The built in Mac speakers aren’t really adequate for playing rich loud music or media, so you’ll want to get a better set. What kind of speakers to will want depend on your needs, but I’d recommend getting a quality set for your home workstation and then if you’re a road warrior get a separate set of portable speakers. I’ll go over a few options that I have direct experience with here.

The best speakers for your MacBook, MacBook Pro, or iMac

Audioengine A5 Powered Multimedia Speaker System – $325 – The sound quality on the AudioEngine A5’s is nothing short of absolutely amazing, with some great features to boot. The speakers include easy line-in to hookup your iPod/iPhone, a USB port to charge your iPod, a power outlet for hooking up an Airport Express, a built-in amplifier, and did I mention seriously amazing sound? I heard these at a friends house and knew I had to get a set myself. If you’re a music lover, audiophile, or a musician and you want truly amazing sound on a budget, just stop reading and get these speakers, your ears will thank you. No more 128kbps audio files with these, you’ll want to play 256kbps or better. My only complaint is that they don’t include a remote control. The AudioEngine A5’s come in black, white, and a snazzy bamboo.

I have to rave about the AudioEngine’s because they are without a doubt the best speakers I’ve heard at anything even close to the price range. For a Mac (or iPod or any PC really) they produce the highest quality sound possible without spending a ton of money.

Ok now I realize not everyone wants to spend $325 for near studio quality sound on their Mac, or they just want something smaller, so here’s some decent options that are significantly cheaper:

Cheap but good speakers for your MacBook, MacBook Pro, or iMac

Altec Lansing BXR1220 2.0 Speakers – $15 – these are small speakers with surprisingly decent sound for their size. Don’t expect deep rich bass or anything though, it’s just not really possible with something this compact and without a subwoofer.

Logitech S220 2.1 Speakers with Subwoofer – $24 – Now if you’re less concerned about space and portability, for about $25 these speakers produce some great bass thanks to the included subwoofer. A friend of mine has these hooked up his MacBook and plays them quite loud at BBQ’s and I’m always impressed that for the sound quality they’re so cheap.

Altec Lansing VS4121 Audio System – $60 – I had a pair of Altec Lansings just like these on my Mac before I got some AudioEngine A5’s, and I was always happy with their sound quality. The subwoofer helps produce rich bass and the speakers provide loud and quality sound for music, movies, and gaming.

Ultra portable speakers for your MacBook and MacBook Pro

Altec Lansing iML237USB Ultra Portable Speakers – $49 – This thing is small and ultra portable, the main downside is that it draws from USB to take power so you’ll be losing a USB port. If you’re a serious roadwarrior though and you’re more concerned with bag space than overall sound richness and just need something loud for teleconferencing, entertainment, or presentations, this is a good choice. I first saw one of these when a someone brought it out of his bag during a presentation, it looked like a chubby YoYo.

B-Flex 2 Stereo USB Speaker – $39 – These are a fascinating speaker, it plugs into your USB port and then has a flexible arm to aim in any which direction. I admit I haven’t heard these myself but they were recommended by a friend for their portability and sound quality, and I trust his opinion so Ill include them. For maximum portability and cord-free speakers these look like a great bet.

What about speakers for the Mac Pro and Mac Mini?

My suggestions for the Mac Mini would be the same as the other Mac’s, but since the Mini is so tiny and stylish I figure Mini owners will be more particular about the appearance of their speakers. In regards to the Mac Pro, since it’s more of a professionals machine I would imagine a Mac Pro user would want professional grade speakers, while the AudioEngine A5’s certainly meet that requirement on a budget, there are other options geared specifically towards audio professionals, but I have no personal experience with that kind of high-end sound equipment.

Obviously there are many other options out there for Mac speakers, but these are just the ones I have come across relatively recently. Feel free to share your own speaker suggestions or experiences in the comments.

“iTunes could not connect to this iPhone because an unknown error occurred (0xE8000065)”

Ahhh! That’s the message I got earlier when trying to connect my iPhone to my iMac, something I haven’t seen before. I searched around a bit online and found out that this is not a Mac OS X specific problem, many people running Windows XP and Windows 7 encounter the same error. While I couldn’t find a definitive answer as to what causes it, I have my own speculation: power issues.

Many of the complaints and descriptions regarding the error describe swapping around USB connections and ports to resolve the issue, and I think this helps to corroborate my suspicion with power management. With this is mind, here’s how I got the ‘unknown error’ to go away and finally connect my iMac to my iPhone again: I just let the iPhone charge more. The battery had been very low, and I have auto-sync enabled, so I imagine the iPhone just didn’t have an adequate charge to maintain a connection.

Now again, all of this is just pure speculation based on my experience and reading other peoples encounters with the same problem. So if you’re running into this “0xE8000065″ error with iTunes and your iPhone (also some people report problems on their iPod Touch…) try the following to troubleshoot:

* Change the USB port the iPhone is connected to the computer with
* Let the iPhone charge sufficiently before trying to access it through iTunes
* Turn the iPhone on and off

If it’s persistant, you could even try resetting the PMU/SMC controller on the Mac.

Anyway, if you encounter this error hopefully these tips work to resolve it for you as well, let me know!

Appropriately named App Store Expense Monitor does exactly what it’s name implies, it tallies up your App Store spending on iPhone/iPod Touch apps and gives you a grand total. The app works by reading your iPhone App information from the iTunes folder on your Mac and then it just tallies up the prices, but it does allow you to edit price information in case you got an app for free or at a reduced cost.

All of those little $0.99 purchases can sure add up!

