Now my habits are significantly different. I have loads of songs, and I hardly ever play them in iTunes. I mostly play them on my iPod, but I still want lyrics in the songs. I needed a better system, and it was looking like PearLyrics was failing to work, anyhow. Here is what I figured out after doing some research:

1) I found an AppleScript called No Lyrics to Playlist. It examines your iTunes library and creates a NO LYRICS playlist, which will contain all songs that lack lyrics. This is a necessary first step: now I have one comprehensive set of songs which need lyrics.

2) I installed an application called Gimme Some Tune. Gimme Some Tune will seek out lyrics to the currently playing iTunes song (and album art, as well), and copy it to the song metadata. It has some nifty features PearLyrics does not.

3) I installed an AppleScript called Needle Drop. Needle Drop will allow you to sample each song in a playlist for just a few seconds each. It will play a song just long enough for Gimme Some Tune to find the lyrics to each song. No need to play through the whole song.

So there, after some configuration, I just ran Needle Drop on my No Lyrics playlist. After a short time, my whole iTunes library is set with lyrics and album art. Actually, Gimme Some Tune could not find lyrics for about 580 songs (out of 3900 total), for various reasons. But it was pretty good.

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1) Backup to external media

Lightroom should enable a smart, organized backup of all images (plus metadata?) to CD or DVD or other external media. This should be executable on request, or automatically according to a regular schedule (ie, whenever I add another 4GB of images, it asks me to insert a new DVD). It should manage the backup in such a way that it splits your collection automatically to fit on sequential disks. It should display for you exactly what it’s backing up to how many disks. It should give you flexible options for auto-naming the disks. It should keep track of what images are backed up on what disks. And next time you go to back up, it should remember where you were in the process and prompt you if you want to continue from where you left off, or do something else. It should also allow you to make a duplicate of your entire backup set, or duplicate individual DVD’s.

I imagine that to facilitate this, BACKUP would become a module on the upper right of the screen. That is to say, backing up your files to external media should be as much a core function of image management as printing, developing, slideshows, or exporting to web.

2) Greater control in customizing print template

Currently the print template gives you some basic options for customization.

However, I’d like to see greater control over placement of printed metadata. For example, maybe I want image titles centered on the top, captions centered .25 inches below the image, filenames at the very bottom of the page flush left, and date @ bottom flush right, all in 40% black.

Lightroom print Templates should allow you to have such precise control.

After some research, I settled on Drobo as my hardware of choice. I guess you’d call it a next-generation RAID, which means that it makes two copies of your data automatically. So if you have two 500 GB drives, basically it assigns you 500 GB of storage and 500 GB as a duplicate of your data. So if one drive fails, you still have a safe backup.

But it’s more than just that: it manages your drives in a “smart” way such that it lets you add drives to the array on-the-fly, and it even tells you, by means of an indicator light, when a drive is about to fail or when the storage is mostly full. I first saw the product demo’d at Photoshop World; I thought the price was a bit high, but it dropped a bit since then to a more reasonable level.

Anyhow, I loaded up my Drobo with two 500GB drives, and upgraded to Leopard. Surprisingly, after just a week my drives were nearly full, so I ordered a third drive, this one 1 TB.

The Drobo documentation suggests that you just pop the new drive into the unit, and it will add it to the array without any further action by the user. However, I have to say that in my case it did not immediately recognize the drive. It was only after I shut down the computer, unplugged the Drobo for a minute and re-plugged it, that the third drive was recognized. However, no harm done; all my data was intact and now I had doubled my total storage space.

I was so happy with my Drobo that I wanted to send the URL to a friend, so I typed in the URL in my browser to confirm it was correct. At the bottom of the screen I noticed a promotion, register your Drobo to enter a contest. I figured, what the heck, I clicked.

On the registration form, it asked for the serial number. Where is the serial number for the Drobo? On the bottom of the unit. So I turned my unit onto its side for about 30 seconds while I typed in the serial number and confirmed it.

At that moment, the pleasant whirring of the Drobo fell to silence. Yes, my Drobo had been writing to the drives when I turned it over, I knew that. Time Machine writes to those drives so often that it’s almost continually whirring away. But I thought it wouldn’t matter. After all, laptops routinely get turned all around all the time.

Well, my happy green indicator lights started blinking green-red, green-red. My Drobo software told me: “Disk Error”. It appeared that $500 worth of hard drives were toast. I tried everything I could think of, including writing a heated letter to Drobo support. The best I could come up with was re-formatting the drive, which resulted in blinking green-red lights and a message: “Preparing your drive for data protection. Estimated time: 16 hours”. So I turned off Time Machine, waited for this mysterious process to complete, crossed my fingers and hoped.

The next day, thank goodness, my Drobo was displaying happy green lights again. I turned Time Machine back on, and so far everything seems to be working normally. I did lose all my data, though. Which is OK in this case because it was just a backup. But I offer this tale as a warning to others. Drobo is a good product … but don’t turn it over on its side.

Problem description: You launch the CS3 installer, and you can’t select Photoshop because it’s greyed out in the install menu.

Solution: Download the CS3 Clean Script and read every word in the PDF document that comes with it. Basically it’s an un-install program. This is a familiar concept to Windows users, but a little unusual for Mac users.

The ink cartridges arrived fairly quickly, and appeared to be well-constructed. Certainly the graphic design of the web site and product was high-quality, which is generally a good sign. As my Canon ink cartridges dried out, I replaced each one with Carrot Ink cartridges. The resulting images were beautiful, certainly comparable to the Canon inks.

However, It didn’t take long before the ink heads clogged. I ran a lot of “cleaning” routines on the heads, to no avail. Each cleaning routine would drain large quantities of ink from the cartridges, wasting my Canon ink cartridges which I replaced with Carrot Ink cartriges, one by one. When that did not work I tried cleaning with alcohol and a clean cotton cloth. No luck. So I ordered another printer head, at about $95.

I installed the new print head, and by this time I was using a full set of Carrot Ink cartridges. I printed three 13×19 images with no problems. On the fourth image, the cyan head clogged. Again I tried a few head-cleaning routines. When that didn’t work I tried an intensive regimen of cleaning with windex and warm distilled water. No matter what I did, the cyan head would not unclog.

By this time, I really needed the printer to work so I could print some large images for a photo competition. So I ordered another printer head (now my third, counting the original and first replacement), and a set of original Canon inks. I installed the 3rd print head with Canon OEM inks; I threw away the Carrot Inks I had remaining. This was sometime around October of 2006.

I’ve been printing with that print head and genuine Canon inks since that time. I have had no significant head-clogging problems since switching back to Canon inks; I think I had to run a head-cleaning routine once during that time. I’ve printed a bunch of 13×19 images that look stunning.

I don’t think I’m ever going to try Carrot Ink again.