The problem

About a month ago, while at work listening to music on my iPhone 3G, I noticed that certain songs weren’t playing.  The iPhone would pause for a brief moment at the start of the song and then skip to the next one.  It happens so quickly that if you weren’t looking at the screen you wouldn’t notice it.

At first, I thought it was an issue specific to the iPhone.  However, when I tried to play those same songs on iTunes 7.x, they would also refuse to play.   Since I am almost always playing music on “shuffle” (random) mode, it’s easy to see why I didn’t notice this earlier.  In fact, I had no idea how long this was occurring.

The odd thing was that these same songs would play in other media players like Windows Media Player, Winamp and Foobar2000.  It was just iTunes, and consequently the iPhone, that was giving me problems.

After researching the problem by scouring the web, I found that this was in fact a common problem hitting a lot of users.  I read a ton of suggestions, some dating back quite a few years.  Here are some of the suggestions that I found and tried in desperation:

• Deleted the ID3v2 tag and rebuilt it
• Disabled “Allow applications to take exclusive control of this device” from the advanced properties of my sound card
• Re-installed DirectX
• Removed song from iTunes Library and Re-added it
• Completely uninstall iTunes and re-install it

None of these worked and I was making no progress.   I even tried upgrading to iTunes 8 hoping that it would be one of the hidden bug fixes.  Unfortunately, the new version of iTunes didn’t help.

Finding a solution

After quite a few more days of troubleshooting and experimenting, I finally stumbled upon the solution.  It turns out that the MP3s that wouldn’t play had out of spec MPEG headers, which I verified and repaired using a freeware tool called MP3 Validator.

I scanned my entire library of music and turned out that about 60% of my music collection suffered from this problem.  Since only a subset of these songs wouldn’t play in iTunes (but would play fine in others), it seems that while iTunes is tolerant of some MPEG header errors it is not as forgiving as all other media players I tried.  Since I”m positive these songs played on older version of iTunes 7, something must have changed under the covers along the way in later iTunes update.

After scanning and repairing all the afflicted songs in my library, all my music happily plays in iTunes (and my iPhone).

Step-by-step guide on how to fix your music

Here’s a quick guide on how to fix this problem using free tools in case you’re suffering from the same problem.  I’ll show you how to fix one song, then you can use the same technique on your entire library if you need to.

1. Download MP3 Tag Validator and extract it to a folder on your PC.  It doesn’t require any installation.
2. To start the program, just run mp3val-frontend.exe. You’ll be shown a simple application window:
3. (Optional) First thing I did was to enable the option Keep file timestamps since I didn’t want all the timestamps to change from the repair.  Go to File | Preferences and make your configuration look like this:
   
4. Find one of the songs that won’t play in iTunes and add it to the MP3 Validator window.  You can either drag-and-drop it into the main program window, or you can go to File | Add File(s).  For me, one of the songs was Stealth by Way Out West.
5. We’ll now run a scan of the file first, to see if you are suffering from an MPEG header problem.  Click Actions | Scan all. The app is quite fast and you’ll get a modal confirmation dialog almost right away.  Dismiss it with OK.
6. In order to see the results of the scan, you have to select the song in the main window, and then you’ll see status messages from the scan in the status area.

   Here is a copy and paste of the output, from which I’ve bolded the specific MPEG errors that are present in the file:

   Analyzing file "D:\Music\iTunes\iTunes Music\Way Out West\Intensify\06 Stealth.mp3"…
   WARNING: "D:\Music\iTunes\iTunes Music\Way Out West\Intensify\06 Stealth.mp3" (offset 0xa301a3): Garbage at the end of the file
   WARNING: "D:\Music\iTunes\iTunes Music\Way Out West\Intensify\06 Stealth.mp3": Wrong number of MPEG frames specified in Xing header (13122 instead of 13056)
   WARNING: "D:\Music\iTunes\iTunes Music\Way Out West\Intensify\06 Stealth.mp3": Wrong number of MPEG data bytes specified in Xing header (10711873 instead of 10658221)
   INFO: "D:\Music\iTunes\iTunes Music\Way Out West\Intensify\06 Stealth.mp3": 13056 MPEG frames (MPEG 1 Layer III), +ID3v1+ID3v2, Xing header
   Done!

