I recently purchased the box set of Malcolm In The Middle. I love this show! It was always so funny, and those kids, OMG what horrible kids they were. However, whilst the show was fantastic, the quality of the DVD video was horrible, especially when I viewed it on my new 4K UHD TV.
Seriously…WTF Hollywood?
I paid $140 bucks for these discs, and there are more artefacts in the video than even Howard Carter can handle! (A little Tutankhamun humour there)
Thankfully, we can fix this with a free program called Handbrake. At the time of writing the current version of Handbrake is v1.6.1. You can download your copy HERE.
ProMovie is a fantastic app for your iPhone that takes recording video to a new level. It has a host of professional features that allow you to fine tune many aspects of video recording, and goes way beyond the capabilities go the built in Camera App. You can check it out on the ProMovie Recorder web site. Note, this is not a free app, but it is worth every penny!
After not using it for a short while, I went in today only to discover that I no longer had the ability to zoom or movie between the wide angle, telephoto and normal lenses on my iPhone 13 Pro. I guess some things may have changed in a recent update. I found this quite frustrating. I was not able to find the answer online either. But after a great deal of messing around I figured it out.
To get the zoom and wide angle working again, click the settings icon, it looks like a little gear.
This will open a menu on the screen – select “Camera”
Another menu will appear, and it is in here that you can select which lens to use.
I selected “Triple”, which gave me back the ability to use all three lenses again, and choose from ultra wide angle and zoom al the way through telephoto. You can also lock in on a specific lens if you choose.
Has Microsoft Office Excel ever confronted you with the error dialogue box that says “To do this, all the merged cells need to be the same size” when you are trying to sort your columns and data? It was driving me crazy, but a little dig into the documents settings revealed the culprit. To solve it just click the little triangle in the top left hand corner of your spreadsheet once to select the whole document.
Then right click on it to reveal some options and select “Format Cells”
This will open another menu with six tabs. Select the “Alignment” tab. Once selected, find the “Merge Cells” option.
Once you have found it, click it a few times until the box is empty.
Once the check box is empty, click “OK” and you are back in the game!
Have you ever had a large USB drive that only shows 200mb when you plug it into your Windows computer? Frustrating isn’t it!
And what makes it worse is that nothing you try in the “Format” utility will change it – it always says 200mb in the capacity drop down.
The reason this happens is that in some stage in the USB Drive’s life it has been plugged into a Mac, and it has done “Mac Things” to the drive. Thankfully, there is an easy way to fix it.
Different volume levels in videos can be a real pain. I have a folder with dozens of music videos that I like to watch from time to time, and often one song will be very quiet and I need to raise the volume to hear it, then the next song will blow the speakers apart because it is so loud.
Sound Normailzer fixes all of that by adjusting the volume of each video to be the same – so you can set your volume once then sit back and enjoy your videos.
The program seems to be built on, or at the very least modeled after MP3Gain Express For Mac, so for those of us who have normalized our music collection, the interface and simple usability will be very familiar.
Just drag and drop your video files into Sound Normalizer, and it will start analyzing the volume levels.
Once analysis has finished, you will see the results listed. It shows you the current dB rating of the track, and the amount of gain it needs to apply or subtract to achieve the desired dB level. The desired level is set by default 89dB which is pretty much the standard most people will want. You can adjust this if you want to, but I advise leaving it alone.
If you are happy to proceed and make the changes to your videos, press “Apply Gain” in the bottom right hand corner, and Sound Normalizer will start fixing up your videos.
The good thing is that it doesn’t actually adjust your original video, it adjusts a copy, and saves it to a new location which can be selected in the preferences. The new copy’s file name is appended with the normalization target dB, which in most cases will be 89dB.
Sound Normalizer works with all of the most popular Video AND Audio file types.
Video formats such as MP4, MKV, FLV, AVI, RMVB, WebM, 3GP, TS, M2TS, MTS, MOV, WMV, MPG, DivX, etc.
Audio formats such as MP3, WMA, AAC, AC3, AU, M4A, MMF, OGG, FLAC, WAV, MP2, etc.
