Oct 06

Exporting songs from Google Play Music

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I recently received a warning from Google Play Music that they are closing their Music service and migrating it across to YouTube Music. I wrote an article 4 years ago about the advantages of Google Play Music over iTunes. Unfortunately this has come back to bite me as I’ll now need to import all my songs back into iTunes again!

Google offered to transfer all my music for free from Google Play over to YouTube Music. I took them up on this offer, only to discover that ‘Youtube Music’ has ads unless you take up their paid subscription. So I paid Google to purchase these songs, and now I am required to pay a further subscription if I want to listen to them ad free through YouTube Music.

I have a lot of songs in Google Play Music – nearly 2000. Some of these are from CD. Some were purchased though iTunes, some were purchased through Google Play Music. At 0.99c a song that’s $2000 worth of music that I own. I don’t want to have to pay a subscription to listen to it!

Thankfully Google also has the option to download all of your songs. To do this you need to go to a website called Google Takeout.

When you are selecting what you want to export, it looks as if it won’t download the actual audio files (see this screenshot below.) But don’t worry, even though it says ‘list of tracks….in your library’ it will do more than just a list of tracks – it will send you the actual audio files.

You can then choose the compression type (zip) and maximum file size (I choose 50MB).

That’s how to export all your music files from Google Play Music.

A few hours later I received a link in an email to download all my music files:

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Sep 13

How to export multi-track audio files from GarageBand

audio 7 Comments »

There’s no option from the GarageBand menus to export the individual files from your multi-track recording. You can only save the entire GarageBand file or a stereo version of the song. But there is a way to do it manually.

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Dec 02

How to connect your iPhone or iPod to your home stereo.

itunes 73 Comments »

To connect your iPhone, iPad or iPod to your home stereo you just need a 3.5mm to RCA cable like this cable above.  The two RCA connectors plug into the back of your stereo and the 3.5mm plugs into the headphone jack of your iPhone. Pretty much every stereo available has RCA inputs as the standard inputs on the back.  If you want the best possible audio quality, then an Apple iPod dock will make it sound even better, but we’ll get to that in a moment.

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Aug 14

How to copy an Audible file to an older iPod

itunes 2 Comments »

I still like to run with my old iPod Shuffle. Recently I tried to listen to an Audible book and it wouldn’t work. Apple Music and Audible do not play nicely together. But I didn’t give up easily… here’s how to listen to that audible book on an iPod!

To download the audible file to your computer, you will need to go to your audible.com account, find your library, and ‘download’ your audio book. This will save it on your computer as a file ending in aax. (e.g. mybook.aax)

Older iPods cannot play .aax files, they can only play MP3 files. So you need to convert the Audible file (aax) to an MP3 file. There are lots of programs out there to do this. Epubor Audible Converter, Open Audible, and Audible Converter. There were all in the $20 to $50 price. Eventually I found one called ‘Inaudible’ which was free.

You can find it here: https://github.com/rmcrackan/inAudible

Or the direct download is here: https://github.com/rmcrackan/inAudible/blob/master/_installers/mac_inAudible009.zip

When you try to install it you’ll get a warning like this:

You need to go to System Preferences, Security, General and tell your OS X to allow this app.

Open the Inaudible app and you’ll see a screen like this:

Drag your audible file into the top text box, and press ‘Begin Conversion.’

It will save your Audible file as an MP3 file which you can drag onto your iPod using iTunes or Apple Music.

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Nov 07

How to send music to more than one bluetooth speaker at once

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Marley

Normally you can only connect to 1 bluetooth speaker at a time using the normal OS X bluetooth and audio controls. But there is a way to join several speakers together so that they appear as one audio device. This means you can send audio to multiple bluetooth speakers at once.

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Sep 13

Google Play Music and iTunes audio quality – what’s the difference.

audio 1 Comment »

I just purchased exactly the same song from iTunes and Google Play Music to compare them. If you are interested, here are the differences.

iTunes uses AAC, while Google Play Music uses mp3. Google Play uses a slightly higher bitrate, but that probably compensates for AAC being a better algorithm.  I can’t hear any audible difference. Read on to see the actual specifications of each music format.

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Sep 09

Sharing songs between Google Play and iTunes

music 1 Comment »

Call me old-fashioned but when I spend money on music I want to own the music myself. So I have not subscribed to Apple Music, Google Play or Spotify. I still purchase songs and albums as I want them. If that’s you, here’s how to share your purchased songs across iTunes and Google Play Music.

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Sep 25

How to plug an iPhone into a sound desk

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I just got caught out for the first time by the missing headphone jack in the new iPhone. I was with some friends and we wanted to listen to a song from one of their iPhones. I went to plug it onto our PA system… no headphone jack in the phone!  But it won’t happen again!  Here’s my recommendation. If you are a club, a church, a school, a recording studio, anyone who has a sound system, grab yourself one of these Apple lightning to headphone jack dongles from the Apple store and leave it near your mixing desk. Continue reading ⟩

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