard history – Type Clipboard History then press the right arrow
7. Pick an item in your clipboard to paste – Follow 14 then use the up/down arrow to select the item. Press enter will copy it to the cursor location.

Control Your Mac

1. Take a screen shot – Type Screen
2. Quit an application – Type Quit
3. Quit all the running applications in your system – Type Quit All
4. Switch to the Login Window – Type Login
5. Switch Users – Type in a username and press Enter
6. Logout – Type Logout
7. Empty the Trash – Type Empty Trash
8. Open the Trash – Type Open Trash
9. Check the date – Type Date
10. Then copy it to the clipboard with Cmd-C
11. Eject a DVD – Type Eject

Access the Internet

1. Get your IP Address – Type Show IP Address
2. Tweet
3. Create a tiny URL – Type URL
4. Search Google – Type Google then press Return. Type in your search query and press Return. This takes advantage of the Search Template feature of LaunchBar. With it, you can create custom searches for your favorite websites. For example you can
5. Search Lifehacker by creating this template – http://lifehacker.com/search/*
6. Start playing a station on Pandora with this template – http://www.pandora.com/#/stations/create/*
7. Look something up in Wikipedia – Type WIK select Wikipedia and press the SPACEBAR

Control Applications

1. Create iCal Events – Type the name of your calendar and press SPACE. Then enter description @ date [and time]
2. Update your todo list – Type the name of your calendar and press SPACE. Then enter description
3. Email a document – Type Send File
4. Send an email to an individual – Type the name of a contact, press SPACE, highlight an email address and press return.
5. Open a web browser to a specific location – Type the name of a website. When you type the dot (.) LaunchBar will switch to a browser search box.
6. Search your browsers history – Type the name of a website
7. Get the definition of a word – Type Dictonary then press SPACE, then type your word.
8. Remind yourself to pickup a pizza
9. Lock your computer and put it to sleep
10. Quickly send an IM message
11. Sync your iPhone

Conclusion

That’s how I use LaunchBar. What’s so great about this program is that it can be tailored to the behavior of each user. If you use LaunchBar, we’d love to hear in the comments how you use it. If you don’t yet have LaunchBar, what are you waiting for?

Please help us spread the word by Retweeting this article.

I’m in love with my new Apple TV so it shouldn’t be too surprising that the last few posts have been video related. I’ve talked about Handbrake before. It’s a great one stop application for ripping and converting your DVD collection to a number of Mac friendly formats. The other day it received a major overhaul.

While not apparent on the Handbrake website this new version adds some great tweaks to the existing feature set including:

• BluRay disc structure support. (No decryption support)
• Updated Libraries (x264, ffmpeg)
• SSA Subtitle support. (Including burn-in)
• MP3 audio now supported in MP4 files (Note: Limited Player compatibility)
• VOBSUB subtitle now supported in MP4 files (Note: Limited Player compatibility)
• Updated Presets for newer devices and better quality
• AC3 encoding support.
• Improved DVD Main Feature detection (when using dvdnav)
• Universal audio downmix support (all audio types can be downmixed)
• Point*to*Point encoding (second or frame start and end times)
• Peak framerate option (Capped VFR)

All GUIs

• Updated x264 Advanced Panel
• Video Quality Slider drops % value and only shows RF for x264
• Batch Scan (Scan Multiple files at once. N.B: Does not include multiple VIDEO_TS folders / Image files)
• Many Bug fixes
• Many Tweaks to improve usability.
• Ability to edit queue jobs

Mac GUI

• New Audio Panel supporting >4 Audio Tracks
• VLC detection in /Applications and ~/Applications
• Multiple instance support

The ability to read the Blu-ray disc structure. This allows Handbrake to rip Blu-ray discs much easier than it did before. It still won’t decrypt them but there are other tools for that.

There are a number of reasons you would want to rip your DVDs to your Mac. When you rip your collection onto your Mac you can load it into iTunes, copy it to your iPod, iPad or iPhone, play it via Front Row or stream it to your Apple TV. Whatever the reason, before your go and purchase software to help your rip your disks take a look at this list of FREE tools.

