Sawyer Paul's Blog, page 40

Moving from iTunes to Plex Music

Usually, I just search for a blog post that would already have this information, but I couldn’t find one. So I decided to write up this experiment.

I don’t like the iPhone Music app. I find the experience of browing, organizing, and listening to music with it is poor, and rating music with it is both not fun and not reliable. Something that used to “just work” simply doesn’t now. But there’s a bigger problem than the iPhone app.

iTunes

iTunes doesn’t save ratings (either stars or hearts) reliably. Sometimes you’ll rate a song on your phone and that rating simply won’t appear anywhere else. Or it will, but then it’ll disappear next week. There’s data rot going on here, and it’s hard to predict, find, and eliminate.

On top of that, iTunes will try to “help” your ratings by rating your albums using an average of already-rated songs. So if you’ve rated one song in an album 2-stars, the whole album will get a 2-star rating. This essentially destroys smart playlists, and has infuriated many.

But the main problem is that iTunes is a relic now, and star ratings are so far down the scale of importance at apple that they’ve been reduced to a feature that isn’t even on by default. Apple has shifted its resources to its subscription service, Apple Music, and iTunes remains alive, but is clearly on the back burner.

Last thing: iTunes doesn’t work great with two computers, and works even worse when those two computers are on at the same time.

Plex

Plex does a lot of similar things to iTunes. But it’s better at working with multiple devices (I can now listen to my music on my TVs again), and so far as I can tell, a rating will stay the way you want it to until you change it. That’s not something Apple Music or Spotify can promise. That sort of stability is getting rare.

Plex is also just a nicer experience. It has a lot of Zune-style features like artist info and related links. It feels like an app pushing you to explore and enjoy your collection.

The integration between Plex and iTunes is a single option inside Plex, called “Import itunes playlists.” Somewhere in settings, you can toggle song ratings as an option for import. The secret feature here is that song ratings also come through. So all that work you put into rating songs in iTunes moves over to your new library.

This is a one-way exchange of information, from iTunes to Plex. It doesn’t work the other way. You can do it as often as you like, however. So if you’re just simply interested in keeping your metadata in iTunes going forward, and just want your playlists in Plex for convenience, this is an easy way to keep the two in sync so long as iTunes remains the “home” for your playlists and ratings.

Other Findings

Removing a rating from iTunes does not remove it in Plex, even after a fresh update.
Changing an existing rating in iTunes does update it in Plex. The new iTunes rating will overwrite the old Plex rating.
Plex can always import more ratings. So you can still use the iPod to rate music, and then just hit the … and hit “import itunes playlists”
This does not work the other way. Rating a song in Plex will not result in the rating being shown in iTunes.
Much like this redditor, I haven’t been able to find a way to take a Plex playlist and get it into iTunes.
Song that have been “Album rated” in iTunes show up with that rating in Plex. So if iTunes decided that a whole album was three stars because you rated one song three stars, the whole album shows up in Plex with three stars.
In running this experiment, I’ve come to realize something about album ratings: I think iCloud is messing this up, and that if your rating column has a grey number in it, it may have actually been your rating. Because while I have grey rated songs, I also have songs that have album ratings but no song ratings.


My personal use case would involve syncing a playlist offline in Plex, and then rating songs on the go. This does work, but the info doesn’t always sync back quickly. But once it does, it stays there.

So why keep iTunes around?

iTunes Match, basically. It’s still a phenomenal service. It’s like an amnesty program for mp3s. iTunes doesn’t care where they came from. Add a file to your iCloud library, and they’ll replace it with their own higher quality one, and it’s still a file you can use with any device (these files load just fine on a Zune).

This is where iTunes Match still comes in handy: Deleting a file in plex deletes the local file from your computer, but if that song is uploaded or matched in iTunes Match, the file simply becomes stored in the cloud. So you can keep a “clean” library in Plex, while keeping everything in iTunes Match.

