The Thrilling New AirTag 2! (…and not much else)

Coming up, the surprise launch of the new AirTag and our review, how to get custom music in your Apple music library and a deep dive into the mysterious and murky past of Lewis Wallace. Welcome to the new Cult of Mac podcast. I'm your host, Leander Caney. Joining me today, we have D. Griffin Jones coming in from snowy Ohio. Hey, Griffin. Good evening. I hate to start the show off on bad news, but sadly, the Cult of Mac Apple Financial Earnings Call live stream-a-thon, which normally begins right after the show, is sadly canceled. The unicyclists I hired came down with scarlet fever, and it just wouldn't be a Cult of Mac Apple Financial Earnings Call live stream-a-thon without live unicycling, so sorry to everybody. Absolutely not. Oh dear, that's awful. That's tragic news. Lewis, what's going on? Hello, Lewis. Hey, at least I'm not, you know, neck deep in snow like Griffin is if he walks outside of his house Yeah, right, it's absolutely beautiful here And we also have a special guest today, Ed Hardy coming in from Georgia, hey Ed Hi guys, nice to join the cast for once Yeah, welcome, whereabouts in Georgia are you, Ed? I'm outside of Atlanta Okay, cool, yeah, beautiful city, lovely place I thought you were going to ask for a street address so people could mail in things not going to dox myself dox it on the podcast alright let's thank our sponsor which is the Cult of Mac Today and Weekender Newsletters thanks very much for sponsoring this week's podcast Cult of Mac Today and Weekender Newsletters our newsletters are sent every day around noon and early Saturday morning you can sign up for both or just the weekly digest the weekend is an easy to read digest of the week's top stories how to's and reviews it's a great weekend read and Cult of Mac today is a rundown of the top news of the day plus reviews and how-tos with commentary by yours truly. Now, for a daily newsletter, our numbers are off the charts. We enjoy a daily 75% open rate, 75%, which is mad for a free daily email newsletter. Not even subscription newsletters, which people pay good money for, see numbers like that. It shows that people really like what they read, and ours are free. Sign up at newsletters.cultofmac.com today, and I hate to say it, but it's the best way to get Cult of Mac. Apple News is also a really great way to read Cult of Mac. I'll say that as well. Add us as a favorite in Apple News. That's true. Yep, that's good. And on Google News, too. That's not a bad way to read it. Oh, yeah. So, all right. Five years. Hundreds, maybe thousands of Apple engineers and designers have been laboring over the AirTag 2. Tim Apple commanded them to come up with an update worthy of the ubiquitous item finder, which has slowly become a sleeper hit. Thousands of tests and millions of prototypes later, Apple has finally unveiled the AirTag 2, which, at first glance, is exactly the same as the old one. Lewis, what do you think? Why don't you tell us about the new AirTag 2? Yeah, it does look a lot like a very familiar item. Launched this week was the first thing Monday morning, right? Very exciting way to start the week. looks the same except for slight slight uh typography change right things are in all caps crazy but that's not what's important what's important is it's got a better ultra wideband chip that enhances the precision finding and uh this is the same one's in the iphone 17 iphone air blah, blah, blah, these other things, Apple Watch Series 11. And the other thing is, it's got an upgraded Bluetooth chip, so that it works better, can reach, you can find it at longer distances. And this is going to be very helpful for a lot of people. A louder, a louder speaker. So now, when you're, you know, you're pressing your phone, you say, make a sound, and it does, and you can just barely hear it. Now you're going to be able to hear it better. I haven't actually heard one of these yet, but I think I know someone who did because he tested. Other than that, same design. It's weird, like, Mentos circle oval thing. Still no way to attach it to anything. You still have to buy a keychain or some other type of holder, you know. And, of course, Apple's cost even more than the AirTag itself. But there's plenty of third-party options. I mean, I can't wait to get my hands on this, although I already have, I don't know, 20 AirTags. They're on everything. So I'm actually excited about the better precision finding because that's the one area where I find it to be, yeah, sometimes it's great, sometimes it's not so great. Sometimes it takes a little while to lock in. So I'm really curious to hear what Ed has to say about exactly how much better that aspect of this thing is. Just like with the old one, the precision finding uses haptic visual and audio feedback to guide you to your lost items. But the AirTag 2, which is actually technically, I believe, called AirTag, in parentheses, second generation, Apple says it can do precision finding from up to 50% farther away than the original one, which is awesome. As I mentioned, Bluetooth chips better. And here's another thing. Before, precision finding for an AirTag only worked with iPhone. Now you can use your, well, certain Apple Watches. Apple Watch Series 9 or later, and Apple Watch Ultra 2 or later. So you get the little precision finding thing on that watch face and go right to where you need to go. I mentioned it's louder. Apple says it's 50% louder than the original AirTag. and uh apple comes up with this number enabling users to hear the tracker up to two times farther than before i i don't i don't know how in the world they would uh measure that but apparently they did uh let's see same size as the original from 2021 same price 29 for a single air tag 99 for a four pack can't wait for the sales to start and uh the one good i don't know if you guys have ever done this, but the one good thing about paying full price and buying it from Apple is that you can get free personalized engraving. And it's kind of cool, especially if you get one of the keychain things that doesn't cover it up completely. You can see the AirTag on there. That's cool. Oh my God, where did this come from? Mind-blowing facts about AirTag? Where did this come from, Griffin? I put it in last night. Tell us about it, Leander. Mind-blowing facts about AirTag. Well, I did some research. I was kind of curious. You know, like they launched five years ago and I was, you know, I wonder how many they sold. So I tried to do some Googling around and no one actually has really come up with a good estimate. There's the best estimate that I saw was from the first two years, which they sold. I forget now. I think it was, I can't remember, 50 million or something like that. Anyway, I found another estimate and I'm not really sure if it's really, you know, good. It came from some analysts that I never heard of, but 330, 340 million sold to date was the estimate. And, you know, that's quite a lot. One thing you do know, though, is that there's 1.65 billion devices in the Find My network. I think that's a much more accurate estimate about the numbers there. And, of course, it spans the whole globe. You know, they say quite rightly that you can find air testing can be found in any airport, you know, worldwide. And it's also good for the carousel with the new precision finding. So, you know, when your bag comes out and