7. Now that we’ve verified there are indeed MPEG header errors, let’s fix them.  Click Actions | Repair all files.  Similar to the scan we did in step 6, you’ll see a modal confirmation dialog informing you the repair was completed.  After dismissing the dialog, select the song and you’lll see a more detailed confirmation of the repair in the status area:
   

   Analyzing file "D:\Music\iTunes\iTunes Music\Way Out West\Intensify\06 Stealth.mp3"…
   WARNING: "D:\Music\iTunes\iTunes Music\Way Out West\Intensify\06 Stealth.mp3" (offset 0xa301a3): Garbage at the end of the file
   WARNING: "D:\Music\iTunes\iTunes Music\Way Out West\Intensify\06 Stealth.mp3": Wrong number of MPEG frames specified in Xing header (13122 instead of 13056)
   WARNING: "D:\Music\iTunes\iTunes Music\Way Out West\Intensify\06 Stealth.mp3": Wrong number of MPEG data bytes specified in Xing header (10711873 instead of 10658221)
   INFO: "D:\Music\iTunes\iTunes Music\Way Out West\Intensify\06 Stealth.mp3": 13056 MPEG frames (MPEG 1 Layer III), +ID3v1+ID3v2, Xing header
   Rebuilding file "D:\Music\iTunes\iTunes Music\Way Out West\Intensify\06 Stealth.mp3"…
   FIXED: "D:\Music\iTunes\iTunes Music\Way Out West\Intensify\06 Stealth.mp3": File was rebuilt
   Done!

8. You should now be able verify that the song now plays in iTunes.  Since MP3 Tag Validator doesn’t rename the file, you won’t even have to re-import the song into your iTunes library.

In the default configuration, MP3 Tag Validator keeps a backup of the original song in the same directory with the added file extension .bak. If your library was as big as mine and spread over countless sub-directories, you’ll want to clean this up to reclaim the disk space.  In Vista, this was really easy using the file search in Windows Explorer.  ALl you have to do is run a search in the root of your music folder for “ext:*.bak” (without the quotes) and you’ll get search results for all the backup files that were made  Just select them all and delete them and you’ll reclaim all the disk space.

Alternatively, you can configure MP3 Tag Validator to delete the backup files when it successfully finishes repairing the files, but I opted against this as I wanted to be absolutely certain the repaired files were OK before deleting the originals.

I really hopes this helps and saves time for at least one other person out there.  I problems wasted a total of 12 hours over the course of week trying to figure this out.

I’m still in the process of authoring a blog post on what it was like to move to an iPhone 3G after nearly 6 years of using Windows Mobile devices.  My most recent phone was a Motorola Q9H which was running Windows Mobile 6.0.

However, in the meantime, I’m getting super frustrated over the crazy bugs and problems I’ve been having with the iPhone so I wanted to spend a bit of time venting.  While Windows Mobile is not perfect by any means, the iPhone is definitely getting a lot of undue accolades in my opinion.  There are features and scnearios that work fantastically such as GPS integration into Google Maps, Yelp, etc, and not to mention the obviously superior web browsing experience.  However, the things that don’t work well, are absolutely horrible.

This writeup is in no way trying to compare Windows Mobile to the iPhone.  Instead, this is isolated feedback on the iPhone 3G.