Season of 1.1

I know this seems like a big jump, but it really isn’t. I’m still using iTunes, but it’s more of a backend archive/file organizer now, and Plex is the place where I can actually enjoy the process of listening to and organizing my music. It’s nice so far.

Morning Pages, May 10, 2018

Breathe. You’re a bad person right now. So think.

Am I doing the right thing at the right moment? That’s the hardest question. As I stood there flanked by two friends of friends, my feet planted in soft landscaped dirt, these nice shoes ruined not even by dancing but one too many trips on fake earth, my mind took my attention to some self help guy they brought in to tell us how to live our best lives. He was this slick car salesman type with small eyes and large teeth and a banana in his suit jacket pocket. His talk took thirty minutes but felt like three hours, and I only remembered one line. He was talking about taking what was ours, and how the only real decision any of us could make at any moment was if we were doing the best possible thing right now. And if we didn’t know, then we probably weren’t.

I’m definitely not. But what would be the best thing to do in this moment? Go back in and forget what happened, and just dance? Go after her, find her, change her mind? I doubted it, and felt helpless. Go straight home, pack up, and start over in a new city with a new identity? Always an attractive option.

The air was getting warmer as the sun set. It was eight o clock now. Two hours left in the dance. I could hear the music from the door. And I realized that surrender was an option. Accept what happened, and let yourself digest it before moving on. She’d tore me up in front of everyone. That happened. I didn’t dream it. I wasn’t going to wake up. And I had questions to answer.

Finding a New Yoga Habit

I’m only kind of comfortable writing about stuff like this. Not yoga, but stuff I’ve been doing for a while and still feel like I have no idea what I’m doing or what I’m talking about.

I’ve been using yoga as part of my exercise routine on and off for over ten years. But I still don’t feel very good at it. I’ve been to a few classes. I’ve used some software. I’ve watched some Youtube. I’m not into the religious parts of yoga at all but I see the health benefits and do try to work it into my life. But because it often seems like it isn’t working, I have a hard time keeping it up.

Classes

I’ve never stuck with one very long. It isn’t the cost so much as the commitment and the schedule, and for some reason yoga makes me extremely shy.

Wii Fit/Plus/U

I’ve bought Wii Fit three times. I thought the balance board was genius, and it’s still the only technology that told you you were off and then helped you correct it. Every new version made getting into the actual activity faster, and the WiiU version didn’t even need a TV.

Kinect

I liked Kinect well enough, and the Nike+ software was better at getting me to sweat than Wii Fit and any other home workout, but it was kind of terrible at yoga, because it was only good at tracking you while you moved.

Youtube

Every now and then I’ll watch a Youtube yoga instruction and follow along. It’s less intimidating than going to a class.

Nike Training

The software for Kinect was good though, and it remains good in its current life: an app that helps you work out. Sometimes I like it a bit more than the Youtube stuff, but it lacks any of the useful corrections the Wii/Kinect software had.

What else is out there? I’m mostly asking myself to figure this out later, but hey, if you’ve got a suggestion.

Sleep and Waking Up

I suck at this.

Alarms

I’ve tried all the alarms. The only thing that has ever repeatedly woken up is my partner. No robot can take this job.

But as difficult as waking up is, getting to sleep is harder.

Sleeping pills

Sleeping pills do this awesome thing with me where they don’t make me sleepy, and then when I do wake up I have such a headache that I wish I was dead.

Light

I do want to buy some drapes. Right now I’ve got light, cute drapes that make the window look nice but provide no defence from the dark arts. But is there any real truth to this one?

Rituals

Moderate success. Ever since I began using Productive, I’ve been able to switch from just being an adult in the evening to an adult trying to get himself to bed. Prep coffee, say goodnight. check, check. Once I get to bed, though, there’s a 30/70 chance I read a little and then fall asleep vs looking at various news sites and feeling so anxious I stay up another two hours trying to forget the world.