you have no idea which one it is, AirTag, you know, will help you there. It's actually, you know, I've forgotten this. It has really good end-to-end encryption. And no one, not even Apple, knows the location or the identity of an AirTag that's found. And neither do the finders. It's really well done. It's, you know, people put it on kids and pets to track them. and I was reading about a dog that got rescued from the ocean. It got swept down in a riptide. The ocean? Yeah. It got swept to another beach, and they found it thanks to its air tag, and they blocked it from the sea. I think the design is pure genius. I don't know why people are complaining, but there's no keychain. I mean, because it's round, it's so adaptable. You can put it into all kinds of places and all kinds of devices. I mean, if it had any kind of attachment on it, I think it might compromise that. It's been used by high-end car thieves to track down luxury automobiles for stealing later. And also, like, air tag poo videos were for a while a thing on the videos. They became a popular craze on viral video. People would flush an air tag down the toilet and see, watch it going down the pipes to the local water treatment plant. and here's an interesting one as well i also found out that they they uh some a security researcher in germany used it to uh out a secret german spy agency she suspected that this um uh some company was a front for the german uh spy spies and so she sent them an air tag in the mail and then watched as it got taken to the the official spy headquarters so she cleverly figured out that this this this comp this uh this fake company was in fact a front for the germans supply agency. I think a lot of people like complain about the design at least because there are spots on the air tag that are empty space and you can like take a really tiny drill bit and drill a hole through the middle. And it's like, if you can do that on like the final engineered product, how hard would it be for Apple to just, you know, rearrange the internals a little bit to make like a proper hole in the air tag, just so you can directly tie it onto a key, tie like a little loop into it and put that onto a keychain instead of do the giant you know air tag holder thing that wraps around the entire air tag itself like if it's possible already to drill a tiny hole through it like if that were an actual supported part of its design then it could be better and easier i'm guessing they do it because it's going to compromise its um water uh resistance you know because if you if you have a if you have a hole there then there's an extra part that's got to be sealed up and i'll bet it's a weak point that would that would make it less waterproof less dustproof i mean it's got an ip67 rating right now i think uh and i forget what that means 30 minutes underwater or something like that um but i i was thinking about the same thing too and i'll bet it's because it would compromise its um you know water and dust resistance i i don't know i think the the holes that people etch in them i think they're just entirely through the plastic and so maybe apple could like redesign the internals to like leave a little smaller space on the top or at least a slightly larger space on the top so that the you know the actual plastic mold of the piece could just have like a hole built in there isn't much room around the edge of that battery though and uh i would think drilling a hole would really like not only would it be a small hole but i bet you there wouldn't be much plastic around the outer edge of it and the danger would be that the thing would snap off. That is a risk, yeah. Yeah, I think they've got about a small, they've made it as small as they possibly can, I think, by packing in. The battery is the one big thing that they can't, at least a replaceable battery, mess with. And then on top of that, the speaker and then the radios. There's not a lot of room there. I'm sure if Steve Jobs dropped it into an aquarium, you're not going to be seeing many bubbles coming up. I'll bet you that they sell a lot of the keychains and those sorts of things, too, even though they're probably not the best choice. I bet they sell a lot of them. But the good news is you can still get a fine-woven one. Fine-woven, it lives. And how much did that keyholder cost? It was like $46 or something? $36 or something. Yeah, right. AirTag itself is $29. Crappy little fine-woven thing is $35. Well, fine-woven, I can tell you, it lasts forever. Very durable. You mean tech woven? You're talking about tech woven. Tech woven. Oh, I think it's fine. This is fine woven. Oh, no. So it's going to fall to pieces and look all like crap about three days after you get it? I don't know. Well, we actually put it to the test. We actually got a hold of a new one. And our good friend Ed Hardy is here today to talk about it because Ed really tested it out. What did you think of it, Ed? I am pleased it is a genuine improvement over the original in multiple ways and pretty much in every way that Apple promised. I'm a big fan of doing real-world testing. So I just started out by putting this little thing on one end of my house and going to the other end of my house and seeing if I could get a connection to it. And I sure could. and I put the original generation AirTag next to it, and I could get to the point where I could no longer do the precision finding connection to the original, and I'm still getting a strong connection to the AirTag 2. And by precision finding, I mean that's the part where you can connect it to a, you can connect to it on your iPhone, and it'll point a little arrow right at the device so you can walk straight to it, like you see in there. And it is tremendously convenient. It really is what sets the AirTag apart. I have used a whole bunch of other rivals, and they all have advantages and disadvantages, but I've never found one that can do precision find. Yeah, I think that's a big differentiator, isn't it? I mean, and it's hugely convenient. I've always had great luck with it. I find it kind of remarkable, you know. and the sound I've you know I don't okay it's fine when if it's close but for leading it right to the you know your lost keys or whatever when they're in someone's pocket hanging up in a jacket on the back of a chair somewhere and you know it takes me right to it I've always had great love but it sounds like you didn't Lewis previous ones anyway I mean it eventually works I mean I I found my car keys that somebody, you know, accidentally took from a bar one time, found them the next morning in their house, which was freaky. But I noticed, it was awesome. I mean, got it right back, beeped it. They walked out, brought my coat out very sheepishly. But I mean, like in my house, you know, we have one on our cat because, you know, where's the cat? We don't know. Did he get outside is he stuck in the closet where is he and um you know so you're pretty sure that he's within range right and you see that like connected the the like circle of dots there it says it says something like far like if you see on the screen if it's far away and then you can kind of it says signal is weak and it you know you move around try and find it you you know you start to you finally finally it connects and the precision finding's great but it does for me anyway with in my house with my cat and my phone sometimes takes a little