iPhone as eReader

Your iPhone is an eReader! It can read eBooks: ordinary books published in downloadable, digital form. All you need is the right iPhone eReader app for the books you want to read.

I have four eReader apps so far. Before talking about them individually, I'd like to mention that all these apps present eBooks with text that is formatted for easy reading on a handheld device. That means that you are not looking at tiny reproductions of the pages in the printed version of the book. Instead, the text is "re-flowed." You see artificial "pages" with however much text can fit on the iPhone screen, no more, no less.

Most of the apps give you the option to choose what font the text is in, how big the text is, how wide the margins are, how far apart the lines of text are, and so forth. (The Kindle for iPhone app is the sole exception; it gives you some formatting control, but it's locked into a single font.)

Now for the four apps:

Kindle for iPhone, free at the iTunes App Store, is the top name in the iPhone eReader app field. Kindle is the name of a handheld device that Amazon.com sells for $299. If you owned one, you could buy any of the over 350,000 books Amazon sells in eBook form, including virtually all of the current New York Times bestsellers, typically for a price of $9.99 or less.

If you have an iPhone or an iPod Touch along with the Kindle for iPhone app, you don't need a standalone Kindle device. You can download and read the same eBooks the Kindle eReader can, right on your iPhone.

Kindle eBooks are in a format that won't work with any device other than a standalone Kindle or a handheld device such as an iPhone/iPod touch that has the Kindle for iPhone app. There are, in addition to the Kindle eBook format, other eBook formats that boast hundreds of thousands of books. For those, I have three other iPhone apps.


Stanza is another free eBook reader app. It reads mainly free books — you don't have to pay for them — from a variety of sources. You can find and download these books by going into the Online Catalog in the Stanza app itself.

Also in the Stanza Online Catalog are links to vendors of books that do cost actual money. Right now one of the most popular eBooks-with-a-price is Dan Brown's The Lost Symbol, which you can get for $9.95 by pointing the Stanza Online Catalog to BooksOnBoard. Using eReader (see below), I recently bought another version of the same book for $9.99. (I have seen the hardcover edition — list price $29.95 — on sale at a bricks-and-mortar Barnes & Noble for 40% off, at $17.97. You can buy the hardcover edition online at Amazon right this minute for $16.17. An eBook price of under $10 is a pretty good deal.)

The maker of the Stanza app is LexCycle. LexCycle is owned by ... guess who ... Amazon, makers of Kindle!

Stanza supports a wide range of eBook formats. If you click on this link, you can get a quick look at many of the main eBook formats that are in existence. Stanza supports most of them, but not all. The catch is — and this is a very important catch — Stanza does not support any format (other than the so-called eReader format; see below) when there is DRM protection involved. And it supports eReader DRM protection only on the iPhone/iPod touch, not in its desktop version.

What is DRM protection? DRM stands for "digital rights management," tech talk for copy protection. If you buy a Kindle eBook from Amazon, for instance, it will typically (but not always) be DRM-protected, which means you can't copy it to your spouse's iPhone. DRM-protected eBooks are usually encrypted, such that you have to enter a code such a a username/password combination to make them readable.

So there are two general types of eBooks. Most or all recently published eBooks have legal copyright protection, just as do the print editions. Dan Brown's The Lost Symbol is one of these. These copyrighted eBooks accordingly cost you money to buy and are DRM-protected and encrypted.

The other type of eBook is free of charge and not DRM-protected. Classic books that are old enough to no longer be copyright protected are the stars of this category. Their eBook versions typically have no DRM protection. Often they are in the ePub format, an open format that Stanza and some other iPhone e-Reader apps (but not Kindle for iPhone as far as I know) can use. (An "open" format is one that is not proprietary and can be used by anyone who wants to. The Kindle format is, on the other hand, proprietary and cannot be used by eBook sources not licensed by Amazon.)


eReader from FictionWise is a free app for iPhone that reads mainly eBooks that FictionWise itself and eReader.com sell.

This part of the discussion gets confusing, so bear with me: eReader.com is the name of a website that sells eBooks that are in the eReader format and are usable by the eReader iPhone app. FictionWise.com is the name of a website that likewise sells eBooks in eReader format usable by the eReader app.

Often, these two sources sell exactly the same eBooks. Both companies are owned by Barnes & Noble ... the bricks-and-mortar bookstore chain whose online store is in competition with Amazon.com, makers of Kindle. As endorsed in July 2009 by B&N, the eReader format is designed to allow DRM protection, putting it in direct competition with Amazon's Kindle format. The free B&N eReader app for iPhone (see below) uses the same DRM-protected format, but it makes you buy eBooks directly from the B&N website, not from FictionWise.com or eReader.com.

