Silent Keynote Exports

If your Keynote exports are all fury and no sound, follow the instructions below to fix them.

After recording your narration, move to the Finder, Control-click on your presentation file, and choose Show Package Contents. In the resulting window, locate the narrationTrack0.m4a file. This is your narration track. Make a copy and move it to the Desktop.

Open both the narration and video files in QuickTime Player Pro. Select the audio track, select everything in it, and copy. Now select the video track and choose Edit -> Add to Movie. The audio track will be added to the video track.

With luck, the two will be in sync. If not, you might wish, instead, to import the video track into GarageBand and then place the audio track in a separate track and move it around so the two are in sync.

[From A fix for mute Keynote exports | Mac 911 | Macworld]

iT8: Convert any file to an "audiobook"

Neat little tip...thanks!

ITunes: iTunes 8 Makes It Easy to Convert Any File to an Audiobook:

The simple trick? Just right-click a track and select Get Info, head to the Options tab, and then select Audiobook from the Media Kind drop-down menu. The file will instantly leave your Music library and head straight for your Audiobook library. To mark multiple files at once, just select them all and go through the same process. The only remaining step is to tick the Remember Position checkbox if you haven't already, and your tracks should now have easily found their way to your Audiobooks section, and even better, they should work like an audiobook.

Ringtones in iTunes--no longer free?

So, it looks like a new cat-and-mouse game has erupted between Apple (trying to gouge folks for another dollar) and savvy users who want to load their iPhone with ringtone music they already own. This is quite similar to the DRM wars, where users have continued trying to remove the protections from AAC files they have purchased from iTunes.

How to sync ringtones for free under iTunes 7.4.1 – iPhone Atlas:

Apple’s release of iTunes 7.4.1 put an end to the free transfer of current AAC tracks as ringtones to the iPhone — for a day or so at least.

Of course, other tricks continue to work for adding ringtones to cellphones using Bluetooth, like the Motorola RAZR v3, especially using music from your CD collection or other mp3s.

"File type not supported" iPod syncing errors

Apple - Support - Discussions - File type not supported

A bizarre problem recently popped up after I had updated to iTunes 7.2. Suddenly, certain songs would no longer sync with the iPod, even though I had ripped them from my own CDs. These weren't iTMS purchases. And there were only 4 mp3s out of a library of nearly 4K songs that wouldn't sync over anymore.

The solution was simple (but stupid on Apple's part):

In iTunes, drag the songs to the desktop.
Then delete them from iTunes.
Re-add the files back in to iTunes.

No clue why this happened.

Is Vista a bomb or a hit???

Depending on which media outlet you believe, Vista is either doing poorly or doing so well that it's hurting OS X sales:

MacNN | Vista awareness doing little for sales:

"Vista promised better performance, reliability, security, and a revolutionary user interface - but it appears consumers looking to upgrade are not ready to buy into the promise," said Harris VP Milton Ellis.

Macworld: News: Vista taking a nibble out of Apple in OS wars?:

Windows Vista more than doubled its market share in March from the prior month, while the share of computers running Mac OS X fell for the first time in nine months, according to statistics released Thursday by market research firm Net Applications. [original source: Computerworld]

I think that CW is primarily a PC-related outlet, so maybe they have an axe to grind against Apple. No matter what, MS is still following Apple's lead in every way. So for a company that's falling further behind MS, Apple sure is dictating how the market goes:

Microsoft changes tune on selling DRM-free songs - Yahoo! News:

Following digital music pioneer Apple's lead yet again, Microsoft said this week it will soon sell digital music online without DRM (digital rights management) protection.