If you have more than just one computer in your home and your media content is spread on all of the systems, at some point you might have encountered the problem of wanting to access some media on a computer that was used at that moment by another member of your family. If you want to do something to avoid this issue in the future you might want to consider buying a large hard drive and move it from one computer to the other in order to grab all of the media.

After doing this, you should head down to your Mac computer and launch iTunes. Once you do this, the software is going to ask you to either create a new library or choose an existing one. What you have to do is create a new library and give it a name. After doing this you might want to save it to your user account’s Music folder.

Now, go to the Preferences menu in iTunes and select Advanced > Change and then go to the Media folder that you just created on your external HDD. My advice is to disable the Copy Files To iTunes Media Folder When Adding To Library but remember to leave the Keep iTunes Media Folder Organized activated. You now must click on the OK button in order to dismiss the Preferences window. Your next step should Choose File > Add To Library and after that go to the Media folder located on your external HDD and after that click on Open. iTunes will now add names to all of your media content found on that hard drive to the iTunes Library window without moving the files. As you would expect, this can take a long time if you have a lot of content stored on the HDD. You might want to know that depending from where you got the media, during this process some of the media will be misfiled. For this reason, it is highly recommended that you look thoroughly in your media and do any necessary reorganizing. Don’t forget about erasing the duplicate content as if you leave it, this content will occupy unnecessary space on your hard drive. You might want to know that in iTunes you get a Display Duplicate function which unfortunately is not very helpful. However, if you press & hold the Option button, the command is going to change to Find Exact Duplicates which will find more duplicates, but even so it’s far from being perfect. The ideal situation would be to have no duplicates at all or at least only a few of them which can be erased manually.

There’s also a third party application that can take care of your duplicates which is called Dupin and it will set you back $15. This program adopts an iTunes-like UI and can find the duplicates in your iTunes library or it can search for them in certain areas, like Movies, Music and TV Shows.

You might not know this but the Tab key is one of the most versatile buttons on your keyboard as it has several tricks up its sleeve about which we shall talk about in this article.

The first thing that you can do with the Tab button is to choose items alphabetically in Finder windows. What you have to do is go into one of the Finder windows, with the exception of the Column view and you can press the Tab button for alphabetically selecting the next file.

Of course, this only works if the window has been sorted by another way than the name (Kind or Size, for example). By pressing the Tab key you can go to the next alphabetical item, while pressing Shift-Tab will direct you to the previous alphabetic file. We should mention that this is going to work also when the items have been grouped in categories with the View > Arrange By sub-menu. Pressing the Tab key will jump to a different group.In Safari you can easily navigate by just using the keyboard. If you press the Tab button it will redirect you from the address field to the browser’s search field, as well as to any other fill-in fields that are in the webpage. You should know that Safari features its proprietary setting for tabbing to other elements which are not fields. You have to access Preferences and from there go to the Advanced tab and choose the option called Press Tab To Highlight Each Item On A Webpage. You are also able to leave this off and just use the Option key when you hit the Tab key for accessing this capability temporarily.If you go to the Keyboard Preferences and activate the All Controls option which can be found in the heading called Full Keyboard Access. When it is on, at first you’ll have to activate the address field in Safari (Command-L) or the search field (Command-Option-L) for focusing its attention on the title bar. After an item has been selected, you can activate it by pressing the spacebar. After the menu has been activated, for opening it you’ll have to hit the spacebar or you can use arrow keys for highlighting an item. By pressing Return it will choose an item, while pressing the spacebar is going to close the menu without making any selections.

You will find an Outline view in Apple’s Pages ’09 as well as in Microsoft Word which gives you the possibility to collapse a long document into headings of various levels which are easier to review. When you are in Outline view, you might want to click the text cursor where you want in a heading and after that hit the Tab key in order to demote it to a lower-level heading, while pressing Shift-Tab is going to promote the heading a level up. In Adobe programs, you have the possibility of hiding tool palettes by doing a simple press of the Tab button while an additional press of the Tab key is going to bring back all of the tool palettes. We should mention that if you are in a text box, you’ll first have to hit the Esc key for deselecting it because otherwise the Tab key is going to be typed in the text.

A very good application for ripping DVDs is HandBrake which is also suitable for converting other types of files on the HDD to various formats that work with iOS. We should also mention that it boasts a lot of built-in presets that make your life easier.

Even though new devices are launched, it takes a while until new presets are made available which can take advantage of what those new devices have to offer. To give you an example, the third generation of the Apple TV as well as the third-gen iPad now are offering support for 1080p playback, but the HandBrake presets for these two devices are still targeted towards the predecessors of these two devices so as a consequence it will not offer the best video quality for these new devices.