The eReader format is discussed in the Wikipedia article Comparison of e-book formats (scroll about halfway down, or else click here). It is also called the Palm Digital Media format, since it was originally for PalmOS, the operating system used on Palm handhelds.

Files in the Palm Digital Media (or eReader) format have the .pdb extension (though when you are using an iPhone app to access them, you can't see the files as such, much less their filenames and extensions). The .pdb extension derives from the initials of "Palm Data Base." These files, when in an open version of the format that is not DRM-protected, are often referred to also as "Palm Doc" files.

To add to the confusion, the term eReader is being used as a generic term for any handheld device that reads eBooks. By extension, any cellphone, smartphone, or other mobile device that can (with the proper app) read eBooks is an eReader.

Furthermore, there is yet another eReader app for iPhone ...


The free B&N eReader app is very much like the eReader app I just discussed, except that it is hot-wired directly to the Barnes & Noble website. When you shop for books in the B&N eReader app, the app automatically opens that website in the iPhone's Safari browser. You then use the browser to buy any eBook you want and add it to the eBook library that is maintained for you at the website. The eBook will automatically sync to your iPhone as soon as you return to the B&N eReader app on the iPhone.

The same B&N eReader app exists for the Blackberry as well as for Windows and Macintosh computers, so you can download and read any e-Book that you have in your Barnes & Noble e-Book library on any of these platforms.

***

More information on iPhone e-Reader apps:

• First Impressions of Kindle on iPhone comes from Walter S. Mossberg, author of the weekly Personal Technology column in The Wall Street Journal.
• Comparing Kindle 2 with Kindle's iPhone app comes from Nicole Lee, an associate editor at CNET.
• Kindle is not the best iPhone e-reader comes from tech columnist Don Reisinger and appears at CNET. It discusses Stanza and eReader,in addition to Kindle for iPhone.
• CNET's review of Kindle for iPhone contains a link with which to download it from the iTunes Store.
• CNET's review of Stanza also contains a link with which to download it from the iTunes Store.
• CNET's description (not a review) of eReader for iPhone likewise contains a link with which to download it from the iTunes Store.
• The LexCycle website has more information about Stanza.
  

More information about obtaining eBooks:

• Kindle Store at Amazon.com.
• Browse eBooks at Barnes & Noble online.
• FictionWise's home page is its online entry point for locating eBooks.
• Likewise, the home page at eReader.com is its online entry point for locating eBooks.
• You can see what eBooks are offered by BooksOnBoard by clicking here.
  
• For free eBooks, visit the Project Gutenberg website. Project Gutenberg is an ongoing effort to make scads of older or more obscure books available in eBook form. Many, but not all, are free. The Project Gutenberg online catalog is here. Project Gutenberg offers eBooks in various formats, with the Stanza iPhone app being able to directly access, download, and read those that are in the open ePub format.
  

***
A big question is: if you have a choice, which format of eBook is best?

One important factor is price. It looks as if there is sometimes a price discrepancy between Kindle eBooks and eBooks in other formats. The Kindle edition of The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows, is only $8.40, while FictionWise and eReader.com list it at $14.00! Barnes & Noble online shows it at $9.99. $14.00 is apparently the "official" list price for the digital edition of the book, while $8.40 and $9.99 represent different levels of discount.

But considerations other than price dominate my own thinking. I prefer an eBook that I can read on my iMac, my MacBook Pro, or my iPhone. Kindle does not have a desktop version of its reader, so Kindle eBooks are not flexible enough to suit me. There are, however, desktop versions of Stanza (click here), of eReader (click here), and of B&N eReader (click here). Not only are there desktop versions of these three readers that work on the Mac, there are versions for Windows platforms as well. (And there are versions for other handhelds, not just the iPhone/iPod Touch.)

It is the combination of Stanza for the Desktop with Stanza for the iPhone that is the key here. Working together, the two can download and use eReader-format eBooks that would otherwise need to use the eReader for iPhone app or the B&N eReader for iPhone app!

The eReader format, remember, is the one that uses the .pdb filename extension (see above for more). The eBooks you buy at Barnes & Noble, FictionWise, eReader.com, and numerous other places typically are (or at least they can be) in this ubiquitous .pdb format. Typically, but not always, these .pdb eBooks are DRM-protected and require you to enter the right identifying information before you can read them. Often, that is, you have to supply the exact name (yours, specifically) and card number you used in specifying the credit card that you used to buy the eBook.