while to kind of connect. Does a new one connect faster, Ed? It connects farther. It's not necessarily faster. But it does that well. I mean, you'll be less – there's a whole lot less going for far and giving you a general connection and giving you go straight to specifics instead what Apple claiming Ed for the distance now for the new one It does not make a claim Because it's kind of meaningless. Like, you can, it's great, you know, the distance between, if it's on your cat and he's in your neighbor's yard, it's going to be completely different from the distance between you're in your kitchen and it's in the keys in your closet, in the pocket of your pants in your closet. I mean, one of them is 20 feet and the other one is 200 feet. And it depends on the construction of your house, I'm sure. Yes. Brick or not brick, it will affect it tremendously. It looks like in your testing, in your review, it looks like you said that the Find My app on my iPhone 17 can point right to the second generation AirTag from almost 50 feet away through walls and a closed door. And it's a moderately, you know, a few rooms over, certainly. I tested it in a couple of houses, and that's about as far away as I could get realistically inside of my house and inside of my friend's house. It's about 50 feet away. That's pretty good. 50 feet, that's pretty good. And how about the speakers? Why don't you tell us a little bit about that? The new speaker is louder, and it's also more shrill, so it's a little easier to hear. I'm glad that's not the only change in the new one. I would not be telling people, you need to run out to get a new AirTag too, so it can be more shrill. Another benefit for the new speaker is apparently the teardown for it finds that it's harder to remove the speaker, so it makes it harder for people to use it for stalking. That was one of the big downsides of this thing, right? I remember not too long after it came out, the original one, it was like, oh my God, people are using it to track people and just, you know, snipping out the speakers or whatever, so that people can't find them on them. That's pretty nefarious. So now it's harder. That's awesome. More importantly, I think it supposedly goes from an F note to a G. That's very important. So by the time that they have the AirTag 8, they'll have a full octave and you can play music. You also read in your review that you checked with a sound meter and it went from 66 decibels to 87. So that's quite a bit louder. It's quite a bit louder. Yeah, 87 is like threshold of, that's pretty close to like you're going to get a warning from your AirPods. I can tell you, holding this thing in my hand and setting it off, that's pretty piercing. Like if you use it all the time to find a lost cat, it'll have an extra benefit of, it'll annoy the crap out of the cat. I have in fact, you know, I've been testing the thing with it on the cat and I set it off and made the cat jump. I guess we should tell people Apple always says they've maintained this from the first one this is not for tracking pets or people I think they specifically said that in the press release not for pets or people 87 decibels right near a cat's ear that might be a little much but I'll use it sparingly there's no volume control is there? no I saw lots of stories about people tracking their kids. You know, they go to Disneyland and then they stick one in the kid or, you know, making sure they get to school or after school activities. And you can actually buy a whole bunch of different accessories too on Amazon. Ankle bracelets. Yeah. For the kid. I think it gets a little bit – you know, I'm sure there's a mixed – whether it's good for tracking people or not. I mean, you're probably far better off with an Apple Watch on a kid, but that's going to be difficult to strap to your pet. And the tracking thing too, you know, they did a pretty good job, I thought, Apple of doing that because if it, you know, when you tell us about it, Ed. My sister, real world, tried to use AirTags to her husband has her, his parents are quite elderly and we're still insisting on driving. so they put an air tag on their car keys so that if the worst came to worst, they would still be able to find their parents. And it's just not great for that. The system works fine on the assumption that what you're tracking is going to stand still because some other iPhone has to come near them to set the alarm off. And if it doesn't, the alarm doesn't go off, which is fine. if your backpack is sitting in a bus station, somebody in the window is going to walk by and alert you, in a time window is going to walk by and alert you that this is where your bag is. But if your bag is walking, like say your grandparents would, then it's not much help. Yeah, and like you said, if they're not passing by anybody who's in the network, they can go undetected for a long time. Yes. I think the idea that somebody can track you with an AirTag, Yes. Can they track you really well? Not really. I mean, they can know you're at the office. They're not going to know that you're, you know, exactly where you are in the park. Right. It's not bad for a place like Disneyland or somewhere where there's a lot of phones, airports or shopping malls, places where there's a lot of people around with, you know, with iPhones and other, you know, devices that can track it. Yes. But also I think the AirTag gets unfairly blamed as being like the, you know, the thing people use to track people just because it's Apple's version of it. And it's the most famous, like among every GPS tracking device, AirTag is probably the only one that most people could name if they could name it at all. Whereas it's really not the best for stalking people. If you actually want to stalk somebody, you know, you're not very well off getting an AirTag. There's a million ones on Amazon that have no privacy protections whatsoever that would be better suited for that purpose. Oh, yeah, you can get one that's a GPS and has cellular phone connectivity built into it. And that'll track that person 24-7. You know exactly where they are. I tested one built into a dog collar, and it worked great. But it's $600, not $29. Yeah. And airtags aren't GPS. They don't have GPS just to be sort of, you know, technical about it. Yes. Yeah, cool. So what do you think overall, Ed? You know, is it worth the upgrade? Yes and no. If you're frequently losing things, absolutely. But I don't know that you need to pitch out your old one to get the new one. Because actually my favorite feature works great on both of them, which is I don't often lose things, even the cat, but I do leave things behind. And that's actually the function that I use 80% of the time, which is I've got- The famous casserole cover. The famous casserole cover. You know, you go to a, I slip one in my casserole dish and I take it, and when I leave my friend's neighborhood, he will go off and say, dude, you've left the casserole dish behind again. You use it to track a casserole dish. Sure. Because the casserole dish isn't going missing, but I don't want to get home. And I was like, oh, damn, and I've left the casserole dish, blah, blah, blah, behind again. And then I got to go to the hassle of going and getting it back. That's actually a really great idea. Because I brought a dish to somebody's house over Thanksgiving, and I left one of my favorite spatulas there. And then I knew I