I heard that others had encountered the same problem, and I assumed that it would be fixed with a firmware update on the router. So I’ve avoided booting into Vista at home for a few weeks, and patiently waited for the update. I noticed an update earlier this week, which I installed with the hope that it would take care of this problem.

Nope.

After a bit of experimentation, I’ve found a workaround. My Macs were joined to my domain at work — which is essential for my MacBook, since I use it much more at work than at home. It isn’t essential for my Mac Pro, so I changed from domain to workgroup and rebooted. Low and behold, that took care of it, and I’m happily writing this post in IE 7 in Windows Vista Ultimate under Boot Camp on my Mac Pro.

Of course, there’s still a problem here — not sure who’s problem it is, but I sure do hope someone fixes it. The severity of the issue has decreased significantly for me by moving to a workgroup, but of course, this isn’t an ideal solution.

I’m posting this in the hope of helping others who may encounter this issue so they’re aware of the workaround, and in the hope that someone capable of fixing it (whoever they are) can do so.

And then I synced. As it turns out, there are inconsistencies here between iTunes, my iPod and my new Apple TV.

• In iTunes, everything is working wonderfully.
• On the iPod, browsing Artists respects sort field values, but browsing by Albums does not.
• On the Apple TV, sort field values are ignored when browsing by Artists or Albums.

This is my experience on my 80GB iPod Video. In the case of my Apple TV, I’m streaming my iTunes Library — not syncing it — since my iTunes library is larger than Apple TV’s capacity.

Come on, Apple — you can do better than that…

After reviewing what I didn’t like about the sorting iTunes provided out of the box, I realized that there were patterns and strategies that I’ve come to use as I’ve entered track information and would need to follow in order to keep things consistent. I’m writing now to create a handy reference to refer back to, and to share with anyone who may be interested in doing a similar thing.

Here are the things I didn’t like about iTune’s default sorting:

1. For soundtracks, I enter the Album as “Pulp Fiction” (including the quotes). Unfortunately, this placed all of the soundtracks at the top of the album list.
2. Although iTunes omits “The” from sorting, other articles (such as “A” and “An”) are not.
3. Artists are sorted primarily by their first names, not their last names.
4. Artists with titles (such as “DJ”, “Dr.”, “Grandmaster”, “Little”, “Major”, “MC”, “Reverend”, “Uncle”, etc.) are sorted by these titles.
5. Numbers are sorted by their numeric value, not their spelling — so Foreigner’s 4 album is not next to the album Four by Blues Traveller.
6. Punctuation, unusual characters and abbreviations, when present, can negatively affect the sort.

So I started down the list, artist by artist, and began populating the Sort Artist field in the hopes of having iTunes sort my music as I would. Now that it’s done, it’s working great.

What follows are examples and explanations about how I enter the Sort Artist information for specific types of artists.

Individual artists

When entering the Sort Artist text for individual artists, I generally use the format of “[last name] [first name] [middle name/initial or title]”. For example:

• “Huey Lewis” is “Lewis Huey”
• “Andrew Lloyd Webber” is “Webber Andrew Lloyd”
• “Bobby “Blue” Bland” is “Bland Bobby Blue”
• “Mary J. Blige” is “Blige Mary J”
• “Sammy Davis, Jr.” is “Davis Sammy Junior”
• “Notorious B.I.G.” is “Notorious BIG”
• “Gilbert O’Sullivan” is “O’Sullivan Gilbert”
• “DJ DMD” is “DMD DJ”
• “Dr. Dre” is “Dre Doctor”
• “Uncle Dave Mason” is “Mason Dave Uncle”
• “50 Cent” is “Fifty Cent”

Multiple artists

In the case of multiple artists, I generally use a format of “[first artist] & [second artist]”. For example:

• “Jerry Garcia & David Grisman” is “Garcia Jerry & Grisman David”
• “Ike & Tina Turner” is “Turner Ike & Tina”
• “Neil Young & Crazy Horse” is “Young Neil & Crazy Horse”
• “Perry Farrell & D.V.D.A.” is “Farell Perry & DVDA”