But DRM-protected .pdb-format eBooks bought at Barnes & Noble, FictionWise, eReader.com, etc., might just as well be read in the eReader for iPhone app or the B&N eReader app for iPhone ... you don't need Stanza on the iPhone for them. Where Stanza comes in handy is with .pdb-format eBooks that you get elsewhere.

For example, I got a free copy of Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen, at VirtualImprint.com. It came as three separate eBook copies in three separate formats, only one of which was in the .pdb format. I downloaded all three copies to my desktop. I then checked to make sure that the desktop version of eReader could read the .pdb copy ... and it could.

Notice that such .pdb eBooks can't be read by Stanza Desktop ... but never mind. Stanza for the Desktop will download them to the Stanza for iPhone app, where they can be unlocked and read.

The procedure for doing this can be found here. I'll repeat the key points, elaborating them as necessary:

The dedicated Stanza iPhone application, which can be downloaded onto the iPhone via the Apple App Store [click here], can download eBooks from your computer using Stanza Desktop. The Stanza Desktop application is currently available for Apple Macintosh and Windows computers from http://download.lexcycle.com. To download books:

1. Launch Stanza Desktop.
2. In Stanza Desktop, go to File->Open [File->Open File... on a Mac], and open a book or document that is in one of Stanza's supported formats. Note: The text of eReader [.pdb] books will not be displayed, but you can still use this interface to share books with Stanza iPhone. [Instead of seeing the text of a .pdb eBook, you will see "Stanza Desktop cannot read this eReader book. However, you can share this book with Stanza iPhone/iPod Touch from Stanza Desktop."]
3. In Stanza Desktop, go to the "Tools" menu, and ensure that the "Enable Sharing" menu item is checked.
4. Ensure that your iPhone is connected to the same wireless [WiFi] network that your PC [or Mac] is on.
5. Launch Stanza on your iPhone.
6. From the top-level library menu in Stanza on the iPhone, select "Shared Books". You should see your computer name. Select it.
7. Stanza Desktop will then notify you that your iPhone is attempting to connect to your shared library, and request your permission to allow the connection. [I chose "Always Allow" the first time I used this procedure; subsequent usages did not request permission again.]
8. Once you have granted permission, Stanza iPhone will display a list of books that are open in Stanza Desktop.
9. Tap on a book to download it to Stanza on your iPhone. It will then appear in Titles and Recent Downloads. [For DRM-protected .pdb eBooks, the download will not take place until the proper identifying information, such as the name and credit card number used to purchase the eBook, is entered into Stanza on the iPhone. Once they are entered, the download proceeds. The eBook that has been downloaded to Stanza on the iPhone is permanently unlocked there, so you won't have to enter the identifying information again. You just use it in the same way you use any other eBook in Stanza on the iPhone.]
   

Though this may seem like a welter of confusing detail, it turns out to be a pretty easy thing to do ... once you've done it two or three times, at least. The point of the whole exercise is that you can then read the same .pdb-format eBooks in Stanza on the iPhone that you can in eReader (or B&N eReader) on your computer. Nice!

Simplify Media 2

Some things that simplify things and make new things possible can be a bit hard to figure out. The first time you use them, they're not always so simple. One such thing is the Simplify Music 2 application for the iPhone and iPod Touch.

I got it because I wanted a way to stream my entire music library from my iMac to my iPod Touch. By that I mean that I wanted to play any of my over 6,600 music tracks any time ... without having synced them to the iPod in advance. My iPod holds just 8 gigabytes, while my music library is close to 30 GB in size.

I have a WiFi network in my home that uses an Apple AirPort Extreme base station to (among other things) connect my iMac wirelessly to the Internet as well as to a pair of Apple TVs, and I figured it could be used to stream music from iTunes to the iPod or Iphoe, too, right? But how?

Enter Simplify Music 2. Here's a video review of it. And here's how I started using it:

Basically, working in iTunes on my iMac, I first had to purchase the Simplify Music 2 app from the iTunes Store for $5.99, download it, and sync it to my iPod. That was straightforward ... but syncing of the app to the iPod didn't happen until I realized that I had not set up iTunes to sync applications to my iPod! Once I set app-syncing up properly, the app synced to the iPod as it ought.