Keep Your Phone Away

I have this awesome two week cycle where I begin by leaving my iPhone on the dock in the living room, feeling great about that for a few days, and then dropping this principal the second I forget, only to spend the next ten days looking up news and feeling anxious for two hours while I try to forget the world.

Sleep is hard

Sleep is hard.

I want to try new things, new rituals. I want to get better at this.

iPhone Organization 2018

I’ve been using an iPhone SE for the last seven months, and in that time I’ve never really organized the apps. My previous phone, the iPhone 6, only had 16gb of storage, so I was always pretty conscious of what could and couldn’t live on it. But the SE has a lot more space, so I generally just downloaded whatever I wanted and didn’t care much for clutter. Search worked okay, but it was mostly just many pages of little icons that only vaguely seemed related to one another.

I toyed with just putting everything in folders and giving them names, but I found this arduous and confusing. Also, many apps defied categories. Try to do this, and five minutes in you’ll find yourself with an app that simply has no home among other apps.

So, anyways.

Why Organize a Phone?

What’s the point of an organized phone anyway? Who cares if it takes an extra second to find an app? So, that’s one. Efficiency is nice. But mostly, I wanted to think of my phone as doing what it’s best at, and leaving other things to different devices.

I thought about it, and came up with a short list of things my iPhone SE does really well:

Capture
Quick replies
Taking photos and sharing them
Music + Podcasts
Quick Access to Data(OneNote, Scrivener)
Maps
Health + Activity Tracking
Wallet Apps

Then, I thought about the things I had apps for, but the iPhone SE really isn’t very good at:

Watching streaming video for more than a few minutes
Editing Photos
Reading anything longer than a tweet
Longform writing
Really, doing anything for more than a minute.

After I put these down, I had a realization. The iPhone isn’t really meant to be used for more than 60 seconds at a time. Not only that, I should think about the iPhone as a tool for capturing and quickly sharing text and photos as quickly as possible, and then spending more time with that data on my PC.

You can use the iPhone has your only computer. But I don’t. It’s one of four computers I own, if I count my TV and my Kobo as computers. But since I have them, watching video on a TV is better than the iPhone, and reading articles and books are better on the Kobo than on the iPhone. And my Surface is where I’m most comfortable writing and planning. But the iPhone is often where I discover this content and have ideas, so what I should use it for is quickly pushing this content to the right place.

So with this as the reason for an organization, I went about cleaning things up.

Apps I deleted

Streaks - I love streaks, but it’s just one too many things. I’ve got room for one “everyday ritual” app and Productive has just stuck a little better with me.
Byword - I like Byword, but I ran into a couple of frustrating syncing moments, and Files/Drafts does the job pretty much just as well anyway.
Most games. I’ve kept Pokemon Go and HQ Trivia, because those simply can’t be played anywhere else. But most other games I played could be played on a PC or on Switch.
IMDB. I think I opened it once in the last year?
Video streaming apps like Netflix. I’m not watching these on my phone. I’m watching them on TV. But I kept Youtube, because I like to add/delete things from “Watch Later” and that just doesn’t work well on a TV.
Documents 5 - A great app with one great secret purpose: downloading Youtube videos to watch offline. If you want that, it’s indispensable. But I don’t, so it’s gone.


Upwork. Even if I do go back to this, it only barely works on the phone.
Last Time - Basically it’s a reminder app to tell you when you last did a thing. I gave it a shot but just didn’t use it much after the first week. And that was four months ago.
NextDraft - It’s a great newsletter service but is better suited to reading on a bigger screen.
Twitter - no good has come of this.

With that all gone, I set about organizing what apps were left into folders that kept a certain context. Now, I’d tried folders before, but this time, I wanted to organize it by time of day, and where I am.

Here’s my organization scheme, built both into folders and in Launch Center Pro.