Bands

In the case of bands, I strip articles and uncommon characters, spell out numbers when appropriate, and refer to my individual artist rules as necessary. For example:

• “*NSYNC” is “NSYNC”
• “.38 Special” is “Thirty Eight Special”
• “Ben Folds Five” is “Folds Ben Five”
• “A Tribe Called Quest” is “Tribe Called Quest”
• “Huey Lewis & The News” is “Lewis Huey & News”
• “Jackie Brenston & His Delta Cats” is “Brenston Jack & His Delta Cats”
• “The Dave Brubeck Quartet” is “Brubeck Dave Quartet”
• “The Brothers Johnson” is “Johnson Brothers”

Feature requests for iTunes sorting

Going through this exercise for almost 3,000 artists gave me pretty good experience with the iTunes sorting features. For the most part, it was pretty intuitive, but there are a few areas where I think the software can improve.

First, once a value is entered for a Sort Artist, it would be nice if iTunes applied the same value when new tracks by the same artist are ripped. As it’s currently implemented, I need to remember to correct this each time I rip a new CD.

Second, when you start typing in a field, iTunes anticipates what you’re typing and provides statement completion, suggesting previously entered values that match what you’ve typed so far. This is nice, but when the match starts with the same letters in a different case, as you continue typing, the case does not change. You need to keep an eye out for this, or you’ll have inconsistencies in your libary.

Finally, let’s say that you change “The B-52’s” from the default Sort Artist of “B-52’s” to “B Fifty Twos” and apply the sort field to all tracks by the same artist. If you later discover that this was a mistake and wish to revert back to the default, doing so apparently requires that you delete the custom entry for each track, one by one. It would be far more convenient to apply the change across all related tracks with one action, like you can when entering a custom value.

Next steps

So that’s my Sort Artist story. I think it’s chapter 1 of a larger project, because I plan to keep improving my track information over time. It’s not a small project, so I’ll end up doing it a little bit at a time.

I’ll be updating the Sort Album and Album Artist fields next, and ensuring that only those albums that are compilations (e.g. contain tracks from different artists) are flagged as such. After that, I’m hoping to verify the genres for the tracks, and determine a strategy for associating more than one genre to each track (when appropriate). Genre on its own is pretty limiting (for example, I don’t consider soundtracks or holiday music to be genres). I think I’ll use genre for a high level classification by artist, but I’d prefer to have multiple style and theme values available at the track level as well. This should give me great capabilities with smart playlists.

Once that’s all done, the next big push will be determining how to populate the beats per minute field for each track, which seems like great information to have available when building music to exercise to.

If you’ve come across this article and have done or are planning to do similar work to your iTunes Library, leave a comment, and let me know about it! I’d love to hear your strategies, what has worked well, what hasn’t, etc.

If you’ve never read a Stephen King novel, this isn’t the place to start.

When I bought the machine in December, I knew I’d be upgrading the RAM very soon and upgrading the video card eventually, I just didn’t expect to do so this quickly. I knew I could use the RAM, especially since I’ll be doing development within Vista, so a quick trip out to get an additional 2GB of RAM was all it took to resolve the problem and proceed.

How my Mac Pro scores

With the added RAM, my Mac Pro gets a Windows Experience Index base score of 4.3 — most of the components score over 5.0, it’s the video card that’s bringing the base score down:

Aero glass is fully supported, so until such time that I need to upgrade to run some high-end game or other graphics-intensive application, I’m very pleased with my current setup — certainly one which should satisfy my needs for quite some time.

I have a 250MB primary hard drive, which I partitioned with the Boot Camp beta into two equal partitions: one for OS X and one for Vista. Even with Microsoft Office Ultimate 2007 and Visual Studio 2005 Professional installed on top of Windows Vista Ultimate, I’ve still got plenty of room to grow, in terms of applications, which is nice. I keep my data on separate drives — currently three 500GB Western Digital drives striped into one large volume for my music, pictures and other documents.

I’ve still got a few unresolved issues — the same ones I mentioned that are occurring on my MacBook, but it’s nothing I can’t live without until the final version of Boot Camp is released with updated drivers. Perhaps they’ll even appear in Windows Update before then, which would be a nice, if unexpected, surprise.