You can also buy the Simplify Music 2 app via the App Store on the iPhone/iPod itself. If you do, you can sync it to iTunes, where it will then reside, waiting to be synced back to the mobile device if the need ever arises.

(BTW, later on in this article I talk about how, owing to a problem I ran into, I had to rebuild my iTunes Library database file, a process that unfortunately loses track of the iPhone/iPod apps in iTunes. I tried syncing my apps again from my mobile and wound up with no apps whatsoever in iTunes or on the mobile; apparently, you can sync an app "upstream" from an iPhone or iPod Touch to iTunes only once. But never fear; when I went to the iTunes Store and pulled up each of the apps I had lost, it was aware that I had already paid for them and it let me download them again, one by one, for free.)

I also had to download the Mac-based version of Simplify Media 2 desktop server software (there are other versions for other computer platforms) and install it on my iMac. This is free software. After starting it for the first time (I had already dragged it to my Applications folder and then put its icon in my Dock), I had to go through an initial setup process before it would pick up on my iTunes music library and make it available for streaming to my iPod.

This was confusing to me, so I'll say it again: you need both the iPod client app, synced from iTunes to the iPod, and the Mac server app, installed and duly initialized on the Mac. Once the server app is installed and initialized, it must be up and running for the iPhone/iPod client app to stream music. (On the other hand, iTunes does not have to be running for Simplify Media to stream music to Simplify Music on a mobile device.)

The Simplify nomenclature is potentially confusing, as well. Simplify Media is the desktop server app, while Simplify Music is the music-streaming app that runs on the mobile device. (On the Simplify Media website, the music-streaming app is called "iPhone Music.") I'll call the pair of them the "Simplify Media suite," the "SM suite," or just "SM."

There is also a separate Simplify Photo client app for the iPhone/iPod that streams photos from your (or your friends') photo libraries, using Simplify Media on the computer acting as a server. It sells for a paltry $0.99. On the website, it's called "iPhone Photo."


This is nominally version 2.n of the original Simplify Music iPhone/iPod Touch app. It contains features not in the original app — on-the-fly playlist creation and modification, for one — and you probably want to avoid getting the original by mistake, which is still available for $3.99.

The desktop server app, Simplify Media 2, has other interesting capabilities as well, such as the ability to stream from up to 30 of your friends' music collections (assuming they give you permission) and to stream your collection to those same friends' Simplify Music apps.

There are, alas, some drawbacks to Simplify Media/Simplify Music:

1. The iPhone/iPod app can't run in the background on the mobile device. Apple will let only Apple-developed apps run in the background; background apps are those that stay active when you fire up other apps in the foreground on the iPhone. This limitation means you can't listen to music in Simplify Music 2 and (say) use Safari for web browsing at the same time. When you go to the Home screen and open Safari on the mobile device, the music stops playing. You can resume playing the in-progress music when you reopen Simplify Music 2 on the mobile, but it won't keep playing while you use other apps.
2. When you re-open the iPhone/iPod app and choose to Resume the previous session, two less-than-wonderful things result. One, although the song that had been playing before picks up where it left off quite nicely, the app doesn't re-fetch the album art that goes with it. Where the album art is normally displayed on the screen, there is nothing. Two, if the previous session was using Shuffle mode (say, to randomize the order of the songs being played from a playlist) the restored session forgets about that fact. Instead, it will finish playing the interrupted song, and then it will start playing the songs in the current playlist unshuffled, from the first one in the list on. Both these drawbacks are ones I would expect to be addressed in a later version of the software.
   
3. The iPhone/iPod app can't play the old-style encrypted (a.k.a. DRM-encoded/copy-protected) tracks from the iTunes Store ... the ones that were ubiquitous before unencrypted "iTunes +" tracks took over. Encrypted tracks show up in iTunes as being of kind "Protected AAC audio file," the latter as "Purchased AAC audio files." A "Protected AAC audio file" won't stream in Simplify Music 2.
4. The iPhone/iPod app is able to connect with the Simplify Media server app by means of a 3G or EDGE cellphone network if no WiFi connection is available — but only if you have an iPhone. If you have just an iPod Touch, as I do — or did; that's changed; see below — 3G and EDGE cellphone networks are inaccessible.
   
