If you have MP3’s that are skipping, sounding weird, or that a media player like iTunes won’t open, sometimes you just need to run them through an MP3 validator app to check and repair the files. A great free MP3 checker is called MP3 Scan+Repair, it’s got an easy drag and drop interface that will repair MP3’s quickly.

Repairing MP3 Files

• Download the MP3 Validator here
• Launch the app and then drag MP3 files into the interface for them to be automatically checked.
• When an error is detected in an MP3 file, a little icon will appear next to the name in the app
• To initiate the repair, click on the hammer icon to repair the file
• Note that you might want to make a backup before repairing the MP3 since it does overwrite the original file.
• The repaired MP3 will appear in the same location as the original corrupt MP3

The process is pretty quick and you can repair a bunch of songs at once, it fixed one of my stubborn MP3’s immediately and now it plays and opens fine with iTunes.

I’ve never really figured out exactly why some MP3 files will become corrupted and then need to be repaired, but it’s nice to come across a free app that handles the repairs quickly. In my experience MP3 corruption usually happens when downloading music from new music sites and blogs, so perhaps the file becomes corrupted in the transfer process.

If you don’t want to download any additional software you can try some other methods. I’ve found creative workarounds in the past when iTunes won’t play a song that involves importing the file into QuickTime and exporting it as a movie track before reimporting into iTunes… this works fine but it’s a bit of work just to play an MP3.

I recently encountered a strange bug where iTunes refused to add a song to it’s playlist and wouldn’t play the original source MP3 file either. Interestingly enough, the mp3 file played fine with Quick Look and even was able to play within the Finder preview, but no matter what I did I could not add or import the mp3 file to my iTunes playlist.

Fix for iTunes not playing/adding songs and MP3s

I came up with a fix that involves opening the song with QuickTime Player and then re-saving it as an iTunes compatible format to play as usual, here are the steps:

• Launch QuickTime Player
• Drag or Open the MP3 file into QuickTime Player
• From the File menu select “Save As”
• Select “iPhone” as the Format
• Click “Save” and let the mp3 file convert to an .m4v iPhone movie file

• Locate the newly created .m4v file and rename the .m4v extension to .m4a to ensure iTunes treats it as audio, and drag that file into iTunes
• Play the song in iTunes as usual

If you want, you can take this a step further and then select the song and convert it to AAC or MP3 with iTunes from the “Advanced” menu. Likewise you can use a third party utility like All2Mp3 and convert the song to MP3 that way as well.

If all else fails, you might want to learn to repair MP3 files, it’s not complicated and it will fix most other problems.

Many new Mac users are coming from the Windows world where they would access the Task Manager to end tasks and stop errant processes. The Mac has it’s own Task Manager but it goes by another name: Activity Monitor. Activity Monitor functions in a very similar way to how Task Manager does in Windows, letting you manage and end tasks, applications, and processes easily within Mac OS X.

The Mac Task Manager

Despite being named Activity Monitor many Mac switchers continue to refer to the utility as the Windows name of Task Manager, keep in mind that regardless of the lingo used it’s the same application utility being discussed and used.

Remember, the Task Manager for Mac = Activity Monitor!

Using the Task Manager in Mac OS X

If you’re used to Windows, you’d get to the Task Manager by hitting Control+ALT+DEL. In Mac OS X, it’s a bit different. You can launch the app directly within it’s containing directory or use Spotlight for quick keyboard access.

Access the Mac Task Manager
Activity Monitor is located in your /Applications/Utilities/ folder. The simplest way to get to Activity Monitor in Mac OS X is to use Spotlight as a keyboard shortcut of sorts.

• Hit Command+Spacebar to bring up the Spotlight search field
• Type in “Activity Monitor”
• Hit the Return key when “Activity Monitor” populates in the spotlight results
• You are now in Activity Monitor where you can manage and manipulate tasks

Killing or Stopping a Task/Process with Activity Monitor
From within Activity Monitor, simply click on the task or application you want to end and then click on the large red “Quit Process” button in the left corner of the app window. You will get a warning dialogue as follows:

Assuming you have selected the process/application you want to end, click on the “Quit” button. If the app is being unresponsive, you can click on the “Force Quit” button instead to immediately kill the process and stop the application from running without any further warning.

Get System Stats, CPU, Memory Usage, Network, and Disk Info in Activity Monitor
Looking at the bottom of Activity Monitor you can also get system usage information about your Mac. Just click on the tabs to see information about CPU, System Memory, Disk Activity, Disk Usage (space), and Network activity and usage.

Quick Tip for New Mac Users from the Windows World
Until new Mac users are more familiar with Spotlight and how their Mac works, I often recommend recent switchers keep Activity Monitor in their Dock for easy access. The good news is you will rarely use Activity Monitor, since Mac OS and applications within it run much better than Windows, but it’s good to have it readily available in case something goes haywire (like Flash messing up Safari or another web browser).

