iTunes for Windows is built with Windows Media Audio (WMA) support – it is able to play and convert WMAs. However, because WMA is a proprietary codec, it isn’t available in iTunes for Mac. If you’re not careful, you’ll be left with a lot of WMAs which will be unplayable on your Mac.

Before we start, I would like to mention that this tutorial was written under the assumption that you are running the latest version of iTunes ( iTunes 8 ) on both your Windows and Mac. Please update before proceeding to avoid any complications which may arise.

The easiest way to dodge this problem is to convert all the WMAs you have while you’re still on your Windows machine. In your iTunes General preferences, under ‘Import settings’, make sure to have AAC or MP3 selected. Configure the bit rate if you like but because you will be converting from one lossy codec to another, there’s bound to be a profound loss in quality.

While you’re still in Preferences, go over to ‘Advanced settings’ and check “Keep iTunes Music folder organized”.

Now you’re ready to convert all of your WMAs into the codec you’ve just selected. To do this, control-select your WMAs, right-click on one and choose “Convert Selection to xxx” (Where xxx is either AAC or MP3). After the conversion is complete, you may choose to delete the WMA copies if you like. Then, consolidate your library from the ‘File>Library’ menu. This will ensure that all the songs in your library are copied and organized into the iTunes Music folder. Normally, it’s located in “My Documents/Music”.

Now, you’re ready to bring that iTunes Music folder over to your Mac. Place it on your Mac desktop.

If you haven’t already, run iTunes on your Mac for the first time. You’ll be prompted with the initial welcome setup procedure. When it asks to search your drive for music files, make sure to decline. At the end, you’ll be presented with a fresh, empty iTunes library. Now, quit iTunes. By default, it would have already set up its own iTunes Music folder located in ~/Music. Go over to this location and delete the iTunes folder then copy and paste your iTunes Music folder from the desktop into it (the one which you have just brought over from your Windows computer). After all this is done, launch iTunes and you’ll be rewarded with your old, personalized iTunes library.

Another method of dealing with the whole WMA malarky is to get an audio converter. The first one which comes to mind is EasyWMA which isn’t free but very popular. A little hidden gem is Switch for Mac. It is capable of converting WMA to many other audio formats compatible with iTunes.

Switch is also available for Windows so you’ll have the convenience of converting your songs before making the switch over to Mac, if you prefer.

I hope that this short Macnifying OS X tutorial made it a little easier for you to transfer your WMA songs over to your Mac. If you’re having any difficulties or run into any sort of problems, let me know in the comments.

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• Macnifying OS X: Learning To Utilize Activity Monitor on Mac (9)

So the first option when faced with a frozen or unresponsive application is to kill it. Not literally, of course! We can try to kill or “terminate” the program. The easiest way to do this is to simply right-click the application in the Dock and select ‘Force Quit’.

Another method is to bring up the “Force Quit Application” menu by pressing ‘Cmd-Option-Esc’ and selecting the application which is non-responsive.

Usually, by forcing an application to quit, we lose any unsaved work. Waiting for the program to resolve itself is a better alternative if you can afford the time. Personally, I’m not quite patient enough. So, it’s a compromise between overworking your CPU and data loss.

Then there is the third method: using Activity Monitor.

One of the first things I do every time I get my hands on a brand new Mac is to add Activity Monitor to the Dock. Simply because I use it so often, accessibility is crucial. If you didn’t know, Activity Monitor is located in ‘~/Applications/Utilities’. Or you could Spotlight for it.

Activity Monitor is the evil twin brother of Window’s Task Manager. With it, you can see a platter of vital information including all running processes, memory usage, CPU load, hard disk usage & read/write speeds and network activity. Mainly, I use Activity Monitor to deal with unresponsive applications. Notice that I said “deal with” and not “kill/terminate” because you can occasionally actually bring a frozen application back to life just by launching Activity Monitor! It doesn’t work all the time but when it does, you’ll be amazingly thankful.

If simply running Activity Monitor won’t solve your problem, you could investigate deeper. Under the ‘Process Name’ column is a list of all the applications which are currently running on your computer. The ones which are unresponsive will be labelled red and will be tagged with a clear (’application not responding’) title. Unfortunately, I can’t provide you with a screenshot because nothing has crashed yet (crosses fingers). To kill a particular hung application, click on it and press ‘Quit Process’ from the menu at the top.

Sometimes, certain frozen applications are more stubborn and are harder to kill, ‘Force Quit’ won’t do the trick. Whenever that happens, try going into the ‘View’ menu and choose ‘Send Signal to Process’. On the window that pops up, choose ‘Hangup’, ‘Interrupt’ or ‘Kill’. I find from experience that choosing ‘Interrupt’ may just bug the application to become responsive again. Just because an application is hung doesn’t mean that it has crashed, so sometimes you won’t need to kill it to restart it again.