was going to see them again at Christmas. And, you know, luckily they're only a month apart. But for that month, I didn't have my favorite spatula. I should have taped an air tag to it before I left. The weird thing is that you have multiple favorite spatulas. You know, I'm a bit of a minimalist. I, you know, each of the things in utensils in my kitchen serves a purpose. They're all like, you know, the matching like KitchenAid set. And, you know, they're all like the Aqua Sky color. And so like when one of them goes missing, then it's like, well, I don't have a slotted spatula. I have other spatulas that serve other purposes, but not that one. You better air tag them all, Griffin. Apparently I do, yeah. I think you should start a website called Cult of Spatulas. It would be a very short website because I would only have five posts and that would be all my spatulas. But you would cover, yeah, there would definitely be the different deep dive on it. I put air tags in everything. I have one in my base case. I have one in my darts bag. I put one in my truck, just in case somebody steals it or I forget where it's parked. And what you were saying about finding stuff in an airport, one of the great things about having an AirTag in your luggage is, like if you're doing a connecting flight or something, you can see, or when you land or you're going, you can see, as soon as you turn your phone on, you can see whether or not your AirTag or your luggage has made it with you. or whether it's still back in San Francisco or wherever you left from, which is, you know, I mean, it's minor, but it's peace of mind. And, you know, like there was one time my wife, Suzanne, was at the airport. I guess we were both there. And, like, the luggage didn't come out forever, like 45 minutes or an hour because there was some kind of, like, strike or something, you know. So you could look and see that the luggage was in the building. It's just nobody would bring it up. It was just sitting there for literally an hour. But way better to know that it's there and you don't just head home and then have to come back to the airport. Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But it definitely infuriated you, didn't it, just to see us sitting there waiting. Yeah, it was very irritating. People were cursing the baggage handlers union. all right well ed is there anything more to add you know to the review anything that we talk about i i mean i do like the device and i think that people dismiss it uh it's like i don't need that because i never lose my stuff but other people will lose your stuff for you um you know your your car keys go missing you know and it's not your fault but they they go they go wandering around so consider putting air tags on your stuff because in many cases if something goes missing it's really bad um it can be uh and uh an air an air tag can be peace of mind think of it this way if you never need it there then you've uh you've come out ahead you haven't lost your stuff yeah and i mean for the last several years you can get a four pack of these things for like 65 bucks often on sale. So that's what I load up on them. So I can't wait till the four packs of the new ones go on sale. Although I know what you mean. Like, why would I retire an AirTag? Because, I mean, they work fine. It's just these other ones work better. Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is how Apple rolls, isn't it? I mean, you know, that sort of steady incremental improvement. I don't think they're necessarily expecting everyone to go out and replace their old AirTags with these new ones just to get the extra 30 decibels. but if you're going to be buying you know from now on down the line whenever you buy an air tag it's it's much better it's much better than you know this is also an excuse to just air tag more things in your life like they just come out with new ones okay buy it buy another four pack and i've got four new things that'll you know be louder and easier to find yeah all your spatulas i know some people who actually double up air tags in their luggage they have one on the outside so that it's visible and it's easier to find but then and the off chance that that one gets stolen or you know cut off by a thief you have another air tag inside the bag that they don't know about yeah you know that's a good idea the only one that i've ever lost uh was on a a piece of luggage it was uh you know attached to the outside and it came off somewhere and my luggage arrived be all beat to hell but without the air tag and the thing was you know in the middle of an airport in italy It's like, okay, well, I'm in the United States. I sent an email. Never heard back from him, of course. Never got it back. It was a nice AirTag holder, too, like a nice leather one. That was before they started working with airlines. Now they have some kind of situation with the airlines, some kind of – and I don't know if it's every single airline in the world, but you can now send – I think it's 30 airlines. Only 30? Anyway, you can send the information to the airline so that they can find it, which is cool. Yeah, very cool. Very cool. All right, let's let Ed go. Thanks so much for your review, Ed. And thanks for letting me do a guest appearance. Thank you. Now get the hell back to work. Somebody right here has got to work. Jeez. Eventually. See you. All right. Well, let's talk about the teardown, because there were some interesting things that they found out when it was a little bit torn down. Major internal changes, apparently. As we discussed before, talking about bad actors tampering with it to remove the speaker so that it wouldn't give a warning if you're tracking your ex. So with the second generation AirTag, Apple redesigned the internal to make it more difficult. And this is a teardown from the tracking tag by YouTuber Joseph Taylor highlighted this. while AirTag 2's outer design and dimensions remain unchanged it features a notably thinner PCB which is, what's a PCB? that's the control board, right? I can't remember what it says something board okay right printed circuit board apparently to avoid tampering it's used more glue to secure the internal speaker magnet into place. It's still removable, but it takes a lot more effort than before. Apple loves the glue. Unfortunately, he tried this out, and it remains fully functional even after you remove the speaker. Other minor changes include slightly angled battery contacts and a QR code inside the battery compartment. Huh. I wonder what that's for. I mean, because the setup is so easy. All you do is pull out the little thing that keeps the battery turned off, and it just instantly pops up on your phone. So what is the QR code for? Maybe that's so that an Apple employee can scan it and ID which one it is somehow. I wonder if it helps with people who find one or something somehow. Maybe, maybe. You know, it sometimes alerts to any phones that are following it. and this works with Androids too so any device found nearby it'll ping so even if you're trying to track an ex or your spouse or a kid or something like that and if they have a phone it'll try to ping their phone but if they don't have a phone on them it'll ping any other phone that it finds near them which I think is actually a pretty good I mean you know the reports of the tracking and the stalking have fallen off a cliff haven they I mean I haven heard