Vista is simply beautiful on this hardware!

Windows Experience Index

After exploring Vista for a while, I came across the Windows Experience Index.

From Windows Vista help:

The Windows Experience Index measures the capability of your computer’s hardware and software configuration and expresses this measurement as a number called a base score. A higher base score generally means that your computer will perform better and faster than a computer with a lower base score, especially when performing more advanced and resource-intensive tasks. Each hardware component receives an individual sub-score. Your computer’s base score is determined by the lowest sub-score. For example, if the lowest sub-score of an individual hardware component is 2.6, then the base score is 2.6. The base score is not an average of the combined sub-scores. You can use the base score to confidently buy programs and other software that are matched to your computer’s base score. For example, if your computer has a base score of 3.3, then you can confidently purchase any software designed for this version of Windows that requires a computer with a base score of 3 or lower.

How my MacBook scores

So my MacBook has a Windows Experience Index base score of 3.1, and seems to be working wonderfully — I get Aero glass, and it looks absolutely beautiful.

Some issues with the setup

Since Boot Camp is still in beta and Windows Vista was just released last week, it’s not without its hiccups. Here are the things that I have yet to get working, though I’ll likely just wait for Boot Camp’s final release before attempting to fix any of it, since nothing here is a blocking issue to me using it:

1. Right-clicking doesn’t work without attaching my USB mouse.
2. 2-finger scrolling doesn’t work.
3. Eject, brightness and volume keyboard keys don’t work.
4. Bluetooth doesn’t work.
5. iSight camera doesn’t work.

Additionally, I did run into a small hiccup with the Airport wireless card. Windows Update automatically provided an update for the network card, which prevented the MacBook from seeing any wireless networks. Uninstalling the update fixed the issue.

Next steps

I hope to install the same dual boot setup on my home computer, a Mac Pro, this weekend. I think I’ll probably need to upgrade my Mac Pro’s RAM in the process, since I only have 1GB of RAM on it today.

This book makes powerful arguments for consumer-focused change in the music and recording industries. Change is coming, and soon — the growing popularity of digital music and the closure of major music stores such as Tower Records is just the beginning. Though I finished the book skeptical on their plan for music “running like water” as a public utility, I found the discussion intriguing, and I doubt that I’ll look at the industry the same way again.

My Mac Mini

I took part of the money for the G5 and got a Mac Mini as an interim solution, hooking it up to my TV instead of getting a monitor. I wanted to play with the idea of having such a machine at home, to get an idea of what I’d do with it and whether I’d end up going the Boot Camp or Parallels approach for running Windows. With Vista’s release coming soon, the Mini was a way for me to test the waters a bit and determine if I wanted to stay with the Mac at home, or go with a Media Center PC instead.

The Mini in the living room is a nice setup, especially given its size and quietness, but it’s a bit under-powered for my needs, and I find that although it’s nice at times to have a computer in the living room for things like Front Row, it gets inconvenient and uncomfortable to use for long stints of regular computer usage. I never really got comfortable typing and mousing from the couch, and even on a 50” plasma, the resolution is pretty limited compared to what’s available on a smaller monitor. Not to mention the whole watch TV or use computer decision. Yes, I realize that there are solutions like eyeTV to watch and record TV (Media Center does this too) but I’m happy with the Comcast DVR for this, and the idea of using my hard drives to record TV seems a bit strange to me. I don’t consume video as much as music, I guess.

I was hoping to hear rumors of Apple introducing a desktop model with power and expandability closer to the Mac Pro and a form factor closer to the Mac Mini, but it doesn’t appear that anything like that is coming soon. So my options to stay Mac meant choosing between a Mac Pro and an iMac. I don’t like the limitations of all-in-one computers, so the choice was pretty easy: I bought a Mac Pro today. Merry Christmas to me :)

I get a pretty decent corporate discount, given Apple’s universal pricing model, but the price of what I wanted for the configuration is still on the higher end of my computer budget. So, selling the Mini is a likelihood down the road. I’ll wait to hear more about Apple TV, but given that my primary interest is in music, I may also look to other solutions (Microsoft’s Xbox 360 and the Sonos Digital Music System come to mind) to fill that need.

