Computer Q&A
Finding names of songs on old CD?
Q: I’ve got an old mix CD, and I don’t know the names of all the songs on it. Is there any way to look them up online?
A: Music-manager programs such as iTunes and Windows Media Player can look up song titles on mass-produced CDs by matching the sequence of track times to an online database, but they can’t do that with one-of-a-kind or few-of-a-kind compilations.
Assuming you’re not dealing with instrumentals, you can try searching the Web for an unusual phrase in an unknown song’s lyrics.
But you may have better results with a specialized music-tagging program that will analyze multiple characteristics in a song, not just its time, to identify it.
A site called MusicBrainz (musicbrainz. org) offers a few free programs to do this job, such as Picard for Windows and the charmingly named iEatBrainz for Mac OS X. I tested the latter — a simple program that elegantly integrates with your iTunes library — on two mix-CD mystery tracks, and it labeled both correctly.
Forget about GoBack
Q: Can I safely load the copy of GoBack I used with my old Win 98 SE computer onto the XP machine my office handed down to me?
A: Most programs written for an older release of Windows will work in a newer version, but that’s not the case with system-utility programs such as Symantec’s GoBack, which lets you undo changes to your files. Unless the developer of the utility you’re considering specifically lists your release as compatible with your copy of Windows, forget about installing it.
This is also often the case with drivers, the software components that let peripherals plug into Windows. For example, if you get a new computer, ignore the CD that came with your old printer and download the latest drivers for it from the printer vendor’s Web site.
Plug iPod into Mac
Q: We bought an iPod nano and discovered it needs Mac OS X 10.4.8, and we only have 10.3.9. Now we’re looking at upgrading OS X ($129), which itself will require more memory— so this $149 iPod will cost $200 more.
A: As this reader discovered, plugging a new iPod nano into a Mac running a 10.3 release of OS X caused iTunes to report that the iPod “cannot be used because it requires Mac OS X 10.4.8 or later.”
This happens even though the current release of iTunes only requires OS X 10.3.9.
Apple spokesman Tom Neumayr said the policy is to certify each new line of iPods for use with the two newest versions of OS X and Windows, but he did not name anything that made the current iPods incompatible with OS X 10.3.
Apple’s prolific pace of operating-system upgrades can leave Mac users worse off than Windows users: The second-most-recent OS X release, 10.4 Tiger, arrived in April 2005, while the second-latest Windows version, XP, shipped in October 2001.
Sometimes a statement that an older operating system is “unsupported” for use with a new gadget means only that the company won’t offer help for that mix of software and hardware. Apple, however, has turned “not supported” into “not allowed” by setting iTunes to reject an iPod if it’s running the wrong version of OS X.
You can’t say Apple misleads buyers. It clearly states that current iPods require OS X 10.4 or newer (and I’d argue it’s worth upgrading from 10.3 anyway).
But it’s still a mistake for Apple to go out of its way to prevent a new iPod from working on an older OS X release — in the process making some Mac users feel they’re being treated more shabbily than Windows users.
The easiest and cheapest way out of this dilemma, should you be in the market for an iPod to hook up to older Mac system software, is to buy a used iPod.
Got a question on personal technology? Send a note to Washington Post columnist Rob Pegoraro at robp@washpost.com . Questions can be answered only through this column.