one about one recently And it hasn't been highlighted by security. Like Griffin said, there are plenty of other trackers that are much easier to use for these kind of purposes. And I haven't seen any security researchers calling them out. I mean, it's been five years out now. And, you know, there was a lot of initial press about this and worries. And I'm sure there have been some cases. But, you know, overall, I don't think there have been any reports recently, especially from security researchers, saying that this is an ongoing problem that needs to be addressed. Yeah. And, of course, you know, the tracking thing, too, makes it – unfortunately, it makes it useless for tracking stolen items because, you know, the thief or the thieves get a notification. you know like i've got them on my bike someone nicks my bike um even if i've hidden it in a clever place somewhere inside the frame whoever's nicked it is going to get a notification that there's an air tag following them which will alert them to you know to go and find the air tag on the bike somewhere and remove it now when you mark a item as missing does that change does it still it must it must not change because people would just if they're going to track somebody who just put it on their market is missing uh i haven't unfortunately it doesn't i haven't noticed those uh i haven't noticed those what does it say it always says like an unknown air tag is traveling with you right that's what it pops up on your phone you're like oh that's interesting but i gotta say i have not i've not gotten those all that consistently there have been times where i've gone on like a road trip with a friend who has like the new you know airpods pro that have the like AirPods Pro 2 or 3 have the you know the built-in Find My system as well and you know by the time we get to Philadelphia it's like oh there are AirPods traveling with you and everybody gets that notification it's like oh okay that's you know John's AirPods. I just I've noticed that it doesn't always happen I mean even I mean I'm sure once you like say oh I know that that's my wife's wallet that's traveling with me I'm sure it's only going to show you that one time but i mean like i've gone on trips with other people who have air tags on their keychains or whatever and and never never gotten one of those alerts so i'm not 100 sure how fantastic that works but i i you know when i've got them i thought wow this is really pretty good it seemed to work fine because i haven't got one recently but then again i haven't been anywhere that'll do it well that air tag teardown i think was really kind of underwhelming to be honest it didn't really say very much more glue and an angled battery yeah and yeah and and some mystery qr code that no one knows what it does the mystery code all right let's move on to apple apple music and you know this is uh this is one of the we're going to talk about one of the big differentiating factors one of the big things that makes Apple music better than Spotify. And, you know, I did this myself back in the day. You know, I don't know if you remember LimeWire and Audio Galaxy, these piracy apps. The Audio Galaxy was amazing. It was just so easy to snag gigabytes and gigabytes of music. And, of course, actually most of this was stuff I'd already owned. I was mostly interested in getting digital versions of stuff I had on LPs or CDs. and it was much easier than ripping a CD. But anyway, I ended up with about 30 gigs worth of dodgy music. None of it was really labeled very well. The metadata was terrible. The artwork was missing. But it's really, if you have a bunch of this stuff and if you have custom recordings of concerts, you know, dead shows or, you know, obscure, what's it called? Something Pony Club. Drupal's Pony Club is my favorite band. from the midwest if they're not if they're not if you if you you know if you can't find their stuff on the streaming services it's it's super easy to add them to to uh to your apple music um to your apple music library and griffin's going to show us how to do that right griffin yeah and you know there are a lot of legitimate places where you can find music like this like archive.org actually has like a lot of uh live albums and stuff and concerts and things like uh you know I was looking up this Radiohead concert that I went to years and years ago. And there was at the Blossom Music Center up north over by Akron. And, you know, this is a concert I went to a long time ago, but I was Googling about it to find out some details about it. Cause I wasn't that big into Radiohead at the time that I saw them, but then I found somebody uploaded it to archive.org, like the whole track listing. And so I, I of course downloaded it. It's in my downloads folder and they have it separated out into like all of the different mp3 files super collider is a great great song i'd love to hear that live oh yeah well i can you can you can you can you know i'll put a link in the show notes to this to this album where you can download it um they already have it as the mp3s but you know the brilliance of apple music is that it is incredibly simple to add this custom music to your library because it's you know an ancient app that dates back to itunes you just select all the mp3s in the finder and just you know drag them in and for some reason it didn't work it only selected one but I'll select them all drag them in and it keeps only selecting one so I'm going to try again okay there might be a problem with my computer here well if that doesn't work there's a different way you can also go to the menu bar and hit file import and then you can you can select them all here from from that interface as well i think you do this on a pc and a mac there's a the new music app on the um for windows that i actually don't know i'm not positive it supports this feature because it wasn't out when i was still using windows but you can still download itunes for windows as well if you want that bundle of fun but you know you import all your music and then it's super easy to customize it as well you know another advantage of um apple music over spotify is you can edit the metadata So I've added this album in and it shows up as unknown album, unknown artist, and all the song titles are kind of a jumbled mess that's like mostly the file name. But you can just right click on the album, click get info, and I can just type in the artist, Radiohead, album. I'll give it a custom name, Radiohead Live, Blossom Music Center. and type in the year and you can even specify the genre and even the number of tracks overall and you can add custom artwork as well one of my favorite features of Apple Music. So I was looking to see if I had any pictures from this event and I found this photo here that's incredibly grainy. I took it with my presumably iPhone 4 at the time. you can't really see anything but you know what it kind of looks like it would be like a a weird sort of like album cover in that sort of way because it's so lo-fi so you know you just drag that in and suddenly it's the it's the album artwork and it'll even show up and you know if you have an apple music subscription it'll all of these changes will automatically just sync to your phone um yeah that's the best thing that's the best thing isn't it that automatic syncing across all devices you know and then you can go back and even you know change that clean