June 2010

Keep On Breathing/ The Delgados
Holiday/ Turboweekend
Only People/ Cantoma
Nobody But You/ The Apples In Stereo
I Don’t Know Why I Love You/ Ivy
Waltz Darling (Introducting Lourdes & Pretty Fatt)/ Malcolm Mclaren & The Bootzilla Orchestra
Bluebird / One Self
Make You Mine /  BreakBot
Things You Don’t Have to Do (DJ Strobe Loungin’ In Ibiza Remix) /   Norah Jones & Peter Malick
Night Dance  /  Chris Coco & Pete Gooding
Everybody Loves a Loser  /  Morcheeba
Static On the Wire /  Holy Ghost!
Crash Years /  The New Pornographers
Er det nu (Pilfingers Remix) /   Marie Key Band
Look Into My Eyes /   Ray Mang
La fée /  ZAZ
Misread  /  Kings of Convenience
With You   / Summer of Space
Untitled Love  /  Still Going
Why Does the Wind?   / Tracey Thorn
A Funny Thing (Radio Edit)   / Penguin Prison
Sweet Jezebel /   Turboweekend
Sun and Rain /   Tenfold Loadstar
Enough’s Enough  /  Jamie Lidell
Take Me to the River  /  Al Green
New Heights /   A Fine Frenzy
Bulletproof (Tiborg Remix)  /  La Roux
Sly (7″ Edit)  /  Massive Attack
Nothing Left to Do (feat. Valia)   / Cayetano
Rome  /  Yeasayer
Sigh  /  Kate the Cat
Adventure We Go  /  Muchuu
Faster  /  Janelle Monáe
Go Get It (feat. Ladi6)  /  Sepalot
L.A. Lights  /  Grum
Never Stop  /  Chilly Gonzales
North Star (feat. Dido)  /  Faithless
Paint Me Rain  /  Muchuu
Sashimi  /  Tunng
Time is Love  /  Be.Alone
When I Am Brave   / Muchuu
New York City (Lazy Sunday In Prospect Park Remix)  /  Norah Jones & Peter Malick

May 2010

Azzurra   / Gui Boratto
Bluish    / Animal Collective
Breaststroke    / Mathemagic
Chaos    / New Young Pony Club
Clap (See the Stars)    / The Myrmidons
Clap Your Hands    / Sia
Coco (feat. Lilja Bloom)     /Parov Stelar
Dingue     /Emmanuelle Seigner
Dreamin’     /Feldberg
Dreaming     /Goldfrapp
Enjoy Your Life (feat. Liz June)    / Chris Le Blanc
Feel It All Around     /Washed Out
Fire In Your New Shoes (feat. Dragonette)     / Kaskade
Forward Motion    / Your Nature
Get Up    / Washed Out
Head First    / Goldfrapp
Hide Me    / The Golden Filter
Hold Out    / Washed Out
It’s Automatic   /  Zoot Woman
June Evenings    / Air France
Kisses    / Raz Ohara & The Odd Orchestra
La Belle Nation    / zeebee
Lately    / Washed Out
Mama Told Me Not To Come    / Wolfgang Press
Maneater    / The Bird and the Bee
Naughty Secret    / Xemplify
New Theory    / Washed Out
Odessa   /  Caribou
Også Om Dagen (SNE Remix)  /  Julie Maria
The One I Am  /  zeebee
Only Man  /  Audio Bullys
Open Your Eyes  /  Elsa
The Phoenix Alive (The Octans Edit)  /  Monarchy
Save Your Love (Lovelock Remix) /   Sally Shapiro
Say My Name   / Holy Ghost!
Sensibility  /  zeebee
She Lion  /  Rebekkamaria
Something Good Can Work (The Twelves Remix) /   Two Door Cinema Club
Sound of Love  /  Husky Rescue
Springer (Smith & Mudd Version)  /  Tosca
Superstition  /  Estelle Swaray
Under (Morgan Page Remix)  /  Under
Vampires (feat. Femi Kuti)  /  Thievery Corporation
Vox populi (Lifelike Treatment)  /  Jupiter
We Want To  /  New Young Pony Club
What’s In a Name  /  Late Night Alumni
Wonderful Life (Arthur Baker Remix Kitsuné Edit) /   Hurts
You And Me (Percussion Mix) [feat. Nadine Hoffmann]  /  Jean Mare
You’ll See It  /  Washed Out
Your Body Is a Machine (Zebra and Snake Remix) /   The Good Natured
Yours Truly   / Rebekkamaria
6 Underground (Nellee Hooper Edit)  /  Sneaker Pimps

Some friends and colleagues who know that I work with Denzyl Feigelson and Club Monaco to provide their monthly in-store music programming have been asking me where they can find a list of music, and also where the songs can be purchased. I’ve decided to post the playlist at the end of each month.
In fact, here’s what Club Monaco has to say about it on their Tunes Page:

FAVORITE TUNES
Club Monaco!

