While we’re waiting for Apple Corps Ltd. and EMI Music to iron out their differences so that the Beatles’ catalog finally can appear on the iTunes Store, music fans can seek out music by old favorite local bands.

Last year I noted on this blog the availability of several albums by Crack the Sky, a band not originally from Baltimore but one that became very popular in the region.

The iTunes Genius feature pointed me to another home-grown favorite available on iTunes: KIX, a glam metal band that hailed from Hagerstown. After several years as a club favorite in Baltimore, particularly at Hammerjack’s, KIX went on to national renown with such AOR staples as “Don’t Close Your Eyes,” “The Itch,” “Cold Shower,” and “Blow My Fuse.”

Oddly, though most of KIX’s albums are present, not all have every song that appeared on the original. Luckily you can find just about all of the band’s best stuff scattered around in the compilations, but fans will have to hunt for their favorites.

I was more surprised to find several albums by the Ravyns on iTunes. The Baltimore-based Ravyns played Beatle-esque dance rock in area clubs for most of the 1980s.

The Ravyns’ released one self-titled album with MCA Records and had a minor hit with “Raised on the Radio,” which was included on the “Fast Times at Ridgemont High” soundtrack.

In addition to the MCA album, iTunes offers “Remnants,” the songs planned for the Ravyns’ second album; and “Live at Maxwells 1983,” a must-have for the regular fans who showed up many a night at that long-defunct Parkville hotspot.

As with the KIX material, not all is perfect. Several of the previews of the songs on the live album are mislabeled. Clicking on “Little Misstique,” for example, plays the “Like Her So” instead.

Just for the heck of it I searched for a few other bands I recalled from my misspent youth. Most were absent, but I did find a few albums by Philadelphia’s Hooters, including the excellent “Nervous Night.”

As the iTunes Store has matured it’s great to see Apple digging into the troves of accomplished local bands from the 1970s and 1980s that didn’t quite make it over the hump to major stardom.

11/26 UPDATE: I just discovered that two of Ravyn Rob Fahey's solo albums, "Breaking and Entering" and last year's "Trust Me, I Do This All the Time" also are available on iTunes. And fellow Ravyn Kyf Brewer shows up on iTunes as a narrator of several audiobooks -- mostly Danielle Steel works. Brewer's solo stuff is not on iTunes but Company of Wolves, the hard rock band he formed after the Ravyns split up, is.

Posted by David Zeiler at 8:51 AM in iTunes/iTunes Store | Permalink | Comments (1)
                       

I replaced the optical drive in my MacBook the other day.

And to my surprise, it still works. Replacing hardware inside a laptop is not a task for the easily deterred, and I recommend it only to the most daring.

Now I’m the type of guy who has never been afraid to open up a Mac tower for anything from a memory upgrade to a CPU replacement. But until this week, I had never performed a major hardware upgrade on a laptop, wary of the complexity of getting the case open and the fragility of the components within.

My apprehension -- despite my success -- turned out to be justified.

What drove me to it was the MacBook’s failing optical drive, the factory-installed combo drive (reads and writes CDs, but only reads DVDs).

While on summer vacation I had problems playing a DVD; the DVD player kept hanging or skipping over large sections. I was peeved, as playing DVDs when I’m vacationing is one of the duties I expect of a laptop.

When I got home I ran various tests to confirm the problem was not software or operating system-related. I also found other users in forums who seemed to be having similar problems.

I still waited on the Mac OS X 10.5.5 update just to be absolutely certain. The drive, indeed, was kaput.

What to do next? I bought my MacBook in May of 2006, so I was beyond Apple’s one-year warranty. I considered doing without the drive; I probably could live without DVDs while traveling, and in a pinch the MacBook could access the SuperDrive in my Mac Pro over my home network.

But replacing the drive could get expensive; an optical drive costs about $150, and that doesn’t include installation. Then again, I could save a lot of dough installing it myself.

As I poked around the Web to find out how tough it might be for me to do this myself I found several sites that sell replacement parts and provide free guides, both in video and PDF form, on how to take various systems apart.

