I’ve been a Nikon fan for several years. The cameras are always first rate and they have some of the best lenses in the business. But it is more than just hardware that keeps me coming back to this manufacturer.

Nikon has continuously been developing their software and web presence to add value to their product line. This coupled with their Nikon Schools educational arm provides a wealth of information on just on cameras but on camera techniques.

Today I received an email introducing another educational opportunity available. Nikon has developed an iPhone App called Nikon Learn & Explore. This free app provides access to articles and information from the Nikon educational archives.

The interface to the app is well laid out. You can select information by image with a matrix of photos displayed. Selecting a photo thumbnail displays a larger version of the picture as you would expect.

From there you can click on Info to get information about the photo including photographer name. You can also select View Article, which will show the article from Nikon World magazine that featured the photo. Where applicable there are also videos about the photo or the article.

Next to the Image tag on the main screen is a learn icon that provides Insights & Techniques including imaging editing, shooting techniques, and fundamentals of photography. These lessons are well done and very helpful.

The Nikon World magazine is a valuable tool and the app provides digital access to the information separated by issue.

The app is like having a desk reference and photography teacher right at your fingertips. It is a great app with a good interface and invaluable information. For anyone interested in taking pictures whether you use a Nikon camera or not you will find valuable information contained within it.

Previously I have mentioned my obsession with iTunes rating stars. I have some sort of personality defect that requires that all of the songs in my iTunes library have as much information as I can add. This information includes album art, lyrics, composer, and of course ratings.

When a new song is added to my library I will listen to it and make an initial rating of how I feel about the song when I first hear it. Subsequently, each time I listen to the song I may adjust the rating higher or lower depending on whether the song is growing on me or losing favor in my personal playlist.

With iTunes the constant changing of star ratings can be kind of cumbersome. I’ve added the rating field to the display to allow me to click on the star ratings from the playing window but if I happen to be on my laptop or if the iTunes window has been minimized it requires a few mouse motions and clicks in order to update this data.

I recently came across a small utility from Potion Factory that has helped with my rating dilemma. They have a product called I Love Stars that will place the star rating of the currently playing song in the menu bar of a Macintosh computer.

I Love Stars will not only display the current rating of the song playing but it will also allow you to change the rating without having to switch to iTunes. Not only can you rate songs by whole star but I Love Stars also recognizes the half-star rating hidden preference in iTunes and allows you to select half stars. Assigning a half star rating is simply a matter of clicking on the next star then clicking again and half a star will appear.

The utility will automatically hide when iTunes is not running to preserve precious menu bar real estate, a valuable feature if you find yourself with too many things cluttering up the right side of your menu bar.

I Love Stars is relatively small and does not appear to take too much memory when it is running. It is one of those utilities that make you stop and wonder why it was not included as part of iTunes to begin with.

Potion Factory is offering I Love Stars for free making the utility one of the best values available for the Mac. I recommend picking up a copy and looking over the other product offerings that Potion Factory has available.

I eagerly followed along yesterday as Steve Jobs made his return from medical absence and introduced the new Apple products at the “Let’s Rock” event. As expected Apple introduced a new generation of iPod Touch although without the rumored camera included. Instead the iPod Nano went through yet another iteration this time adding an FM tuner, a pedometer, a larger screen, and a video camera. The video camera was an unexpected feature and it will be interesting to see how users will utilize this new feature.

Besides the iPod offerings, Apple also introduced iTunes 9 which sports a new interface to the iTunes Store as well as other long-requested features. For iPhone and iPod Touch users the new iTunes offers a way to manage applications and introduces Genius for applications that will suggest applications based on what you have previously purchased.

One feature of iTunes that continues to be left out is a better rating system for content. Since its inception iTunes have provided the user with the ability to rate content using a five-star scale. Approximately five minutes after the first user downloaded iTunes they began complaining that five stars were not enough to catalog their content appropriately.

Over the years there have been Apple Scripts and other hacks that would circumvent the five star scale into more options. The most often used are scripts that will allow the user to assign half-star ratings. Until now these solutions were not very elegant and met with limited results.

Over the past couple of weeks I have run across a couple of solutions that make the implementation of half-star ratings a little easier. Since my household includes both Macintosh and Windows computers running iTunes (my Linux box does not have iTunes), I needed a solution that could be implemented on either platform.

