Reflection on the ReflectionApp and the AirServerApp and Apple TV

I have been very excited because every year when I get my tax refund back I usually convince my wife to let me buy a new toy. Like my iPad’s or a new kayak. This year I’ve known for a long time that I was going to be buying an Apple TV with the converter from HDMI to VGA with audio. I’ve been using my iPad for two years now every day in class and I wanted to take things to the next level. I want the students to be able to see many of the tools that I have at my finger tips.

I’ve been using the AirServerApp, running on my classroom computer for a year now. That app was the previous version 3. I used it to AirPlay music to my classroom sound system. Of course it has worked flawlessly, with the one exception that there was no security on it. That meant that frequently some kid working out down in the weight room would discover a pretty new icon on his iPod Screen (you know, that one for AirPlay that is never there until you can actually use it!) and in the middle of rehearsal I would suddenly have some pumping jams in the middle of a Michael Sweeney festival piece! Now during a high school rehearsal we would simply enjoy the commercial break. I would dance a bit for the class and then flip the mute switch then back to work we would go. BUT I REALLY tried to leave the mute switch on during middle school class because the rest of rehearsal after an episode like that was usually useless! It was worth it though to be able to wirelessly stream music, at will from anywhere I had my phone, iPod Touch or iPad!

You are probably wondering why in the world I didn’t just buy an AirPort Express and use that. Those have pass codes on them! Well I did! The only thing was that my PC tech guys freaked out! Plus I could not for the life of me get that darned thing to work at the school, on the school network! I even talked to the “big guys”, the ones doing the install on the new wireless servers going into our school to see if they had an answer for making it work, These are tech guys not form our school but instead with a big company whose only job was to install these wireless servers. Their answer was – don’t bring in home network devices, our devices will simply block them! I was in fact afraid I would have similar trouble with an Apple TV. I was hoping though that it would work.

Turns out I might not even try though! This last week of February was a great week! Especially for those of us school teachers in situations like this!

First, the ReflectionApp came out! This is from the same company that makes AirParrot – which puts your mac screen on your AppleTV. ReflectionApp is meant to mirror your iOS device onto your Computer! Of course your iOS device has to be capable of this, the iPad2 and iPhone4s both are. Not only does the mirroring include the picture but it streams the audio as well! So in other words, instead of having to but an AppleTV ($99), a convertor ($45 or more), and get it to work with my school network, I simply bought a $15 app and installed it on a computer I already have hooked up to my classroom projector and I am in business.

Second great thing was that the same day I bought and installed the ReflectionApp an error message showed up on my computer. Getting excited about error message is not normal I know, but this error came from an app called AirServer that I have been running for a year now! The message said that I needed to purchase an upgrade from AirServer in order to mirror my iPad! This startled me! I had not heard, and still haven’t, anything about AirServerApp adding the capability to mirror from an iOS device! So I headed over to their website - http://www.airserverapp.com/ and found it plastered all over the front page of the website! I quickly bought the $3.99 update. I had some issues with the update because when I originally bought the AirServerApp I used an old email that I never use any more. I bought the update with a new email. This really ticked off the AirServerApp and for a day I was in a limbo with the update screen from the app freezing up when it tried to authorize the update. The tech support took a day but considering that it was Friday night that’s probably not bad. They updated their databases of paid people and I was in business. I like their tech support.

So now, the good stuff! I’ve been playing with both apps for all of today and it’s been great fun. Of course I am at home with my MacBookPro and no projector hooked up. My kids walk by and I’ve had one of them do a double take and say – Whoa! Your iPad is on your computer! Then one of the other boys said, Why are you doing that?