So you forgot your Mac password… uh oh. Don’t worry, it happens and you aren’t out of luck. You’ll need to reset the forgotten password and there’s several ways to do this, we’ll focus on the two best methods; one does not require a Mac OS X installer CD and is a great hack, and the other is much more simple if you happen to have a Mac OS X DVD laying around.
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You can initiate the same Repair Disk Permissions functionality that is seen in Disk Utility via the Terminal by typing the following command in the Terminal:
diskutil repairPermissions /

This will repair the disk permissions on your Mac’s main drive, if you want though you can run it on another disk by specifying it rather than / at the command line. Once the command has been executed you will see a message like:
Started verify/repair permissions on disk0s2 Mac HD

The time it takes to repair the disk permissions depends on various factors, but the command will update as permissions are repaired and will end itself when diskutil is finished. If you have verified disk permissions and you find a bunch of problems, you might want to cross check them with this list from Apple for errors that you can safely ignore.

If your Mac is suddenly running sluggish and you launched Activity Monitor, you may notice a process named ‘mds’ cranking away at 30% and even up to 90% CPU utilization. If you see this, don’t worry, it’s not abnormal behavior and your Mac isn’t crashing, it’s just indexing it’s built in search engine.

What is MDS in Mac OS?

mds stands for “metadata server” and the mds process is part of Spotlight, the amazingly powerful and very useful search feature built directly into the foundation of Mac OS X. You access Spotlight by hitting Command+Spacebar.

An easy way to identify that mds and Spotlight is indexing is to look at the Spotlight icon in the upper right corner of your menubar, when Spotlight is indexing the magnifying glass will have a dot in the center like so:

You can then click on the Spotlight icon and you’ll see your main hard drive being indexed, with a progress bar and estimated time until completion:

Is mds related to mdworker?

Yes. Usually you will see the mds process in conjunction with mdworker, which is another part of Spotlight and it’s indexing engine.

How long does mds & Spotlight take to finish indexing?

How long it takes to update the Spotlight index depends on a few variables, but mostly the size of your hard drive, the amount of data being indexed, major changes to the filesystem, and the time since last indexing. Just let the indexing complete, it generally takes between 15 and 45 minutes to complete.

If Spotlight isn’t working, you can check out these Spotlight troubleshooting tips which will get you situated again. If you don’t ever use the search feature or just don’t like it, you can also disable Spotlight and all of its indexing.

Starcraft 2 has been out for about a week now and since launch date my life has basically revolved around the game (I’m a nerd, I know). The game is an absolute blast and you should buy it if you like real time strategy games. Now all that said, it’s not without problems. Despite a lengthy beta testing period, there are still some pretty annoying bugs and crashes in SC2, particularly for Mac users who have NVidia hardware.

Here is the known problem list for the Starcraft 2 Mac client, and more importantly some potential fixes for the problems:
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If you’re troubleshooting a machine it can be helpful to list what kernel extensions are activated, particularly third party kexts. Here’s an easy way to list all third party kexts, using the command line:
kextstat | grep -v com.apple

Of course you can always list all kernel extensions (Apple’s official Mac OS X kexts included) by just typing:
kextstat

I use Synergy to share a single mouse and keyboard between multiple Mac’s and PC’s. Recently I added a new machine to the setup and was frustrated to discover that the Synergy client on the new machine just refused to connect to the server, without any attempts I would immediately get the following error message:
WARNING: failed to connect to server: Timed Out

Everything is configured properly in regards to settings on all clients and the server, so what’d I do to fix this error?

Change the host connect-to name from the hostname to the machines IP address, and instantly Synergy connected and everything worked as usual.

I don’t really know why the “Timed Out” message was appearing when it obviously wasn’t even attempting a connection, but nonetheless switching the client to connect to the host IP works fine. This occurred using Synergy clients and servers running 1.3.1. If you’re running into a time out error with Synergy, check your logs and try this fix out. You can check your Synergyd error messages by opening the synergyd.log log file either manually in Console, Terminal, or through SynergyKM.

In my experience, Synergy is the best cross-platform compatible solution to share a keyboard and mouse. If you’re only using Mac OS you can also share a keyboard across multiple Mac’s using Teleport which is sometimes easier to setup, but I’m still partial to SynergyKM for Mac.

You can find out what the manufacturer, model number, and type of LCD panel you have in your MacBook or MacBook Pro by executing a command in the Terminal.

Paste the following into a single line in the command line:
ioreg -lw0 | grep IODisplayEDID | sed "/[^<]*</s///" | xxd -p -r | strings -6

You will see something similar to this:
LTN154BT
Color LCD

With the first line being the LCD panel model and the second line being the color profile you are using (same as set in your Display preferences). You can then find out what the manufacturer and specs of the display are by googling for the model number, for instance LTN154BT turns up this page indicating it is a Samsung 15″ display running at 1440×900 and capable of displaying a maximum of 262,000 colors.

This is particularly helpful information to know if your MacBook screen has been cracked and you want to do the installation yourself. Official repairs are often very expensive, but with a little patience and the right tools it can be done by anyone. You can typically pick up an LCD panel through Amazon or eBay for rather cheap and the installation takes about 30 minutes if you follow a guide.