The Macintosh solution to allow half-stars is one simple line that can be entered in Terminal. In order to implement this hidden feature you will need to close iTunes on the Macintosh and open Terminal (/Applications/Utilities). With Terminal opened type the following command followed by the ENTER key:

defaults write com.apple.iTunes allow-half-stars –bool TRUE

You may then close the Terminal window and launch iTunes. When you want to rate a song you can drag across the rating field and you will see the stars appear. Dragging between two stars will enter a ½ in the rating field. If you ever decide you do not want half-star ratings you can enter Terminal again and type the same command replacing TRUE with FALSE and it will disable the half-star rating.

For Windows users the implementation of half-stars is simply a matter of adding a few lines to a hidden preference file. After closing iTunes on your Windows computer navigate to the iTunesPrefs.xml file. This file is normally located in C:\Documents and Settings\username\Application Data\Apple Computer\iTunes for Windows XP users or C:\Users\Username\AppData\Roaming\Apple Computer\iTunes for Windows Vista. The Application Data folder is generally hidden so you will need to make sure you have “Show Hidden Files” selected in Folder Options.

Open the iTunesPrefs.xml file with a text editor such as Notepad or Wordpad and search for “User Preferences” Find the place in the iTunesPrefs.xml file that says:

<key>User Preferences</key>
<dict>

Below that line type the following:

<key>allow-half-stars</key>
<data>
dHJ1ZQ==
</data>

Save the iTunesPrefs.xml file and launch iTunes. You will be able to click between the stars in the ratings field to rate content by half-star. If you ever want to disable this ability just edit the iTunesPrefs.xml file and remove the lines you entered.

These patches work with both iTunes 8 and the new iTunes 9 versions. I didn’t have any earlier versions so I am not sure how far back this hidden feature actually existed.

One thing I have noted is that even without these patches loaded iTunes will display half-star ratings, it just cannot set them until the patches are entered. The iPhone and iPod will accept the half-star ratings but will not display them on the screen. It will round the rating down to the next whole star.

With this simple patch you have just doubled the number of rating criteria than you had below. Hopefully this will be enough to keep users satisfied until Apple can implement a better rating system.

I was an early adopter of the Apple iPod. I suffered through the growing pains that accompanying a new technology. The struggles though were worth it as each iteration of the iPod built upon the previous successes making it one of my favorite gadgets that I couldn’t imagine living without.

While the iPod itself is an incredible device that has changed the way many of us listen to music, an equally important aspect of the experience is iTunes. For all that it does, iTunes is many times maligned. I am sure that if you ask any iTunes user they could produce a laundry list of features or changes they would make to this application yet very few people actually go as far as replacing iTunes with a different application for managing their music files.

I count myself among those users who sometimes have a love/hate relationship with iTunes. I absolutely love the user interface and the ease of use decisions that went into the design of this software. On the other hand I am constantly frustrated by the lack of advanced search criteria or the ability to build more intelligence into a Smartlist.

Perhaps one of the most confusing points of iTunes is the seemly haphazard way it manages your music files and the difficulty users have in migrating their iTunes library from one location to another.

Having been using iTunes for several years now and being a self-proclaimed music pack rat I have somehow accumulated a fairly sizable music library consisting of roughly 12,500 individual songs.

It’s not just the sheer number of music tracks that is alarming to me. It is also the fact that I have spent countless hours managing the data associated with each song. I suffer from some sort of personality defect which causes me to spend enormous amounts of time making sure each track has as much associated information as possible such as composer, lyrics, album art, etc.

Given the amount of time I have spent making sure each track has the most accurate data possible you can imagine my nervousness when it came time to migrate my iTunes library from one computer to another.

I initially made a fairly naïve assumption that I could just copy the music files from one computer to another and all of my data would magically appear including playlists, track play counts, and track ratings. When I copied the files and opened iTunes on the new computer I nearly fainted when I saw this data had all disappeared. This was clearly unacceptable and I began searching for a solution that would allow me to successfully migrate iTunes from one computer to another. What I have come up with is a workflow that works for me. I am sure there are several ways to solve this issue but this one worked for me so I thought I would share it in case others find themselves in a similar dilemma.

