13543 Think of ProSoft Engineering's new TuneTech utility as "Drive Genius for iPod."

ProSoft's Drive Genius is an excellent suite of disk maintenance, repair, management, and optimization tools designed from the ground up specifically for Mac OS X that optimizes drive performance, protects data, can defragment a volume, analyze a volume and repair it if necessary, and includes media surface scanning and long term data integrity checking.

TuneTech for iPod doesn't have quite as many functions and features as everything-including-the-kitchen-sink Drive Genius, but it is likewise a suite of tools and helpers for maintenance and management of your iPod.

TuneTech for iPod optimizes iPod performance, protects data, can defragment your iPod's hard drive and optimize your playlists for less wear-and-tear and better battery life. It also offers advanced management features including media surface scanning and volume testing and repairing capabilities to keep your iPod drive in tip-top condition. Additionally, TuneTech for iPod can erase files and volumes on your iPod securely for added security, and its Backup and Duplicate features allow you to create a backups of your music and data quickly and conveniently. If you ever accidentally delete songs, TuneTech for iPod's Undelete feature can recover them.

TuneTech for iPod's feature modules are selected from an iPod-themed "click wheel" user interface.

TuneTech for iPod Features in summary:

Repair
Analyze, Repair, and Rebuild the iPod's directory information.

Optimize the iPod's playlists for better battery performance and
less wear-and-tear to the iPod media.

Duplicate Create high-speed backup clone to another iPod.

Backup and restore the iPod to and from a disk image.

Undelete music, photo, and calendar files that were accidentally
deleted from the iPod.

Shred - Securely erase the free space or the whole iPod using U.S. DoD
specification algorithms.

Scan - Media scanning to test the iPod for media faults.

Info - Detailed report about your iPod's volume structure information.

To use TuneTech, first you connect your iPod to the Mac in Disk mode using the iTunes Preferences panel.

• Connect the iPod to your computer
• Open iTunes an select the iPod from the source list
• Click the iPod Options button
• Select General form the Music/General tab
• Select "Enable Disk use" and click OK

Now select the task you want to perform by clicking on the appropriate module's icon button or using the buttons on the "click wheel", which has four "click" functions: toggle, forward, backward, and go. You change the function of the center button by hovering the mouse over the four click buttons respectively. To my mind, this motif is unnecessarily and unintuitively complicated, and more straightforward control functions would be more practical if at the cost of some aesthetic coolness.

You can also select a task by double-clicking the icon on the Tool Palette of the UI, which is the mode I prefer.

For some operations such as backing up, cloning the iPod, or salvaging files, you are required to enter/select additional information pertaining to the operation. Other operations, such as shredding, verify and repair, get details, and media scanning don't require additional user input. Once you've entered the parameters for the operation, click go the button to start the task.

Prosoft sensibly recommends that you back up your data regularly before using TuneTech for iPod; so that if anything goes wrong (virus, power blackout, OS error or hardware failure etc…), you will have your data preserved for restoration.

Verify, Repair, and Rebuild

TuneTech's Repair module is a tool for verifying and repairing most kinds of catalog or directory faults. It analyzes the iPod volume for a general overview and can repair/rebuild the volume if any error is detected, and it can also be used to enable and disable Apple journaling.

Repair should be run whenever excessive skips and crashes occur, and it's also not a bad idea to to run this routine periodically to detect minor faults that may appear on the iPod media before they become major faults.

Options for drive repair with TuneTech are:

Verify: Checks the iPod volume for errors. Runs a general scan over the volume to detect any errors.

Repair: Checks for and repairs any error found on the iPod volume. Checks the volume for any errors, and attempts to repair them if they are found.

Rebuild: Rebuilds the iPod media drive table that holds the file information. This will rebuild the portion of the iPod's drive (known as the Catalog B-Tree) that contains information pertaining to the location of all of the files on the volume. It is a separate utility from the Verify and Repair functions and may be used to repair faulty volumes. Since it rebuilds the structure based on the existing content of the rest of the drive, it can potentially fix errors that the Repair tools cannot.

Repair Permissions: Corrects the ownership and permissions according to Apple specifications. Repair Permissions will correctly set the permissions to solve most of problems related to permission issues.

Note that the Repair module does not verify any physical media defects, for which you use the Scan function.
.
Journaling - Apple's journal file system keeps a log of the iPod's hard drive main data activity. In the case of a crash or other system failure, the file system can retrieve lost data by consulting the "journal" log, restoring the system to its previous state instead of having to go through the lengthy process of rebuilding it. It is important to note that enabling Journaling can potentially slow drive access time down by up to 10%, but can be preferable in situations where data stability is more important than drive access speed.

Optimize Your iPod

If you find you're not getting the hours-per-charge from your battery that you used to, optimization may be in order. Factors can affect battery life include the age of the battery and the number of times you recharge it. They have a finite lifespan.