Sound Normalizer is not free however, but it is well worth the $7.99 price tag. Grab your copy today in the app store, or find out more on Sound Normalizers Preview Page HERE.
Like millions of other Apple/iPhone users around the world, I turned on Apple Music. Immediately, my whole music collection turned on its head. I had duplicate playlists, song files went missing and couldn’t be located, songs were renamed incorrectly, and music I had on my phone that is not in the Apple music library disappeared. Like most other musicians, I had a lot of music from my own bands there, and lots of music from fav’s who shunned the streaming service, like Prince. This music was ALL gone, and no matter what I tried to do, I just couldn’t get it back onto my iPhone. I tried to click the upload button next to affected tracks in iTunes to supposedly load them to iCloud, and it never worked. I could never get those tracks back onto my phone.
As time went on I grew to like the broad range of tunes available in Apple Music, and I came to accept that I just wasn’t going to have that old music on my phone anymore.
Over the weekend, I did a back up on my wife’s phone, and she asked for a specific playlist we have to be added. As she did not want to use Apple Music when it launched, I was able to click the playlist in iTunes, and sync her phone, and she had the music quickly and easily. It made me so angry that I decided enough was enough. I wanted control of my music back.
After lots of fruitless Googling, I was finally able to figure out what the issue is, and it is not Apple Music at all. It is “iCloud Music Library” that causes all of the problems. All Apple Music does is give you access to over a million songs, but iCloud Music Library tries match all of your music with songs in Apple’s collection, and then give you access to those tracks on your devices. In theory it sounds like a great idea, that should save drive space and give you high quality tunes. In the real world though, it is a poorly developed, rushed out, cacophony of errors that ruined my music collection. If you listen to mostly main stream music your issues might not be so bad, but if you have lots of live music, rare music, old vinyl you have converted yourself, or in the case of musicians your own original music, iCloud Music Library will mismatch, grey out, and in the some cases, remove music entirely from your device. And, no matter what you do, you will not be able to put it back.
**DISCLAIMER** – I TAKE NO RESPONSIBILITY FOR YOUR MUSIC COLLECTION IF YOU DECIDED TO FOLLOW IN MY FOOTSTEPS! PROCEED AT YOUR OWN RISK! THIS ARTICLE EXPLAINS HOW I GOT MY COLLECTION BACK TO WHERE I AM HAPPY WITH IT – THESE RESULTS MAY NOT BE SUITABLE FOR YOU.
In the end, it really only took one simple step to end this misery, regain control of what music is on my phone, and still have access to songs not in my collection via Apple Music.
I Turned off “iCloud Music Library” on my phone.
I went to settings and selected music:
Then I turned “iCloud Music Library” off, and got control of my Music Collection back!
Now, doing this is not without its perils, it turns your iPhone music collection on it’s head again, just like it did when Apple Music turned it on. A large majority of my music disappeared immediately, as it was matched (poorly) with music in Apple’s cloud. Thankfully, all of my original playlists before Apple Music were still on my Mac Pro, so when I did my first sync after flipping the switch, and I was able to select which music I wanted myself again, ALL of my music pre Apple Music was back! My 80’s Hairbands playlist went from 230 songs back up to its original 400. And lo and behold, the Gold Album was there as well.
The Down Side to switching off iCloud Music Library – All of the tunes I added to my iPhone collection from Apple Music had disappeared. Playlists containing Apple music disappeared. The ability to click the plus “+” button and save a song to my phone is no longer available. I can still search for and play any song on Apple Music, but I can’t add those songs to my device or use them in playlists, because Apple is a big whiny greedy baby!
Waaaaa – You cant save this song to your phone cos we want you to use
iCloud Music Library – Waaaaa-Ha-Haaaaa!!!! NEWSFLASH APPLE – Not everybody wants to sync their computer playlists to their iPhones and vice versa!
The bottom line is I now have control again, I have all of my favorite music back on my device, and I can control what is on there and what is not. I have lost a lot of functionality with Apple Music, and it is a small price to pay in my opinion, because I can still listen to those songs, and I finally have The Con!
Lionel Ritchie – Now a member of Warrant – Thanks Apple Music!
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