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!

iPhone Event Confirmed - October 4th

FINALLY! iPhone event confirmation - October 4th on the Apple Campus. This is actually one invite that can be somewhat deciphered. The calendar shows 'Tuesday - 4' for Oct 4th, the Clock shows '10' for a 10am event (typical of all Apple events), and the '280' on the Google Maps represents the highway next to Cupertino, Apple's HQ. The Phone emblem and the '1' isn't as clear, but it probably refers to the event title - 'Let's Talk iPhone'. Meaning - one iPhone -- not two.

Sadly, I doubt it's going to be a 4G iPhone. We don't even know if it's going to be an iPhone 5. Maybe just a slight upgrade to the iPhone 4.

I do have a feeling that Apple won't offer a 4G phone until at least 2/3 of the US providers can support it. With 4G service still not prevalent everywhere-- Verizon in over 160 markets (mine included), and AT&T in 5, and Sprint in 40.. Well, I think we will be waiting until next year.

Apple has made mention of not making compromises to go to 4G, and that probably involves waiting for a lower power consumption chipset.

Still, this iPhone will be worth the long wait -- and iOS 5 is incredible.

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...

Print from your iPad, iPod, and iPhone on your Mac - for FREE

Printing from your iOS device can be a little mysterious. If you have a version of iOS that supports 'AirPrint', you've seen the 'Print' button. However, you click it and no printers show up. Well, thanks to a nice little exclusive agreement with HP, only select HP printers get the privilege of being able to be printed on. Apple really blew this one for the consumer.

No worries though.. some third party apps will let you use YOUR printer as long as your Mac is up and running and you have a printer(s) connected to it. .

First up is Printopia, from Ecamm. This is a great app offering more than just printing to all of your printers, it can also print a file to PDF, send it to your Dropbox, Evernote, or your Mac. You simply install the $20 app and it goes into your Mac's control panel and is instantly working. It's a breeze. I wasn't able to fully test it since my 7 day trial expired before I could write the review. Still, a good option, and I've read glowing reviews about it. Sadly, they didn't respond to my NFR request, so I couldn't give it a  good look. Originally version 1 of the App was $10. Version 2 upped the price to $20.

If FREE is more your style, and you only want to print to your printer, then all you need is AirPrint Activator from Netputing.com. This is a cool little app that will enable a Mac with OSX 10.6.5+ and iTunes 10.1+ feature to print to your printers that are connected to your Mac. Install this little app and you can print to any of your available printers.

Works great, and it's FREE. Just be sure to install the proper version for your OS. AirPrint Activator 2 (beta) is for OSX 10.5, 10.6 and 10.7 (Lion).

iOS 4.3.5 Software Update Now Available

Update your devices - Apple has just released a security update to push us to 4.3.5. Connect your device to iTunes and click on Update.

iOS 4.3.5 Software Update

Fixes a security vulnerability with certificate validation.

Products compatible with this software update:

• iPhone 4 (GSM model)

• iPhone 3GS

• iPad 2

• iPad

• iPod touch (4th generation)

• iPod touch (3rd generation)

For information on the security content of this update, please visit this website:

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1222