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iTunes Match – VirginMedia Problems

Posted by rhodzy on
Dec 27 2011
Apple, iTunes Match, Technology
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So yesterday I posted about iTunes Match upload problems on my slow internet connection. Well I say slow, it’s currently 10mb download and not too sure about the upload speed.

After some searching on the internet I came across a Virgin Media blog where quite a few people are complaining about iTunes Match uploading music to the cloud and people seem to be coming across quite a few errors, some not being able to upload and getting error messages within iTunes and some just taking forever. I myself am in the taking forever to upload category.

Apparently VirginMedia have a cap in place where if you upload too much data within the times of 3pm – 8pm you will be auto lowered onto the capped upload speed. However I tried this morning (I currently have 386) that need to be uploaded. However after 2 hours, it had only uploaded 7 songs.

I have a nasty feeling that on the 13th January when I get upgraded to 100mb broadband, it’s not going to make any difference.

I also read that some people tethered onto their O2 iPhone connection and the iTunes Match started uploading quicker than it was on a Virgin Media 100mb Fibre Optic connection.

I hope Virgin sort this out soon, you would have thought with Fibre connections this sort of thing would be small fry to upload a few hundred mb of data.

iTunes Match – First thoughts

Posted by rhodzy on
Dec 26 2011
Apple, iTunes March, Technology
0 Comments

So today I subscribed to iTunes Match. Why?

1) I wanted all my music available where ever I went.
2) I wanted all of the album artwork that was available to me
3) I wanted someone to sort out my music collection while I drank coffee and which was all automatic

This works really well, however one thing I am disappointed with was the ability to not rename the file name of my music. iTunes match obviously had in mind what all the albums were but it didn’t rename the tracks that were in different styles. I wanted all my music to look similar. I have file names in capital letters, lower case and was hoping iTunes would sort all these out when it downloaded the album artwork for all of my music. However it didn’t.

This was a huge disappointment for me and for that reason I decided to turn off my auto renew subscription. I am going to see how much i use iTunes match and try to justify to myself is it worth the £22 that I paid for the year.

Another grumble I had, not anything to do with apple, or I don’t think it is, is how long it takes to upload the songs that iTunes doesn’t already have.

I have had iTunes running all day and uploading music files to “the cloud” but this is still on going as you can see from here

Screen Shot 2011 12 26 at 22 20 32

I think this may have something to do with my crappy upload speed but Im not sure yet. Time will tell.

Overall I am half satisfied and half not, I really wanted all my music to have a standard naming convention which iTunes match simply just hasn’t done.

#SiriProxy installed and already loving the plugins

Posted by rhodzy on
Dec 21 2011
Apple, SiriProxy
3 Comments

Well today I finally managed to get SiriProxy working on my Ubuntu VMware installation.

I wanted to try this to see all the cool things that could be done.

Plugins I currently have installed:

  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • IMDB

I messed up the first installation on my Ubuntu installation which resulted in endless problems. I got around this by completely reinstalling Ubuntu, since this was just going to be used for a Siri Proxy it didnt really make a difference to reinstall it or not.

Now that Siri Proxy is up and running I love it, still not sure why Apple hasn’t allowed all this stuff already.

More to come when I’m not so tired.

The installation guide I used is from Github

#Here’s what I did to get to the point where I’m at:
#-Install Ubuntu 11.10
#-Get all available updates
#-Add the VirtualBox add-ons and video driver
#-Set up SSH (for the SCP at the end)
#
# I have done nothing else to this virtual machine.
# On my iPhone, I set the DNS server to 192.168.2.131 (the IP of the virtual machine)
#
# That’s all the pre-setup that was done on the iPhone (the certificate is installed as part of the process)
# Here are the exact steps steps I followed:
#Install all the prerequisites
sudo apt-get install dnsmasq ruby build-essential openssl libreadline6 libreadline6-dev curl git-core zlib1g zlib1g-dev libssl-dev libyaml-dev libsqlite3-0 libsqlite3-dev sqlite3 libxml2-dev libxslt-dev autoconf libc6-dev ncurses-dev automake libtool bison subversion
#edit the dnsmasq conf
sudo vi /etc/dnsmasq.conf
# Keystrokes in vi:
# /address=
# A <enter> address=/guzzoni.apple.com/192.168.2.131 <–This is the IP of the VM
# <esc> :wq!
#Restart dnsmasq
sudo /etc/init.d/dnsmasq restart
#Install RVM
bash < <(curl -s https://raw.github.com/wayneeseguin/rvm/master/binscripts/rvm-installer)
#Set RVM path
[[ -s "$HOME/.rvm/scripts/rvm" ]] && . “$HOME/.rvm/scripts/rvm”
#Set the RVM path to be set up every time I log in
echo ‘[[ -s "$HOME/.rvm/scripts/rvm" ]] && . “$HOME/.rvm/scripts/rvm” # Load RVM function’ >> ~/.bash_profile
#Install Ruby 1.9.3 — This will take several minutes
rvm install 1.9.3
#Use ruby 1.9.3 as the default (and current) version of ruby
rvm use 1.9.3 –default
#clone the SiriProxy repo
git clone git://github.com/plamoni/SiriProxy.git
#Enter the SiriProxy directory
cd SiriProxy
#Install SiriProxy — Can take a minute or two
rake install
#Make the .siriproxy directory in my home directory
mkdir ~/.siriproxy
#Copy the example config
cp ./config.example.yml ~/.siriproxy/config.yml
#Generate the certificates
siriproxy gencerts
#Install the certificate on the phone.
# The way I do it in the video is through dropbox on my host machine.
# You can email the certificate to yourself, or whatever floats your boat.
# Here’s the SCP command I use in the video. It’s probably 100% worthless to anyone else
#
# scp 192.168.2.131:~/.siriproxy/ca.pem ~/Dropbox/Public/siri.vm.pem
#Bundle SiriProxy (this installs the plugins and whatnot)
siriproxy bundle
#Start the server
rvmsudo siriproxy server