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S#!t Dogs Think

Ingram Media Manager fail

Rant mode.

My library offers ebooks, which in turn requires the installation of Ingram Media Manager to access and convert them to something useful. IMM is not. Having it transfer the audio book directly to my iPhone (on MacOS X 10.6, running current iTunes (9.0.3)) corrupted its music database so I had to restore it from backup. Having it convert to MP3 failed once per audio part with the error message “Error occurred while converting the file <insert part name> An unknown error occurred (-50)”. Here’s a way to fix that:

In iTunes’ Advanced settings tab, uncheck “Keep iTunes Media folder organized” and “Copy files to iTunes Media folder when adding to library”. Conversion now works, if you are lucky. (In my case, it transcoded five of 22 files the first try and left the rest empty. A second try managed to get the rest, too.

Before I came up with the above solution, I tried running the Windows version, too. It, too, depended on an iTunes installation for mp3 encoding, but supposedly could do wma encoding. No such luck, though; “You are not currently licensed for this operation. One or more arguments are invalid.” was all it left me with.

Ingram Media Manager will not popularize audiobooks.

macbook syslog overflow

My (Snow Leopard) /private/var/log/DiagnosticMessages is overflowing with console warnings and errors, repeatedly creating full disk conditions. Every 10s, there is one from com.google.keystone.daemon. Testing the tips at Stopping all OSX Google background ‘updater’ apps to see if it alleviates the issue, after a sudo launchctl remove com.google.keystone.daemon which seems to have taken away the immediate pain.