up the the title for all these songs uh if you want you know archive.org has the the track listing so i can say okay but this one is just the uh intro and it's track one then you go and this one is bloom and it's track two i'm having a flashback i used to i used to do this kind of crap with stuff from Napster. There are albums that I've added to my music library that I've made my own album artwork for because I didn't like the album artwork that it came with it. And that's not something you can do on Spotify. It's only Apple Music. And it's also not something you can do on an iPad. Again, only a Mac or a PC running Apple Music or iTunes. But there you go. Quick little nickel tour. And if, you know, we have an older audience, maybe this isn't new to them, but, you know, a reminder, you know, clean up your music library. Make it beautiful. Make it fun. You know what I hate about this, though? What? So I have to do this all the time. Those aren't accordions getting ready for a gig. So I make a set list in Apple Music. And sometimes there are demos, right? Demo recordings. It's never been released. I've got a file on my hard drive. I make a set list, and then I make the mistake of sharing it with somebody. and for whatever reason, I always find it very confusing. Like a message says something like, oh, if you do this, it'll be, you know, if you share it, it will be deleted from your library or whatever. And I'm constantly battling it. And finally I realized I just can't share a thing like that. I think I would have to give each person, send them that file. I could blip them that song file. And they have to have it in their library. and somehow match it up. I don't know. I've never figured out a way to do it. And I find it completely infuriating, like once a year when I have to make a set list to practice with. That is the downside. You can't do, so you can't do shared albums. You also can't do, they also don't show up in your Apple Music replay if you listen to a lot of custom albums because it doesn't match them to Apple Music. Apple Music does have a feature called like iTunes Match where it'll try and match them up if it's something that it knows about like maybe you ripped your beatles cd and so it's like oh yeah you know that's the beatles we know what that song is it'll match it up and then you'll get the live lyrics and then you'll get the it'll show up in your apple music replay sometimes but uh you know if it's a concert that apple music doesn't know about it doesn't show up in your apple music replay so i've exclusively been listening to like this uh orchestral concert version of like this particular video game soundtrack uh for pretty much on repeat of the last month and ode to spatulas yeah i i don't even know what my apple music replay is going to be for january it certainly won't be this weird concert that it doesn't know about so who knows uh my my listening hours are going to be way underreported but that that's another downside but sometimes the juice is worth the squeeze it's worth the effort I remember trying to use some of those third-party TuneSweeper, I think it was called, and some of the other apps that were supposed to automatically clean up your iTunes library. It would recognize the tracks and then go out to Music Match, and then it would also find artwork, but it never worked. And in fact, actually what it did, I think a few times it completely mislabeled a bunch of stuff, so that caused a huge headache. you know that uh then i had to face a prospect of going back and manually fixing all these tracks that are mislabeled so i gave up on those but i haven't tried that for years so i don't know whether they've improved or not i can only hope they have i know itunes match used to not be very good but it's i think they've they've cleaned it up in in the last few years i haven't had the big problems i mean when it first launched there was the the big kerfuffle over you know it was like switching out the explicit versions of songs with the non-explicit versions and it was like censoring them and people were getting mad about that but um i think it's improved over the last few years and since it transitioned into apple music it's still a great service what's it like on spotify it's it's horrible i think i came across an article that says that it's technically possible but it is a massive pain in the ass in part because spotify doesn't have a real mac app it's basically just a wrapper around their you know web app and so you have to like point it to a particular folder and music that you add there will add you know add into spotify but i don't that you can change the metadata for it. It's clunky and it's kind of annoying. Well, there you go. That's a good reason. You know, a huge advantage coming from old Apple, a creaky old code from iTunes. Good reason why it still works better. And the number one reason why I don't consider the iPad a real computer because you can't add your own music to the iPad. Thank God Ed isn't on the show right now. His head would explode. We've got a couple of good questions from listeners this week. actually one is a comment and this is on some networking site called Macedon. Have you ever heard of that, Louis? It rings a bell. Listener Ian Williamson wrote me to say Leander was asking about security controls when HomePod answers personal requests. You get a notification on your phone every time it answers one. And he included a screenshot that shows a notification on his lock screen as he's listening to our podcast. So, you know, he gets plus five points there. And it says, kitchen HomePod, Siri responded to a personal request for calendar. And that's maybe like the most annoying way Apple could have solved that problem. Like, oh, yeah, we'll just send you a notification. Anytime somebody asks your HomePod a question asking about your life. Like, first of all, it doesn't stop them from getting answers about your personal calendar, but also just inundates you with notifications. so does it does it if you ask about your calendar does it is it like a feedback loop i mean i gotta say i've never ever asked my home pod a question and had a like a good answer and i never even thought to ask it something like that i mean so i don't know but it supposedly it can recognize your voice right so if you ask hey what's on my calendar today surely it doesn't pop up a a thing saying, Lewis, somebody just asked about your calendar. I mean, if it doesn't know who's asking, then I don't see how it would know not to send you a notification. I'm going to ask about Suzanne's calendar later today. Yeah, me too. I'm going to test it out too. I'm now really curious about how this thing works. Like you, I've never ever actually ever asked a question about my calendar. I think my wife has ever asked me about my calendar. Yeah, why would you ask the HomePod when you can just ask your wife? She probably knows better than your iPod. Exactly. Yeah. That's exactly how it works. Precisely. I know. What's on my calendar today? I also have another bit of follow-up. This one from listener and mother to me, my mom, texted me after last week's show and said, in reference to the Apple AI pin, the thought of anything, even my own private personal device, hearing and recording me muttering out loud all day is horrific. And she says, literally the only useful thing I can think of would be telling it to play back