This is a description of my experiences with finding and hiring a sound designer to create royalty free, custom sound effects for my game. My experience with hiring and working with a sound designer was quite pleasant. The entire process was completed exactly one week after I first started contacting designers.

I’ve been spending a little time thinking about sounds in applications lately, so I enyoyed reading about Andy’s experiences with a sound designer.

One thing I’ve been meaning to do for a very long time is talk a little bit about the state of my other popular Mac app, Cocoalicious.

I’m glad to see Buzz getting Cocoalicious up and running once more, and I’m not just saying that because I contributed to the next release.

What has changed is that Apple unveiled iTunes+, complete with unprotected AAC files. In theory, these files should “just work” with TiVo’s existing AAC support. Of course, as is true of many things, the transition from theory to reality did not go as planned. As reported by The Apple Blog, iTunes+ still are not playable through HMO.

We come here not to bury TiVo, but to fix it.

On The Apple Blog, the suggested solution to this problem is to use iTunes’ Convert Selection command to convert your files to either MP3 or AAC. I’m not crazy about this, because you either take extra hard drive space storing two copies of each track or you introduce an additional lossy compression into your only copy of each track. The trick is to make TiVo Desktop recognize the “Purchased AAC audio file” type.

For the record, I’m pretty about everything that follows, but there’s always the slim chance that following my instructions could reduce you system to a smoldering pile of rubble, or something slightly less drastic. Make sure you’ve got a backup of everything and proceed at your own risk.

Inspired (heavily) by Dan Benjamin’s Building Ruby, Rails, LightTPD, and MySQL on Tiger, here we go.

What You Need

1. Mac OS X 10.4 (previous versions might work, but I have no idea).
2. Developer Tools
3. TiVo Desktop
4. Some level of comfort with the Terminal and editing some Java code.

Getting Started

Before doing anything, you need to make sure TiVo Desktop is not running. Open System Preferences and select the TiVo Desktop Preference Pane. If it says “TiVo Desktop On” underneath the TiVo logo, click the Stop button.

To keep things simple, we’re going use one working area for pretty much everything. I suggest creating a folder called tivo in your home folder. To do so, enter the following into a new Terminal window:

mkdir tivo
cd tivo

Keep the Terminal window open so you stay in this folder.

LAME

Not a social commentary on my part, LAME is the tool that TiVo Desktop uses to support AAC files. TiVO Desktop uses LAME to convert AAC files to MP3 files on-the-fly and sends the MP3 file to your TiVo. The AAC file on your hard drive remains unchanged.

You can copy the following lines into your Terminal one at a time. When the current line finished, proceed to the next line.

We’ll end up using the sudo command a few times during this process. One or more times, you may be prompted to enter your password. Do so when asked.

curl -O http://umn.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/lame/lame-3.97.tar.gz
tar xvzf lame-3.97.tar.gz
cd lame-3.97
./configure --prefix=/usr/local
make
sudo make install
cd..

If you get an error like this:

checking whether make sets $(MAKE)... no
checking for gcc... no
checking for cc... no
checking for cc... no
checking for cl... no
configure: error: no acceptable C compiler found in $PATH

then you don’t have the Developer Tools installed. You should have a copy on your Tiger CDs/DVDs or you can download a copy from the Apple Developer Connection website.

JAD

JAD is a Java Decompiler. Basically, it lets you get back to the Java source code used to create Java byte code files. The portions of TiVo Desktop we care about are written in Java, so this tool will enable us to make the necessary modifications to support iTunes+ files.

JAD is not a Universal binary — there are separate Intel and PowerPC version. Make sure you download the appropriate version. Also, I have not tested the Intel version. The JAD website indicates that the Intel version is for Mac OS X 10.4.6. I assume that means 10.4.6 or newer, but I can’t be sure.

Intel

curl -O http://www.kpdus.com/jad/macosx86/jadmx158.zip

PowerPC

curl -O http://www.kpdus.com/jad/macosx/jadap158.zip

Once you’ve downloaded jar, you expand the file and make sure jad is configured as an executable.

unzip jar158.zip
chmod a+x jad

TiVoDesktop.jar

TiVoDesktop.jar is contains the Java byte code that we’re going to be modifying. We’re going to copy this into working area before making any changes, extract the byte code from the archive, and decompile the byte code we care about back into a Java source file.

cp /Library/Application\ Support/TiVo/TiVoDesktop.jar .
jar xf TiVoDesktop.jar
./jad -sjava com/tivo/util/SoundConverter.class

Editing SoundConverter.java

The jad command above will create the SoundConverter.java file, which contains the source code for the SoundConverter class. Open this in your favorite text editor and find the method named:

public static boolean isConvertibleToMPEG(String type)

This method pretty short — only 6 lines. The first 2 lines check if a TiVo will natively support the file type. The second 2 lines check if the file type can be converted into a file type a TiVo will support. The last 2 lines indicate that the file type cannot be used with a TiVo.

