December 2011 – Black Frog Guitars

Google Analytics – for web and mobile traffic

For some odd reason, I have always enjoyed tracking certain types of data. I was very happy when I hooked up the Jetpack suite of plugins for WordPress this past weekend and was then able to see basic site traffic information. Tonight (guess I should say this morning) I have also incorporated a second level of tracking – Google Analytics.

Setting up Google Analytics to track your own app or web page is pretty simple. It will tie your analytics access to your Google account – a simple gmail account will be just fine.

Go to http://www.google.com/analytics/ and click the link saying “New to Analytics -sign up now.” If you already have a google account just type in your credentials on the next page. You will need to put a note in your app that clearly states that users are being tracked.

Like many google pages, there is a gear on the top right.
Click the gear to go to the account administration screen
Click the plus sign to add a new account
Now you will enter the name and URL of the site or app you want to track.
After you have filled out this short form, Google will generate a unique identifier for you to use from your mobile app or web page. This ID in their terms is called a UA code.

Once this is set up you are ready to use their UA code from your app or from your web page.

Since this post is meant to be only a high level introduction, I will keep this short. Excellent documentation is available on the Google Analytics site.

Tracking basic web pages
If you want to track a web page, just cut and paste the javascript they give you when they generate the code.

Tracking WordPress pages
If you want to track your WordPress page, I recommend installing a plugin such as the Google Analytics for WordPress plugin. It will allow you to type this UA Code in and then do page level tracking.

Tracking iOS page views
Grab the latest Analytics SDK directly from Google – http://code.google.com/apis/analytics/docs/mobile/download.html#Google_Analytics_SDK_for_iOS
Extract it and copy the GANTracker.h and libGoogleAnayltics.a into your existing iOS project with Xcode.

Open up your application delegate and in didFinishLaunching add the following snippet

[[GANTracker sharedTracker] startTrackerWithAccountID:yourTrackerId                          dispatchPeriod:10
                      delegate:nil];

Now you can do page tracking with a simple line like this: (note I would put this in viewWillAppear in a view controller)

NSError *error;
if (![[GANTracker sharedTracker] trackPageview:yourPageName withError:&error]) {
        NSLog(@"Analytics logging failed %@", error);
}

Conclusion

There is a lot more you can do besides page tracking, but this is enough to hopefully perk your interest and set something up. As you can see, it is really minimal effort to get something up and running. They have an API for Android and other platforms as well. As I said before, Google’s documentation is great and for free analytics, it is really excellent! The benefit of data like this is to aid you in creating better experiences for your users to see what features they like and what gets ignored. Your biggest challenge will be in determining what and how much to track to gain the best insight into their needs.

Create Smart Playlists to find those lost Christmas favorites

There are only a few more days until Christmas. Time to enjoy those delicious once a year peppermint milkshakes from Chick-Fil-A and peppermint blizzards from Dairy Queen. It is also time to enjoy your favorite holiday tunes. If you love Christmas songs but have trouble finding them in your ever-growing iTunes library, consider this quick tip.

Set up some Smart Playlists!

Most people are familiar with Playlists which allow you to add a bunch of songs of their choosing to a named list. Playlists are a great way to help manage a music library that doesn’t change much.

Smart Playlists takes things to the next level. This is a feature that was actually added to iTunes several years ago. Sadly I didn’t catch on and try it until this past Halloween when I was trying to find some spooky songs for trick-or-treaters. For managing things like holiday song mixes or favorites within a constantly growing library it is AWESOME and best of all completely fluid. As you add new songs to your library, those new songs will appear in your smart playlists dynamically if they match the rules that you define.
To set up a new holiday playlist in iTunes, hold down the Option key (see my other post about the magic of the option key). This will turn the + sign at the bottom left to a gear.
Smart Playlists have this gear image next to them to indicate they are different from the regular playlists. You will now have a form to fill out to define the rules of your new lists.
Here are the rules that I use for my Christmas music selections.

Note that you can add more rules to get more specific. If you are good about rating your songs with stars you could add a rule to only play your best (3 stars or greater). You can also nest rules. Once the rules are set, when you select this new smart playlist in iTunes it will immediately show you EVERY song in your library matching your set of rules. If you make the rules too broad, you will get more than you want. If they are too narrow, you will have too little. Play around with your own set and see what you get. If you come up with something you’d like to share, post it in the comments! Have fun and Merry Christmas!

No sound from the TonePort – fixing the bouncing red clip led problem

I am a pretty big fan of Line 6 gear. Their modeling has gotten better and better over the years. I started with a PodXT many years ago and now have their flagship HD500 which I am very happy with and hope to post a future article on sometime soon. In the meantime, this little post will hopefully help someone else who like me has wasted several hours trying to figure out how to get their TonePort to work again.