VideoLAN – VideoLAN (VLC) is a free media player that can pretty much play every format you throw at it including DVDs. You generally need this as part of your ripping tool chain because other programs like Handbrake and Fairmount use VLC to decrypt DVDs

Fairmount – Fairmount is a free program that will mount DVDs in a way that allows you to rip the content off the disc. Normally if you try to copy files from a DVD it will fail because DVDs are encrypted to prevent you from copying the files. Fairmount uses VLC to “mount” the DVD as an unencrypted disk image.  Fairmount is a free utility that comes with DVDRemaster. You can download the demo and continue to use Fairmount after it expires.

MetaX -MetaX is a tagger for MP4 files. It will allow you to lookup the names of DVDs on multiple websites and import the DVD information as metadata on your MP4 file. This will allow the content to properly show up with artwork and descriptions in Apple TV, and iTunes.

Handbrake – Handbrake is an open source transcoder that will take a video file in one format and convert it to another format. This is typically used to rip a DVD to an Apple compatible video file. If you want to use other tools with Handbrake you may also need to download HandbrakeCLI, a version of Handbrake without the GUI.

MakeMKV – MakeMKV will read and decrypt DVDs and Blu-Ray DVDs.

Elgato Turbo.264- If you are ripping a lot of discs you should invest in this piece of hardware. It’s basically a USB plug that will speed up the conversion of your DVDs to Apple compatible file formats.

Automator – Automator is a scripting tool that comes with OS X. It allows you to build workflows to help you convert video. It basically can be used to tie the various tools together to make the conversion process automated.

If you know of any other tools to rip DVDs that you just can’t live without, let us know in the comments section.

I use Handbrake to rip DVDs into the Apple TV version 2 format. For a DVD this is generally a pretty straight forward process. For TV Shows this is a manual process and is quite a pain.

To further complicate things, I’m a fanatic about making sure my files are tagged properly so they show up in the correct categories in iTunes. If you go through this step then finding them in an Apple TV works really well. The problem is that you need to use another set of tools to tag your files. This is yet another manual step and is quite a pain.

I spent some time scouring the Internet for a solution. I knew someone had to have cracked this problem. I found it and it really rocks. There is a tutorial on this over at Mac Rumors. In a nutshell, the solutions is to use Automator to script the process of ripping DVDs, encoding them to the appropriate format and then tagging them. Here is the basic process.

I’ve used these Automator workflows to begin ripping my collection and it works really well. I load the DVDs into my system during the day and then I run the encoders at night when I’m not using my Mac. The next morning I have fresh MP4 files ready to go to my media server.

I still have a few more steps to go. I need to write an Automator workflow to copy the files to my Media Server and then automate adding them to iTunes. I’m inspired by the scripts that the author wrote. It really shows how you how you can use Automator to build applications to solve complicated problems.

Note for OS X 10.5 Leopard Users

The author of these scripts built them for 10.6. If you are still using 10.5 you will need to make some changes. Most notably, you will need to move the automator workflows.

The workflows are in ~/Library/Services. They need to move to ~/Library/Workflows/Applications/Finder. Once you do this then you can click on a file or folder in the Finder and have the Batch Rip actions show up in the Automator window.

I’ve been using the password manager 1Password for nearly a year now. I’ve mentioned many times how it’s a great way to keep all of your passwords in one place. This morning, while browsing through the list of passwords, I realized it had a different use.

Over the last year, I’ve accumulated over 300 online accounts. My situation may not be typical, but as I was looking through the list, I realized I couldn’t remember why I even used some of these accounts. It was time for an audit.

Here’s what I did.

1. Sorted the account list by date.
   I wanted to see if there any accounts I could just get rid of. I added a tag to each of the ones I didn’t care about anymore. I also tried to tag the accounts with a category. My categories are pretty coarse. I use some tags specific to my day job, Social Networks, Tools, Traveler Programs, Game Sites, Blogs and the new category, Unused. Any sites that I’m no longer interested in, I tag Unused.
2. Sort by password
   Not all password manager let you do this but 1Password displays the passwords in a list as a series of colored bars from Red to Green. You want to make sure that you are using secure passwords. Passwords listed in Red or Yellow will need to change.  I go through each account and update the passwords to something more secure.
3. Sort by Location
   For some reason I have duplicate account information for some domains, sorting your password list by location helps you identify them.
4. Print a paper copy
   A lot of people, myself included often forget to keep a physical copy of your passwords. Why might you want to do this? Well, not to get morbid but if you get hit by a bus, is someone going to be able to get to your account information to help tidy up your affairs? A physical copy of your password list kept in a safe will eliminate this problem.

