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Advanced SearchUser Name David Parry
Member Since 2001-09-06
Total number of Feedback Posts: 12
Total number of comments: 0
Last 10 Feedback Posts by David Parry [ Search for All ]
TuneRanger 1.0 Build 270 (Mac OS X)
Best of a bad bunch, but still got serious problems 
I've got a large library of 18000+ tracks that I regularly sync between my desktop and laptop. On the surface of it, Tuneranger's features is ideal. But after many months of use, and lots of feedback to the author, this app still has serious problems:
- Frequent crashes
- Trouble connecting over the network
- Poor UI responsiveness (developer doesn't understand threading)
- Maxs out CPU for long periods, shortly after startup
- Duplicates 1000s of tracks!!!!
- Does not fully sync metadata for all tracks (I constantly have 1000s of tracks where the metadata is different on desktop and laptop machines, despite numerous syncs)
Post a comment | More Info | 2 of 2 users found this helpful
Wednesday, March 12 2008 @ 06:55 PM PDT
TuneRanger 1.0 Build 270 (Mac OS X)
Best of a bad bunch, but still got serious problems
I've got a large library of 18000+ tracks that I regularly sync between my desktop and laptop. On the surface of it, Tuneranger's features is ideal. But after many months of use, and lots of feedback to the author, this app still has serious problems:
- Frequent crashes
- Trouble connecting over the network
- Poor UI responsiveness (developer doesn't understand threading)
- Maxs out CPU for long periods, shortly after startup
- Duplicates 1000s of tracks!!!!
- Does not fully sync metadata for all tracks (I constantly have 1000s of tracks where the metadata is different on desktop and laptop machines, despite numerous syncs)
Post a comment | More Info | 1 of 1 users found this helpful
Wednesday, March 12 2008 @ 06:54 PM PDT
HandBrake 0.9.1 (Mac OS X)
This version's improvements with the UI and new features is great: a big improvement. However, I am now getting mysterious quits and crashes almost 50% of the time. This is with the exact same sort of encoding I have always done (h.264, 2-pass, 800kbps, stereo mixdown). I have to queue and re-queue the same disk over and over... sometimes it rips a whole disk fine, other times it quits half-way through a track, I restart it, then it goes fine. It's intermittently unreliable, and it does not seem related to individual tracks or settings: just random crashes. It's enough to make me want to go back to an older version. [alert admin]
Saturday, October 20 2007 @ 03:51 PM PDT
TuneRanger 0.9.5 Build 194 (Mac OS X)
First to actually do what it claims...
I've been looking for something like this for years, and this seems to be the first product to actually do what it claims, and not have real problems attempting to do it. I have over 17000 tracks, and have built up an extensive set of playlists for genres, moods and styles, which I use a lot. This has always been sitting on my "master library" computer, and in the past when I've copied stuff onto my laptop I feel like my collection gains "multiple personality disorder", which then takes some effort to get them consistent again. This seems to be the solution. I ran Tuneranger overnight on my main library and all playlists... it took most of a night and half a day to copy all the songs. I connected them via ethernet, which gave a fair bit of improvement on the copy speed compared to WiFi. I've since gone away on holidays with my whole library on my laptop, playlists too and that's great, particularly when I did an all-night DJ session at a party while away. Thanks! One feature that I couldn't see the point of, at first, turned out to be invaluable: filtering. My first attempt to sync libraries I realized that I'd added 60GB of MP4 movies to iTunes to sync with my AppleTV, which is about 55GB too much to fit on my laptop drive. This is where filtering was great... just switch off syncing of video file types, and everything worked fine. Mind you, the product, as a whole, is not perfect. Yet. There are a few rough behaviour problems and features missing which I would regard as essential. I'm hoping that the version number (0.9.5) is a hint that there's more to come. Here's my short list of what would make this product perfect: 1. Ratings! They don't sync! When you have a big collection of music, the ONLY way to make sense of it is to rate the tracks. I would call this almost a show-stopper. 2. Last Played, Play Count, Date Added. Same as above! I have smart playlists that "rotate" by selecting tracks that "haven't been played for a while"... this information is essential. 3. Smart Playlists. Okay, this might be a bit trickier... it's been a while since I took a look at the APIs that are available for iTunes database manipulation, and I don't know whether this is even possible, but from my point of view I have a LOT of smart playlists... It's gonna be a major pain to recreate them. I dunno... maybe I should go outside and get a life or something... 4. Error dialog box pauses processing. This happens even when you select the "Don't stop for errors" checkbox in preferences. Duh. For some reason (only when syncing the playlists, not the Library), I got a whole lot of errors, and each one paused processing with a dialog box asking me whether I wanted to stop processing. This is just dumb interaction design. Like I'm gonna wanna sit there all night pressing the cancel button when I get an error... Also, when an error occurred in a playlist sync, the rest of the playlist DIDN'T get synced, or at least a whole lot were missing. A bit disappointing. And, it was pretty hard to see in the logs what the cause of the problem was. Given that the main library sync went off without a problem, I find it a bit odd that it had problems in the playlists. Maybe the author should have a separate "Error Log", apart from the normal log... with verbose logging on, it's almost impossible making sense of it. 5. The "double sliding side-draw'. I'm not a big fan of the "sliding draw" user interface feature at the best of times, but 2 of them, that slide over top of each other? It's a bit daft. Just make your UI pane bigger for the controls, and have a separate window for logging... Anyway, I think this is a diamond in the rough... I'm hoping the author does a few tweaks to it, but I'm even finding it useful as it is. [alert admin]
Read Comments (1) | More Info | 1 of 2 users found this helpful
Sunday, August 05 2007 @ 08:07 PM PDT
TuneRanger 0.9.5 Build 194 (Mac OS X)
First to actually do what it claims...
