Some time ago I was having the worst time getting my Contacts and Calendar to sync with iTunes. iTunes would recognize my iPhone and back it up as it usually does first thing. Then it would always get stuck on “Syncing Chace’s Contacts”. If I uncheck the contacts to skip that step it would hang on “Syncing Chace’s Calendar”.

I tried multiple fixes, including exporting all contacts, calendars from Outlook and closing, then re-importing them. I restored my phone both by clearing it completely and using a backup to restore and just by restoring without clearing.

Finally I tried the suggestions from the following post:
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=7671182

Along with the suggestions in that post and uninstalling iTunes, Safari, Quicktime and any other software from Apple, then installing a fresh copy of iTunes 8 I was finally able to sync my phone again. I am not sure what happened exactly but hopefully this information will come in handy for someone else!

Hello all. It has been a while since I have made a post. Probably because I was on-call this past week and a slew of personal and work related things going on I haven’t had time to do much else as far as side projects, reading or anything like that goes. I just wanted to mention a few of the things in the queue for the site and what I am currently working on.

1. iTunes Tools – I have received a few posts and e-mails about this and some bugs which I plan to work on when I get some time. Please feel free to let me know if you also have noticed things not working properly or even things you would like to see (within reason). You can see an earlier post about this in my Blog to get to the SourceForge project and gather any more information, or feel free to post here or in the forum.
2. Commenter – I bought a couple AJAX books a while back and have been slowly working my way through them, doing the walk through’s, trying some things, playing around and so on. I have a working Commenter application like the one you might see on this post, but it uses AJAX and is visually pleasing. I am working on getting it touched up for my own site as well as the ability for someone else to install it and use it as they see fit. There will be more to come on this as well, I just thought I would mention it now.
3. Data Grid – Along with the commenter mentioned above I have been fooling around with a data grid to make database and dynamic content editing simple and user friendly. Right now it is basically a paginated grid of all the data in the specified database with the ability to edit that data in it’s place using AJAX. It is in it’s early form and I will be working to make it as easy as possible to use and incorporate into your or any site. Look for more information on this too as it progresses.

Aside from all of that my job has been keeping me busy right before the Winter Holiday freeze and there are other things going on in my life as well that have kept me very busy. I wanted to make this post to let everyone know I didn’t forget about this site and am working on things just not as fast as desired.

I also want to wish everyone a happy and safe Holiday Season! I know around my neck of the woods it has been very, very cold the last few days and the road conditions have been iffy to say the least. Hopefully everyone has a great Christmas and a good break heading into 2009, I can’t believe it’s already here, where did 2008 go?!

After a recent post about a VBScript written by Jeff Story at treeratfishing.com that removes duplicate songs from iTunes for you I decided to use some of his code, modify it, and add some of my own and put it into a GUI. It is written in Visual Basic and requires you have the .NET framework installed on your machine, which I would advise anyone to have since there are a lot of applications that use this framework. Chances are you probably already have a version of this framework installed on your machine. If you don’t, as part of the installation of the iTunes Tools it will install any framework files for you.

Here is what the GUI looks like:

The application not only will check your iTunes library for duplicate entries and then remove the duplicate based on a few decisions. It will keep the newest, largest or highest quality entry. It will also look for any entries in iTunes that don’t have a matching file on your system. These entries would show up in iTunes with a ‘!’ icon next to them meaning that it doesn’t know where the file is. One last thing that I found useful is that you can select your Music directory where you rip, download or save your files for iTunes. The application will match all songs in your library to the files in the directory you choose. Any files that don’t already have an entry in iTunes will be added to iTunes. This helps ‘sync’ your music directory with iTunes without having to pick files to add or adding an entire folder (which leads to duplicate entries).

Please let me know if you find errors or suggestions of any kind, as well as if you like how it works or not. I am thinking about making an updated version that will give you the option to run this on a time interval so that it will sync and remove dupes say every hour or every fifteen minutes.

I also have a SourceForge project opened for this. I will be posting the source code for this as well once I clean up and comment the code. You can download the application here, iTunes Tools, or you can get it off of my downloads page.

A lot of times when we are adding songs to our beloved iTunes, we don’t have time or patience to load songs individually so we just add the whole music folder, causing iTunes to load duplicates of the same song. Several friends have asked me if there is a way to removed duplicate tracks from an iTunes library. Jeff Story of treeratfishing.com thankfully already had a script made that does this job for us.

To do this, simply download the Visual Basic Script from here and save it first, then run it from your machine. The original script would not let you know it was running until it finished. One way to be sure or to check on it is to navigate to your iTunes main music library and watch the statistical information at the bottom of the window. If this script is still running you will see the total songs decrease. Once the script has finished it will give you a pop-up alert telling you it is finished. I have also modified the version downloaded from my site to alert you that the script is starting to make life easier.

I usually run this two or three times just to make sure it gets all the duplicates and even triplicates (is this a word?).

Another issue with iTunes is that when we download music from an application other than iTunes, a lot of times we have to manually add the music to our iTunes library. I am in the process of creating a script that will add any new songs found in a specified folder to the iTunes music library, and this will also help make life easier as well as stop us from loading all these duplicates. In addition I also have a SourceForge project open for this script which you can find here. There isn’t much there now since it isn’t finished but just FYI.