Apple has enabled a new feature that allows you to use your Airpods Pro 2, or later models, as hearing aids.

They’ve made some of the functions unnecessarily confusing. Below I’ve outlined steps for some various tasks that you may be struggling with.

Also, here are some Apple links that may help but I find that Apple instructions can be a little confusing at times.

If you don’t have Airpods Pro 2, they are cheaper from Amazon than from Apple direct. You can get them (currently for $189) here.

Links To Below Sections

• Update your Airpod firmware
• Take a hearing test
• Switch between test results
• Delete a test result
• Thoughts & feedback for Apple
• Alternatives to Airpods for hearing aids

Update Your AirPods Pro Firmware

You need to make sure your Airpods have the latest firmware to enable this feature.

1. Put your Airpods inside the case and close the lid.
2. Keep the lid closed for about 30 seconds, then take out the Airpods and insert them into your ears. Keep them in your ears for about 20 seconds.
3. Put the Airpods back in the case and close the lid.
4. Charge the case via cable or a MagSafe charger.
5. Keep your iPhone near the case for about 10-15 minutes.
6. After 10-15 minutes, open the Airpods case lid and on your iPhone, go to Settings > Bluetooth and tap the “i” to the right of your Airpods’ name. The Airpods should have been updated to the most recent version.

Take A Hearing Test With Your iPhone Or iPad

Before you begin, make sure you’re in a quiet room. One good place is in a bedroom closet. The clothes will provide some sound insulation and it’s probably the quietest place in the house. The test takes about 5 minutes.

Wear your AirPods Pro 2, and make sure they’re connected to your device.

Go to Settings on your iPhone or iPad, tap the name of your AirPods near the top of the screen, tap Take a Hearing Test, then follow the onscreen instructions.

Switch Between Hearing Test Results

If you have more than one test result saved in your phone, you can switch to a different one like this. It’s unnecessarily lengthy but pretty easy. Apple just makes you step through a bunch of pages that explains the feature as if you’re enabling it for the first time.

1. On you iPhone, open Settings
2. Toward the top, tap on your headphone name
3. Tap on Hearing Assistance
4. Tap on Update Hearing Test Results
5. You’ll see, “Chose a Hearing Test Result”. You’ll see your test results listed. Just tap on the test result that you’d like to apply.
6. Tap on Next
7. Tap on Set Up Hearing Aid
8. Tap on Get Started
9. Tap on Next
10. Tap Turn On Hearing Aid
11. Tap on Done

Delete An Audiogram / Test Result

1. Open Health App
2. tap Browse
3. tap Hearing
4. tap Hearing Test Results
5. Scroll to the bottom and tap Show All Data
6. tap Edit
7. Tap the delete icon for the Audiogram you want to delete.

Thoughts – Feedback For Apple

I would like a way to duplicate an existing hearing audiogram and then would like to easily make adjustments to it. The process to manually enter a new audiogram is quite time consuming, and I assume the logic is, “your hearing loss is your hearing loss”, and it’s not really subjective. I know that it’s not supposed to work like an stereo graphic equalizer but if I test for one tone at 38 db, I may want to tune it down a tad to 35, as an example.

Some higher tones can create some loud popping, for certain hearing abilities, and I may prefer to roll those off just a touch. There is a Tone slider to make the Airpods sound darker or brighter but I don’t know how this is changing the audiogram or equalization. More visuals explaining what this is doing would be nice too.

Alternatives to Airpods

Now that over-the-counter hearing aids are allowed, there are more coming out in the market. Dedicated hearing aids will work better than Airpods because they have dedicated circuitry, and have a much longer battery life.

Sony now makes hearing aids

• CRE-E10
• CRE-C10
• CRE-C20

Jabra also makes hearing aids

• 50R OTC
• 300 OTC
• 500 OTC

My first article on Medium:

Apple announced yesterday at WWDC that they are redesigning the Apple Music app, “from the ground up.” While it is much needed it isn’t enough.

Apple’s Music app was a mess and was in need of a redesign. It looks like they had too many Cooks in the kitchen, pun intended. It feels to me like the creatives were handcuffed by what their executives wanted. They need to make a music app for the music lover and I think this will be a step closer but still many steps away.

Today Apple released their new Apple Music application and streaming music service, which includes a redesigned Music app for iOS and iTunes for desktops. It also includes a new live radio called Beats 1.

