music

iPhone Slow To Respond When Playing A Song?

general, music, tip, utils One comment

My iPhone 4 has this annoying issue when playing a song. It freezes and locks up the iPhone while the song continues to play. The iPhone would not respond to ANY of the buttons for a good 30 seconds or so.

With the help a good friend, we investigated the issue and found something very unusual. (Btw, when I say we, he did 99% of the work).

Mashups, FTW!

First, let’s take a look at the specific songs and album. It’s a great mashup  album from the one-man band called Girl Talk.

Check out this great website that gives you a visualization of the many tracks that are used in the mashups. And, you can listen online too:

image

You can download it for free here (click on the image):

Insert 1

Album Art – The Culprit

Turns out the problem is not the mp3 but the album art that somehow got embedded in it. A few of the tracks had a JPEG album art file with embedded information from the original TIFF file. That’s not so much the problem. The problem was that the image size was 3744×3744. The image was taken with a Canon EOS 5D Mark II and the TIFF was created from Adobe Photoshop CS4 Mac.

How did we find all this info?

  1. Using a different MP3 player (MediaMonkey) loaded the mp3s and viewed their properties.
  2. Then saved the artwork to hard drive.
  3. Viewed that artwork in an image viewer.

The Fix

Fix, is very simple.

Remove all embedded images in the mp3. Then, add a new image, with a smaller size.

I’m not sure whether the original mp3s had the large image issue or perhaps I accidentally added the large album art myself.

Lesson here, check your mp3s if your iPhone is slow to respond when playing certain songs. Winking smile

This American Life – Great Radio Show

interesting, music Leave a comment

This is a great show with humor, heart and some insight. It’s great to listen to the different stories through my iPod. Here is a brief description of the show:

If you’ve never heard This American Life, our staff’s favorite shows page provides a great introduction to what we do. You might want to start there. After a few episodes, we’re sure you’ll figure it out. Or, if you’re looking for a written introduction, here goes:
One of our problems from the start has been that when we try to describe This American Life in a sentence or two, it just sounds awful. For instance: each week we choose a theme and put together different kinds of stories on that theme. That doesn’t sound like something we’d want to listen to on the radio, and it’s our show.
So usually we just say what we’re not. We’re not a news show or a talk show or a call-in show. We’re not really formatted like other radio shows at all.

This American Life – About Our Radio Show