5. Whereas the Simplify Music 2 client app on the mobile device was at one point able to display song lyrics obtained from LyricWiki, for some reason that nice feature has gone away. The Simplify Media folks give as the reason here, "LyricWiki announced that their licensing agreements with the major recording labels have changed, and they will no longer be able to provide lyrics to other applications. We are investigating alternatives to see if we can find a replacement to include in future versions." Pity.
6. I have discovered that SM doesn't handle compilations in the iTunes library properly. An album can optionally be set up to be a "compilation" by using the iTunes' Get Info window. It's a good idea to do so when each track on a given album has a different artist; otherwise, iTunes will tend to present each track that is by a different artist, but is on one single album, as if it were on a separate album. But if you (as is usual) have iTunes manage the files and folders that contain its tracks — as opposed to just referencing the files — it will put each album's files in a folder inside a "Compilations" folder, and SM will fail to utilize them right. Solution: stop calling the tracks a "compilation" in iTunes and instead give them all the same "Album Artist" in iTunes' Get Info window to hold all the tracks together in a single album. Make up an artist name if there is no one artist whose name can be used.
7. All in all, I have found the Simplify Media website, the support section thereof, and the Simplify Media e-mail support at support@simplifymedia.com to be variable in terms of my ability to get needed information. A little rooting around on the web makes it clear that the Simplify Media team are up to their ears and sometimes can't get everything done that they would like to, including answering e-mail speedily.
   

Update:

Since I filed the above, I have done some things. One is that I bought an iPhone 3GS 16GB. Now I can use the Simplify Media suite to stream music from my computer to my new mobile wherever I am, as long as I'm getting a signal from the AT&T 3G cellphone network. (Or, I believe, from the EDGE network; I'm not clear on what the difference is, but the SM suite supports both networks.)

What this means is that I don't have to be in range of my home WiFi network (or some other WiFi net that I am allowed access to, such as the free one at Panera or the public library) in order to stream music. My iPod Touch doesn't have this flexibility; for it, it's WiFi or nothing.

My tests have shown that 3G streaming works like a charm. On an extended 90-min. car jaunt to a remote location and back, I ran into just one dropout, lasting less than a minute, that resolved itself satisfactorily as I drove on. I also found (I was listening to the Beatles' Abbey Road) that the gapless playback of the connected songs that make up a large part of the album sometimes glitched very briefly between songs. But I was happy to find that connecting the iPhone to my car's stereo system through the connector provided by the Mini Cooper people let me listen to the streaming music that way, rather than having to use the earbuds.

Another thing I have done since I filed the original report is to try to add a second music library into the 6,600+ tracks I already had in iTunes. The second one is roughly as big. It comes from a friend who donated her own iTunes library to me.

The tracks in her library are all MP3s that were imported into iTunes on her Windows machine. Up to now, I've kept them in a separate library on my iMac that I can switch to using PowerTunes. With the SM suite, library switching isn't supported, as far as I can tell. So I thought I'd add the second library's tracks into my main iTunes library, thus to make them available to SM.

That caused problems. Mystifying ones.

Remember, both libraries are pretty huge — well over 6,000 tracks each. That might or might not have something to do with the problems I encountered. Basically, after I added Library #2 into Library #1, the songs in Library #2 refused to show up in the iPhone app.

The old songs were still there. It was just that the new ones weren't there. None of them.

There was also a problem getting SM on the iMac to admit that it could see all the tracks. But, after I left things alone overnight, the SM Media List window on the iMac finally did say that the full 13,266 music tracks were "available." And they were all finally present in iTunes, under a "Shared" entry in the list on the left side of the main iTunes window. (This is the so-called "reflection" of what's supposedly available on the mobile device; SM's Media List won't actually list the media files it sees, for some reason.)

However, although the just-added music was supposedly in the Media List on the iPhone itself, it wasn't. None of it. I got an indication that the status of epstewart - iMac, which is what the iPhone app calls my computer, was "updating - 99% ... ". It never got to 100%.

As an experiment, I set up an empty iTunes library and put just one album from Library #2 in it. There were a grand total of eight tracks in the test library. With some difficulty, I got SM to switch its Media List to that library on the iMac. (That was, as I say, difficult. Whoever writes the SM suite really ought to give some consideration to giving the user an easier way to send SM back to square one and reinitialize its Media List and re-update the mobile client. This just in: in an email response I got from the folks at Simplify Media, I learned that all you have to do to force a "full library rescan" is to go into the Preferences panel and, under Computer, change the name you have given your computer.)