My Mac Pro

I decided on the mid-level Mac Pro, and went with the basic configuration for RAM, storage and video, knowing I can easily upgrade those as needed, and can do so for a lot less money by going 3rd party. I got more storage right away, and I’ll likely get more RAM to run Vista once I get that far in the setup – probably not until January.

Here are the specs:

• Two 2.66GHz Dual-Core Intel Xeon 5100 series processors with Intel Core microarchitecture (4MB shared L2 cache per processor, 128-bit SSE3 vector engine, 64-bit data paths and registers, lower power optimization)
• 1.33GHz, 64-bit dual independent front-side buses
• 1GB 667MHz DDR2 ECC fully-buffered DIMM (FB-DIMM) memory, taking up two of eight slots (expandable up to 16GB). Update: 2/3/07: I added an additional 2GB of RAM and I am now running Windows Vista Ultimate under Bootcamp. Nice.
• NVIDIA GeForce 7300 GT with 256MB of GDDR2 SDRAM, one single-link DVI port, and one dual-link DVI port (support for 2 displays)
• 250GB primary internal hard drive (Serial ATA 3Gb/s, 7200-rpm, 8MB cache), expandable up to 3TB
• 16x SuperDrive with double-layer support (DVD+R DL/DVD±RW/CD-RW). Writes DVD-R discs at up to 16x speed, DVD+R DL discs at up to 6x speed, CD-R and CD-RW discs at up to 24x speed. Reads DVDs at up to 16x speed, CDs at up to 32x speed.
• One open optical drive bay for an optional second SuperDrive.
• Three open full-length PCI Express expansion slots
• Two independent 10/100/1000BASE-T Ethernet (RJ-45) network cards
• AirPort Extreme wireless networking at 802.11n speeds
• Bluetooth 2.0 + Enhanced Data Rate (EDR) up to 3Mbps
• Two FireWire 800 ports (one on front panel, one on back panel)
• Two FireWire 400 ports (one on front panel, one on back panel)
• Five USB 2.0 ports (two on front panel, three on back panel)
• Two USB 1.1 ports on included keyboard
• Front-panel headphone mini jack and speaker
• Optical digital audio input and output Toslink ports
• Analog stereo line-level input and output mini jacks
• Apple wired mouse and keyboard

Display

I really wanted to get Apple’s 30” display, which I’ve had my eye on ever since they announced it, but I decided on the more economical Apple 23” Cinema HD display instead. If necessary, I can take a dual monitor route with two of these displays for about the same price as the 30”, and have a backup in the event of a problem with one of them.

Western Digital hard drives

250GB isn’t enough space for OS X, Vista, my applications, music, photos and other files, but Apple’s pricing for expanding storage is awfully expensive. After exploring several different options, I ended up creating a second partition consisting of three Western Digital Caviar SE16 500GB hard drives (7200 RPM, 16MB cache, SATA 3.0Gb, model WD5000KSRTL).

All-in-one printer

Apple was running a printer promotion for Mac purchases, which I took advantage of, getting a Canon Pixma MP600 printer/scanner/copier. I haven’t used an all-in-one combination in a while, and the quality of this model is very nice. The software on the Mac side is certainly far better than the HP versions I had been struggling with on the G5.

Video

I’m not much of a gamer, so I’m fine with the video card I have at the moment. I’ll wait to see how it does in Vista (I want Aero Glass) and the next version of OS X (I want Core Animation), and decide whether or not to upgrade then.

Sound

I’m sticking with the Harmon Kardon Sound Sticks II. They’re great.

Now, twelve years later, Smith is back, with The Ruins, a horror-thriller about four Americans traveling in Mexico who stumble across a nightmare in the jungle. Those of you familiar with A Simple Plan may wonder if this new book generates the first book’s harrowing suspense. Yes, it does. Is it as successful and fulfilling as a novel? No. It’s a good story, but it seemed it a bit stretched out.