Home Row

Drafts 5
Launch Center Pro
Camera
Safari (for quick googles)

The rest are in folders in roughly this order:

Day

Productive
Carrot Weather
Headspace
Wunderlist
Calendar
Stylebook

Evening

Carrot
Productive
TeeVee
Letterboxd
Day One
UberEats
Sleep Cycle

Out

Pokemon GO
Cineplex
Uber
Lyft
Highball
Google Maps
TTCWatch
Meetup
Yelp
Universe
Opentable

Quick Replies

Facebook Messages
Whatsapp
Outlook
Messages
Phone
Microsoft Teams
Tumblr
Google Hangouts
Contacts

Taking photos and sharing them

Instagram
Photos
Motion Stills
Gifwrapped
Onedrive
Annotatable

Music

Spotify
Music
Plex
Overcast

Data

Onenote
Onedrive
Files
Scrivener
Day One
1password
Workflow
IFTTT
Pocket (this is how I get articles from the web to my Kobo)
VLC

Health

Carrot
Fitbit
Forrest
Health
Nike Training
Biko
MapMyRide
Pause

Wallet Apps

Amazon
Starbucks
Ebay
Bobby
Mint
RBC Mobile
PC Optimum
Indigo
Scene
Ticketmaster
MEC
Freedom Mobile
Wallet App
Paypal

But for how long?

I wanted to spend some actual time doing this specifically so that can be the last time I do it, at least for a while. New devices bring different layouts so it’s probably not something I can avoid, but I’m glad I went through this. It already feels a lot less like just a random grouping of ideas and a pointed tool that can help me get my ideas down and quickly sent to the right places.

Morning Pages April 26, 2018

I’m building a bridge for you. I want you over here. I will use all my knowledge and all my technology to bring you over. I will learn new models and workflows to get you here. I will subscribe to new podcasts to get you to cross that bridge. I will sign up for a flower delivery subscription service to make sure you feel loved and beautiful. I will buy you the trendy headphones. They’ll fit in your ear. They fit just fine in mine.

You’re over there because we don’t talk anymore. We spend our evenings doing our own things. Me with my growing github repository, you with your books and television and bars. You with your new friends who don’t know me. Me with my top of the line smartwatch that can tell you when I’m home. You with your new tattoo and nail art and Justin. Who is Justin anyway? Oh, a guy from work. Okay.

I will hack through this. I will put my head down and find you in a script. I will fiddle with this emulator until you love me again. I will ask you to let me subscribe to your google calendar again. I lost access at some point. I will ask, what’s for dinner, and then I will cook dinner.

You would have loved it, she tells me. You should have come. I wanted you there. I wish you’d been there. But I’d stayed home, building the machine that will fix us.

Morning pages April 24, 2018

Finn and Tich flanked me, as if protecting me from a mob, but we were alone. As we reached the smokers pit, Tich turned me around like I’d been blindfolded at a birthday. In the same swift and slick move, she stuck a cigarette in my mouth and lit it. She stood back and lit one for herself.

“Breathe,” she said.

I didn’t know whether or not to obey that.

“Jesus Christ,” Finn said. She didn’t smoke, instead taking out a compact out of her jacket to check her face.

“I’m so jealous of your pockets,” Tich said, waving her little purse around.

“I really like your suit, Finn,” I said. “It’s sharp as shit.”

“Thanks, bro,” she said.

The season of reconfiguration

So this year I wanted to see if I could theme out my year a bit (thanks Cortex). But a whole year seemed like a lot, so I tried to just do a season. One of the most fun parts of this whole exercise was naming it, and I came up with a good one: The season of reconfiguration.

My general theory was that I would try to be conscious of habits, tools, workflows, and schemes I was doing and to see if I could swap them out with different ideas or do without them entirely. There were also some new things I threw in just to see if they’d stick around in my life.