Notice that "initializing" is what the SM server application does when it sets up its Media List on the iMac or whatever computer you are using. Another name for it seems to be "full library rescan." "Updating" is what happens when the SM server sends the Media List to the mobile client. Updating happens only after initializing is complete. (Initializing SM on the server computer and then updating the mobile device do not require you to connect the mobile to the computer physically, as would be the case if you were syncing songs to it from iTunes, by the way. iTunes doesn't even have to be running. as far as I can see, to use SM successfully. But the Simplify Media server software does have to be running.)

Also, once SM figured out that I wanted it to reinitialize/re-update, which involved changing one of its Preferences options and changing it back again, that process took surprisingly long to complete — and there is precious little indication given by SM as to why it takes so long, or exactly what it thinks it is doing at any particular moment in time. Hint: when the server has finished reinitializing its Media List and is updating the mobile client, the server's Media List window puts up a spinning "in progress" indicator; if you position your mouse pointer over it, a note pops onto the screen saying how much of the updating, percentage-wise, has been done.

My results: the good news is that, once all that finally was over and done, the eight tracks duly showed up and played back in the iPhone app! Problems? What problems?

The bad news is that I still have no idea why SM can't find these same tracks and all the others from Library #2 when I am using my real iTunes library.

More later, if I figure anything out ...


Update #2:

After some experimentation, I was able to determine that building a new iTunes Library file and adding any number of files from the problematic Library #2 to it resulted in ... SM working just fine.

So I tried making a new iTunes Library with all my tracks, from Library #1 and Library #2, added into it. And that cured all my major SM problems!

I now have a Media List with fully 13,276 music tracks in it (no, I haven't investigated why it's a greater number than the 13,266 I reported earlier). So far, they seem to work fine in the SM server on my iMac and in the SM app on my iPhone. Plus, SM's initialization and iPhone updating processes seemed to go fairly swiftly this time.

Unfortunately, I did lose my playlists from the original library ... but I can recreate those that I feel I really need. I think of it as a needed housecleaning ...

So, what was wrong?

The short answer: Who knows?

It seems that my original "iTunes Library" database file must have been infected by some sort of subtle form of corruption. Rebuilding it from scratch fixed that.

Meanwhile, all my original music files are untouched. They remain right where they were ... which is where iTunes originally put them when they were added to the original iTunes library.

Given that a library rebuild cured the major problems, I can now say I give Simplify Media 2 a big thumbs up ... but before you buy, note the minor problems I mentioned earlier, in my original report.

Duplicate Handling in iTunes

(This is a place saver to be filled in later.)

"Managed" vs. "Referenced" iTunes Libraries

(This is a place saver to be filled in later.)

PowerTunes to the Rescue!

As I said in the first entry to this blog, I sometimes find iTunes so simple, it's hard to use.

It's particularly difficult if I want (as I do) to manipulate multiple music libraries whose number of tracks (each, not collectively) can be in the four and five digits.

The totality of what I'm contending with takes up 184.62 gigabytes on an external hard drive. It comes in seven separate folders, the largest of which is 88.8 GB. Basically, each folder (along with its vast subfolder hierarchy) is a separate music library.

No problem, right?

I know what you're thinking. I could just drag each of the seven folder hierarchies in turn to the iTunes icon in the dock. Or to the iTunes window itself. Or I could use any of the other common ways to add a bunch of tracks to my one central music library.

If I did that, though, I'd wind up with jazz from one library, a classical-folk potpourri from another, and rock-blues-pop from yet another, all in the same mega-library — perhaps 50,000 tracks worth, if duplicates are included. Sometimes I don't want that many tracks (or genres) in one library: it's too hard to find what I want to listen to. But, then again, sometimes I want one single vast library with everything in it.


What's the answer? If you use a Mac as I do, the answer just might be PowerTunes from Fat Cat Software.

PowerTunes (PT for short) lets you easily maintain multiple music libraries. If you're starting completely from scratch with iTunes, you can fire up PT and tell it you want to create a new music library. PT interacts with iTunes to arrange it all seamlessly. (Of course, you then have the problem of how to populate your new, originally empty music library, perhaps through iTunes Store purchases.)

If you're not starting from a completely blank iTunes slate, you can fire up PT and it will import the information iTunes is already keeping track of for your current music library.

Thirdly, if you already have more than one current library, you can point PT at each of the libraries in turn. It will switch between them all by telling iTunes to quit (if it's open) and then relaunch with a different library in mind.

Those options are enough if I want to have several separate libraries, but I want to do more than that. I want to have the separate libraries for occasions when they are useful. But I also want, on occasion, to have everything in one big library, no matter how hard it may be to navigate. For that, there is ...


