If your iTunes songs are getting cut off...

...you may have a very simple solution.

I just moved my iTunes library to a new machine and found that a huge number of my ITMS purchased sons would cut off at odd points in the song (but for songs from the same album THEY ALWAYS CUT OFF AT THE SAME PLACE - oh iTunes how I sometimes hate you... ;) )

Anyhow, I chanced upon a solution to this (which I gleaned from a post 30 posts deep in an apple forum) which requires you to create a new music library and simply import your previous library into it.  This sounds complicated but it is, in fact, quite simple.

To do this, I held down the shift key (either one should work) when starting iTunes and iTunes gave me a little dialog allowing me to create a "new Library" which I did right next to my old one.  Then, after iTunes opened onto this new and empty library, I simply chose File|Library|Import Playlist and located my old library's base "iTunes Music Library.xml" file and imported that - bingo, it imported everything from my previous library.

After validating that this worked, and that my music was now playing properly, I consolidated all my files into my new library folder.

Hope this helps someone the way it helped me.

By the way, I believe that on OSX you hold down the option key when starting iTunes to replicate this approach.

Cool iTunes gadget for Vista Sidebar

I very much enjoy using Vista (despite all the FUD) although it isn't particularly more spectacular than XP Pro, it isn't much prettier than any of my KDE desktops, and it's probably quite similar to OSX (I have not used OSX for years so I'm no judge of what it does/n't do excepting what I read online from people I deem at least remotely reputable. I've been seriously considering building some gadgets for myself; however, I just found a gadget I was planning on writing (thanks for saving me the trouble mysterious gadget man!)




You can see the gadget on the right side of the full size image (please excuse the code in the IDE I'm hurriedly writing a screen capture test...)

It is a gadget for controlling iTunes from your sidebar and it shows album art as well. Very nice; however, if you do not start iTunes by default on your machine when booting up, this gadget will do so from now on. There's currently no option for disabling this either (so I may end up writing one in any case.) I've been thinking of writing a 'live thumbnail' UI utility anyhow (it would use the DWM thumbnail manager and whatever window you wanted watched you could manipulate its controls from the sidebar thumbnail. May not sound useful to you, but for myself (with several desktops in addition to a multi-monitor setup believe me it *is* useful, lol...

Anywho - Enough jawing/clacking. Here is a link to the gadget:

Vista iTunes Gadget



Enjoy!