It’s hard to say much about the book without giving away everything. It tells the tale of four young American tourists who make friends with a German named Mathias whose brother has gone off into the jungle with some archaeologists. This group heads to the jungle to find Mathias’s brother, the archaeologists, and the ruins. What they find instead is a very interesting trap from which there appears to be no escape.

I purchased this book because I loved A Simple Plan and because the book’s jacket compared it to the television show Lost. Though the story is a bit more Stephen King than A Simple Plan, I felt it suffered from the comparison to Lost.

Thought I’d post the list here for those who may be searching for fright night music down the road. Oh, and I didn’t organize the list in any particular way — it’s best to just shuffle it and let the spirits control the order :)

1. (Night Time Is) The Right Time, Ray Charles
2. A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving, George Winston
3. Bad Moon Rising, Creedence Clearwater Revival
4. Bark At The Moon, Ozzy Osbourne
5. Batman, Wolfman, Frankenstein or Dracula, The Diamonds
6. Black Magic Woman, Santana
7. Blue Moon, Elvis Presley
8. Bohemian Rhapsody, Queen
9. Boris The Spider, The Who
10. Brain Damage, Pink Floyd
11. Break On Through (To The Other Side), The Doors
12. Brother, Toad The Wet Sprocket
13. Cry, Little Sister (Theme From “The Lost Boys”), Gerard McMann
14. Dead Man’s Party, Oingo Boingo
15. Devil Inside, INXS
16. Devil’s Haircut, Beck
17. Ding-Dong! The Witch Is Dead (Reprise), Herbert Stothart
18. Don’t Fear The Reaper, Blue Öyster Cult
19. Don’t Let The Sun Go Down On Me, Roger Daltry
20. Dracula’s Wedding, Outkast
21. El Distorto De Melodica, Everclear
22. Evil Ways, Santana
23. Frankenstein, New York Dolls
24. Gardening At Night (Different Vocal Mix), R.E.M.
25. Ghost Train, Marc Cohn
26. Ghostbusters, Ray Parker, Jr.
27. Gravedigger, Dave Matthews
28. Hells Bells, AC/DC
29. House of 1000 Corpses, Rob Zombie
30. I Put A Spell On You, Creedence Clearwater Revival
31. I Want Candy, Bow Wow Wow
32. I Would Die 4 U, Prince
33. I’m Your Boogie Man (Sex On The Rocks Mix), White Zombie
34. In The Midnight Hour, The Commitments
35. Iron Man, Black Sabbath
36. Living Dead Girl, Rob Zombie
37. Lost In The Shadows, Lou Gramm
38. Love Potion #9, Herb Alpert & The Tijuana Brass
39. Machine Gun, Commodores
40. Meet The Creeper, Rob Zombie
41. Monster Mash, Bobby “Boris” Pickett
42. Night Prowler, AC/DC
43. People Are Strange, The Doors
44. People Are Strange, Echo & The Bunnymen
45. Pet Sematary (Single Version), The Ramones
46. Prayer For The Dying (Seal)
47. Requiem, K. 626, Dies Irae, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
48. Riders On The Storm, The Doors
49. Runnin’ With The Devil, Van Halen
50. Son Of A Preacher Man, Dusty Springfield
51. That Old Black Magic, Frank Sinatra
52. The Devil Went Down to Georgia, Charlie Daniels
53. The End, The Doors
54. The Great Pumpkin Waltz, Chick Corea
55. The Munster’s Theme, Jack Marshall
56. The Murder From “Psycho”, Bernard Herrmann
57. The Purple People Eater, Sheb Wooley
58. The Time Warp, Richard O’Brien
59. Theme (From “Halloween”), John Carpenter
60. Thriller, Michael Jackson
61. Trick Or Treat, Otis Redding
62. Twilight Zone, Golden Earring
63. Wave Of Mutilation, Pixies
64. Werewolves Of London, Warren Zevon
65. Witch Doctor, Sha Na Na
66. Witchcraft, Frank Sinatra
67. Witchy Woman, The Eagles
68. X-Files Theme, The Dust Brothers

If you have further recommendations or found this list to be helpful, please leave a comment!