How-to | Stuff-Review

How to upgrade your music to 256kbps AAC DRM-free quality with iTunes Match

May 1, 2012 at 1:29 pm

So you’ve signed up for iTunes Match and you’ve been enjoying access to all your music from the cloud, but did you know that there was another great benefit from the service?

You can easily upgrade all your lower audio quality locally stored music to iTunes-quality 256kbps AAC files. As long as an audio file has been matched and made available on iCloud you can get yourself a spanking high-bit-rate quality copy.

In this guide we’ll show you how you can quickly and easily upgrade your entire local music library with iTunes Match by first batch-deleting all low-bit-rate files and then downloading 256kbps tracks from iCloud. Note that iTunes will not overwrite any of your tags, the new high quality files you will download below will maintain all your original metadata and even play counts.

Everything we’ll be doing in this guide happens inside iTunes, so first fire up the software and read on.
continue reading

How to: sign-up and access Google Music for PC and Android from outside the US, easily

Guides

November 20, 2011 at 9:19 am

I’m sure you’ve read about Google’s online music service, appropriately titled Google Music. If you haven’t, it’s Google’s online music store and it’s also a free service which allows you to upload up to 20,000 of your own music files to Google’s cloud. Then, it allows you to listen to both purchased and uploaded songs from any browser (Windows or Mac PC) or through the Google Music app on Android devices. It’s Google’s answer to Apple’s iCloud and Amazon’s Cloud Player.

Unfortunately the service is currently only available within the US, and although Google will successively begin offering the service to other countries, if you reside outside the United States you will be out of luck for a while. Nevertheless there is a very easy way to sign-up and use the service from anywhere in the world, if you are willing to jump a couple of hoops. Note you still won’t be able to buy any music through the service, but you will have access to the free storage and streaming service for you own songs.
continue reading

What do all the new cloud icons in iTunes mean about iTunes Match and your iCloud library and how-to troubleshoot errors

Guides

November 15, 2011 at 7:54 am

If, like us, you were anxious to try out the new iTunes Match service offered by Apple, you’ve downloaded the latest version of iTunes, and subscribed to the $25/month service — more info on that here. You’ve run iTunes Match and your library is now fully accessible from iCloud. Note that running iTunes Match does not affect your locally stored files, also if you’ve painstakingly edited the meta data (i.e. Artist name, Album etc.) of your files, these will be transferred to the iCloud copies, even if the files are just matched and not uploaded.

So now you could be presented with a new set of icons in iTunes which show the status of each song in iTunes Match and iCloud. Apple has created a handy table to guide you through these cryptic new cloud figures, which however tell you a lot about the status of your library:
continue reading

How to: Root the Samsung Galaxy Note and install ClockworkMod recovery

Guides

November 3, 2011 at 7:48 am

The 5.3-inch Samsung Galaxy Note tablet-phone (or is it phone-tablet) has only been out for a week now. Well, it took less than that for the device to get rooted and ClockworkMod (CWM) recovery to be installed. This means that you can run all sorts of applications requiring root and potentially install custom ROMs for the device or even overclock it. Rooting was performed by the never-tiring Android community and it has certainly helped that Samsung doesn’t go out of its way to lock-out its phones. The rooting methods are very similar to that of the established Galaxy S II, which explains why it was achieved so fast.

There are several ways to achieve root and install CWM recovery on the Galaxy Note. One method, involves downloading and running the zengRush Revolutionary tool, for one-click root — step-by-step instructions after the break.

A second method, proposed in the video also after the break, involves flashing CWM using a Windows PC and then installing the SuperUser zip through recovery. Be aware that, as always, taking the rooting and custom ROM route, involves the risk of ending up with a dead device.

Another, bigger disclaimer here is that, flashing a custom ROM could invalidate your warranty with Samsung. Similarly to the SGS II, the Galaxy Note has a flash counter, i.e. every time you flash a custom ROM or kernel to the Note the counter goes up by one. If something happens to your device and you send it in to Samsung, they might refuse to service it under warranty if you counter is not zero. Currently there is no way to reset the flash counter (though a method might be devised), so be careful with flashing any custom ROM before a method is confirmed.

So, with all that out of the way, if you are really sure you want to take the risk, fully charge your Galaxy Note, grab your USB cable and sit in front of your Windows PC (unfortunately no Mac instructions yet), and head over after the break for the full how-to.
continue reading

How to: Control your Android phone with your voice using Google Voice Search Actions: setting-up and list of commands

Featured Guides

August 28, 2011 at 5:27 am

You may or may not know that you can control your Android smart phone using just you voice. Have you tried speaking to your phone yet?

Well we’ve compiled below a handy list of commands you can use to control certain aspects of your phone. You’ll be surprised how accurate and convenient this can be. But before you start testing the commands out, first make sure you have the latest version of Google Search installed. Open the Market from your applications and search for Google Search. Either install or update if you haven’t yet.

Now launch Google Voice Search, if you have the Google Search widget on your homescreen touch the microphone icon or else press and hold the Android search key (the one that looks like a magnifying glass) until the “Speak now” dialogue appears. Now speak your commands. If you are dictating text, Voice Search will present you with a closest match and highlight in blue, words it’s not sure about, touch those words and you are presented with alternative matches.
continue reading

How-to: Create an RSS feed from any Google News search result

Guides

February 9, 2011 at 12:03 am

So, you already catch a large chunk of your online infotainment through an RSS reader (see Google Reader, Outlook etc.) and a bunch of carefully collected feeds. What do you do however if you want follow a specific subject either for fun or for work?

One option is to create a Google Alert using a bunch of keywords and choose RSS delivery. But that would mean having and logging-into your Google account to catch the link and manage these alerts.

There is however an easy way of creating an RSS feed from any Google News result; read on to find out how.
continue reading