Here’s what I’ve discovered. With the ReflectionApp there are more options for you to configure. At first boot the iPad (or iPhone) pops up with a border around it. This looks cool at first but in my case I want the image as big as possible so the students can see it better. It’s easy to take the border off. Another option that helps get the image bigger is to have the app go fullscreen. Now I have not really liked using the full screen mode in Lion. But I like it in this app because it is more what I expected – when using my iPad everything is full screen all the time. Plus I want no other distractions when projecting that image to the students. A quick shortcut (command F) and the app pops out of full screen mode. There are different optimizations for what image size you want mirrored, iPad, standard iPhone, Retina iPhone, or High resolution. This has been one of three issues I have found when using ReflectionApp. When I switched to High Resolution I really messed things up. I had to quite Reflection and reboot my iPad both to get things mirroring again. The second issue I found with ReflectionApp is when switching from portrait to landscape mode. If I am in landscape mode when I start the mirroring the image on the computer is filling the full screen, top to bottom – right to left. Then I can switch to landscape and the image is still top to bottom (not right to left of course) BUT when I switch back to landscape the image is no longer filling the entire screen top to bottom. It is smaller. A quick flick of the command F shortcut pops it back but I am not going to want to do that in the middle of class. The image when it is not filling the screen still is large and acceptable though.

Mirroring with both apps have gone very well – I will mention one exception at the end of this post about trying to mirror instrument apps though. In face with the ReflectionApp I found that I can end up mirroring both my iPad2 AND my iPhone4s! OK – I take that back I can mirror both devices with both apps! If you really want to do this though you should not have the automatic full screen mode on though because it is kind of a pain to get it to look like my screen shot. One of the amazing things I’ve found is that I can be running both the ReflecitonApp and AirServerApp at the same time. They are working very well together and they are not fighting each other at all! I even have been running audio from iPad through ReflectionApp and mirroring it too while mirroring my iPhone with AirServerApp! The audio plugged away and the video behaved as it had all day long with just one of these apps running at a time. I have been running the mirroring all day when I have been at my computer (my daughter did become a teen though so my time has been limited with her party and bowling and shopping though!). Every thing runs smooth as I would expect for all normal apps. I even tried photoBooth. There is a bit of a time delay in PhotoBooth as well as FaceTime with the video. At times I do get a stutter in the audio too. You should understand though that I am running an old AirPort Express with only 802.11b and I know that two of my boys have been running iTunes, FaceBook, Web Surfing and the like through their iPodTouches too.

My only complaint is when I have tried my musical instrument apps. For instance a piano app, MorphWiz or something like this. The lag is not going to work at this time for live performance! There is not way I could mirror this at at a concert and play a song on my iPad so the audience could see what was going on. Now I’m not sure what the problem is though because the PR on both web-sites show gaming apps running and they say that people could be using this for mirroring games! I am not a gamer but I do have a few games loaded on my iPad and I tried BugDom and it worked pretty well on both apps. Cro-Mag Rally crashed the ReflectionApp but worked in AirServer. So for gaming and musical instruments…. I wouldn’t hold my breath too much. These apps are not rock solidly performing in either mirroring app yet!

In wrapping this post up… there are two more points I need to make. The ReflectionApp tech support is really super and really super fast! I sent an email requesting and asking about a passcode (because the first version I downloaded didn’t have a passcode in it) Within minutes they had responded back to me. The next day there was an update to the program! Now don’t get me wrong – I know the update was not because of me but these guys are working hard on their app and want to interact with their users.

The AirServerApp has been rock solidly streaming music in my band room for a year now. This app is a bit more polished. For instance, there aren’t very many settings that we can adjust, the app just does it for you. When you select a song on your iPad in the Music app and push play there is a little notification (very Growl like, if you know what Growl is) on your Mac that tells you what song is playing. When you play videos, like YouTube, and take the video full screen, AirServer uses it’s own built-in movie player. AirServer has some more info about this sort of thing on their web site.

Both apps are great. ReflectionApp requires OS 10.6 or higher. AirServer will work somewhat with Tiger, Snow Leopard, Leopard and Lion as well as working some with Android devices (I think just for audio though) they are both $14.99 (the upgrade for AirServer from v3 was $3.99)

Ineligible song issues with iTunes Match.

