Tag: apple

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I have a bunch of playlists that I’ve crafted over the years and when I moved to Apple Music I was disappointed to see my local library copies of those files replaced with Apple Music’s versions. It seemed to be totally arbitrary and, importantly, the play count, rating, etc. was different on my local library copies then it was on the Apple Music versions of those songs.

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In the above, I know that I have a copy of Can’t get There from Here in my local library, so not sure why the Apple Music one was substituted in my playlist. Anyway, I want my local version in there so I can track stats, etc.

I poked around the venerable Doug’s Scripts for a while but couldn’t quite find what I needed so I wrote this script which:

  • Select/start playing a song in the playlist you want to work with
  • Creates a new playlist called “$playlistname Local Files.”
  • Checks each song in the active playlist to see if it’s local or Apple Music
  • If it’s not Apple Music, it just adds it to the Local Files version of the playlist
  • If it is Apple Music, it checks to see if there is a song in your library with the same Artist and Song name
  • It then copies the tracks that result from that search to the Local Files version of the playlist
  • If it can’t find a local copy, it adds the Apple Music version to the “Local Files” copy of the playlist

The search is really loose so it will find multiple local copies if you have them which is a bit of a pain in the butt. SO you need to go to the new playlist and remove the local versions (live! Remix!, etc.) from the playlist.

I’ve run this on a few big playlists with ~1000 songs and it runs just fine. It might be helpful for a few folks so I’m putting it up here but that said, I wouldn’t download and run this unless you know what the code is doing.

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Sometimes you need to go nuclear and get back to baseline on all of those Finder window customizations that you make over time and start afresh. This will get rid of all the .DS_Store files that hold those customizations. I save it as a bash script, chmod it 775 and keep it in my ~/bin/ directory as reset_finder_windows.sh

#!/bin/bash
sudo find / -name .DS_Store -delete; killall Finder

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I’ve been second-guessing drive read/write speeds on my new iMac because it has a fusion drive. My iMac has a 2Tb Fusion Drive so that means it has 128GB SSD and the rest is spinning platters.

I never really know if I’m reading/writing to/from the SSD or the platters. I mean, it seems zippy so my inclination is just to leave it as-is and trust that Apple knows what they are doing.

I have entertained the idea of splitting up the fusion drive and trying to manage the SSD space on my own but thanks to this post, I’m feeling less inclined to do so. Rauol Pop did it and then ran some tests that show splitting the drive up yields equivocal benefits and some measurable negatives so, I’m trusting that the engineers at Apple know what they’re doing.

That, and I’m making good use of 24GB of RAM and just loading up all my applications into RAM anyway, so, there’s that. Also, as soon as they come down in price just a smidge, I’m going to pickup an external SSD that supports Thunderbolt 3 like the Samsung X5, that ought to be pretty close to the speeds of the internal SSD.

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Desktop

Spent a lot of time yesterday waiting for sql inserts to load and thought, hmm let me change my desktop background image. From there it was all down hill. Rabbit hole after rabbit hole, looking for vintage Mac icons. I even resucitated DragThing, forgot what a great application it is. Anyway, back to work.