music

Ted has a business and plays a pandora in the background. Is he breaking the law? Leo says that technically, you need a license fee to play music in your business. ASCAP/BMI has secret shoppers that go around looking for this kind of thing and then sends businesses letters letting them know you're in violation and have to buy a license. Google ASCAP BMI, you'll find a page on what to do in order to play music. The fee is about $250 a year. There is a service called MUZAK that does just that. They handle all that, but you pay for the service. Also, check out SoundTrackYourBrand.com.

Clyde ripped all his CDs and has the music on his phone, but he doesn't have any backups anymore. How can he back them up from his phone? Leo says that if you backup your mobile phone, your phone backs it up. But Leo wants Clyde to also make a separate, accessible copy of the music from his phone. Connect your phone back to your computer and then let iTunes back it up and add those phones to the iTunes library.  Here's how. There's a third party program called Senuti that can also work. 

Patty wants to know about an app called iMazing for transferring her music from her phone to her Mac. But when she tried to use it, she lost all her music from her phone. Leo says Patty should have backed up her iPhone with iTunes before doing it. Anything non-standard can cause problems like this. She could check to see if she has a backup of her music on iCloud.

John wants to know what's a good way to clean up his iTunes and back them up to the cloud. Leo says that iTunes Match is great because users get 256kb aac copies placed in the cloud and they can replace those old MP3s with much better versions. What can he do with all the songs named "Track 1?" Leo says the file name isn't as important as the metadata, and iTunes Match needs to know the metadata of the song to match it, but there are several programs that can replace that "track 1" with the title.

Diane is worried that if she has to reinstall the Samsung music player on her Android phone, that she'll lose all 4000 of her songs. Leo says that Android is designed to have music in a single folder accessible by any music app. So she should just use a different app. Leo likes Doubletwist. Can she back it up to her laptop? Leo says DEFINITELY YES! Before she does anything else, she should plug in her phone and drag those songs over to a computer or a backup hard drive. It would also be a good idea to backup her phone to the cloud.

Peter has an old Walkman, which is about 40 years old. But when he presses play, the cassette plays for one note and stops. Leo has a hunch that the motor in the walkman is probably worn out. If it can play other cassettes, that would point to the cassette that's gone bad. It could be fixed, but Leo suggests digitizing his entire cassette collection because the older they get, the more likely they will start peeling off the oxide coating and he'll lose his music. He should get a Crosley Cassette player and digitize them.

Travis works out a lot and would like to grab 30 second snippets to work out by. Is there an app or function that will do that? Leo says that there is no function on the iPhone or iPod, but iOS12 has a feature called "Shortcuts," so he may be able to create a shortcut to play just 30 seconds of a song. Shortcuts works by daisy chaining tasks from apps. Some headphones have a skip button, where he'd tap the button twice to skip.

Mary wants to upload her own music to the cloud. What services would let her do it? Google Music and Spotify will both do that. Apple can also do this with iTunes Match. Once up in the cloud, she can then download the songs to her smartphone, or stream them directly. Amazon doesn't do that anymore, sadly.

Kevin is having issues with iTunes. It won't open at all. Leo says it should, and that isn't unusual. Sometimes .dll files get corrupted. Try uninstalling and reinstalling iTunes. Will that delete his music? Leo says no. It'll be safe. But Leo says that iTunes is an app that has never really worked well, and over time, it's gotten more ungainly and difficult to use. It really needs to be stripped down and built from the ground up. Alternatives include Double Twist. Media Monkey.