I have several albums of mp3′s that iTunes Match claim are ineligible albums for iTunes Match that I have no idea why they have been marked as such. They are CD’s that I have ripped, I own the CD, and I know they are are available in the iTunes Store.

I also noticed that iTunes suddenly had two of the songs listed with the incorrect times on them. Instead of being 4 or 5 minutes in length, they were now listed as being 29 or 30 minutes long! I thought maybe this was just an error, so I clicked the play button in iTunes. They actually played fine for the length of the actual tune but then iTunes kept playing, in silence, for the rest of the 30 minutes! I dragged the song out of iTunes and opened the mp3 in several other programs, QuickTimes, SoundStudio and Audacity. No other program had issues with the length. So I figured that possibly these mp3′s were corrupt in some way or another.

SOLUTION
I went back into iTunes, went into my preferences, and made sure that my import settings were set for AAC. I then  went back into the iTunes library, selected several of the songs that were ineligible, and created an AAC version of the song. After iTunes had updated my iTunes Match results these songs became eligible! They were now marked as being Matched! I went through and did all the other songs in this album and they are now all Matched. If you take a look at the screenshot from below you can see where some of the files are mp3′s still and are marked ineligible, whereas other songs have been converted into aac’s and are now Matched. You can also see that after going through this process of converting the files you will need to wait for iTunes to re-post the iTunes Match results – or you can force iTunes to update by going to the store menu and selecting update iTunes Match. After getting the results you want… Matched files… then you will of course want to go through and delete the bad files. If you want to make sure to get the best file possible after getting your tunes Matched in the Cloud then you will want to follow my previous post where I talked about how to get iTune Match’s better file.

iTunes Match Issues

I just ran into an issue with using iTunes Match and having tunes that are ineligible. I have a list of songs that for one reason or another are not being uploaded to iTunes Match Cloud. I’m sure Apple has a list of reasons why songs may not be eligible, I’ve seen it. That list explains a few of the songs on my list but not all. So at first I wasn’t concerned. No big deal, who cares if they are in the Cloud or not right? Well, the issue came in when I wanted one of those songs on my iPad to use in class. iTunes will not let you put an ineligible song on your iTunes Match enabled iOS device.

This could be a huge issue. For instance, I have songs that I have recorded accompaniment tracks for the choir for, using my keyboard and laptop at home in my studio. Those are songs that I would obviously like to be able to have on my iPad so that when I am at school I can use them. For some reason some of these accompaniments that I have created are in that list of ineligible songs.

The solution I found was easy enough. I simply put those songs into a playlist, burned a CD of them, deleted them from my library, and then imported that CD of songs back into my library. Issue gone. You could get into a pickle though if you need a certain song FAST and it is on your ineligible list though so it would be a good idea to make a SmartPlaylist of all songs that are ineligible for iTunesMatch and check through so you know what all is on that list.

Good luck with your conversion to the Cloud… it will be a journey full of twists!

Updating your iTunes songs to the higher quality using iTunes Match

So I have turned on iTunes Match, as I’ve mentioned in several other posts here. Apple has made an attempt to give a good description of what the service is and how to use it – check this out from them… and then there is even more here “Learn More About iTunes Match.” They even have a nifty “Understanding the iCloud Status Icons“

There are gaps though. I consider myself a pretty good reader and I consider myself someone who digs around for answers – more so than the average person trying to figure this stuff out! For instance I had an icon show up in my iTunes Library that is not listed on the above page. Another question i had was how to get the better quality file from iTunes Match that I had read about in all the advertising.

I had to dig around on the web to find an answer. I still can not find the answer on Apple’s web site. CNET gave me the answer. Follow along here and I’m going to go a bit more into depth.