The first step I took was to set a few preferences in the iTunes located on the computer I was migrating from. If you are fortunate enough to have all of your music located in a single location; I want to congratulate you. Unfortunately for many of us long-time users the music location has changed through the years and because of this we have music spread across our computer landscapes.

One of the great things about iTunes is that it will keep track of where your music is located. It stores the file location for each of the tracks so when you click on a song it will know exactly where to find that file to begin playing it. The key to migrating to a new computer though is to gather all of this music together through a sort of an iTunes cattle drive.

Within the iTunes preferences screen under the Advanced tab are two check boxes that need to be selected. “Keep iTunes Music folder organized” will allow iTunes to create folder structure under your iTunes Music folder by artist and album folders and will go a long ways to making the migration easier. The second preference, “Copy files to iTunes Music folder when adding to library” will allow iTunes to move your music files into the iTunes Music folder thereby neatly putting all of your music in a single place for migration. The key to both of these of course is having accurate data in your iTunes library for artist and album otherwise the files will be consolidated but into a filing system that might be difficult for you to find anything later.

Once you have set both of these check boxes you are ready for iTunes to do some heavy lifting. Hidden under the File/Library menu in iTunes is a gem named simply “Consolidate Library”. What this option does is essentially consolidate all of the files listed in your iTunes library into the iTunes Music folder as defined in the iTunes preferences. It will copy the files from their current location into the iTunes Music folder renaming them with the track name and organizing them into a folder structure of ARTIST\ALBUM. Depending on how large your iTunes library is, this step could take a while as it moves all of your songs to a single location. It should also be noted that you need to make sure you have adequate space on the drive where your iTunes Music folder is located.

Once the Consolidate Library option has completed running, your iTunes music files will all be located in the iTunes Music folder ready for migration. You will then need to copy the iTunes Music folder contents from the old computer to the new computer. I used a portable external hard drive to move all of my music. I simply copied the iTunes Music folder to the drive then disconnected the drive and attached it to the new computer and copied the folder to its new location.

Merely copying the files from one computer to another is not enough. If you stopped here the music files would be on the new computer but the new iTunes may not be able to find them and even if it did you would lose ratings and play counts at a minimum.

Going back to the computer you are migrating from, launch iTunes. Under the File/Library menu you will find an entry called “Export Library”. This will create an XML file with all of the information iTunes knows about your music files. This is a key piece that we need to take with us to the new computer. The XML file that is created will have the song information but will be pointing to the file locations on the old computer. We need to edit this file to tell iTunes where to find the songs on the new computer.

An XML file can be opened in any text editor such as TextEdit or TextWrangler. Opening the XML file you will notice an entry for each song file that shows its location. Using the global search and replace function of your text editor, change the disk and folder names from the old system to the new location on your new computer. Once the replacement is completed; save the XML file and transfer it to the new computer.

On the new computer open iTunes and go to the Preferences screen. Under the Advanced tab enter the location where you want your new iTunes Music folder to reside. While on that screen make sure that “Keep iTunes Music folder organized” and “Copy files to iTunes Music folder when adding to library” are both checked.

The next step is to actually import the XML file that we created above. It took me quite a while to figure this part out as it was not as logical as I would have expected. Under the File/Library menu you will find a menu option called “Import Playlist”. I know what you are thinking, we are not importing playlists, we are importing an XML file. Believe me, I didn’t think that was right either but you have to trust me on this.

In the dialog box select the XML that you modified with the new file location and let iTunes do its thing. It will parse the information contained in the XML file and in the end you should see all of your songs listed in the library with their associated ratings, play counts, and other data.

Once done, you should probably review your library and remove any redundant files. I haven’t had a problem with duplicates showing up in this process but if you had multiple copies of some of your music files it could have introduced duplicates during the library consolidation step.

That’s it; you should now have all of your music files with their associated meta data on your new computer and be ready to once again enjoy your music. These steps should work regardless of whether you are transferring your library between two PCs, two Macs, or between PC and Mac. The only differences may be where you find the iTunes preferences. Good luck, hopefully this will make your iTunes transfer less painful and reduce the level of stress in your life.