The good news is that it is quite easy to make your very own presets in HandBrake once you learn a few tricks. One example would be to develop one for econding at up to a resolution of 1080p so the source material also has to be 1080p. Keep in mind that HandBrake is not able to rip Blu-ray discs but we should note that it still is able to transcode those that have been ripped using specific software like MakeMKV. The following method can also be used if you want to develop a tweaked version of the built-in presets, depending on your necessities. The first thing that you have to do is select a source file because otherwise HandBrake will not allow you to select or edit a preset. You have the possibility to choose just about any type of video file that the software is able to recognize. After making the selection you must click on Toggle Presets which can be found in the toolbar in order to view the available presets. Next, you must perform a click on the drop-down triangle which you will find next to Devices. One of the available presets is the AppleTV 2 preset which you should load if you want to follow our example. After the selection has been made it will load the settings of the preset and next you have to click on the “+” which is located at the bottom of the drawer so that you can start making a new preset. Now, from the Use Picture Size menu you must choose Source Maximum (Post Source Scan and after that enter a name and also a description if you want. You will also have to think about whether you prefer using the picture filters provided by HandBrake. Then you will notice the preset located on the preset list at the bottom.

You can choose this one as the default preset for all of the new video encodings from now on by selecting it in the drawer, clicking on the gear icon and after that from the pop-up menu you have to select Make Default. Once you do this the preset is going to appear in bold. The best thing about this preset that you have made is that it is going to create the highest resolution format video files for those who have one of the latest devices from Apple, based on the type of video you feed to it.
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With Quick Look available for OS X you are able to view the contents of a file by selecting it in Finder and after that pressing the spacebar. What this means is that you do not have to wait for the file to open in a suitable app as it will appear right away.

Once you have selected a file in Finder and viewed it with the help of Quick Look, you’re now able to view other files that are located in the same folder very fast. How? By pressing the arrow keys so if you are in either Column of List View, you just have to press on the up and down arrows in order to view other files. If in Icon View, you can still use the up and down arrow keys but most likely you’ll also have to use the left and right ones for seeing the items in other columns.

After opening a file that has multiple pages with Quick Look, you’re able to scroll through the entire file to see all of the content. Let’s take for example a regular PDF file. If you press the spacebar you’ll notice the first page appearing along with the other page’s thumbnails which are found to the sidebar located on the right. For reading these pages you can use the trackpad or the mouse for clicking on them. For moving through them you must use the Page Up and Page Down buttons. This will also work with the documents that have been created with Numbers, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Keynote, and others as well. If you’ve received an e-mail that has an attachment in your Mail, you have the possibility to click the Quick Look button found on the message’s top-right so that you can see it. If that e-mail has more than just one attachment, arrows are going to appear at the top left of Quick Look’s windows. By clicking on one of these arrows you will see the previous or next attachment. Also there is a button called Open With Application Name which we’ll allow you to select to open that file which you are looking at in its appropriate app. If you have moved some of your files to Trash but you are not certain if you have made the right decision, Mac’s OS X doesn’t allow you to open the files in Trash but the good news is that you’re able to select those files and then press the spacebar in order to view their content with the help of Quick Look.

If you enjoy using Spotlight in order to search for the files stored on the hard drive on your Mac, you should know that there is a way for accessing a form of a Quick Look option when you are browsing the results. What you have to do is hover the mouse cursor over a result so that you can see the content of that file. You can hover over a web page to see how it looks like, or you can hover over a music or video file and then move the mouse cursor over the display and then select the arrow button for playing the audio/video file. Similarly, hover on a document written in Word to see its content.

Lots of the users that have moved from a Windows-running PC to a Mac were worried that making this switch involves leaving all of the files behind and starting from scratch. This is a very legitimate concern especially if we take into consideration that Windows-compatible applications are not available on the Mac, much like many games that will only run on Microsoft’s OS. The good news is that nowadays you get the best from both worlds since Macs are now able to run Windows natively with the help of the Boot Camp technology developed by Apple.

What this technology does is creates an independent partition on the Mac’s HDD where you will have the possibility to install Windows. For using Boot Camp you will have to boot your Mac from that separate partition and once you have done this, Windows is going to run just about the same way as it does on a regular PC.

You should know that Boot Camp is not the only solution available for running Windows on Mac, as there are other similar apps like VMware Fusion and Parallels Desktop. However, Boot Camp is totally free and offers the best performance when compared to other similar virtualization apps. If you have made up your mind and decided to install Boot Camp on your Mac, you should know that it is compatible only with the systems that are powered by Intel processors so it won’t run on a Mac that has a PowerPC processor. It is important to note that in Lion, Boot Camp will only work with Windows 7. You will need a minimum of 16GB of available storage if you plan on running the 32-bit edition of Windows 7, while for its 64-bit counterpart you must have at least 20GB available. Needless to say, you also must own a Windows installer disc or a disc image with the appropriate serial number.

Due to the reason that Boot Camp is going to create a partition so it might move some of the data on your hard drive during the process, it would be a wise idea to perform a system backup so that you will not lose any important files that you have stored on the Mac’s hard drive. To perform the backup you might consider using the bundled Time Machine software which came with OS X. Also bundled with the Mac OS is the Boot Camp Assistant which you can locate in the Utilities folder that is found in the Applications folder. After you launch it, you’ll notice a first screen called Introduction that provides an overview of the Boot Camp software. In the next window you will observe a couple of options that you have to choose from, like Download the Latest Windows Support Software From Apple and Install Windows 7. In some cases it also show another option called Create a Windows 7 Install Disk, which is for those Macs that don’t have a media drive, like the latest Mac mini or the MacBook Air. If you own one of these two products you must enable the option and then select continue. In part two we’ll continue explaining the process of installing Windows 7 on a Mac.