Apple told me that iTunes Match would upgrade the quality of all those songs I recorded into my laptop from all my old cassette tapes. I have a ton of tapes that I simply put into the old tape deck, hooked an 1/8inch cable to RCA plugs, then pushed record on an audio program and proceeded to record all those old tapes – TOOK FOREVER! Plus at the time when I did it I made the choice to save the files as mp3 files. (I was thinking – save space and it’s about the same quality sound) Well, when I read that Apple would match those old mp3 files and upgrade their quality to the files they sell in the iTunes store, I liked that idea! I liked it even better when I realized that I would be able to keep those files in a year if I choose to not pay for iTunes Match again! Plus many of my tapes were WELL worn out – so the quality of sound coming into the laptop was questionable many times! But at least I had a digital copy of my tapes and I could listen to them from my iPod. I was happy, was being the key word here! So let me give you the short version….

• MP3 files recorded from old worn out cassette tapes that barely played at times
• Upgraded to 256-Kbps AAC DRM-free quality
• I keep the better files at the end of the year!
• SCORE!

So, like I said, I signed up. Took two days for Apple and my laptop to upload and match songs. (Short in comparison to Google Music’s 2 weeks!) Now I want my upgraded songs! Here’s how I did it…

We will look at one of my my cassette tapes that I had worn out so you get the picture of how this works.

First thing I want to bring up here is that when I knew I was going to turn iTunes Match on… I went to my iPad and deleted all the songs off my iPad. I did the same thing with my iPhone and iPod Touch. I had a ton of songs on there that were “Just in Case” songs. You know… the ones that I “MIGHT” want to listen to but probably never have or will (like at the end of an album – I mean with 6 kids when do I ever get to listen to an entire album?!) So on my iPad every time I listened to a song I was automatically downloading the newer, better quality file from the Cloud. So everything below here is simply so I could get the better quality file on my laptop and have a permanent copy of it on my hard drive.

SHORT VERSION

On my laptop, in my iTunes library, I had to…

1. select the songs that I knew iTunes had Matched,
2. delete them from my iTunes library but keep them in the Cloud
3. re-download them
4. Enjoy the better songs!

LONG VERSION WITH PRETTY PICTURES

STEP 1- So here is a screen shot of my album…Notice that some of the songs under iCloud Status say Matched and some simply say Uploaded. Why some songs on this album got Matched and some didn’t is a question for another day.

Take a look at the bottom two songs – You see that these two say Matched – that means iTunes has a better quality file in the Cloud waiting for you. Look over in the rectangle – you can see that Track 9 is a MPEG audio file. Track 7 is a track I already downloaded and updated, that’s why it says Matched AAC audio file.

STEP 2 – So the next step is to select the files that say Matched, then delete them from your iTunes on your computer but not on the cloud! Look below and you will see the pop up dialogue that appears when you hit the delete button, along with the check box that you DON’T want to have checked!

AGAIN – DO NOT DELETE these songs from the Cloud!

Then you can move these files from YOUR library to the trash. That pulls those old yucky files out of you iTunes library. You don’t want duplicates around wasting space.

I would not go empty the trash though. After downloading the better quality files you will be able to listen to the better files then listen to your old files – In my case it was very refreshing to actually make this comparison – HUGE difference!

STEP 3 - After deleting the files you will see that a Cloud, with an arrow in it, icon shows up next to those songs. That icon means the songs are in the Cloud waiting for you to download them.

Click on the little Cloud Arrow Icon….. Now the file starts to download and you see a little pie, progress icon that starts to fill up as the track downloads. It is a very fast process!

After the file downloads you can now see the songs will say Matched next to them and the file types have now changed…

Step 4 - Now all you have left to do is sit back and listen to your better quality files! Like I mentioned earlier – go pull those old version out of the trash and listen to the new version first then the old version. You will realize how much your were missing before. $25 bucks well spent I think if you have as many old file in your iTunes as I do!

By the way….

The screen shots I used in this post, you know… the ones with the pretty pink arrows and boxes…. were created in Skitch. Skitch is a free app for your Mac, Windows, iPad and a few other things too I think. It is a part of the service that Evernote offers. If you have not downloaded Skitch on your iPad especially, go do it now!