However, adding and deleting files to and from your iPod can cause the data stored on the drive to become fragmented, which makes the drive have to work harder as it scans around the drive media to locate and read the data. The resultant spinning up of the drive, moving of the media or drive heads, etc. take a toll on your battery life. Additionally, if your playlists have songs scattered all over the iPod's drive, the drive must work harder to retrieve songs from different areas of the platter, resulting in consumption of more battery energy.

TuneTech for iPod's Optimize feature can help reduce wear-and-tear and prolong your iPod's battery life, not to mention that of your hard drive. The battery of my daughter's first generation iPod actually outlasted its hard drive, which failed recently after four+ years of pretty intensive use.

In an Optimization, TuneTech will first defragment the data on the hard drive, then rearrange the songs according to the selected playlist, resulting in fewer disk spin-ups and disk head activity, which means better battery life and less hard drive wear-and-tear.

Click the button to proceed. To cancel, click the button.

Before optimizing the iPod drive, TuneTech for iPod will ask to defragment the iPod drive.

The TuneTech Optimization interface is very similar to that of Drive Genius's Defragmentation function, on which it is obviously based.

• The screen gives a graphical rendering of the fragmentation of the volume:
• The yellow portion represents the data has already been defragmented.
• The lavender portion represents file that hasn't been moved yet.
• The black portion represents the free space.

After the iPod volume is defragmented, TuneTech for iPod proceeds to
rearrange the songs according to the playlist.

Cloning your iPod

The TuneTech Duplicate function copies all the information from one iPod to another iPod.

Rather than backing up by copying file-by-file, TuneTech for iPod utilizes a method called device copy so all your songs and data from the original iPod are kept. Device copy is also faster than the traditional file-by-file backup. After the duplication process, TuneTech will apply a proprietary resizing technology to expand the volume size to the maximum, so no space is wasted.

The information on the target iPod will be replaced with the information from the source iPod. If you want to backup or archive to a file instead, use the Backup feature.

Backing Up Your iPod

TuneTech for iPod's Backup function archives all the information from one iPod to an image file on your Mac, and restores all the information back to the iPod when needed. As with the Duplicate function TuneTech's Backup module uses the device copy routine.

Shredding your iPod

TuneTech's Shred function is used for securely erasing the contents of the iPod's media, which may be useful for a variety of reasons such as:
• To avoid identity theft.
• Stop intellectual property theft.
• Permanently get rid of your data files so no one can recover it. For example, an iPod with personal photos.
• Permanently remove any software since software licenses usually apply to only one iPod.
• Permanently erase all music files to avoid piracy.

TuneTech for iPod also allows you to permanently erase the free space on your iPod volume in a secure fashion making it impossible for anyone to retrieve old music and photo files you have previously deleted, which is achieved by first filling up your volume with temporary files, then writing a secure pattern over the files.

Scanning the Media

TuneTech for iPod's Scan function is designed to verify that every sector (block which can contain information) on your iPod's drive can be read correctly. You should run this test if you notice abnormal sounds emitting from the iPod, or when some of the songs do not play properly.

TuneTech Scan tests all of your iPod drive's space. If there are any errors, TuneTech reports them to you live as it scans the media. The time required for a Scan test is dependent on the iPod drive's capacity and rotational speed. If TuneTech reports any bad blocks, you may need to reformat the drive with Drive Utility that comes with Mac OS.

Details of your iPod

To get Info on your iPod:
1) Launch TuneTech for iPod by double clicking on it.
2) Select the iPod you want to get details.
3) Click the button on the top panel.
4) The Details window will open, displaying info of the volume such as name, serial number, hard disk firmware revision and information that expert users will find useful.

Salvaging Lost Tunes

TuneTech for iPod's Undelete is for recovering deleted files from your iPod. It can recover music and picture files deleted intentionally or accidentally, and will recover any M4A, MP3, M4P, WAV, AIFF, JPEG, TIFF, PNG, BMPS, TIFF, DV, WMV, MPEG, HTML, and Calendar files, including restoration of:
• Files accidentally deleted
• Files that have become unreadable due to media faults
• Files that were on an iPod before it was initialized/formatted.

If you lose any music or photo files that you want back, and if the deleted files have not been written over, TuneTech will recover them, although it can't recover deleted files that have subsequently been written over by copying more data onto the iPod. However, due to the way data are distributed when being copied to an iPod, there is a chance of recovering the deleted file even if you have copied more data onto your iPod since the loss.

System requirements:
Mac OS 10.3.x and up
Tune Tech will only work with Macintosh formatted iPods.

TuneTech for iPod sells for $59.00, and cancan be downloaded in a Lite version or the Trial version, which has part of the feature set disabled.

The following features are disabled in the trial version:
• Restore
• Undelete
• Recovery
• Duplicate
• Optimize
• Repair and Rebuild

TuneTech for iPod is also available on CD from:
http://www.prosofteng.com

For more information, visit:
http://www.prosofteng.com/products/tunetech.php


Charles W. Moore

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