To keep this story from being too long, I got the TonePort UX2 – which is a nice computer recording interface/tone box for Christmas from my wife several years ago. It is really a marvelous little box offering very good sounds for both guitar, vocals and bass. I love the thing but it has brought some headaches along the way. I used to use it with a Mac Book Pro which worked well but was a pain to always disconnect the wires as I needed to move the machine around quite a bit. In August, I got my dream computer – a 27 iMac and couldnt wait to get my magical little TonePort running against it to do some recording. It has been months since then and I had never really gotten it to work with my new computer. It was running briefly a couple of weeks ago but then last weekend started just blinking the red clip lights back and forth. I had tried reinstalling drivers, using their license manager, etc. but nothing worked. Just blinking red clip lights! UGH!

This week, I need to practice a TSO song to play next weekend and I really need this box to run again. Tonight I decided to spend some time to solve the problem and I am happy to say I think I found the root cause. My theory – which was kind of echoed by one of Line 6s support forum posts is that the Mac Migration Assistant that I used when I migrated my files from the MBP to the iMac brought along some extra garbage with it. Thus my attempts to reinstall the drivers were silently failing. The Line 6 uninstall tool apparently doesn’t always work and in this case completely failed. It acted like the old drivers were removed but they were not!

Bottom line – you need to completely eradicate those drivers from your system and reboot before you can use your TonePort again. Though this is specific to my circumstances (a UX2 migrating from one mac to another mac, I would expect this to apply generally to any TonePort on any machine. Perhaps the uninstaller is more reliable on a PC. If you know, please chime in on the comments below.

I’m guessing the uninstaller failed because the Line 6 tools, drivers, etc are spread across so many different directories. Below are the steps I took to remove the old drivers. I noticed on some other posts in the Line 6 forums that some folks were having success by removing EVERYTHING tied to Line 6 on your computer. That is the approach I took and it did work but realize that I lost all of my custom tones in the process for all of my Line 6 gear that were saved on my mac. In my case, everything is backed up via Time Machine so no big deal, but before you continue make sure you understand the risks and make sure you have things backed up!

I removed all of the files directly via the terminal. Please be careful when doing this and understand that if you accidentally delete the wrong libraries or other system files you will have more problems than you started with. Do not do any of this without a backup. If you have any doubts in your ability, I suggest you contact Line 6 and request a better Uninstaller app that actually works.

BE VERY CAREFUL DELETING FILES IN THESE DIRECTORIES. ONE BAD MOVE AND YOU WILL REALLY HOSE SOMETHING UP! ONLY DELETE THE LINE 6 stuff and NOTHING else!

Here is what I removed.

/Library/Audio/MIDI Drivers/Line6*
/Library/Audio/Midi Devices/Line 6
/Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/VST/Line 6
/Library/Audio/Plug-ins/Components/POD*
/Library/Frameworks/L6TWX*
/Library/Application Support/Line 6
/Applications/Line6
~/Library/Preferences/*line6* – only files with line 6 in the middle of the name

There was a forum post at Line 6 that also going to /private/var/db/receipts and running sudo rm -i com.line6*

Once you have eradicated everything Line 6 on your machine, reinstall the latest Line 6 Monkey software – this is their main hub for installing everything else

Now verify that the Line 6 license manager is installed and run it. I made sure that both the iMac AND the Tone Port are listed. You may have to rescan devices after licensing your computer to find the Tone Port
Install and fire up Pod Farm 2 and play!

Remaining Issues

Things are still not perfect yet! I used to use GearBox as my main app to access the goodness of this little box. Now, GearBox appears to be outdated and replaced by Pod Farm 2. Well that is fine except us old timers don’t have software licenses that fully supports PF2! Reinstalling GearBox today is not an optimum solution since the link from the Monkey refers to GearBox in an outdated complete package. i.e. it is a link to a big archive that includes outdated drivers, outdated Monkey, and GearBox. Not sure why they bundled it but I sure dont want to have to go thru all of this again. I have issued a support ticket with Line 6 and am awaiting their response. Hopefully us long term Tone Port users can get grandfathered in!

Update 12/13/11 –

Heard response back on my support ticket today copied here for anyone interested:

The POD Farm 2 license is built into the newer POD Studio devices by design. All owners of previous generation Toneport hardware are not ‘grandfathered’ in to get a free POD Farm 2 license. This is not a feature of the device that you purchased, so if you want to use the POD Farm 2 software the license must be purchased. You CAN use the POD Farm 1.12 software for free which will provide you all of the models that you get with the basic model set of the Toneport UX2:

I am not terribly thrilled with this response. Basically it sucks if you are an early adopter into the TonePort family of products. If you want to use it and have the same features and sounds as the folks buying the same hardware today, you need to pay them an extra $99 for that privilege. I suggested in my reply that they take some of the profits from the folks that agree to this to devote time to fix their broken device uninstaller. The problems with that uninstaller are the reason this post was written.