Screwing up my courage I ordered a SuperDrive (why not upgrade while I’m at it, eh?) from PowerBook Medic, though iFixit had similarly priced drives. Fortunately, the job requires only two tools, a Philips size #00 screwdriver and a Spudger, a stick-like nylon tool used to pry up connector cables and nudge otherwise stubborn parts.

I set aside an evening to do the job and a good thing, too – it took me about three hours moving at a deliberate and cautious pace.

The reason it takes so long is because of all those darn screws holding the MacBook top case in place. They are almost all tiny, nearly identical but not interchangeable. In other words, you need to keep track of where each screw came from in order to get the correct ones back in their proper places. Otherwise you could have a screw either slightly too large or too small for the hole.

Once you get the top case off, getting the drive out isn’t too difficult, though you need to disconnect several other cables to free up the optical drive. One nasty little screw, the tiniest of them all, is tucked beneath several cables. It’s a bear to get back in.

More headaches: you need to remove several pieces from the old drive and attach them to the new drive, one of which – a plastic piece that hold the Bluetooth antenna in place – is glued on.

After struggling to get the machine back together properly (you have to follow the directions in reverse), I pressed the power button and held my breath. When I saw the Apple logo, I knew the MacBook had survived.

The good news: my new SuperDrive works flawlessly (it’s a Matshita UJ-857E, for those who must know) and is much quieter and faster than the combo drive had been when it still worked. For that matter, it’s much quieter then the SuperDrive in my Mac Pro, which is annoyingly noisy.

But trust me on this one: unless you know what you’re doing and aren’t afraid to put your $1,000-plus (or $2,000-plus for the Pro models) Mac laptop at risk, don’t try this sort of thing at home.

Posted by David Zeiler at 1:17 PM in MacBook | Permalink | Comments (7)
                       

Despite greatly scaled back consumer spending this holiday season, Apple should fare better than most other companies, including most of its competitors.

A recent set of surveys conducted by Rockville, Md.-based ChangeWave Research on planned consumer purchases over the next 90 days hints that Apple’s primary products, particularly its Macs, will remain popular.

One would expect the opposite. Because Apple’s products have a better-quality, higher price reputation, you’d think consumers would be looking for cheaper alternatives this year. But as usual, Apple defies conventional wisdom.

Though ChangeWave’s predictive numbers usually overstate Apple’s actual numbers as reported by the company, I’ve found they reflect general trends pretty well. The research firm conducts frequent surveys from among the 20,000 members of its “ChangeWave Alliance,” a self-selected group of business professionals and early adopter consumers.

ChangeWave’s consumer PC purchasing survey (conducted Oct. 23- Nov.3 among 3,699 respondents) indicates that while Apple may sell fewer Macs than it would like, its share of the overall PC market pie should continue to grow -- even if only a bit.

The number of people planning to buy a PC this holiday season fell about 25 percent from the November 2007 survey, from 11 percent to 8 percent, among those looking to buy a laptop and from 8 percent to 6 percent among desktop-buyers.

According to the survey, Apple can expect 27 percent of the desktop buyers and 33 percent of the laptop buyers to choose a Mac. The desktop number is down two points, but the laptop number – which account for nearly two-thirds of all Mac sales – is up four points from a year ago.

The lack of a recent refresh in the Mac desktop line probably reduced enthusiasm for new iMacs, but Apple should cash in on the recently unveiled aluminum unibody MacBooks.

ChangeWave asked specifically about the new MacBooks; 7 percent of the respondents said they’d be very or somewhat likely to buy one. And 6 percent said they’d be very or somewhat likely to buy one of the previous-model, reduced-in-price MacBooks – proving the wisdom of Apple keeping it in the lineup.

More good news for Apple surfaces in ChangeWave’s question asking likely PC buyers which operating system they’d want preinstalled, and I’m not talking about the 29 percent that would like Mac OS X Leopard.

A shocking 48 percent of the respondents said they’d prefer a version of eight-year-old Windows XP to Vista, which only 33 percent chose. The numbers for Vista actually dropped from last year, when Vista edged Windows XP 42 percent to 40 percent.