Each month, we get scores of questions about our Club Monaco store soundtracks. Who sings that song with the addictive rhythm? What band performs the cover of that amazing song? When are the new tracks coming out? Where can I buy these songs? Why don’t you spread the news?
Who, what, when, where, why!

~ Cheers
Chris

April 2010

All Those City Lights  /  Sono
Comme Ci Comme Ça (The Twelves Remix) /   Terry Poison
Go Go  /  Alphabeat
Desperately Trying  /  Anna Luca
Sans l’ombre de toi   / Mélanie Pain
Phébus  /  M
Fire  /  Tesla Boy
Blow Away  /  A Fine Frenzy
Strange Transmissions (Chillout Remix)  /  Norah Jones & Peter Malick
London Girl   / The Invisible
The Metro  /  Sleepthief & Jerri Eckert
I Can’t Wait   / The  Kenneth Bager Experience
That’s the Way Love Goes  /  Yuliet Topaz
Engiadina /   Sky D’Or
The Shining Path (feat. Phonte Coleman)  /  RJD2
So Light Is Her Footfall (Breakbot Remix) /   Air
She Takes My Breath Away  /  Casio Social Club & The Diogenes Club
Avenue l’Amour (Lemongrass Remix) /   Naomi
Addicted  /  Waldeck
Amour (Lounge Mix) [feat. Stella]  /  Superlounger
J’me fais mal  /  Etyl
Erlend /   Ted & Francis
Higher Heights  /  8000Below
Always Something Missing  /  Sono
A Night Like This  /  Caro Emerald
Sitting On Top of the World  /  Joey Negro & The Sunburst Band
Star  /  Lazy Hammock
Another Sunday Morning  /  The Casino Royal
A Bright New Life (Morgan Geist Re-Edit)  /  Escort
Stuck /   Caro Emerald
The First Picture  /  The  Kenneth Bager Experience
Conmigo (Featuring Sol Galarreta)  /  Fous de la Mer & Sol Galarreta
Apples and Pears  /  The Canyons
Let It Flow  /  Naoki Kenji
Be As One (feat. Emma Saville)  /  MinusBlue
Locomotion  /  Sophialorenians
Still Here (feat. Kim Sanders)   / Aural Float
Airtight [Aeroplane Remix]  /  Cobra Dukes
End of the Day (Silence)  /  Blue Foundation

Let’s face it: our Digital-Lives are getting just a bit more complicated every day!  It started with emails, and then .doc files, and .pdfs.  Then came digital music, and digital photos.  And now each one of us has 2 or 3 devices floating around the home or office that record video as well as take photos.  As our digital lifestyles expand, the sheer SIZE of our files have expanded as well.  New computers ship with 50% larger hard drives than they did just two years ago, but we’re now faced with a new problem:

How do we send files to our friends and colleagues that are far too large to send in an email?

Luckily, there are a lot of ways in which we can share files with others.  We’ve got excellent services like Flickr, SmugMug, and Picasa for sharing our photos.

For video sharing there’s Viddler, Vimeo, and the ever-ubiquitous YouTube.

Now that’s all about sharing, which is great, but how does one send that 300MB video you shot to your editor?

Or perhaps you’ve hired a designer who would like to deliver the full-resolution Photoshop files to you so you can have them printed.

You’ve tried to send it via email, and have come to the painful realization that the file is just too large, and your email program is starting to get a bit cranky with you.

There are 2 products I use to accomplish this feat with.  One them is not free, and the other one is mostly free.

The not free solution is YouSendIt.

With a YouSendIt account, you can upload any file up to 2GB in size to YouSendIt’s servers, and they then send a message to your recipient which contains a download link.  Your friend or colleague then downloads the file from YouSendIt’s servers to their own computers.  Easy, intuitive interface.  Even easier to understand for the recipient.  All they have to do is open their email, and click on a link.  This solution is perfect for anyone who intends to regularly send large files across the internet.

