Wednesday, April 30, 2008

Fixing 7digital's playback problems in iTunes

Summary: you'll need to rename .mp4 to .m4a

I just bought The Age of The Understatement by The Last Shadow Puppets, which is rather lovely. As an experiment, I bought it from 7digital - it cost a fiver rather than £7.99 on iTunes.

The beggar doesn't play properly on my kit. Each track pauses for 5 seconds or so, just under 10 seconds into the track - which is hardly conducive to great listening pleasure. As far as maintaining the atmosphere goes, it's a bit like turning the house lights on in a nightclub for a few seconds, just as every track gets going.

This is not normal, so for the configurators among you, I'll describe normal. Music comes from the iTunes store or CDs. I play the songs using iTunes under Leopard on my non-intel Mac Mini. As a tester, I've got CPU monitoring on, always, and as a tester I notice that the machine is pushing as hard as it can during the gap, but not either side. This is also not normal.

Let me also describe the differences - comparing specifically with iTunes Plus, as both deliver AAC audio without DRM protection.

The most obvious difference is that 7digital sent me the files encoded at 320kbps, compared with iTunes' 256kbps. The problem could be to do with the way iTunes codec responds to higher than expected encoding rates. However, I've successfully worked with AAC of my own projects encoded at this rate.

One consequence of this difference is that the files are larger, so perhaps this is at the root of my problem. However, I'm instinctively less than keen on the this as a target for investigation. Digging into that instinct, I can rationalise that 1) the kit is perfectly capable of shifting the quantity of data, 2) the problem is limited to part of a song, 3) the position and duration of the dropout seems unrelated to song length. It doesn't feel like something to do with amount of data.

Another difference: while looking at iTunes' information for the song, I find that it's listed as an MPEG-4 video file. This seems inappropriate - I'd expect it to be an AAC audio file. This is, after all, how it was described at download. I'm aware that this is linked to the extension, and checking the files, find the extension is .mp4. Pretty much everything else is .m4a, including those iTunes Plus files. Other iTunes files are .m4p. Both these extensions indicate Apple's AAC format, one unprotected, the other rights-managed. Those in the know can chastise me for (at least) two reasons. Firstly, MPEG-4 is a container, not a format. Secondly, iTunes should treat .mp4, .m4a and .m4p files the same - if it doesn't, it's iTunes that has the bug, not 7digital.

In the spirit of investigation and experimentation, I change the extension from .mp4 to .m4a, and the problem is gone - no hot-running CPU, the right details in the information. Most importantly, the music now plays without interruption.

Now, this is a hack. It may have corrected a simple mis-configuration. However, sound files are complex containers, and their interactions with various players are not always predictable. Will iTunes be able to burn these tracks onto a one-off mix CD? Will they play nicely with the iPod? If I chuck them into Ableton's Live to mix and mash, will there be a problem? Heaven knows, until I try. Perhaps I should have stuck with their MP3 versions . . .

The immediate problem is solved. I've not resolved the bug, but I've developed an understanding of it which has led to a fix for my machine and my purposes.

Now I'm bug-hunting, here are a few more I noticed along the way. These may help you fix/get round/be prepared for stuff on your own machine.

  • The transition between Black Plant and I Don't Love You Anymore is stuffed - there's a hole where there should be a transition. This isn't iTunes' infamous truncation bug, it's because it sticks a pause between tracks unless told not to. It's easily fixed - setting the album to "gapless" does the trick.
  • 7digital's site, for reasons best known to itself, gives the tracks un-numbered, and in reverse order - it was only when I played the album that I noticed that due to my own finger trouble, I had two Calm like Us and no Standing Next to Me. That said, re-downloading is trivially easy and (with the server in the UK) pleasantly speedy.
  • I have to trigger each download individually (dull) if I don't want to install their downloader (I don't, thankyou - and I can't anyway as it's PC only), and when done have to put the tracks into my library (whine whine whine).

Customer impressions of 7digital: they are good value, but slightly troublesome. The trouble may not be their fault, but it means I have to work to use their music on my kit. Not their fault, but I may not buy again.

Customer impressions of The Age of the Understatement: a fine album - good songs, great words. Retro and fun without too much pastiche. Epic, if you're in the mood; insert iPod and become the hero of your supermarket trolley. Better fixed than buggy - I like it enough to mean that I'd buy a working copy if I'd not managed to fix this one, but not without a niggling sense of being conned.

Update: shortly after posting this entry, I was contacted by the CTO of 7digital, who is clearly on the ball. The .mp4/.m4a thing is now with his technical people. Good to help - better to be useful.

Monday, April 14, 2008

Comedy bug

So: I'm having a problem or two that's likely to be related to a particular software package. I can't say I'm surprised - the software's been buggy and crash-prone from the off, has a UI designed to appeal only to a designer, and the online support is anything but.

I choose to uninstall the software with an application the supplier supplies. Halfway through the install, it tells me that I should have quit out of mail, as it's uninstalling a component with which it vandalised my mail application. It quits its own uninstall and gives me a nice, although temporary log.

I quit mail, and (with a hint of a tester premonition) head off to find the uninstaller, so I can uninstall the final component of this rotten puzzle.

The uninstaller has, naturally, uninstalled itself.

Marvellous.

(for those of you unfamiliar with why this is a problem, it's broadly analogous to locking the keys inside the car)

Wednesday, April 09, 2008

Running LEWT

Rikard Edgren's WhereTesting Creativity Grows pointed me to a resource that should be read by anyone trying to create an environment that supports creativity. Nils-Eric Sahlin's article creative environments:
a simple recipe
(translated by Linda Schenck) neatly encapsulates and codifies the principles that I try to use for LEWT - and, indeed, extends them.

To borrow Rikard's summary, they include;
  • generosity
  • a sense of community
  • qualifications
  • cultural diversity
  • trust and tolerance
  • equality
  • curiosity
  • freedom of spirit
  • small scale


It's interesting that the facile quality 'communication' is not included. It's also interesting that qualifications (which don't particularly play their part in LEWT) is more subtle that I had perhaps expected. I'll be considering making some minor changes so that people are more confident in their qualification to be part of the group - although I'll be careful about affecting its diversity. My feeling that LAWST's guru-led approach is problematic is neatly caught by the note on equality.

I'll be posting a link to the article to the LEWT discussion group, and hope to start a conversation. Let me know if you'd like to be part of it.

Creativity in Software Testing

Software testing is frequently - and fundamentally - a creative endeavour. That creativity is closer to that employed for mathematics and music than for statistical analysis or singing.

Although I've talked about this until I've bored all around me, I've never managed to write anything coherent on the subject. So I'm pleased that I came across Rikard Edgren's Where Testing Creativity Grows, as it is one of the very few papers I'm aware of that looks at this important, yet unaccountably neglected perspective.

You can find it here: http://qualtechconferences.arobis.com/upload/documents/REdgren_where_testing_creativity_grows.pdf

I encourage you to have a read. If you know of other papers on the subject, post them here.

James