PowerTunes' Merge Capability

You are going to want to have multiple libraries, if you have PT. Only one of them can be active at a time, though. That can sometimes get in your way ... unless you take advantage of PT's merge capability. Merging two or more libraries in PT creates an entirely new library containing all the tracks belonging to each of the merged input libraries, minus those that PT filters out as being duplicates.

(Duplicate filtering is, of course, optional, but it's one of PT's features that I relish. As I said, I have libraries that overlap bigtime. Without duplicate filtering, merging multiple libraries could create a monstrosity. But I'm getting ahead of myself; duplicate filtering is a topic for a completely different entry to this blog, "Duplicate Handling in iTunes.")

Getting back to the merge capability itself: When you merge libraries in PT, you can, if you like, tell PT to copy all the original music files into a brand new music folder of your choosing, after which iTunes will manage these files in the customary way (provided the "Keep iTunes Music folder organized" iTunes preference is enabled for that library). Once you do the merge, you will then have two copies of each music file.

I am here referring to "music files," be it noted, yet when I do I also mean to include the various other kinds of media files that iTunes uses, such as Movies and TV Shows and Podcasts. They're all part of the "big iTunes picture," as I think of it. However, it's easier just to talk about "music files" rather than the somewhat abstruse "media files" or the wordy "music files plus video files plus podcasts, etc."

PT's ability to copy "music files" (et cetera) when doing a merge is something I like, but in certain situations you might want to disable PT's copying of merged music files. PT readily lets you do that, too, resulting in a merged music library full of "referenced" rather than "managed" tracks.

In my case, I have so many tracks that I prefer to have the tracks in the original input libraries that I am going to be merging be referenced, not managed. It is the output of the merge that I want to be managed by iTunes. This way of doing things means that I wind up with two, not three, copies of each music file.

This distinction between "managed" and "referenced" iTunes libraries is awfully abstract, I realize. However, it's something that you are going to have to grasp, if you want to be an expert PowerTunes user. I discuss it more thoroughly in "Managed" vs. "Referenced' iTunes Libraries.

Inputting referenced, not managed, libraries to PT's merge capability means that when, in PT, I create the iTunes libraries that will eventually become the input libraries to the merge, I need to disable iTunes' "Copy files to iTunes Music folder when adding to library" preference.

I could do that manually in iTunes, with a promise to myself to turn the "Copy files to iTunes Music folder when adding to library" preference setting back on when I am done. But PT offers a simpler way. When creating each individual input library in PT, I can drag the Finder icon of the folder(s) containing all the input music files onto the PT window's entry for the library, while I am holding down the Command key as I drag.

The result is that PT temporarily suspends the "Copy files to iTunes Music folder when adding to library" iTunes preference setting while the files contained in the folder and its subfolders are being added to the library. Neat.

If, by the way, you typically have "Copy files to iTunes Music folder when adding to library" disabled and want it temporarily enabled during an add-to-library operation in PT, you can just Option-drag the folder instead. The files in the folder and its subfolders will be copied into the iTunes Music folder associated with the library you are adding them to.


Oh, and PT maintains a separate set of iTunes preferences for each library that it knows about, so you can institute different default behaviors for each library. Each music library that PT uses has, quite naturally, its own central iTunes Library file to act as its coordinating database. This file is, in turn, associated with a unique com.apple.iTunes.plist file that resides in the same folder alongside it (along with an iTunes Music folder and several other special-purpose files). The .plist file contains the preference settings associated with this particular iTunes Library file.

By default, the enclosing master folder is named simply iTunes, though you can have PT rename it as something more meaningful if you wish. On a Mac, its customary full pathname is: ~/Music/iTunes, where the first "~" character, a tilde, represents the specific Mac OS X user's home folder. Hence, ~/Music/iTunes.iTunes Library is typically the fully qualified name of the iTunes Library database file.

You can learn more about the usual names of the various iTunes library files in the Apple support document "What are the iTunes library files?" Again, PT lets you change these files' names at will.

PT is, as you can see, a richly capable tool for managing multiple iTunes music libraries on a Mac. Highly recommended!

About This Blog

This "iTunes Notes" blog is about using iTunes.

iTunes is a lot harder to use than you might think, mainly because it's so "simple." The problem with things designed to be simple to use is that they actually hide a huge amount of complexity. I find that my iTunes use sometimes runs into problems because of all the hidden complexity.

