Macworld:

I recently made some suggestions about how you can manage a classical music library in iTunes. Apple Music, however, can be even more of a challenge for listening to classical music. This isn’t surprising; the music streaming model is designed around the “song” rather than multi-movement works, such as symphonies and sonatas. Here are a few tips to help you listen to classical music more efficiently.

I like classical music at times but am no means an aficionado. This article may help some of you who are get through the ins and outs of classical on Apple Music.

Above Avalon:

The tablet market is in complete disarray. Only five short years ago, the iPad helped jumpstart the category, ushering in multi-touch computing and the modern-day app revolution to large-screen devices. Today, there has never been a time when the tablet market faces so much unknown.

A quick look at iPad and tablet shipment data would show that things have gotten bad in recent quarters. However, in reality, things are much worse than quarterly shipment data would suggest.

I think Apple sees this as a good problem to have. They are still selling lots of iPads, are still the market leader and still have the opportunity to control the future of tablets.

But there’s no doubt the market for tablets like the iPad has cratered, due in no small part to large screen iPhones. I know my iPad is only used as a bedside alarm clock now because the iPhone 6 plus has taken over almost all of the functionality I needed and wanted in the iPad. It’s going to be fascinating to see how and if Apple can do anything about this problem or if the iPad will go down as the most successful “failed” product Apple has ever produced.

The Bloggess:

When I was little my favorite places were libraries. You weren’t expected to speak, which was heaven for a shy girl with an anxiety disorder. Thousands of small secret stories were hidden in plain sight all around you, just waiting to be held in your hands and discovered.

As a small girl in rural Texas, I knew that the best chance I had of seeing worlds that would never be open to me, and meeting fantastic people I’d never be bold enough to speak to was through books. I was able to see places that exist (or that had existed, and or that would never exist) through the words of the storytellers whose worlds had been bound up and shared and protected through generations of docent-guardians who called themselves “librarians”.

I still remember when I was first allowed to go on the bus by myself to the Halifax Public Library. There was a huge (to a ten year old) sculpture of Winston Churchhill you had to pass by. The library was a sanctuary to a shy, fat little kid.

No one picked on him there and he could indulge his love of reading. His family couldn’t afford many books but the library let him read anything he wanted to. It’s where he discovered science fiction, history and travel – all things that took him away from his boring, scary life and into the great big world he knew was out there. That little boy still loves libraries and, when he went back home for a visit last year, he made a point to go the library and say hello to Winston — just like he did when he was a kid.

Tim Cook:

Diversity is critical to innovation and it is essential to Apple’s future. We aspire to do more than just make our company as diverse as the talent available to hire. We must address the broad underlying challenges, offer new opportunities, and create a future generation of employees as diverse as the world around us. We also aspire to make a difference beyond Apple.

Great progress.

Graham Cochrane is doing a series a videos showing users how to mix a song. I always like watching these types of videos—every audio engineer has their own way of doing things, but I usually pick up a tidbit from everyone.

Apple posted a support document showing users how to install or upgrade to Windows 10.

To be clear, I haven’t used this, but a reader wrote and said it’s very fast and does the same thing as Ghostery. It’s always good to have an alternative.

Here is the company’s new Gear S2 smartwatch interface.

Macworld:

Check out Ghostery, a Safari extension (also available for Firefox, Chrome, and Internet Explorer). With Ghostery installed, whenever you visit a Web page that uses such tricks to track, you’ll briefly see a box listing all the services that are tracking your visit to that page.

Click the Ghostery icon in Safari’s toolbar, and you get a detailed list of each of those service along with the specific script(s) each is using on that Web page. Click a script to view it in a new Safari tab or window. Click the More Info link next to a service to view Ghostery’s page for that company, which includes information about the company; contact information; a link to the company’s full privacy policy; and a summary of the types of data the company collects, how that data is shared, and how long it’s retained.

I’ve been using Ghostery for a while and really like the way it reminds me of just how much tracking is going on and it shows you just how ridiculous the situation has gotten. One page I visited had 54 trackers on it. Needless to say, it was a painfully slow web site.

Ars Technica:

At the Flash Memory Summit in California, Samsung has unveiled what appears to be the world’s largest hard drive—and somewhat surprisingly, it uses NAND flash chips rather than spinning platters. The rather boringly named PM1633a, which is being targeted at the enterprise market, manages to cram almost 16 terabytes into a 2.5-inch SSD package. By comparison, the largest conventional hard drives made by Seagate and Western Digital currently max out at 8 or 10TB.

That’s quite a lot of porn.

But I can’t quite put my finger on it.

…when iOS 9 beta detects a flight number, in this case Delta #2182, it transforms the text into an actionable link connected to data pulled from an offsite server. A long press on said link brings up options to preview flight information or copy text.

This is a great little added feature.

Catalog your repertoire. Prompt your lyrics live on stage. Keep everyone in sync. If you perform live on stage, alone or with a group, Setlists will make you a better professional. Forget carrying around heavy binders of paper and writing up tonight’s set on a napkin with a Sharpie.

Great looking app. I’ll be using this one.

Rene Ritchie takes an in-depth look at multitasking in iOS.

Twitter:

While Twitter is largely a public experience, Direct Messages let you have private conversations about the memes, news, movements, and events that unfold on Twitter. Each of the hundreds of millions of Tweets sent across Twitter every day is an opportunity for you to spark a conversation about what’s happening in your world. That’s why we’ve made a number of changes to Direct Messages over the last few months. Today’s change is another big step towards making the private side of Twitter even more powerful and fun.