Apparently the continuous pounding Vista has endured in the tech media as well as from Apple’s “Get a Mac” TV ads has become burned into consumers’ minds. Vista’s now-unsalvageable reputation will continue to motivate PC buyers to consider a Mac at least through 2009. The exact time frame depends on when Microsoft gets Windows 7 out the door. By then Apple should have Mac OS X Snow Leopard ready.

ChangeWave also had positive news for the iPhone. In a survey of smartphone buyers, 41 percent said they’d get an iPhone, compared to 24 percent who said they planned on Research in Motion’s new BlackBerry Storm. T-Mobile’s G1, which sports Google’s long-anticipated Android operating system, scored only 4 percent.

Apple’s Retail Store failed to gain ground in a survey on consumer spending trends, but at least held its own. When asked where they planned to shop for home entertainment products, 9 percent mentioned the Apple Store, same as last year.

As rough as this shopping season will be for all merchants, Apple’s cachet should help it collect a big enough share of the few dollars spent to make a respectable quarter.

Posted by David Zeiler at 8:46 AM in Mac market share | Permalink | Comments (2)
                       

Now I understand why so many people have complained about Apple’s Mighty Mouse.

I had noticed for months that I sometimes would have trouble using the tiny scroll ball atop the Mighty Mouse. Vigorous rolling with my finger usually cleared up the problem, presumably a speck of dust or dirt that got stuck inside.

But last week I could hardly get the scroll ball to work at all. Since I use the scroll ball constantly when browsing the Web, this became a big problem very quickly.

This Mighty Mouse, which came with the Mac Pro I bought in January, is barely 10 months old. I think that’s too soon for a mouse to go south; most mice I’ve used have lasted at least two years.

So I trolled the Mac Web for answers. In addition to a lot of other frustrated users, I found a good bit of useful information.

The folks at the Web site AppleMatters had a photo gallery on how to disassemble a Mighty Mouse. At first I thought this was great – if I could get inside the mouse I could clean the balky parts.

But when AppleMatters tried to remove the collar that’s glued in place on the underside of the mouse, it snapped in half. Another blogger claimed he had used a razor to separate the collar from the mouse, but I wouldn’t recommend it.

In any case, getting to the scroll ball involved several more tedious and risky steps with no guarantee of getting everything back together correctly.

Does anybody remember the old-style (pre-optical) Apple Desktop Mouse with the roller ball in its belly? Remember how whenever that mouse got fussy all one needed to do was twist the ring on the bottom, remove the ball and scrape the crud off the rollers with your fingernail? It could be done in two minutes. No tools required.

The scroll ball in the Mighty Mouse is roughly the same mechanism, except the user has no means of accessing the innards for cleaning. And for a Mighty Mouse to function optimally, it needs its scroll ball cleaned every few months or so.

After some poking around in forums, the best advice I found was to turn the Mighty Mouse upside down and roll the scroll ball firmly against a clean surface, such as a piece of paper.

In my case that only helped a little, so I tried a more extreme version recommended by another user. Instead of paper, I used a lint-free cloth dipped in alcohol. (To be totally honest it was an old dried-up baby wipe. But it served the purpose.)

That worked amazingly well. My Mighty Mouse now scrolls like a champ up, down and sideways.

Eventually I found a Knowledge Base article on Apple’s Web site that suggests cleaning the Mighty Mouse with a lint-free cloth, and rubbing the cloth on the scroll ball with the mouse upside down to dislodge any troublesome particles.

But I’m still annoyed at Apple for designing the Mighty Mouse in such a way that the scroll ball becomes difficult to use in an appallingly brief time. Can’t they figure out a way to provide scrolling without a physical rolling ball?

Apple already has solved similar engineering challenges. The famed iPod click wheel doesn’t actually move, for instance.

I bet it can be done, and Apple is just the company to do it.

Posted by David Zeiler at 8:44 AM in Mac Pro | Permalink | Comments (17)