If your Mac gets a new logic board you’ll find that many of your software licenses must be re-applied or re-activated. For example, iTunes wouldn’t recognize my newly repaired MacBook Pro as being authorized.

My former authorization was orphaned and iTunes doesn’t allow its removal. Being forced to re-authorize used another one of my five precious authorizations…putting me at four. I began to wonder the consequence of orphaned authorizations but fortunately Apple has solutions for this.

If you reach the maximum of five authorized computers you can use the “deauthorize all” option in iTunes which resets the count back to zero. At that point you can authorize your primary computer and whatever others you wish. This can be done once per year.

Read the iTunes Authorization FAQ for everything you ever wanted to know.

It’s Friday evening and a sudden thought occurred to me. Has anyone blogged about OS X 10.5’s support for A2DP? Google to the rescue…

It’s confirmed if you believe a post by claudej in the Apple Discussions forum a few hours after Leopard’s release. Also found a reference at iPhoneApps (with unlinked credit to Engadget). Snippet:

Just installed Leopard & the 1st thing I checked is…

Bluetooth profiles supported by Apple Bluetooth software
Apple’s Bluetooth software supports the following profiles on client devices:

Advanced Audio Distribution Profile (A2DP): Controls stereo audio headphones.

Audio Video Remote Control Profile (AVRCP): Controls the buttons on headphones and other devices.

My copy of OS X 10.5 won’t arrive until the ACN mails it out (next week I hope) and the rest of you get a chance to kick the tires so I don’t have to. In any event, I’m charging my Bluetooth stereo headsets as I write this. Rock out, recharge, and realize that wired headphones don’t need a power outlet.

I’m guessing an iPhone update is just around the corner to coincide with Leopard’s support for A2DP.

Apple’s tech support article describes it the best. FCP cannot playback an MP3 file in real-time due to the compression. As a newbie this seems strange since the DV codec requires decompression as well but I guess the assumption is that MP3 files aren’t appropriate for video projects so they didn’t optimize it for RT.

Since I’m working on something “straight-to-YouTube” I really don’t care that my soundtrack is of the highest quality but rendering audio is no fun either. Rather than re-rip the music from CD media I’m converting the MP3 to AIFF as described in the tech article using QuickTime Pro. The result was surprising: a 6.9 MB file in MP3 format was 133 MB in AIFF format.

On a whim I created a batch job in Compressor 3 and the same file took mere seconds to convert and was half the size: 61 MB. I expect to be using QT Player less and less.

It’s craziness that OS X 10.4 (Tiger) doesn’t support stereo Bluetooth (A2DP) headsets. There is a hack to get something working but it should really be implemented by Apple at the system-level. When OS X 10.5 (Leopard) is released this month it will finally include this capability – no more hacks or mono headsets.

At this point I’d forego Leopard’s other features just to get Bluetooth stereo support. It’s a wireless world and so should be your stereo headphones.

What’s so fun about YouTube are the old school videos that get uploaded. I went looking for 90’s era techno tracks from BG The Prince of Rap and Brooklyn Bounce from the early 2000’s. Before you roll your eyes take one look at your playlists of crap before you throw stones.

Example: Brooklyn Bounce’s Bring it Back. You can’t buy this song anywhere let alone the video. I found it on YouTube, saved it my favorites, and now it’s gone. Forever pulled from their massive hard drives due to a TOS violation.

I understand fully about copyrights and the DMCA. What I don’t get is the music industry’s attitude of “lock it up so no one can get it.” As a consumer I can’t buy Bring It Back nor can I enjoy it for free on YouTube. I’m certain the stupid video played ad naseum on some music channel back in the day (free to the viewer I might add) but today? Nope.

Options? Rip the video from YouTube and save it, forever, locally. It’s as if the music industry encourages piracy by withholding content. TubeSock, you are my friend.