App Store Expense Monitor
Download now

This is a very cool feature I had no idea existed but accidentally stumbled across while on a recent flight. If you have an iPhone, you probably know that the earbuds included with it have a button to adjust volume and what not, well guess what, you can control the volume level in iTunes and QuickTime with the iPhone Earbud buttons as well! This works at least on the Unibody MacBook Pro’s, but I’m not sure if it works on the Unibody MacBook. Just plug in the iPhone earbuds to your Mac and launch QuickTime or iTunes to test it out yourself.

It’s also worth mentioning that the iPhone earbuds microphone works fine with Mac OS X too, and it makes a significantly better microphone than the one that is built in. This is particularly handy for VOIP calls through iChat, Google Voice, and Skype.

iTunes 9 is great and has a lot of improvements, but changing the background color in Grid view from the nice easy-on-the-eyes dark to the bright retina torching white is not on my happy list. Now they made this different recently but Manish is still am not thrilled. Thankfully French designer Damien Erambert has come up with an easily installable hack to change the grid mode colors in iTunes 9 back to an attractive dark color scheme.

Developer home
Download now (intel only)

Moving your iTunes music library to another machine is really easy to do since Apple has made iTunes store all of your music in one central location. Unless you have changed it yourself to something else, iTunes music is by default stored in your home directory at ~/Music/iTunes/

Moving your iTunes Music Library

Using this method you can move your entire iTunes Music library to anywhere, including an external hard drive.

* The first thing you’ll want to do is locate your iTunes music library, as mentioned earlier this is located in your home directories Music folder, at ~/Music/iTunes
* Next, copy that entire ~/Music/iTunes folder to the new desired location. This may take a while depending on how large your music library is.
* Launch iTunes, enter the Preferences by going through the iTunes menu and selecting ‘Preferences’
* Click the ‘Advanced’ tab and you’ll see the location of your iTunes music library like the screenshot below. Click the ‘Change’ button and navigate to the new iTunes music library location (where you copied the ~/Music/iTunes/ folder too)

* Now click ‘OK’ and your iTunes library is set to it’s new location!

How do you move the iTunes library to a new Mac so that it is the main machine for my iPod/iPhone?

The iTunes music directory stores all of your iPhone/iPod ownership data, so moving this directory also moves ownership in that sense. This is achieved in practically the exact same way as the method above, you just need to connect the two Mac’s together either through a network or through something like firewire target disk mode (obviously this only works on Mac’s with firewire support). If you’re lucky enough to have both of your Mac’s with Firewire support, then hook a firewire cable between the two, and reboot one of them holding down T to place it into Target Disk Mode. When the machine boots it will act as an external hard disk on the other Mac, so you can easily and very quickly copy the contents of your ~/Music/ folder to the desired location.

Note that the above methods work all more or less the same with Windows PC’s as well, except that the Music/iTunes directory is usually located in ‘My Documents’ but you can transfer it to a Mac (or vice versa) or PC just the same.

You can rate iTunes songs directly from your Dock! Just right-click (or control-click) the iTunes icon within the Dock, and scroll up to ‘Rating’ and from there select the Star Rating for the song.

Listening to a great song that you think everyone should hear? You can easily share music with your friends thanks to iChat and iTunes, just drag a song from iTunes into an iChat window and off it goes! This may be Snow Leopard and iTunes 9 only, I don’t recall this feature working in Leopard.

If you have a large iTunes library it’s really easy to inadvertently gather duplicate songs. Thankfully cleaning up and removing the duplicates from the iTunes song library is really easy, here’s how to do it:

Removing Duplicate Songs from iTunes

* Within iTunes open the ‘File’ menu
* Navigate down to ‘Show Duplicates’ (see below screenshot)
* iTunes will now show what it thinks are duplicates

This method does not always work though to find true duplicates of songs and will sometimes give you songs that are just very similar in name or artist, so you may want to try this instead:

Remove Exact Duplicates from iTunes Song Library

* Hold down the Option / ALT key
* Navigate to “File” menu
* Click on ‘Show Exact Duplicates’
* Now iTunes will display ONLY the exact duplicates (see screenshot)

This list shows you the songs that iTunes thinks are duplicates, so do not delete everything in the list or else you may delete the original song that you want to keep. iTunes isn’t perfect in detecting duplicates either, it looks like it bases most of the detection on song, artist, and album names, so if you have two songs named the exact same thing but they are different iTunes will likely think it is a duplicate.

After you have cleaned up your duplicate songs, you can get the iTunes library looking like normal again by clicking the ‘Show All’ button that is highlighted in the above screenshot, or simply navigate back to the ‘File’ menu and click on ‘Show All’ where “Show Duplicates” once was.

DRM on songs is restrictive and obnoxious, you paid for the music therefore it belongs to you. Unfortunately record companies don’t always agree with us, so when you buy something like a song from iTunes it’ll often come with DRM protection preventing you from doing what you want to do with it.

Remove DRM from songs using iTunes

Ironically, you can use iTunes itself to remove DRM from the songs you just paid for on iTunes with DRM forced on you. This is the easiest way to do it:

* Create a playlist within iTunes that includes all the songs with DRM
* Using a blank CD-R disk, Burn the DRM songs to this CD with iTunes
* Once the CD is burnt, re-rip the entire CD with iTunes
* Your newly imported songs will be DRM free! To avoid confusion you may want to delete the originals with DRM protection.

This method to remove the DRM protection works on Mac OS X and Windows, so regardless of where your iTunes music is stored you’ll be able to remove the restriction.