Besides using Activity Monitor to force hung applications to quit, it is also useful to provide you with the vital information you need to know about your Mac. CPU load, for instance, is something simple but useful to know at all times. Increased CPU load can make your fans work harder, that makes more noise and your Mac will also run hotter. Most of the time, if you notice an increased CPU when you aren’t performing any CPU intensive tasks, that’s when something fishy is going on.

Activity Monitor’s dock icon is configurable to show you either CPU usage, CPU history, network & memory usage or disk activity but not all at once. If you want access to all this information, I suggest iSlayer’s range of monitoring applications. Personally, I use iStat menus to show my CPU history, network & memory usage and CPU temperature right on my menu bar, which is wicked!

How often has Activity Monitor brought your frozen application back to life? Let me know in the comments. Also, which monitoring application do you use?

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• Macnifying OS X: Migrate iTunes and WMAs from Windows to Mac (6)
• Macnifying OS X: Introduction and working with NTFS Drives (13)
• Run Windows Applications on Linux (or Mac) with WINE (15)
• Music Sharing with Mojo (18)
• Macnifying OS X: Backup your Mobile Contacts & More with Address Book (3)

This week, I’ll be teaching you how to connect your phone to your Mac and sync data between them. You’ll be surprised how easy it is. The main reason most people sync devices is to prevent data loss and to easily recover data from a backup in any event that your device malfunctions.

The main applications that we’ll be looking at are iSync, Address Book and iCal, perhaps iPhoto as well.

But before we begin, you’ll need to check if your mobile device is compatible with iSync. Apple supports most mobile phones from the major manufacturers but there are some exclusions. Generally, most Sony Ericsson, Motorola and Nokia phones are compatible; on the other hand, Samsung being the black sheep, is a bit of a nuisance – they’ve got only 3 compatible phones. If you’ve got a relatively new phone (around 3 years old) it shouldn’t be a problem but it’s better to check and be sure. Additionally, syncing is performed either over a bluetooth connection (which most newer phones should have as standard) or through a sync cable so have those at the ready.

*In case your phone isn’t supported, I recommend Nova Media plugins for iSync. It’s not free but so far, it’s the only solution if you want to get it to work.

Right, let’s get cracking. The first step to syncing your phone with your Mac is to set up a bluetooth connection (or if you have a sync cable, just plug that in and connect your phone). Enable bluetooth on both your Mac and your phone and pair them.

There will be several interim steps i.e. entering a passcode on the phone and selecting services to use with the phone; have a read to understand what this whole process is about, then just click on ‘Continue’. Once they’re paired, launch iSync.

In iSync’s menu bar, select ‘Edit’ and ‘Add Devices’. It will then search for your phone so remember to keep the bluetooth running. Select your phone from the results to add it to iSync’s list of devices.

On the first sync, you will be asked if you want to merge the data from your phone and your Mac. You must select this option since you have no contacts in your Mac’s Address Book.

Once the synchronization process is over, you’ll be rewarded with your contacts in Address Book and your itinerary in iCal. Easy, isn’t it? Now, to tackle some of the random questions that most newbies may have:

Q: What if I make a change in my Mac’s Address Book and another change in my phone’s contact list? How will this reflect after synchronization?
A: iSync will always only sync the latest changes to each item. If more than a 5% change is detected, iSync will show a confirmation window where you may view the changes which will be made. This alert can be set to show at 5%, 25%, 50% or when any amount of data is modified.

Q: What if I accidentally delete a contact in my phone’s contact list? Will iSync re-sync them from my Mac?
A: Yup. iSync will always merge data to have a copy of each contact in both your phone and your Mac.

Q: Will iSync retrieve the photos I have in my phone?
A: Short answer — no. However, you can transfer them over manually. Here’s how.

• Click on the bluetooth icon in your menu bar and select browse device
• Choose your phone from the list
• A Bluetooth File Exchange window will then pop up allowing you to view the contents of your phone
• Select the files you want to copy over and press ‘Get’. (Usually, the phone’s file structure is pretty simple. From experience, I’ve only encountered folders labelled according to their content i.e. ‘Music’, ‘Pictures’, ‘Videos’, etc.)

So now, what do you do with your newly-acquired data? Well, for starters, you could edit them. Most people won’t bother re-arranging or properly labeling their contacts because their phones’ screens are so tiny and everyone knows how difficult it is to properly type on a numberpad. Now that your contacts are in Address Book, you can clearly see what’s what. Incomplete fields are more obvious. You can also add emails, addresses and birthdays to your contacts and even paste in a contact photo (if you haven’t already). Everything you do in Address Book will reflect on your phone upon synchronization (depending on the model, refer to the bottom of this page).