It’s the second 2 lines that interested us. Specifically, this line (split into 2 lines here for readability):

if(type.equals("AAC audio file") || type.equals("AIFF audio file")
    || type.equals("Apple Lossless audio file") || type.equals("WAV audio file"))

This line sees if the file type can be converted to MP3. We need to add “Purchased AAC audio file” to this list to support iTunes+ files. So, replace the above line with the following (again, 1 line in the source file, 3 lines here for readability):

if(type.equals("AAC audio file") || type.equals("AIFF audio file")
    || type.equals("Apple Lossless audio file") || type.equals("WAV audio file")
    || type.equals("Purchased AAC audio file"))

The only change was adding || type.equals("Purchased AAC audio file") between the last two closing parenthesis.

Updating TiVoDesktop.jar

Once the source code has been edited, we need to update TiVoDesktop.jar. This involves generating the byte code for the SoundConverter class and replacing the old byte code in TiVoDesktop.jar.

javac SoundConverter.java
mv SoundConverter.class com/tivo/util/
jar uf TiVoDesktop.jar com/tivo/util/SoundConverter.class

If you get an error after running the javac command, you’ve made a mistake in your code. You can either try to find your error or you can delete the SoundConverter.java file start back at the jar command under “TiVoDesktop.jar”

Replacing TiVoDesktop.jar

Now it’s time to replace the old TiVoDesktop.jar with our updated copy.

pushd .
cd /Library/Application\ Support/TiVo/
sudo mv TiVoDesktop.jar TiVoDesktop.jar.old
popd
sudo mv TiVoDesktop.jar /Library/Application\ Support/TiVo/

Finishing Up

If you’ve gotten this far, you’re pretty much done. All that’s left is to restart the TiVo Desktop (open the TiVo Desktop Preference Pane and click Start) and start playing your iTunes+ files through your TiVo.

Theoretically (there’s that word again), this should be relatively simple for TiVo to implement. However, development of TiVo Desktop for the Mac has not proceeded at a brisk pace. It wouldn’t surprise me if the next release doesn’t come out until after the release of Leopard (assuming the current TiVo Desktop doesn’t play well with Leopard).

Since I implemented this change, the only issue I’ve seen is occasional when my TiVo is playing back the converted tracks. Since the files are being converted and streamed on demand, the skipping’s probably due to the 5-year-old computer I’m currently riding like a rented mule (the skipping didn’t occur if I left the computer alone while it was streaming). I suspect that those of you with more modern hardware won’t have any problems.

…and no, I wouldn’t suggest using this trick to try and add support for Protected AAC audio files. Something tells me the results might not be pretty.

In the spirit of those two things, I’m happy to actually post something new. My Display Webpages in Tabs Automator action is now available. This action is largely a drop-in replacement for Apple’s Display Webpages action. The main difference is that my action, appropraitely enough, generates new tabs for URLs instead of new windows. The other difference is that my action only returns a single document reference instead of one one reference for every created document.

You can download Display Webpages in Tabs directly or you can visit the Automator Actions page on this very site. I may get around to posting the other actions I’ve got floating around my system.

Amit Singh — who first published example code showing how to use unsupported APIs to use the motion sensors in Mac notebooks — now shows how to get readings from a Mac’s ambient light sensor and how to get and set the brightness of the backlit keyboards.

How long until someone writes a hack to use the keyboard backlight as a CPU monitor?

This particular Linked List entry is pointing Amit Singh’s experimentation with the Light Sensor API. The API allows access to the readings of the ambient light sensor, the LED brightness value of the backlit keyboard, and the display brightness.

Gruber’s CPU monitor could happen. Parhaps somebody could link brightness to system temperature? In either case, there should be an option to make the keyboard (and/or screen) throb the warp core on the Enterprise as CPU usage temperature increases.

Of course, I could see this eating into the PowerMate’s market. I mean, who needs a flashing knob to notify you of email when you can have a flashing keyboard?

I really want to find some time to look at the changes — one of the downsides of my original technique was that it only found favicons named “favicon.ico” that were in the root level of the server. If that’s still the case, I’d be interested in trying out the WebKit-approved method for finding favicons, since that also checks the actual HTML code for a link tag pointing towards an alternate location for the favicon.

It sounds like there lots of other cool stuff in this release as well. Check out the release notes and grab the latest version.

When I finished VoodooPad 1.0, I told myself I would write a post-mortem about my experiences working on it. Only I never did that. Then when I finished 1.1 told myself I’d really do it this time. Bzzt. Ok, this time I really mean it.

Unless I’m forgetting something, this is the first time I’ve contributed code to any sort of open-source project.

The ODB Editor Suite is Apple Event based interface that allows applications to easily communicate with BBEdit — it’s at the heart of the “Edit in BBEdit” functionality found in many apps, including MarsEdit and Gus’es own Voodoo Pad 2.0. For more information, check out the Bare Bones web site

Then again, I also wish I had OS X back when I was taking Perl, but that’s another story

[via Michael]

I’m using the REST interface to AWS and I’m making sure to leave at least 1 second between the end of one request and the beginning of the next.

If I grab the URL from the NSURLConnection and paste it into seemingly any other HTTP client, the results of the wishlist are properly downloaded. I’ve attempted this with IE, Safari, and curl.

Normally, I’d chalk this up to some random occurrence, but my code / AWS is choking on the same pages in a given wishlist every time. I’m not really sure how one goes about debugging connections with AWS, so if anybody has any tips they’de like to share, they’d be greatly appreciated.