After you’ve gone through these four simple steps, the next step is to eliminate. Go to the passwords tagged Unused. It’s time to prune your footprint. This isn’t always an easy process. For each of the websites you’ve identified, go to the site itself and search for delete account. One easy way to do it is to use this handy Google Search.

 site:sitename.com delete account

This will likely return the appropriate information on how to remove your account.

Don’t delete the account from your password manager yet. After you’ve gone through this exercise, you want to go back to these sites in a few weeks to ensure that they did delete your account.

There you have it. A few simple steps to identify and possibly cleanup your online footprint. If you have any tips for how you keep your identity clean, post it in the comments.

Audit the password quality. In the account list, you can sort your passwords by field.

I’m a big fan of taking screenshots as a form of communication. It’s generally way easier to take a screenshot of an error message and paste it into an email then type it in.

I’ve mentioned before that it’s pretty simple to do this with Grab and the built in keyboard shortcuts in OS X. Grab is great for taking a screenshot. Often times, I need to make some markup in the screenshot to highlight a particular area. Grab doesn’t let me do this.

I just came across a new application called Skitch which allows me to take screenshots, add comments to them and easily share them online. Best of all, it’s free. Rather than have me try to explain how cool it is, check out this quick 3 minute video they created showing how powerful this tool is.

Regular readers of this blog might swear I work for the folks at 1Password. Honestly, I don’t! It is just one of my favorite OS X applications.

I’m also gradually loving Google Chrome. It’s fast compared to Firefox and is developing a rich ecosystem around plugins. The only thing keeping it from becoming my primary browser was the lack of support for 1Password.

All this changed about  today when I discovered that Agile Web Solutions created a 1Password Chrome extension. I don’t believe it was very well publicized so I’m hoping this post remedies it.

It’s a little rough around the edges but you can download the 1Password Chrome Plugin here.

Update – The Chrome plugin is now available as part of the 1Password download release. When you purchase 1Password or get an update you’ll get the plugin.

Have fun!

I’ve mentioned my favorite password manager 1Password on Learning OS X a few times before. It’s a great tool to help you keep your online identity secure. The downside to using a password manager is all of your passwords are kept in one place. Well, with the help of another great application Dropbox, that is no longer an issue.

Dropbox is a tool that allows you to easily create shared folders across computers and across the internet. The service comes in free and paid varieties. I use it to keep my office and home Macs in sync. With it, I never have to worry about leaving files in the office, it’s always available for me wherever I go.

You might be able to see where I’m going with this. Dropbox will synchronize files between multiple computers. If I store my 1Password keychain there, it will sync between each of my computers. Follow the directions below and you too will be syncing your keychain between multiple computers in no time.

Install Dropbox

It’s quick and easy, go to the Dropbox website, create an account, install the client and you’re off and running

Move your 1 Password Keychain to your Dropbox

Make sure your 1Password keychain is setup as an agile keychain. Start 1Password, click the 1Password > Preferences menu to open the Preferences window. Click the Keychain tab and click the Switch to Agile Keychain Format button, shown here:

Then, move your keychain by clicking 1Password->Preferences->General and selecting the Move button. Browse to a folder inside your Dropbox directory and select “Move to Selected Folder.”

That’s pretty much it. When you click the Move button, Dropbox in the background will move the file out to the Internet. After a few seconds, the file should appear on your second Mac in its Dropbox. Click it and it will open inside 1Password. This will then tell 1Password to start using this file for the keychain.

Pretty simple way to connect two great tools. If you have any other creative uses for Dropbox, please tell us.

LaunchBar is a kick ass OS X application. How’s that for a lead-in?

So now that I have your attention, I have to tell you about my new favorite OS X application. LaunchBar is a swiss army knife application launcher. If you have used Quicksilver to quickly launch applications on your Mac, you should know that the original author of Quicksilver now recommends LaunchBar.

LaunchBar gives you instant access to files, applications, bookmarks, address book entries, basically anything you might need quick access to throughout your day, all without lifting your hands from the keyboard.

Rather than spend time reinventing the wheel. This post shows some tutorials from the a German blogger which should give you some sense of the power of LaunchBar.

This first video gives you an overview of LaunchBar, compares it to Quicksilver and explores some of it’s main features.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=mqdhCK5D6DY

For the rest of the series, check out his blog.