iTunes Match & SoundHound Make Beautiful Music Together

We've all seen the problems iTunes has with recognizing CD tracks that you may have turned into a special mix Audio CD you burned. If you've taken a collection of MP3s and burned them for an Audio CD, you are probably familiar with this image - Track 1, Track 2, Track 3, etc. You have no idea what those songs are - or at the very least, what the correct names are.

With an app, iTunes Match subscription, and some CDs you can change your 'unknown' collection into something useful and make them available to all of your iOS devices and Computers.

1. Launch the SoundHound app on your iOS device.

2. Insert a CD with unrecognized tracks into your Mac - you can import now if you wish as well.

3. Click Play on one of those tracks (Track 1, Track 2, etc).

4. Turn up the volume on the song, and then Click  'Tap Here' on the SoundHound app.  Within a few seconds, that song with be recognized. Incredible.

5. Now go into iTunes and CONTROL-CLICK on the track you are playing and choose 'Get Info'.  Now enter the correct data into the track. I'm not sure of how iTunes Match makes a match, but it doesn't hurt to enter the track info as precisely as you can.

6. Now iTunes Match should do it's thing and try and Match, or at least Upload to iCloud. If not, CONTROL-CLICK On it and choose 'Add to iCloud' and this should match or upload it to the iCloud service.

7. Check your other Macs or iOS devices - these newly updated songs will now be in your iCloud. If you had poor quality versions, now you can download the MATCHED songs in the higher quality 256kbps AAC format. Easily worth the $25 a year!

Restore Data, Pictures, and more from iOS Applications

As iOS 5 approaches,  I would like to start fresh and no longer sync my iPhone & iPad to my iMac as my primary, and use my notebook instead. As I was looking for ways to do this without losing data, as some apps don't sync to the cloud, I need some methods to recover data from applications.

For example, I routinely scan in receipts using 'JotNot Pro', a wonderful scanning utility for the iPhone. I typically scan receipts, upload them to Evernote, and also save a local copy. The local copy is what I want to transfer over after my clean install so I will still have that data inside of the application in case I need to look something up and can't get online.

In fact, JotNot Pro is just one, there are several applications that I want to grab that data from -- Nike +, numerous high scores and saves from games, etc. As I've been working on a way to do this, I think I found a few cool utilities with the help of an easy to follow article from iSource.

Note: Before you start, if you have encrypted backups enabled, you may want to consider creating at least one unencrypted backup to get the full use of the utilities below. Use your own discretion on this, but your mileage may vary if you are working with encrypted backups.

iPhone/iPod Touch Backup Extractor - This application lets you extract the data from your backups that are created each time you sync to iTunes. You can extract the data for each application with this app.

iExplorer - This little app lets you browse your iOS device as if it was a USB Flash drive. You can scan through all of the files and folders and copy what you need.

Picturescue - This app scans the backups from all of the iOS devices you have synced to iTunes and lets you extract the photos from them. Perfect for when you have lost your phone or it has been broken. Easy to use interface, and it works as advertised, but it is not FREE.  However, if you want your precious memories back, can you really put a price on that? For $4.99, this app is a steal and worth every penny. Note -- if you do encrypted backups, this is not going to work. That's why you do encrypted backups.. So some nefarious person that has stolen you iPhone can't do this.

I've made all of these 'must have' apps for that 'just in case' scenario. You know -- Just in case I lose my phone, just in case it breaks, or just in case I want to do a clean install. As a suite, they have enabled me to accomplish my main goal -- backup up the data and being able to restore specific pieces of information into a clean install. It's not for the novice, but then again, it's not rocket science...

Plants Vs Zombies 2 - August 2nd?

Plants Vs Zombies is baaaack! Are they coming for more brains? I know quite a few people looking to get their hot little hands on this game, including my wife (@bizzy2009) who has beaten the game a minimum of two times on her iPhone.  

They (PopCap Games) have sent out an email asking people to 'save the date' for August 2, 2010. Could it be the release, or just the announcement of the game? We'll find out August 2. 

Definitely a highly anticipated game, so let's hope it doesn't disappoint.

Tweetie is now Twitter

To provide a unified experience and offer arguably one of the best twitter clients, Tweetie for iPhone was bought by Twitter. If you update your Tweetie app today, it's now free, and has a few new features.

First, it's no longer called 'Tweetie'. The new name is 'Twitter', which is exactly what the folks at Twitter want. If you search for 'Twitter' in the App store, you will now see this 'Official' twitter client.

They added a few new feature like browsing trends, finding popular users, changed the re-tweet to be just like twitter online, in-app sign-up, and more.

Overall I think the changes are good ones, except for one that sticks out like a sore thumb. The new application icon; it looks like a ghost (to me at least). Here is the official release from the folks over at Twitter.

Download it in the App Store

App Clutter - A look inside my App folder

My app folder is cluttered with crud. Do you know what you have installed on your Mac? I started to wonder what I had in my Applications folder that I never use. With all of these MacHeist style bundles available, I seem to buy a bunch of junk that I never ever use. I also demo a lot of software that I just don't care to register.

Essentially my workflow is this: I have a need for something, download several apps that have trial versions, install them and forget to uninstall them. I even have AppZapper, which makes uninstalling an app and getting all of the junk a snap. I just forget to use it.

Let's take a look at my current Applications folder:

Things circled in blue are apps that I depend on every day to function.

Things circled in pink are the items that fall into any one of these categories:

• I reviewed it, but have no day to day use for it.


• It was installed with some hardware I purchased.


• I was running a trial version to test the capabilities and forgot to uninstall it.


• One time use for a particular purpose.

Apps not circled indicate they fall somewhere between the blue and the pink, meaning I don't regularly use them, but when there is a time for them, I launch them.

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