all of my farts at the end of the day. Sheesh. A new generation of fart app. Fart compendium. Your own. I mean, it's your own. Yeah. Imagine Apple developing, talking about that during a keynote. Wow You know what though I like the idea I never thought about this get one of these things pin it on my wife And then at the end of the day I could say hey look listen to yourself muttering to yourself She does it all the time She sits there and she talks to herself And then I say what And she oh no I talking to myself And then you know the next time when she muttering to herself then she like why didn you answer me I like because you muttering to yourself again I love this. You can have evidence. That's the fastest possible way to make your wife move out of the house from you and never speak to you again. Are you sure it wouldn't make her just mutter a little less? No. All right. And then we got some other feedback. Who's this? What's the other one? Brad Thornborough also DMV on Lasted On and says, what the new podcast needs is a theme by those darn accordions. So, Lewis, tell us about that. I heartily agree. And there's several albums available. You can pick whatever one you like and use it for the podcast. I recommend Them Hippies Was Right. That's the most upbeat one. They're on Apple Music as well, so you don't have to rip them and add them to your library of your own, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. All of our albums are on, although maybe the first one's not. I can't remember. That was released on a very independent label. Yeah, man, I've been playing in this band. I was thinking about this this morning. I've been playing in this band for over 35 years. Longer than you've been breathing, Griffin. I've been playing bass in those darn accordions. If you've never heard about the band, this band started out in San Francisco in 1989. I wasn't in it then. But it started out in 1989 as just a group of crazy accordion players. They would run into bars in North Beach playing Lady of Spain. And basically, either everybody would be totally into it and buy them shots, or they'd get bounced immediately. It ended up, there was a show at a place called, I think it was at the Paradise Lounge. I don't even know if that place still was. Yeah, I went there. Well, I mean, the very first gig was at Paradise Lounge. And the woman who was in the band at the time named Big Lou, she basically just did this on a whim. She said, let's do this as an actual band. And they used sheet music and they played like, you know, Stairway to Heaven and all kinds of rock covers and stuff. And in the ad it says, hey, bring your accordion and come down and join us. And this guy, I guess he was like 68 at the time, something like that. His name was Clyde Forsman. And he was an old Swedish-American guy, played accordion, loved accordion. And he was a hoot, man. He was in that band for a couple of decades. We traveled all over the place. We used to play all over the country. You guys were big. I remember, you know, you were like one of the city's big bands, because when I got here like in 92 or something like that, we went to the Paradise Lounge to see you guys a couple of times play there. Yeah, yeah. We used to gig a lot. And, you know, the band, when I joined the band, it was, I was their first permanent bass player. And I remember when I first, I went to like, you know, audition, right? A friend of mine had played a couple of gigs with him. And he's like, I just can't do this. I got another band I'm in, and maybe you'd like to do it. So I'm like, okay, I'll give it a shot. I take my bass there, and I'm standing in the living room. Somebody down on, what is it like? Kind of close to Hate and Ashbury, actually. Patty Brady's apartment. And I was surrounded by, at the time, I think it was 10 accordion players and a drummer. Bill Schwartz, our original drummer. And I was sitting there playing bass with these. it was like having all those because they're all slightly out of tune you know and it's like you're it was like being on a carousel you know I get that like weird audio warping kind of thing going on I always felt dizzy from being surrounded by all these accordions playing this stuff and I'm trying to like I'm trying my best to hack through this music you know using charts and stuff and at the end I was like oh god I wonder if I'm going to get you know be in this band and Paul Rogers who was I guess was he the I don't even know he was kind of becoming the band leader at that point he's like well you know you're talking about stuff it's great now that we got a bass player we don't have to play the left hand on our accordions and we can I'm like oh I guess I'm in the band so uh you know 35 years later still doing it we're shockingly we're still doing gigs here and there I mean we slowed down a lot Paul who writes almost all the music and is definitely the band leader at this point. He moved up to the Olympic Peninsula, so it's a little hard to get together and practice. Everybody else is scattered around the Bay Area. So we basically get together for sometimes the Cotati Accordion Festival up in Cotati, California, North Bay. And we play a lot of Oktoberfest lately, actually, which is kind of bizarre. We used to play Italian festivals all the time. Now it's Oktoberfest. And so we're usually like a summer slash fall band, you know, and then, then we, we take the rest of the year off and, but you know, we still get together and do it. It's still a good time. So, so I went on a bit of a rabbit hole because I found, I found the website for the, uh, for the band, excellent website, if I do say so myself. Uh, and then that led me to apparently a blog called on Blogger called the wall of wheeze. Yeah, this was great, man. I was looking, looking through this, uh, links to these will obviously be in the show notes And I was like, all right, I don't know. It looks like there were a lot of posts in like the mid 2000s. Let me just click on a random one, clicked on the 2007 one. And then I came across this video called how to pop a cork with a sword featuring the voice of Lewis Wallace, uh, as you attempt to use a, a, a knife to uncork a bottle of champagne. It's definitely Lewis's voice. And I think I hear the lat Leander's laugh at the end of this video as well. So what do you have to say for yourself about this video here? This is back in the day at Wired News. And I think it was probably, it was right around the holidays. I don't think it was New Year's Eve, but it could have been. But it was definitely in that period of time of the year where there's just like no tech news happening. And you're like, why are we even here in the office? And Evan Hansen, the editor-in-chief, for some reason we start talking about sabering champagne bottles. And we went across the street and bought a couple bottles of champagne. We're like, okay, let's give this a try. And it took me like four or five times to actually... That's me there with that butcher knife from the crappy kitchen at Wired, trying my best to savor things. Oh, there it goes! Finally made it happen. Spill half the bottle of champagne. Not the greatest way to open a bottle of champagne. But yeah, I had completely forgotten about that. And Mike Calori, who I think he still works at Wired, our good friend back there he put it up on YouTube that video has 279,000 views 279,000 what in the living