I've been looking for something like this for years, and this seems to be the first product to actually do what it claims, and not have real problems attempting to do it. I have over 17000 tracks, and have built up an extensive set of playlists for genres, moods and styles, which I use a lot. This has always been sitting on my "master library" computer, and in the past when I've copied stuff onto my laptop I feel like my collection gains "multiple personality disorder", which then takes some effort to get them consistent again. This seems to be the solution. I ran Tuneranger overnight on my main library and all playlists... it took most of a night and half a day to copy all the songs. I connected them via ethernet, which gave a fair bit of improvement on the copy speed compared to WiFi. I've since gone away on holidays with my whole library on my laptop, playlists too and that's great, particularly when I did an all-night DJ session at a party while away. Thanks! One feature that I couldn't see the point of, at first, turned out to be invaluable: filtering. My first attempt to sync libraries I realized that I'd added 60GB of MP4 movies to iTunes to sync with my AppleTV, which is about 55GB too much to fit on my laptop drive. This is where filtering was great... just switch off syncing of video file types, and everything worked fine. Mind you, the product, as a whole, is not perfect. Yet. There are a few rough behaviour problems and features missing which I would regard as essential. I'm hoping that the version number (0.9.5) is a hint that there's more to come. Here's my short list of what would make this product perfect: 1. Ratings! They don't sync! When you have a big collection of music, the ONLY way to make sense of it is to rate the tracks. I would call this almost a show-stopper. 2. Last Played, Play Count, Date Added. Same as above! I have smart playlists that "rotate" by selecting tracks that "haven't been played for a while"... this information is essential. 3. Smart Playlists. Okay, this might be a bit trickier... it's been a while since I took a look at the APIs that are available for iTunes database manipulation, and I don't know whether this is even possible, but from my point of view I have a LOT of smart playlists... It's gonna be a major pain to recreate them. I dunno... maybe I should go outside and get a life or something... 4. Error dialog box pauses processing. This happens even when you select the "Don't stop for errors" checkbox in preferences. Duh. For some reason (only when syncing the playlists, not the Library), I got a whole lot of errors, and each one paused processing with a dialog box asking me whether I wanted to stop processing. This is just dumb interaction design. Like I'm gonna wanna sit there all night pressing the cancel button when I get an error... Also, when an error occurred in a playlist sync, the rest of the playlist DIDN'T get synced, or at least a whole lot were missing. A bit disappointing. And, it was pretty hard to see in the logs what the cause of the problem was. Given that the main library sync went off without a problem, I find it a bit odd that it had problems in the playlists. Maybe the author should have a separate "Error Log", apart from the normal log... with verbose logging on, it's almost impossible making sense of it. 5. The "double sliding side-draw'. I'm not a big fan of the "sliding draw" user interface feature at the best of times, but 2 of them, that slide over top of each other? It's a bit daft. Just make your UI pane bigger for the controls, and have a separate window for logging... Anyway, I think this is a diamond in the rough... I'm hoping the author does a few tweaks to it, but I'm even finding it useful as it is. [alert admin]
Post a comment | More Info | 2 of 2 users found this helpful
Sunday, August 05 2007 @ 08:03 PM PDT
TuneRanger 0.9.5 Build 194 (Mac OS X)
First to actually do what it claims...
