Airtunes is/was Apple’s way of putting music in other rooms. It came with the Airport Express, but when the Airport Extreme was updated, Airtunes was nowhere to be found. Worse, Airtunes can only be streamed to one target?!? Now that Apple has released yet two new WiFi audio products, the iPod touch and the iPhone, why does they not include Airtunes capabilities? They should be able to both stream music and have music streamed to them! Apple, where is Airtunes heading? I still want the same music in every room of my apartment.

Run the following as root to make disks auto-mount during system startup. I use this to have an external disk to put my Tomcat, JBoss and MySQL logfiles on
defaults write /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/autodiskmount AutomountDisksWithoutUserLogin -bool true

Tuesday’s Apple announcement held many goodies, but Apple seems to be going nowhere on Airtunes. Airport Extreme had been updated, but no Audio Out. And with my Airport Express, I cannot simply add more Airport Expresses to play the same set of music in every room of my house: Because iTunes and the Express use Apple Lossless compression to encode music (rather than native MP3 or AAC), you can stream audio to only one unit at a time (source). Dear Apple, wouldn’t you make a nice little plug-this-adapter-in-the-wall-and-get-audio-out Airtunes device that I can put in every room of my house with a stereo, and throw in a remote control or two in the package?

When Steve Jobs announced that the iPhone would be running OS X, I thought to myself that that’s just what he sais: it will have the same userinterface, but he’s not going to keep the core there: the BSD subsystem. Looks like he has, though, and now people are SSH’ing into the phone. That suddenly made the whole phone very much more appealing. I’ll still need 3G and a decent camera, though. At the moment, my k800i is doing both camera and MP3s all right, but then again, it has no BSD subsystem.

Well, I’ve been using iPhoto, Lightroom in it’s different beta stages and now I had a demo of Aperture. I’ve been shooting digital for quite some time now, and scanned lots of negatives from when I still shot film and my parents before me. My collection is about 35.000 pictures, spanned over many DVDs and CDs. Pictures that are virutally inaccessible because I don’t know where they are. So I decided a while back to throw them all into a harddrive and try out different programs.

First program I had to ditch was iPhoto. Even iPhoto 6 becomes unusable after about 5000 pictures. It’s just ghastly slow on my Macbook Pro 15” 2,33Ghz Core 2 Duo with 2GB RAM. So that’s inexcusable.

Second program was Lightroom, after about 10.000 photos it was very slow. At 16.000 photos it grinded to a halt. Not even half way there. A shame, really, as I really liked Lightroom and had high hopes for it, I have now abandoned it.

I grabbed a demo of aperture, and hit a very convenient limit. Where Lightroom and iPhoto just died more and more, Aperture said:
Aperture has max 10000 pictures
Aperture projects are limited to 10000 master images each. You should create new projects and import your images in batches of less than 10000.
Quite convenient, really

So, what do I do now? Shooting mainly RAW I don’t suppose changing to F-Spot is much of an alternative, especially since it’s proved quite inaccessible on OS X. I guess I’ll have to talk with the crowd that uses iView Media Pro and see how it fares. Do you have any other recommendations?