Pricing:
YouSendIt offers several subscription levels, starting at $9.99 per month, or a Pay Per Use option which is actually a really terrible value.

—–

The “Mostly Free” option is Dropbox.

I recommend Dropbox to most of my clients, because of its overall value, ease of use, and cross-platform performance.  Dropbox is compatible with Windows, Mac OS, Linux, and iPhone, which means that you can send and receive files to and from almost any computer on the planet without too much fuss.

Dropbox is an application that you download and install on your computer which gives you access to your own file server up in the “cloud” that you can then drag files to, and organize just as you would the files on your own computer.  One of the folders in your Dropbox is a “public” folder which others can access to download files that you leave in there for them to pickup.

In addition to using this service to send really large files to others, Dropbox is perfect for anyone who has ever emailed an attachment to themselves so they would have access to it from another computer in a different location.  Dropbox is also perfect for anyone in the habit of carrying a USB Thumbdrive around with them all the time.

Pricing:
Dropbox offers a free, Basic version which offers full access and 2GB of file storage

Their Pro 50 subscription costs $9.99/month and allows 50GB of file storage.

The Pro 100 subscription costs $19.99/month and allows 100GB of file storage.

These prices are a HUGE value for anyone who needs to share large files with others, or who is looking for secure, large-capacity offline storage.  Small business can benefit from using Dropbox as a shared file server for their employees.

Mac users often ask me to compare Dropbox to MobileMe, which is Apple’s all-in-one file sharing, syncing, sharing service.  MobileMe costs $99 per year, and offers 20GB of file storage, which can be incrementally upgraded for a price.  While MobileMe offers a lot more than Dropbox does (it’s not the same sort of product, though they both offer off-site file storage) Dropbox offers a much higher value as a storage product than Apple’s MobileMe does.

Unless you need the other features included with a MobileMe subscription, I’d recommend giving Dropbox a try instead.

Thanks for reading!

~ Chris

February 2010

Alone/ Tennis Hero
Angie/ The Rolling Stones
Apprends Moi/ Superbus
Balulalow/ Revolver
Beaches and Friends (Hey Champ Remix)/ French Horn Rebellion Vs. Database
Bon Tempi/ Bazille Noir
Boys & Girls/ Martin Solveig
Come Dancing/ The Kinks
Faut-il, faut-il pas ?/ Nolwenn Leroy
Feel So Free/ Ivy
Feelin’ Good (Joe Claussell Remix)/ Nina Simone
Fireflies/  Owl City
Gadfly/ Blue Pilot’s Project
Hands In the Dark/ Chromatics
Heartbox/ Christophe Willem
Heaven Can Wait/ Charlotte Gainsbourg & Beck
I Got You/ Split Enz
I’m a Stranger Here Myself/ Masha Qrella
Idéaliste/ Pascal Obispo
If (duo avec Charlotte Gainsbourg)/ Étienne Daho & Charlotte Gainsbourg
Il y a/ Vanessa Paradis
July Flame/ Laura Veirs
L-O-V-E/ Nat “King” Cole
L’âge des possibles/ Marie Espinosa
Lalalove You/ BB Brunes
Let’s Do It/ Diana Ross
The Light/ Supreme Beings of Leisure
Love Love Love (Aeroplane Remix)/ Low Motion Disco
Love Protects/ B.Alone
Ma vie n’est pas la tienne/ Najoua Belyzel
Magnetising/ Marsmobil
My Favourite Book/ Stars
Out of Your Mind/ Eriq Johnson
Positivity/ Stevie Wonder
Pussycat On a Leash / Oceana
Quicksand (Thievery Corporation Remix)/ Natalie Walker
Sconsolato/ Nathan Davis
Someday, Someway/ Marshall Crenshaw
Still Going Theme/ Still Going
Take Yo’ Praise/ Camille Yarbrough
Things We Do (Nils Krogh Alternate Take)/ Soular Sound
Toc Toc Quentin/ Mosimann
Toi + moi/ Grégoire
Under Pressure/ Queen
Warwick Avenue/ Duffy
We Belong in This World Together/ Stereo MC’s
Wonderwall / Oasis

We’re really pleased to announce the launch of our own Automated Help Desk system for receiving and tracking support requests for our customers.

Our Help Desk software allows us to capture your information as soon as you report your issue, and keep a record of the support session, from start to finish.  There is also a Forum inside and a knowledge base full of helpful FREE articles which could very well save you the expense of opening a support request!