In no particular order, here are my gripes:

• The UI and Application performance is horrible. There is unacceptable lag in so many scenarios, but the most glaring one is with the Contacts application.  Even after updating to the new 2.0.1 firmware, it can take up to 4 seconds for the Contacts application to load.
• Why does it have to “backup” my iPhone everytime I dock and sync with iTunes?  Even better, why isn’t this configurable?  This is made worse because these “backups” can take as long as an hour for me.
• When the first generation iPhone launched last year, Steve Jobs stated:

“…iPhone’s battery life is longer than any other ‘Smartphone’ and even longer than most MP3 players… We’ve also upgraded iPhone’s entire top surface from plastic to optical-quality glass for superior scratch resistance and clarity. There has never been a phone like iPhone, and we can’t wait to get this truly magical product into the hands of customers starting just 11 days from today.”

When the iPhone 3G launched this year, he said:

“If we compare this to WiFi, we’ll see 3G approaches WiFi speeds. We’re also really proud that we’re doing this with great battery life — standby time is 300 hours.  2G talk time is up from 8 hours to 10 hours. 3G talk time… other phones have 3 - 3.5 hours, we’ve managed 5 hours of 3G talk time, which is an industry-leading amount of time.”

I have no idea how the Apple Engineers have their phones configured, but there is not way I’m getting this type of battery life.  With 3G, push email, bluetooth and Wifi turned on, I can barely get through half the work day with a single charge.  I’ve had to resort to either 15 min email sync’ing on the “fetch” setting, bluetooth off and wifi selectively turned on.  I can now last a full day now, but as a contingency plan, I bought an iPhone 3G dock for my office.  Goodbye $40.

• I get continued errors about applications not being able to install or update, and when that happens I get obscenely useless errors messages. Here’s the latest gem I get from iTunes:

• iTunes still has horrible performance after all these years.  It doesn’t like the fact my music was on a network share, so much so, that there would be a noticeable lag between keystrokes in the search box.  Did I mention I have a gigabit ethernet network at home?
• I get random crashing from applications.  At first I thought this was the fault of the 3rd party application developers, but the biggest offender is Safari.  If Apple can’t even get it right, then how can 3rd party developers?  Something is amiss either in Apple’s hiring competency for developers or the iPhone OS is pure crap.  Either way, the end-user loses.
• Apple gets continually praised for making things “easy to use”, but the iPhone is an counter-example, and a big one at that.  There are weird UI inconsistency exist all over the place, one example is between SMS and Email.  For SMS, why is there no way to delete a message when you’re viewing it like there is with email?  You can only “clear” the message thread, but this leaves an entry in the SMS inbox.  To delete it you have to do it from the inbox.

This is all I can think of off the top of my head.  Stay tuned for a later post on specifically commenting on an enterprise user like myself going from a Windows Mobile device to an iPhone.  That’s where it will get interesting.

Instead of giving Apple money for ringtones on your iPhone for music you already own, here’s a simple set of steps for getting free iPhone ringtones from your MP3s:

1. Select your favorite MP3 from your music collection.
2. Open it in Audacity and trim it down to at most 30 seconds.
3. Import the edited song into iTunes and choose to convert it to M4A format. The file will then be something like yourRingtone.M4A in file explorer.
4. Copy the file and rename the extension to M4R in file explorer (e.g. yourRingtone.M4R).
5. Drag and drop the newly renamed file back into iTunes.
6. Delete the old M4A song to avoid the duplicate.

It’s surely not as simple as a one-click purchase through iTunes, but hey, save yourself a few bucks

zAlternator is an app that allows the Zune to sync with other software clients like Windows Media Player (WMP), MediaMonkey and even Winamp!  From their site:

Finally, a release candidate of zAlternator is here! Yay! zAlternator is a program that will allow the Zune to be picked up and synced with programs other than the Zune program. It has been fully tested and proven to allow the Zune to be picked up and synced with the Zune program (duh), Windows Media Player 11, Winamp, and MediaMonkey. I have been unable to fully test the iTunes side of the program, but hopefully it should work.

While I love the Zune v2 software, the current lack of support for dynamic playlists and editing ID3 tag information is enough to turn me to WMP11.  I’ll jump right back to the Zune software when the Zune team adds these 2 features.