I've been looking for something like this for years, and this seems to be the first product to actually do what it claims, and not have real problems attempting to do it. I have over 17000 tracks, and have built up an extensive set of playlists for genres, moods and styles, which I use a lot. This has always been sitting on my "master library" computer, and in the past when I've copied stuff onto my laptop I feel like my collection gains "multiple personality disorder", which then takes some effort to get them consistent again. This seems to be the solution. I ran Tuneranger overnight on my main library and all playlists... it took most of a night and half a day to copy all the songs. I connected them via ethernet, which gave a fair bit of improvement on the copy speed compared to WiFi. I've since gone away on holidays with my whole library on my laptop, playlists too and that's great, particularly when I did an all-night DJ session at a party while away. Thanks! One feature that I couldn't see the point of, at first, turned out to be invaluable: filtering. My first attempt to sync libraries I realized that I'd added 60GB of MP4 movies to iTunes to sync with my AppleTV, which is about 55GB too much to fit on my laptop drive. This is where filtering was great... just switch off syncing of video file types, and everything worked fine. Mind you, the product, as a whole, is not perfect. Yet. There are a few rough behaviour problems and features missing which I would regard as essential. I'm hoping that the version number (0.9.5) is a hint that there's more to come. Here's my short list of what would make this product perfect: 1. Ratings! They don't sync! When you have a big collection of music, the ONLY way to make sense of it is to rate the tracks. I would call this almost a show-stopper. 2. Last Played, Play Count, Date Added. Same as above! I have smart playlists that "rotate" by selecting tracks that "haven't been played for a while"... this information is essential. 3. Smart Playlists. Okay, this might be a bit trickier... it's been a while since I took a look at the APIs that are available for iTunes database manipulation, and I don't know whether this is even possible, but from my point of view I have a LOT of smart playlists... It's gonna be a major pain to recreate them. I dunno... maybe I should go outside and get a life or something... 4. Error dialog box pauses processing. This happens even when you select the "Don't stop for errors" checkbox in preferences. Duh. For some reason (only when syncing the playlists, not the Library), I got a whole lot of errors, and each one paused processing with a dialog box asking me whether I wanted to stop processing. This is just dumb interaction design. Like I'm gonna wanna sit there all night pressing the cancel button when I get an error... Also, when an error occurred in a playlist sync, the rest of the playlist DIDN'T get synced, or at least a whole lot were missing. A bit disappointing. And, it was pretty hard to see in the logs what the cause of the problem was. Given that the main library sync went off without a problem, I find it a bit odd that it had problems in the playlists. Maybe the author should have a separate "Error Log", apart from the normal log... with verbose logging on, it's almost impossible making sense of it. 5. The "double sliding side-draw'. I'm not a big fan of the "sliding draw" user interface feature at the best of times, but 2 of them, that slide over top of each other? It's a bit daft. Just make your UI pane bigger for the controls, and have a separate window for logging... Anyway, I think this is a diamond in the rough... I'm hoping the author does a few tweaks to it, but I'm even finding it useful as it is. [alert admin]
Sunday, August 05 2007 @ 08:01 PM PDT
iTerm 0.7.6 (Mac OS X)
I really like this application. Ideally I'd use it all the time, but I'm constantly getting a couple of significant problems under 10.2, G4 powerbook, lotsa RAM, etc: 1. Serious pauses when opening a new window or tab view... I'm talking 1-2 minutes here. Also, similar length pauses occassionally for seemingly no reason. 2. Intermittent crashes. Just quits. Happens about once a day, at least. Seems to happen more often when 1 view is being flooded with a lot of output for a long time. 3. Serious CPU usage showing in the process list by the iTerm app itself. Sometimes up to 40%! At first I thought this might have just been the way the child processes were being spawned and whatever task that I was running in a certain window was being shown as "iTerm", but no, it really seems to just be iTerm itself. That's just gotta be wrong! Perhaps the only thing I might have that's significantly different in my config is that I usually use a 2nd monitor on my laptop at work. Any thoughts on these issues? They sure sound like memory issues to me (leak or some such). [alert admin]
Tuesday, August 26 2003 @ 01:55 AM PDT
Music Maid 1.0 (Mac OS X)
iTunes does not allow you to automatically move around all of your files ON DISK by their Tag info. This is similar to the reorganize features in MP3Rage. It's not bad, but they should lose the 1 minute delay before use... It would be a lot wiser to just let people use the damn thing first. There are a few things they could improve on: more controls for whether it's sorted by artist/album or various artists/album (can cause hell if all the artists are different), and I dunno about that colour scheme. But nice try. [alert admin]
Saturday, January 12 2002 @ 01:16 AM PST
Epson Stylus Photo 1270 1.0 (Mac OS X)
"Unexpected Error -108" whenever I try to add it to my printer list. This is absolute rubbish. Epson deserve a good kick up the arse for this. [alert admin]
Tuesday, November 06 2001 @ 01:10 AM PST
Obelisk 1.0.3 (Mac OS X)
at all on my G4 laptop, 10.0.4, 512MB RAM. it just quit... that's it. [alert admin]
Saturday, September 29 2001 @ 05:39 AM PDT
Last 10 Comments by David Parry [ Search for All ]
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