LeeBing's Corner

As both of my readers know, I have absolutely HATED the fact that iTunes 8 doesn’t give you the same simple check-box to turn off adding track numbers to your filenames.  All previous versions gave this option.

For a very long time, only on a Mac did it seem you had an option to turn this off via some command line tweaks, but it seems those of us still stuck in Windows finally have relief!!  I recently searched again for options and found the following…

1. Hold down the Windows key and press R.

2. Type %appdata% and click OK. (Yes, you could manually navigate there, but why?)

3. Open the Apple Computer folder.

4. Open the iTunes folder.

5. Open the iTunesPrefs.xml file using Wordpad. (Not notepad, Wordpad will be much easier to read the file as it formats it much better.  You can right-click and choose Wordpad from the Open with… dialog.)

6. Scroll down to the User Preferences section. There should be a couple of lines that say:

<key>User Preferences</key>
<dict>

7. Below that line, type in the following (I personally copied & pasted):

<key>create-filenames-with-tracknumber</key>
<data>
AA==
</data>

8. Save and close the iTunesPrefs.xml file. iTunes will no longer import track numbers on your imported CD’s now.

I would expect you should do all this while iTunes is closed.  I didn’t try while open & expect that could cause issues.

I must give credit to the first site I found this on, Technipages.  My apologies if someone else was the original person to discover the trick.  I’m just glad this nightmare is over.  Apple, if you are listening, please focus on adding features, not removing them.

Copper & Pixie are starting to get along better each day.  Wendy got the best picture today as they looked out the window.  Don’t you want a Papillon now?

Ok, if you happen to be using Windows Live Writer (and you should be), you really should look at the Dynamic Template plugin by Joe Cheng (thanks Joe!).

I allows several ways that you can automate text or html that you need to use regularly.  For example, we now use posts in WordPress to post the links for the audio of our weekly church ministry fellowships at KCBT.  Every week the html for the links need to be added to a new post for each class pointing to a file name using the class name and the date (i.e. crossover020809.mp3 as part of a href line).

Thanks to Joe’s plugin, now I just go to my Insert options and choose the dynamic template…

Then choose what class I need it for…

Then the following code drops in:

<a href="http://kcbtmedia.org/media/crossover020809.mp3">Download</a>

There’s a lot of potential in this (more if you know what you are doing more than me).  Great short video examples on Joe’s site showing examples & usage.  Worth checking out!!

So I ran into a nice extra in Windows 7 that I had to make a quick note of you all my readers! (that means both of you!)

When you have a full screen of activity such as this.  Sometimes you just want to see how the upload of your pictures is progressing (or a download, or any quick view of a window you have open).

Sure you could click on the window for the app you want and then minimize again, but why bother when you can peek at it!

Simply point your mouse at the app you want on the taskbar and then point to the preview window that you want to see and you get this…

Just the window view you want, much like peek can give you the whole desktop.  Once you move your mouse away again, you are right back with your normal layout as it.  Pretty slick I must say.