So I’ve been on my deathbed for 2 days now running one crazy fever. Good news is that the fever broke earlier this afternoon so I can finally stand up for more than 5 mins at a time. So I guess it’s a good time to write a lengthy review of the Zune 80.

After upgrading my sister’s older Zune 30 to the new Zune software, I was definitely impressed with the overall experience. Coupled with everything else I read about the hardware, I decided to place an order for one.

I ultimately decided on a Zune 80, since I could fathom a world with only 4 or 8GB worth of storage. I was getting sick of picking and choosing what media went on my music player, so I figured going with an 80GB would squash that whole issue. Yeah, yeah.. the Zune 80 is bigger than the Zune 8, but I’m coming off an iPod 30GB Video, so the size difference is neglible.

Shipping time

I placed an order for the Zune 80 last Thursday at 3pm on the Zune Originals site so I could get the custom engraving and design on the back. 24 hours later, I got a shipping confirmation. Woah. That was pretty fast production time.

This morning at about 11am, Fedex arrived at my door dropping off my brand new Zune. A few hours later I checked the UPS tracking numbre to find the origin and it shipped from from Shenzhen, China. Holy smokes, that was fast. Less 4 days from clicking “Confirm order” to my doorstep. Talk about impressive.

Unboxing

The Zune v1 was quite good with high quality build materials and a very minimalist (read: apple-like) approach. I didn’t expect much improvement in this area. However, Microsoft did a great job here making the customer feel special when ordering from ordering from the Zune Originals site with a special box and a “Thank You” card blazoned with a “Zune Originals” Logo. Very slick. Everything was packaged neatly and they upgraded the headphone quality.

(Looking at the unboxing of a non-Zune Originals, it’s safe to say that I got the better end of the stick.)

Connecting it for the first time

I already had the latest Zune client installed on my PC from when I upgraded my sister’s Zune so setup was as easy. I just plugged it in and was prompted to upgrade the firmware to the latest v2.2 and to give it a name. Entire process took less than 2 mins.

Setting up wireless syncing

I had visions of painful scrolling in the Zune device UI to connect it to my wireless network. Thankfully, they allow you to do this on the desktop software. Once connected, you choose to setup wireless sync’ing and it automatically finds surrounding wifi networks. I selected my network, entered my encryption key and it connected succesfully. At no point did I have to specify what encryption type I was using. I could definitely see a lay-person set this up in no-time flat.

Moving off iTunes to Zune

Since I was coming off iTunes, all my music is stored in the well-known “\iTunes\iTunes Music” directory. For me, it happens to be off a network drive mapped to V:. I figured it would be easy enough to make the switch, but to minimize the pain, I just told the Zune software to use the same iTunes Sub-folder.

Everything seemed to work fine, so I went on to sync my music, but then quickly realized 3 shocking things.

No Auto playlists

First, there are no auto-playlists (aka dynamic playlists). For some reason, we decided that it was a good idea to cut this feature. Maybe I’m in the minority here, but why in the world didn’t we ship with this?! This is the bread and butter of my music playing experience and device sync’ing strategy. My primary auto-playlists in iTunes consisted of:

• Recently added
  • Songs added in the last 30 days
• Favorite songs
  • 4 or 5 star ratings songs in any genre
• Favorite <Genre>
  • 3, 4 or 5 star rated songs in a specific genre

With the above playlists, I can listen to music in whatever mood I’m in and easily access all the latest music I’ve purchased. I’ve been using this system for years. Even Windows Media Player had auto-playlists! In scouting the various Zune websites and the official Zune community forum, this feature will be shipped in a future update. They’re even trying to canvas user scenarios, so I don’t think this is coming out any time soon. Let’s keep our figures crossed for something to happen within 6 months.

Re-designed Rating system is a dud?

