Apple World

It's not unusual to walk into an office setting and see the entire staff wearing headphones. Thanks to the MP3 revolution, we're able to cram thousands of songs onto our computers without busting the internal drive. Most of those folks are using iTunes to listen to their carefully selected work music. But behind every Arcade Fire song, there is an Ace of Bass single waiting to jar the worker from his or her indie slumber.

We here at the Mac|Life compound are pretty confident in our music taste. Some of us are bigger music snobs than others, but even the biggest music elitist has a few secret songs from Britney Spears.
That's where iTunes Chicken comes in.

Using iTunes DJ, we control the playlist of our coworkers. Of course, the also get to control our music. It's a fun way to find out that Ray has Kidz Bop on his computer and to force him to listen to each and every one of them. It's okay, he found that damn Smash Mouth song on my computer and now I'm a believer.

As with any game, there are few rules:

1. You're not allowed to delete or skip over songs in your iTunes DJ playlist, unless it's a duplicate song. Forcing Flo to listen I Saw the Sign by Ace of Base over and over again is cruel and unusual punishment.

2. You get 3 picks per co-worker every 30 minutes. That way the torture is spread out amongst the staff.

3. You have to listen to the music. If you walk away, you have to pause the music.

4. You have to change your AIM status to the song currently playing in iTunes. You have to share your shame with the world.
5. Once you start listening, hide iTunes and hope for the best. It's funner if you have no idea whats coming up next.


Those are the rules, this is how it's done:
Difficulty Level: Easy
What You Need:
>> iTunes
>> An iPhone, iPad or iPod touch with the Remote app
>> Bad music


Launch iTunes and head to the Playlists section of the sidebar. Select iTunes DJ.


Select Settings in the lower right hand corner.



Adjust the settings to match the screengrab above. For the Welcome Message, change that to whatever you want. A reference to iTunes Chicken will let others know you're playing along. Hit Ok.




Launch the Remote app on your iOS device. You'll see the libraries with iTunes DJ enabled.


Select your victim and start voting on songs for them to listen to. Just tap Request a Song to navigate to the song you want your victim to enjoy. I usually use the genre category to find odd songs.


You can check on the songs various coworkers will soon be forced to listen to and you can see what song they are currently playing.


Once you're settings are complete, set your AIM client to display the song you're currently "enjoying."
Got a fun office game?

The new iTunes is out. While it's, let's just say different looking, we took a good hard look at the latest update to the hardest working app on our Macs and came up with some tips, tricks and features you might find helpful. From Ping to Album Art List View, we check out the good, the bad and the gray.

Ping

Opt In
Ping is opt in, so you have to turn it on in order for it to work. If you're concerned that Apple is going to pull a Facebook on you, put the aluminum foil down--Apple seems to have learned from the bad press surrounding Facebook's tendency to automatically opt-in its users to new features. You have to turn Ping on in order to start judging your friend's musical taste.

Becoming friends with people with restricted accounts

Unless you actually know the person and you're fine giving them the email account you use for iTunes, we suggest you steer clear of adding people with restricted accounts. And really, what are these people hiding? We all know you love Milli Vanilli. Blame it on the rain...

Posts?

Unlike Twitter and Facebook, there is no "post" what you ate for lunch option on Ping. Everything is based around music and friends.


You can post an album to your account via iTunes. After clicking the post button, you can add your musical pearls of wisdom.


You can also "Like" an album then comment on that.

Or you can just buy the album and tell the world why it's important for everyone else to buy the album.

Finally, you can comment and "Like" items in Recent Activity.

Go away Lady Gaga--Fixing recent activity

If it was up to Apple, we'd all be fans of Lady Gaga. The top of Recent Activity defaults to showing you people and artists you should follow. You can get rid of that and make the Recent Activity page actually useful by highlighting, well, recent activity.


To hide people to follow, artists to follow and search from Ping: Just navigate to the top left corner and click on the X. Don't worry, they're in the right-hand column.

A clean Recent Activity

Only featured artists so far

If you're looking for Bad Brains, Morrissey, The Arcade Fire, Britney Spears, or really anyone that doesn't show up in Apple's Featured Artist list, you're going to be disappointed. So far, only a few artists have jumped on the Ping bandwagon. Hopefully more artists will join the party soon.

Ping is available everywhere in iTunes

Seriously, it's in the Source bar on the left, it's in the menu bar of the iTunes store. Everywhere you look, Ping. If you haven't seen it by now, it's probably because of the new bland gray color scheme of iTunes.

No swears

If you have a "colorful" vocabulary, Ping is going to automatically tone it down for the kiddies. We tried some of our favorite PG-13 words and ended up with the * replacement. What the F**k?

Manually change your top 10 songs

No one we've met has agreed with the automatically populated top 10 songs Ping picked for you. The Music I Like option says that they will, "Automatically display all music I like, rate, review, or purchase." We're pretty sure purchase trumps the rest of that list. While we listen to certain albums over and over again, it chose an album we purchased and then never listened to because it sucked.


To fix this, navigate to My Profile > Edit profile, and scroll down to Music I like. Check Manually pick the Music to Display. Use the Search for Music box to search for songs you actually like.

If you think you're going to be able to pick songs not in the iTunes store, you would be mistaken. It's a huge mistake on Apple's part to not allow you to populate your top songs with music not available in iTunes. Oh well, fingers crossed for an update.

Preview what you own?

When you click on your Music I Like, instead of just playing the song. If you like it, you probably own it. It pops up with the preview of the album the song is on.

Preview your friends picks

If someone posts an album that interests you, you can click on Show Songs right below the album art to preview the album.

Invitations

You can invite friends to Ping via email or with Facebook Connect. As of writing this, Facebook Connect is wonky disabled and invite via email isn't tied to your address book. You have to type in every email address.

Share your profile

Instead of dealing with broken default ways of sharing your Ping profile, just navigate to Your Profile. Right-click on your name and select Copy Link from the contextual menu.


You can paste that into Facebook, Twitter, or any other way you can think of. It's faster and easier.

iPhone Ping Party

Remember when Steve said you could get your Ping on with your iPhone? Well, Plug your iPhone into your Mac after you update to iTunes 10 and it pushes Ping onto your iPhone.