Please view the brief video, and feel free to click on the big RED help button at the bottom of this page to register for your own free account.  You can also use the FoleyPod Help Desk system to ask us a question, make a suggestion, or request a tutorial topic for the eZine.  Use it your own way.

I love my iPhone.

Most iPhone users I encounter feel the same. Occasionally I meet someone who says they really don’t like it.

I met Nick at a friend’s house. He said “ I’m sorry I got an iPhone. It just takes too many steps to do anything and it constantly interrupts my phone calls with text messages.”

“Show me what you mean it takes too many steps”, I asked.

“OK.”

Nick pulled out his iPhone and holding it between us says, “For instance, to make a phone call I have to wake up the phone, swipe the unlock bar, tap the phone icon, find the contact or dial the phone number. That’s just not simple! On my old free flip-phone, I can just open the phone and dial.
Why can’t people at Apple make the iPhone that simple and direct?”

Now, I do a lot of iPhone support and training both personally and professionally and I occasionally hear this kind of complaint and comparison.

I said to Nick, “I get it. On a flip-phone you can open and dial. On an iPhone you can’t.
The problem is that the iPhone is not a phone. It’s a handheld computer. It has one application that makes phone calls.
If you stop relating to the iPhone as a phone (even though the name says phone…) and start relating to it as a computer I predict your experience will change.”

I could see his brain processing this info… In a minute, he looked at me and said, “Got it.”
“Next,” he said, “ are these text messages that constantly interrupt my phone calls. I have to tap either “Ignore” or “Reply” to the text alert before I can continue to interact with the phone call. That’s ridiculous!”

“OK… Let’s think about this from the context of a computer. Computers are configurable, customizable, so that you have the experience using them that you want. And… Apple is one of the premier interface companies. How these computer applications interact with you and with each other is largely configurable. Let’s find the options relating to text message alerts.”
We go to Settings…

Messages…



The first option is Show Preview.



“If you turn this to OFF you’ll stop being “interrupted” while on a phone call, and can check your text messages at will.”
Nick turns off Show Preview, nodding his head in understanding.

So, what’s the #1 tip?

Remember that the iPhone is a computer. When it does odd or unexpected things troubleshoot just as you would your computer.

(Those steps coming in a future entry… stay tuned.)

——————-

Wyn Matthews is new to the FoleyPod Digital-Life Coach eZine.  He comes to us with decades of Mac and PC troubleshooting experience, and is an expert on both systems.

DO YOU HAVE A QUESTION OF YOUR OWN?
Click on the HELP button at the bottom of the page to submit your own question?

iPhoto Library Manager

Pausha and I have a unique issue in our house regarding photos.  I’m the photographer, and she’s the designer.  She likes to have access to all of the shots I take, because they  often find their way into site and print designs that she does for clients.  In short, I have become part of her stock library, which I like a lot, because it’s very interesting for me to see my images show up in neat and unexpected ways.

Our issue is one of workflow.  Pausha works in Adobe Bridge and Adobe Photoshop.  I work in Apple’s Aperture.  I like Aperture because of the feature-set, and because Aperture (like iPhoto) is an excellent image organizer software.  Like iTunes for your photos, but with a very robust set of editing tools.

We’ve tried a few different ways of dealing with this issue, and some readers may find these methods familiar.  My first solution was to put a LaCie hard drive on my Airport, thus creating a network drive that anyone in the office could access.  I then exported all of my photos from Aperture (yeah, 10,000+ of them..) and sorted them into categories.  Each category had its own folder, and then all of those folders went up into the network drive for Pausha to go sift through whenever she wanted.

This solution was a pain in neck, because each and every time I would go shoot something, I’d have to export all of my images, after importing them all, sort them into categories, and then upload them to the drive.  In short, it became a lot of work for me, to provide her with the images she needed.  Another issue with this solution is that we could not browse through the many files on the network drive visually. We’ve all become accustomed to using services like iStockPhoto and Flickr, and FaceBook, and being able to visually browse through photo libraries to find what we’re after.  For this reason, my first solution was a non-starter.

My next solution was to use my MobileMe in combination with my Aperture program to create a series of galleries up on our .Mac/MobileMe account that she could go sort through visually.

This worked pretty well at first.  My favorite part of this solution was that it would take advantage of smart albums created in Aperture, which is was already using anyway.  Providing I add tags to my images upon import using several keywords that I had setup ahead of time, the smart albums would auto-import any images tagged with those keywords.  A few examples of my own keywords are Flowers, Portraits, Candid, Outdoor, Pets, Statues, Paris, Poland, Beach, etc.