my god of course it was what 20 years ago I forgot all about all this the wall of wheeze I used to write a lot of short little blog posts on that was that using blogger or something yep yep blog spot it looks like blog spot so add that to your rss feed hell i'm adding it to my resume genuine viral hit linkedin the one the one story i remember lewis that you told me is that you fell asleep one time playing bass on stage that is i i did get busted i was playing an october fest and I was so tired. And, you know, I mean, let's just be completely honest here. I mean, some of these Polkas are very much like other Polkas. A lot of the sort of German style Polkas that we play, very similar to each other. And there was somebody had a video of me and I was just standing there, my eyes shut completely. And I woke up and like, I don't think I missed a beat. Did you not miss a beat though? I don't think so. No, it was— You actually meant to play—that was the most incredible thing, that you claimed that you could still play even while asleep. It was definitely autopilot. I don't know. Full self-driving supervised. So I guess I should say I'm working on a new theme song for the podcast. Once a little more energetic, I'm having my friend Will compose it, but it's still a work in progress. But, you know, Lewis, I think what we need is an accordion intro. Do you think you put something together a little faster? You know, I am not an accordion player. I own an accordion. Bought one for $100, and it says right on the accordion. You know how they used to put names on them? This one says Dick. I couldn't pass it up. But I do know plenty of accordion players. Oh, look at that. TDA is accepting special bookings for 2025. Get off the time machine, Paul. Copyright 2010. I haven't spent much time on this website lately. Yeah. But, you know, like I said, I could think of several songs that might work for good bumper music for this. If you want to check it out, I'll send you some links. Download at the iTunes Music Store, the website says. Yeah. Like I said, not exactly high priority. Look at that. We still got CDs for sale. Oh, my God. I don't even think, to be honest, I don't even know if we have any CDs left. Because, you know, what's the point? I mean, at recent gigs, it's almost just like, well, let's just hand them out. Nobody listens to CDs anymore, really. I mean, some people do, but almost no one. Cool title, Squeeze Machine. That was a fun one. I got to say, our records, I mean, I like them. And I think that they definitely got better over time. Our band got better. The songwriting got better. But they're all over the place. The one sort of common theme, 99% of the songs are comedy songs. They're funny. They're story songs, a lot of them. I love that one there, Rice for One. That's like a slow country song about a guy eating at a Chinese restaurant by himself. I crack up every time I listen to that. And one of the greatest things about playing in those darn accordions all this time, is staying there playing and watching people. If you're doing a gig and the sound is good and people can actually understand what the singer is saying, and you can see people sitting there hanging on every word, and you can see them crack up at stuff. Honestly, that is so heartwarming. Sometimes that almost brings a tear to my eye. It's weird. I'm actually kind of getting teary right now just thinking about it. That is a very satisfying feeling. Well, you guys are a fun show because there's a lot of people on stage. And like you said, you're playing the Led Zeppelin covers. And they sound great. They sound really good with accordions. It was a lot of fun. Really fun as shit. Yeah, I mean, everybody in the band, we've gone through phases. A lot of people in the band, we have a couple of singers in the band now. We're really great singers. They don't do every single gig with us. I mean, everybody's schedule is different. But, you know, we run accordions through guitar pedals, all kinds of stuff. You know, Suzanne has all these effects that she uses and makes it sound like, you know, sound like the record. I mean, that was always the that was like the shtick. Right. We and I think that's one reason Paul. I mean, Paul is the main songwriter. He writes a million songs. He's been doing a thing on YouTube, releasing a song a day or, you know, they're ones that we've already recorded and stuff like that but um that's his thing this year and uh so he he writes these really great songs and just millions of them uh and he i think he always kind of feels like playing these covers is like a i don't know like a cheap way out right but i mean the bottom line you're playing it you know back in black on the accordion and it sounds you know kind of like the record i mean that's that's pretty cool and then you follow it with Mr. Saggy Butt. I love that one. That would be a great song for the very, that's a total funk groove. You'd love it. Very energetic. Not the kind of NPR crap I heard last time I listened to our podcast. All right, well, let's mix it up. Maybe the readers, if anyone has any suggestions, listeners, sorry, I beg your pardon, have any suggestions about which one we should take a clip from. That might be very, very helpful. You put some accordion music on there, the subscriber list just vanishes overnight. All right, well, I think that's a wrap. Should we wrap it up there? Might as well. Yes, I think so. There's a consensus. Sounds like a good plan. Time to go get some lunch and do the newsletter. Woo-hoo, news letters. so anyway if you like this rubbish please give us a 5 or even a 6 or 7 star rating on Apple Podcasts and also send it to someone who else you might think might listen to this or send it to your worst enemy friends enemies they show all the same in our analytics so alright so you can find Lewis on Twitter he's at Lewis Wallace at D Griffin Jones and as I said earlier I write this newsletter that at CultOfMate.com. And 75% open rate. I mean, that really is something to be proud of. We were just talking to our camp manager at Beehive, and he was like, you know, you don't see these numbers normally. These are really, really off-the-chart numbers. Yeah, he said even like paid ones, that's a phenomenal open rate. Like anybody would be thrilled to have that. So, yeah. I can't believe the advertising budget that they're able to sponsor a podcast like this, though. Wow. I mean, also, when I did marketing work, a good day of open rates would be like 12%. Wow. Yeah, yeah, for sure. Yeah, yeah. 12%. Yeah, for sure. 75%. Anyway, it's a good newsletter. It really is good. It's a really good way to see the stuff we put out, the cover mic stuff. I think, you know, it's, as I sort of said earlier, unfortunately, it's way better than the website. I don't want to say that. But it is. It is, unfortunately. It is. It's a better presentation, better way to read it. It's very scannable. Very scannable, yeah. And anyway, so thanks. Thanks a lot for watching. Thanks for putting up with this rubbish. And we'll see you next time. Have a great weekend, everybody. Goodbye. See ya. Oh, my God. Could I go on and on about my band any longer? That was good. I thought it was kind of fun. I think that's fun. I was looking for the Logic icon in my document. Where is it? It's the Apple Creator Studio one. Come find it. indecipherable sorry I need to look for the blue circle