As I’ve gone, I’ve written about a good number of them:

Beginning this blog
Using Streaks/Productive to keep me going on small stuff everyday
Getting music from MP3 blogs again instead of just Spotify
Giving life-logging a try
Trying out some hacks to use my phone less
Reading newspapers
Dropping Twitter and Feedly as a way to read the web and returning to bookmarks
Recording a podcast in a live space instead of just privately

On top of that, there’s a few things I haven’t yet written about on this blog:

Trying to bullet journal every day
Getting a second TV in the apartment and getting back into Plex
Replacing my WiiU with a Switch
Finding a new Yoga habit
Trying to write new workflows for what I do in InDesign
Finding a new backpack
Buying a new Fitbit
Trying to cut Youtube and Facebook out of my life
Trying to wake up earlier

All of these have changed my everyday life in the last few months. Some of them in big ways, some small, and some have worked out, while others have failed. Some I’ll go on about in updates, and some I’d rather not talk about (mostly because it’s boring even to me. I mean, the Fitbit kinda works, but so what?). But looking at this list of things I haven’t yet written about gives me a few ideas.

Writing all this down has also made me realize it’s actually been a huge three months of personal development, and I should probably slow down for a bit. So, for this season, I’m planning on it being more of a season of 1.1. Tiny tweaks, little things. More on that later.

More Things April 21, 2018

With the help of an IFTTT recipe that turns what I save to Pocket into a Markdown link, I can easily make a linked list blog post again. Hence, the return of More Things.

Articles are ordered from oldest to newest.

What to Do When You Suck at Sleeping

I miss Windows Phone

Fake Instagrams are one of the last refuges of the authentic online self

What Is “Soft Dick Rock”? Jenny Hval Explains

Kanye West has mastered Twitter like nobody else

Celeste Taught Fans And Its Own Creator To Take Better Care Of Themselves

The rise of the ambient video game

What Comes After The Social Media Empires

Reconsidering the Hardware Kindle Interface

Sharing Music

You have music you like. Somewhat inevitably, you might want someone else to hear it. What do you do?

Okay, so the answer is YouTube.

This is a hard question today. If you want to share music with even just one person, it might be hard. What if they’re not using the same streaming service you use? What if they don’t use streaming services at all?

Yes yes. YouTube. Find the song on YouTube and send that link. Sure.

The most recent Why’d You Push That Button episode “Why did the Instagram of music fail?” is all about this. They talk about wanting to see what their friends are listening to, and that Spotify’s activity feed is the only thing even remotely good at this. There are two major problems with this setup, though: this feature is desktop-only, and if wager most Music listening happens on phones now, and even if you are on the desktop, you can’t do anything with the information. You can’t even send them a “like.”

So use YouTube, genius. Just find the song and grab the URL.

Rdio did social listening fairly well, but it was a link-based experience that was definitely desktop-only. Also, Rdio’s dead now. So.

Cymbal is a site that seems like it’s nailed this. You sign up and then share whatever music you like. You can do it on your phone and it works with every major service. The downside is that it’s shutting down. So.

Last.fm still works! But nobody uses it now and I wouldn’t be surprised to see it shut down. So.

Personally, I make a little playlist on Spotify every few weeks. It’s not perfect, but it’s the easiest way for me to express what I’m into at any given time.

Hey, what about YouTube though? (Fine) Lax copyright restrictions mean just about every song has been uploaded. Search, grab a link, and go. This is what everyone I know does.

Well, those who share music. Most don’t. And I imagine that’s probably the truth here. The reason social music hasn’t ever properly taken off is that most people probably wouldn’t use it.

I’ve got a quick theory here. I think people don’t share music because it’s personal, and they’re afraid of revealing something potentially embarrassing. We’re not too far away from a time when you were weird for liking rock and pop. I know that sounds crazy, but that’s totally how it was in my junior high. Music is so close to us that we don’t want it ruined by any outside contaminant.

My other theory is that most people don’t think about music in any sort of ranking way. Music is just there or it isn’t, and they would never think of becoming an evangelist for a particular album.

So, malaise or fear. That’s why we can’t have nice things like good social music sharing.