I honestly don’t know if this is a good thing or not.

9to5Mac:

Apple has joined the official NFC Forum as a top-tier sponsor. Along with the sponsorship role, Apple has joined the forum’s Board of Directors, according to the forum’s official website.

With representation and sponsorship of the forum, Apple will be able to help advance the development of NFC chips across the industry and develop new NFC-based products at a quicker pace.

Apple has joined multiple industry forums for key components over the past several years, and the Cupertino-based company is a core member of both the USB and Bluetooth connectivity organizations.

This will undoubtedly help drive even more innovation in NFC. Apple waited to implement the protocol until they had the device to really take advantage of it. Now that they do, they are looking to use their directorship to drive further development in ways beneficial to the company.

iMore:

iOS 9 takes multitasking from the background and puts it right up front on the iPad.

Apple calls it Multitasking for iPad. The iPad, of course, has always multitasked at the system level, and over the years has gained background tasks and refresh and other forms of third-party multitasking as well. With iOS 9, however, the iPad is getting more than just the ability to do multiple things at once—it’s getting the ability to show multiple apps at once. It’s getting Slide Over and Split View.

Both Slide Over and Split View allow you to have two apps on-screen at the same time—a “primary” app and a “secondary” app. The primary app is the one you start with, full screen. The secondary app is the one you bring in that either overlays a part of the screen in Slide Over or takes over part of the screen in Split View.

This new functionality might actually get me using my iPad more. It’s been gathering dust since I got the iPhone 6 plus but Slide Over and Split View sound like the kinds of features I’m looking for to help the iPad get closer to a laptop in terms of useability.

Re/code:

CurrentC, the payments app being created by a consortium of big retailers known as MCX, may not launch widely this year as originally planned, MCX CEO Brian Mooney told Re/code in an interview on Tuesday. The company will begin a public pilot of its app in Columbus, Ohio in a few weeks and will not rush a wider rollout if the product is not ready, he said.

“This is a long game,” Mooney said. “Certainly going faster is always better — that’s not necessarily a debatable point. But we’re going to do it right.”

I don’t think there’s much doubt, after RiteAid and Best Buy and others have changed their plans, that CurrentC, at least in its present form, is DOA.

Vinyl Record Day:

Vinyl Record Day is dedicated to the preservation of the cultural influence, the recordings and the cover art of the vinyl record, celebrating our fondest music with friends and family.

Today is the day Edison invented the phonograph in 1877. Do you remember the first (or last) vinyl record you bought? For me, it was Rush’s “Bastille Day”.

Flyovers are very cool.

Mental Floss:

The British Library is the largest library collection in the world, with more than 170 million items in its catalogue.

The collections are generated by the so-called “Mechanical Curator”, which randomly chooses images from public domain books from the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. Better yet, every image links back to a PDF of the source book so you can determine the full context. The sheer volume of images means it’s impossible for the institution to organise them alone, and so part of the project is a request that users help identify and tag the content. Essentially, you get to contribute to the British Library’s curation.

Do not go to The British Library’s Flickr page unless you have a lot of free time. It’s an absolute time suck.

Macworld:

Photos for OS X is designed to appeal to a broad audience, with simple editing tools that let anyone improve their photographs. But is that it? Even though it’s a 1.0 product (replacing iPhoto and Aperture), a lot of editing power is actually hidden beneath that user-friendly surface.

I’m a happy Lightroom user and won’t touch Photos for OS X with a ten foot pole but this article does a good job of explaining what kind of editing you can expect to find in the app.

Rite Aid announced today that all of the Company’s nearly 4,600 stores nationwide will begin accepting mobile payments, including Apple Pay and Google Wallet, starting Saturday, August 15.

The significance here is that Rite Aid was a supporter of CurrentC. Clearly that didn’t work out so well for them.

BMW on Tuesday said it was looking into whether Google infringed any trademark rights after the Silicon Valley-based group set up a new company called Alphabet, which is also the name of a BMW subsidiary.

“We are examining whether there are any implications over trademarks,” a BMW spokeswoman said on Tuesday. The spokeswoman said there were currently no plans to take legal steps against Google.

This is a very important topic for many people, especially when considering what technologies to implement on the Internet.

Business Insider:

We’ve rounded up some of the best libraries around the world that offer not only an impressive collection of reading material, but also boast unique architecture.

From an 8th-century monastery in Switzerland to a library with hanging bookshelves in Mexico City, here are the libraries that every book worm should visit.

I still remember going to the Halifax Library as a kid and marvelling at all the books. To this day, I love these kinds of expansive, beautiful libraries. I was surprised to see Vancouver’s Public Library on this list. While its outside is interesting, it’s interior is fairly pedestrian and not nearly as spectacular as many of the libraries pictured.

Fortune:

Ad-blocking software is estimated to cost websites nearly $22 billion in ad revenue this year.

Software that blocks digital ads will cost online publishers nearly $22 billion in advertising revenue this year, according to a new study.

That figure comes by way of a new study from Adobe Systems Page Fair, an Irish startup that caters to websites and advertisers looking to avoid those so-called “ad-blocking” practices.

As a content creator, this is a disturbing statistic (and one I take with a truckload of salt because of the inherent bias in the study’s creator) but it’s a problem brought on by the industry itself. If ads hadn’t gotten so intrusive and obnoxious, perhaps their intended recipients wouldn’t be working so hard to avoid them. And it’s only going to get worse for both sides.