For one thing, my brain is not as capacious as it used to be, so I'm apt to make stupid mistakes, such as losing track of the iTunes Preferences settings I want to use and either changing them inappropriately or failing to change them back when I need to.

(In iTunes Preferences: Advanced, the "Keep iTunes Music folder organized" and "Copy files to iTunes Music folder when adding to library" options make a big difference in how iTunes handles new items that you add to your library. The latter option determines whether adding new items causes copies of those items to be placed within the iTunes Music folder hierarchy as "managed" files, or whether the original files are left in place as merely "referenced" files. If the former option is checked, then the files that iTunes uses, whether "managed" or "referenced," are subject to being modified in various ways that help iTunes keep track of them for you. If you have a very large iTunes library — and I do — you may have media files strewn over multiple hard drives and accordingly may need to disable the "Copy files to iTunes Music folder when adding to library" option. If that is the case, there still may be times when you want to "Copy files to iTunes Music folder when adding to library" anyway, necessitating re-enabling that option temporarily. Once you are finished doing whatever it is that you intend to do with that option enabled, you must remember to put it back in its customarily disabled state. I typically forget to do that.)

There are also things that iTunes supposedly can do well but actually does rather poorly, such as helping you manage and eliminate duplicate tracks.

Then there are the many things iTunes does quite well ... so many of them, I'm always forgetting how best to take advantage of them.


For those and other reasons, I find I'm continually needing to "look under the hood" of iTunes to accomplish tasks that most people never run into.

For instance, I have two Apple TVs that I use with iTunes, and I find that using an Apple TV can cause (usually minor) problems that might never crop up otherwise. For some reason, just to take one example, Apple TV seems to balk at discovering some of the album artwork that nonetheless seems to be present in iTunes' database.

Again, at this point I am just trying to give you an example of why we sometimes need to look under the hood. One possible solution to the problem I just mentioned, or so I believed, was to make sure that all my MP3 files contain the latest version of the ID3 tags that hold crucial information such as the name of the track, the name of the album, etc. — (sometimes, but not always) including the album art (if any) associated with the track.

If you select an MP3 track in your Music Library in iTunes and do a Command-I to bring up its Information panel, then click on Summary, you can check which ID3 Tag version the track uses. If it's anything lower than v2.4, it isn't the latest.

I have oodles of tracks that use v2.3, and some use the even older v2.2. Some of the tracks whose album art doesn't show up on Apple TV had ID3 tags older than v2.4, so I decided to update the tags. By selecting those particular tracks in iTunes and using Ctrl-Click to pop up a contextual menu, I was able to choose Convert ID3 Tags ... from that menu and then update the selected tracks to v2.4. That worked pretty well, with the result that album art that Apple TV formerly couldn't find suddenly began to appear on Apple TV.


So then I figured it would be a good idea to make sure that all my MP3 tracks use ID3 v2.4 tags.

Big mistake.

For reasons I don't fully understand, a huge number of tracks that had earlier ID3 versions, when converted by iTunes to v2.4, stopped showing their album art entirely, even in iTunes!

In trying to recover from that fiasco, I learned an awful lot of things that I never really wanted to know about iTunes album art. Much of it is useful information, at least in certain situations. Some of it can actually make your life easier, once you learn to take it account.

I'll be discussing more about album art and a host of other fairly advanced iTunes topics in this blog.

When I say "advanced," I actually mean that this is stuff about iTunes that I personally find challenging, whereas you might find the same stuff elementary.


On the other hand, I'm not going to spend a lot of time explaining what I take to be the basics of iTunes.

Unfortunately, iTunes is so richly complex that even its basics fill every one of the several iTunes/iPod/iPhone reference books that your local or online bookstore can sell you. I have thumbed through several of these, and although they all have a lot of strong points, none of them say much of anything about the "under the hood" details of how iTunes handles album art.

For instance, I found little if any mention of the differences between how current versions of iTunes (iTunes 7 and later) handle album art and how older versions did.

Older versions, as a default, stored all album art in ID3 tags in individual MP3 files. Each file of a multi-file album contained a separate copy of the album art.

Starting with version 7 of iTunes, the default behavior changed. Instead of putting the album art in each individual file, iTunes 7 (and later versions) store a single copy of it in a separate Album Artwork folder.

If you import MP3 music that violates iTunes' current assumptions about where and how album art is stored — maybe it was created under an earlier iTunes version, or by software other than iTunes — it's all supposed to work.

But I found that that doesn't always happen.

Thus the need to look "under the hood" sometimes.

More about that in subsequent posts to this blog!