Well, this solution failed as well; with almost 10,000 images being loaded up on MobileMe, the problem with creating those synced galleries in my Aperture was that every time I would launch Aperture, it would go through an intensely long syncing process, as it compared my 21 gallery albums with the MobileMe server, thus slowing Aperture down to a halt and making it relatively unusable until the syncing was complete.

Of course, I would then import my newest images, tag them on the way in, which would push most of them to the smart albums corresponding to the images’ keywords, and then the MobileMe gallery syncing would immediately start up again, because the system would detect new images!  Again, Aperture became unusable for the next 15 minutes.

The sad result of this solution is that I actually stopped shooting and using Aperture for a while, out of sheer frustration.  It became a simple case of creativity being hindered by our technology.  Now, this very concept is the reason I created FoleyPod in the first place, so back to the drawing board I went.

People have asked me why I don’t simply install Aperture on her computer, import my own library into it, and then overwrite that library with my own on a monthly basis.  This is a good solution, but for the fact that Pausha doesn’t want to learn Aperture, and that she also has a large handful of new images of her own that she’s adding every month to her iPhoto Library.   She already knows how to use iPhoto, and is comfortable in that environment.

For these reasons, we finally settled on using iPhoto as our parent libraries, and employing Fat Cat Software’s iPhoto Library Manager to regularly merge our iPhoto libraries together.  iPhoto Library Manager is (fairly) simple to use, and maintains additional file attributes that you would lose when doing an image export.  Attributes such as Titles, Rating, Keywords, etc.  In fact, this software provides several other extremely useful features unrelated to library merges and syncing, such as first aid to rescue photos from corrupted libraries, Applescript support to help with automating various tasks, easily splitting large libraries into smaller libraries, and creating a shared library folder that other users on your machine can also access, just to name a few.

So, my workflow is this:

• I import my images into Aperture, just as a normally would.  I tag my photos during import, and they all go into the projects and smart folders I’ve assigned them to.

• Next, I create a new album, and dump all images into it that have not yet been synced over to Pausha’s library.

• Next, I launch iPhoto, go up to File, and select Show Aperture Library.

I locate the Unsynced folder and import those items into iPhoto.

Because the images have already been tagged with keywords, and because Aperture and iPhoto talk to each other just as great Apple applications do and should, all of my images come over and get immediately filed into the smart albums I’ve created in iPhoto.

• I can then remove those images from the Unsynced album in Aperture and close Aperture.

• Next, I connect to Pausha’s computer over the network,

and I launch iPhoto Library Manager, and run the Merge tool on our libraries.  (Note that beforehand I had to merge both libraries off of a little external hard drive, because it would have taken a million years to do the initial merge over a network.  Also, if your network is not very fast, you can do this with an iPod or an external HD.  See Fat Cat Software’s site for more info on this.)

That’s it!

What I love about this solution is that while I do most of my work in Aperture, I now have a redundant set of images in iPhoto and they’re all very well organized, but separate from my Aperture library.  See, I don’t necessarily want Pausha’s images in my Aperture, since that is where I deal with my own photography.  Also, iPhoto has a few great features that as yet have not been ported into Aperture, such as one-click Flickr and Facebook sharing.

In short, I now think of Aperture as my project workspace, and iPhoto as my output gallery.  When I want to show photos to a visiting friend, I launch iPhoto.  The downside of this method is that I now have a 22GB Aperture library AND a 22GB iPhoto library.  Pausha has a 22GB iPhoto library on her computer.  If this were 3 years ago, we’d have a crisis on our hands, but it’s not 2006, and we both have 500GB hard drives in our MacBook Pros, so we can handle the extra space.

Our Time Machine software backs us all up nice and tidy, and I don’t ever have to worry about losing an image, or the meta data assigned to those images (which can be, as any professional will tell you, every bit as valuable as the images themselves.)

My dream is that Apple will soon release some sort of Aperture or iPhoto Server version, so that we don’t have to have redundant libraries on each of our computers.  This will enable us to work together into a single shared library that we could access from within the network, or even from outside the network, using a remote access system.

Until that time arrives, I’ll stick with this solution.

Thanks for reading!

~ Chris

Here are some recent book cover redesigns Pausha did for the Hendricks Institute.