Freedom! I can move my laptop wherever I want! No trailing network cable! At least for 90 minutes or so, then I need to recharge the battery. Not exactly a stellar battery time, but I’m not really intending to use the laptop “on the go” anyway.

I also spotted three other networks in the vicinity, all of them without protection, and one who has enough sense to both use WEP and not announce his network. (Not that this stops me from finding it.)

Right now I’m in bed, and the only wire connected to my laptop is the one from my headphones.

One slight problem, now solved, was how to organize my music on the laptop. When my stationary computer is running, I can play all my music via the shared playlists in iTunes.

Copying my music to the laptop to play when I’m not at home isn’t a problem, but keeping it organized was. So I had a look at rsync.

rsync isn’t new to people who have some Unix experience. It’s an application to copy stuff from location A to location B, where A or B doesn’t necessarily have to be the computer you’re running rsync on.

I’ve used it quite a lot in Linux environments, but now I had to run it in Windows. Cygwin to the rescue!

Cygwin is essentially a Unix environment in Windows, with all the familiar shells and command line applications ported to Windows.

I only need to sync from the file server, running Linux, to my laptop, so there’s no need for an rsync service on the laptop. If you’re interested in that, here’s a good guide.

I have a batch file with the following command in it:

rsync -rtv -e ssh --stats --modify-window=1 --delete --progress echo@192.168.0.3:/mnt/data/Music/Albums/ /cygdrive/d/Albums

This will recursively copy everything in /mnt/data/Music/Albums/ on the file server to D:Albums on the laptop. Cygwin uses a pseudo-directory for different drives in Windows: /cygdrive/d/ equals D:.

The --delete flag removes any file on the destination that doesn’t exist on the source; so if I remove something from the file server, it gets deleted on the laptop as well the next time I run rsync.

Update: I had some problems with rsync checking every single file, despite them matching on the file server and the laptop. After reading the rsync man page, I found that Windows doesn’t store file dates with the same precision as Linux, so rsync saw them as possibly different due to the time difference and had to check them. Adding --modify-window=1 as an option to the rsync command solved this.

The command above has been updated to reflect my new settings.

• “Getting moldy” — My rating is in the range of 3 to 5 stars; last played is not in the last month; limit to 10 songs selected by random.
• “Recently played” — Last played is in the last month; limit to 100 songs selected by most recently played.
• “Top 25″ — Limit to 25 songs selected by most played; match only checked songs.
• “Top rated” — My rating is greater than 4 stars; play count is greater than zero.
• “Unrated” — My rating is zero stars; limited to 10 songs selected by random; match only checked songs.

Smart playlists in iTunes rocks my world. Before them (known as “the dark ages”), I tended to either listen to a random playlist with all my songs (though I still do that 70% of the time in iTunes) or listen to a subset of my favorite songs.

The ability to make a playlist of songs I haven’t played in a long while alone makes smart playlists worthwhile.

I currently have 2222 songs in iTunes (how’s that for symmetry?), and rating them all takes time. So I listen quite a lot to the Unrated list now and make a quick rating of the song. The ratings are always in a state of flux and may change on subsequent plays. Of course, smart playlists update themselves dynamically, so as soon as I rate a song on the Unrated list, it disappears and another unrated song is added.

First impressions: Ctrl-W closes the entire application. This is bad. In OS X, it just closes the window and keeps iTunes running and playing. This means I have to keep it in the activity field while running. Slightly annoying.

I’ll toy around a bit with the music sharing; tomorrow I’ll set up an SSH tunnel from school to home and see if I can access my music that way. iTunes only allows music sharing on local subnets; but an SSH tunnel is considered local for all intents and purposes.

Update: Some more impressions.

• iTunes quits if I right-click the close button. Broken behavior, no Windows applications do that.
• No always on top. Windows is (duh) windows focused as opposed to the application focus on a Mac; I want always on top for the mini-mode. It iTunes had only used the default Windows widgets instead of the OS X brushed metal appearance, I could use the nVidia drivers to force a window to be always on top.

For something that calls itself “the best Windows app ever” (Apple.com front page as of writing this), it sure is inconsistent with every other Windows app in existence…

More update: I’ve tried the Rendezvous sharing now. It rocks.

I have a Mac here too, and I used to mount my music collection via SMB to access it from my Mac. Now I just need to have iTunes running on my Windows machine, and the Mac sees the entire collection at once via the Rendezvous shared playlist. Rock on.

I want more Rendezvous/Zeroconf applications for Windows!

Now I’m just looking for something that lets me control iTunes across the network — preferrably some kind of web interface so it’s platform independent.