The second disappointment was the change in rating system. Previously, when I used the Zune software, they used the typical 1-5 star rating system which was consistent with iTunes and WMP. With the latest v2.2 update, however, they changed this to a “Love it” or “Hate it” model. Each song can have exactly 3 values: unrated, Love it, Don’t like it.

They’ve attempted to make it a bit easier by doing some WMP rating translation to their new system. That is, anything below 2 stars is “Don’t like it” and anything above is “Love it”. (Obviously everything unrated is still unrated).

After some digging, I found the personal blog of someone on the Zune team, and found a bit more of an explanation.

Last year, we extensively tested the 0-5 star rating system with users – both on the current system and their potential usage - and learned a few interesting things. First, there was a great degree of confusion between different ratings for different users – e.g. a 3 star rating for one user might mean “I love this song” but for another user, it could mean “this song is just ok.” And when we asked users if they would rate content using the existing system, 90% said that they wouldn’t. So we had to figure out a way to implement a rating system that users both understood and would be likely to use. We tested several different variations, and in the end users gravitated towards the heart/broken heart system, as it put track ratings into more human terms. Hence, the new rating system.

While I always struggled for what it meant for something to be “2-star” rated in a music library, I got used to it. If I didn’t really like a song, why the heck would I have it at all? All my songs in iTunes ended up being either Unrated, 3, 4 or 5 star rated. Nothing was 2 stars. Songs were un-rated because many times I’d buy entire albums because I liked 3 or 4 songs, but never got around to listening to the entire thing. If I didn’t like the other songs when I did listen to them, I’d just delete them.

I also don’t buy the given explanation that across users there wasn’t consistency in the meaning behind ratings. Who cares if my rating definition isn’t the same as everyone else’s? It’s my music library!

Speaking objectively, and without factoring in existing rating systems in iTunes and WMP, I might prefer the new Zune rating system. However, since iTunes and WMP have been around for what seems like forever, has Microsoft been painted into a corner and should just adopt what already exists? What makes things worse is that I thought by going to the Zune I would make my song management easier since it would finally play nice with my Vista Media Center PC. Since Media Center is WMP based, this isn’t the case and I’m essentially stuck with the same problem I had with iTunes.

Auto-collection management no more

The final shocking thing was the omission of auto-collection management. In a nutshell, this is when the software auto-manages your folder hierarchy and filenames based on ID3 tags. iTunes does it, so does WMP. The new Zune software? Hmm.. nope!

Whenever you drag and drop songs into the Zune client, it just adds them from their existing location. So if I have songs on “D:\scratch”, I not only have to copy them to my Zune library location, but also create all the artist\album hierarchy. What a complete pain in the butt. Thankfully I’m not adding as much music to my library as I used to, but this is seriously another huge feature to be missing in a flagship product launch. I’m surprised I haven’t read about this anywhere yet.. perhaps I just haven’t been reading close enough?

Final thoughts

Despite all my gripes about the 3 missing features, I still do really like the Zune. Much of my experience has been colored by the face that I’m migrating off iTunes and have an enormous music collection (nearly 60GB). For the majority of people I know, this migration issue will be, well, a non-issue and I doubt they will notice the changes in ratings (they might even like this simpler method). The lack of auto-playlists will either another polarizing issue — people either use them extensively or not at all, so this will again be another love-it or hate-it issue.

I love the form factor of the Zune 80, it feels much more polished than the Zune v1 and more importantly better than my iPod 30GB Video and even the “new” iPod Classic.

The end-to-end experience from ordering on Zune Originals, insanely quick delivery and high quality physical product make the new Zune a winner in my books. The good news about the missing features? They are clearly on the Zune team’s radar and I bet you that in 6 months, I’ll be making a blog post telling you about how great the changes are. (Note to Zune team: Please don’t make me a liar )

As my usage with the Zune 80 continues, I’ll be sure to update you all with more info. But for now, here’s to hoping I can survive the transition from avid iPod user to Zune dork.

I surely didn’t cover everything about the Zune 80, so if you have a question please ask and I’ll do my best to respond.