Your itinerary will also be copied to iCal. If you have always added new events on your phone, you will be relieved to see how easy it is to manage your life with iCal by comparison. Of course, when you’re on the run, you will always need your phone to add meetings/events on a day-to-day basis but once you reach home and after you’ve synced your phone with your Mac, everything will be laid in front of you on your [much] larger screen. Re-ordering and managing your schedule would then be much easier.

In iCal, you’ll have the option to view your events by the day, week or month. If you need to set a reminder for an event, just double-click it and press the ‘Edit’ button. The alarms will go off both on your Mac and on your phone so you’ll never have to worry about being late for a meeting.

If you haven’t noticed, there is a little pin on the bottom right-hand side of iCal — that’s the to-do list. Adding items onto the list will also sync over to your phone. Although, I have no idea how this feature would work on older phones which may not have to-do lists.

It doesn’t just stop on your Mac. Your contacts can be synced over to your iPod via iTunes so you’ll have an extra copy in case your phone goes kaput. Also, you could export your Address Book and calendar and save them online so that you could easily retrieve them from anywhere.

To sum up, iSync will retrieve contacts and schedules from your phone and add them into Address Book and iCal respectively, providing you with a backup of your data on your Mac. Simultaneously, that will also allow you to easily edit that information on your Mac and see your schedule span out on your screen.

(By) Jackson Chung is a full-time medical student attempting to perform a juggling act with relationships, studies and his future.

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Hopefully this will ensure that your switch to Mac is a smooth process with minimal hiccups. So without further adieu, here is the first Make Use Of “Macnifying OS X” column.

NTFS Blues

When I first started using my Mac, the first problem I faced was NTFS drive compatibility issues. Macs run on a different file system called Hierarchical File System (HFS). Windows, on the other hand runs on a NT File System (NTFS). Because of this discrepancy, Macs can only read NTFS-formatted drives and are unable to write on them. This brought up a lot of fussing about when my friends had their portable hard disks over to copy stuff from my Mac, only to find that I can’t write (copy) files on it. They would throw up some unfriendly comments about Macs while I frantically looked for a spare USB thumb drive.

You would expect Apple to plug this miniscule problem by adding NTFS-write compatibility; that was what everyone hoped from OS X Leopard before it was launched. But they didn’t. This is one of Apple’s quirks. They seldom do what you’d expect them to.

Luckily, there were several groups of developers who got together and solved our simple but common problem. I’m going to write about two methods of solving it: one is free and the other isn’t.

How to write on NTFS drives with Mac (the free solution)

If you’ve ever done a search on Google on “How to write on NTFS with Mac”, you’d definitely come across NTFS-3G. NTFS-3G is a driver that is used with MacFUSE in order to create a fully-functional NT file system within OS X. Actually, NTFS-3G works on many other platforms as well but we shall focus on Mac for now.

NTFS-3G is an ongoing effort and its latest update was July 12 so that’s pretty recent. There are 2 versions of the driver:

- the stable one (which runs at around USB 1.1 speed so I wouldn’t recommend you use that),
- and the UBLIO one (which is patched for improved performance).

I’ve tried using both and I can honestly tell you that the non-UBLIO one is truly, dreadfully slow. Also note that I’ve had some problems recognizing some particular unknown brands of hard disk enclosures. More reliable external hard disks like Maxtor and Western Digital read and write with no issues.

Installation is not very difficult. The first thing you need to do is install MacFUSE — get the latest version here (be aware that there are different versions for Tiger and Leopard). Then you’ll be asked to reboot your system. The next step would be to install NTFS-3G, reboot and you’re all set!

The paid solution

Although paying for software just in order to read and write on NTFS may sound grim, this piece of software might very well be worth your money. Paragon NTFS for Mac was very easy to install and use. It managed to detect and write to every NTFS-formatted hard disk I threw at it. If you would rather do away with the hassle of setting up MacFUSE and NTFS-3G, this is the next best thing. However, it comes with a price and $39.95 is hefty but arguably worth it. If you’re not convinced, try it for 10 days and see how it goes. You might find yourself missing it after that trial period is over.

The other solutions

If you still have external hard disks which you need to use back and forth between Windows and Mac systems, maybe you could consider formatting them in FAT32 instead. Macs write on FAT partitions just fine.

Another option is to install virtualization software which will enable you to run Windows on your Mac but you would have to deal with the reduced transfer speeds as the data passes through the USB interface into the virtualization program and back onto your Mac.

To sum up, NTFS-3G coupled with MacFUSE is a great and free way to write on NTFS-formatted hard disks. Paragon NTFS does the same thing, is more convenient but comes with a $40 price tag. These tools will help bring about the sorely-needed NTFS-write capability to your Mac.

(By) Jackson Chung is a full-time medical student attempting to perform a juggling act with relationship, studies and his future.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

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• Macnifying OS X: Migrate iTunes and WMAs from Windows to Mac (6)
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