Apple is supposed to be the epitome of design. Simultaneously making something simple and intuitive yet engaging at the same time. After playing with the new Apple Music app, I’m left doubting that I’ll make the switch to Apple Music from Spotify. Spotify isn’t all that special either but Apple hasn’t capitalized on their strengths to surpass Spotify’s weaknesses.

Recommendations / “For You”

Apple should capitalize on the data they already have on me to learn what I like or don’t like. I clicked on the initial setup where they present genre and artists bubbles to indicate your preferences. (This didn’t appear to be pre-populated) Afterwards I went to check out which artists I was following. Apple auto added about 60 artists. I promptly deleted 2/3rds of them.

Apple has access to my iTunes library which includes things like my play counts and song ratings. I’m pretty crazy about rating songs to use with dynamic playlists and have thousands of songs rated highly) They could utilize this data to auto populate my profile and it doesn’t look like they do. I realize not everyone rates their music but everyone has play counts. (songs most played, songs most skipped)

They could also use it to determine the kind of music I don’t listen to. When I click on ‘Connect’ > ‘Find More Artists & Curators’, the first 3 are Apple related curators and the other 6 mind boggling artist suggestions include Maroon 5, One Direction, Pitbull and Miley Cyrus. The other two are Tom Yorke and The Decemberists. This makes me think Apple is not using my iTunes history and metadata to calculate my initial profile. This is disappointing.

This info, combined with my music taste neighbors, could be used to suggest music to me that I’m not familiar with. At no point did Apple ask me anything about importing my iTunes data, last.fm or any other service. I realize they want to make it easy for the user and some of this might be done behind the scenes without my realizing it but from the results I saw it sure didn’t look like it.

Connect

My second concern is regarding the artists I follow. I can see for the average consumer who may only follow a couple dozen artist how it could work but what about those of us who want to follow hundreds? (I have a Spotify playlist with 1 song per band with over 800 artists)

How is Apple planning on presenting all of this data to us? Album releases, tour information, news, etc.? It’s likely to be notification overkill that I may eventually just completely disable or ignore. I don’t see how the current interface is going to manage that in an easy-to-use yet addictive and engaging manner, not to mention customizable. What if I only want album release info for one artist but I want album and tour info for another? What about geo location specific data? What about last.fm?

Curation / Playlists

I’m still not convinced that curated playlists are the answer that everyone in the industry seems to think they are. Having curated playlists is a nice feature but it’s not something to hang your hat on. I don’t care if my non-techie, non-music professional cousin created it or if some super celebrity created it. It’s going to have tracks on it I know and don’t know, like and don’t like. Do people really care all that much about how they found out about it? A good creative user interface and algorithm should be the answer for music discovery. Apple Music doesn’t appear to have it.

Just how useful are playlists like those called, “Intro To Grizzly Bear” or any other artist. (I love Grizzly Bear by the way, no offense to them, just the “Intro to…” concept.) These suckers can balloon into overload way too easily and clutter up any playlist recommendation service. Spotify had apps for a while and there were way too many that were basically just links to one particular artist’s recommended songs. I equate them to all of the App Store ‘countdown’ apps. Do. Not. Need. Also, why is Apple Music’s “For You” front page showing me a playlist called “Intro To Grizzly Bear” and “Intro To Girls” when I already have many songs by each in my library that are rated?! If you are going to give me an “Intro to…” playlist then I think it needs to 1) be an artist I haven’t heard and 2) give me a brief explanation why you’re recommending this. (“The guitarist in this band was in this other band that you love”)

Some of the curated playlists look like they were created either randomly or by chickens from a tic-tac-toe game. Apple Music’s curated “Indie Summer Party Jams of 2015″ includes Kanye West (not Indie), and Pitchfork’s curated “Best of the Half Decade: Dreampop” includes Lana Del Rey (not Dreampop).

Other Concerns

I think Apple will face some backlash with regards to merging ‘My Music’ with iTunes/Apple Music tracks. I have special releases, vinyl rips, live versions, et cetera and I just imagine managing all of these along with Apple Music’s cloud version will be a nightmare and be a cause of many headaches. I would recommend taking a complete backup of your music, phone and iTunes database before installing the new software and keep it around for a while. [This has proven to be a problem just as I suspected. (1) (2) (3)]

Sound quality isn’t impressive.

Song matching: If I ‘love’ a song that I personally own that resides on my Mac, when I go to that song within Apple’s Music section the same song isn’t showing up as ‘loved’.

If I go to an Apple Music playlist on my iPhone and view the list of songs in the playlist, some songs appear with a small phone icon indicating I have the song on my phone. There are many songs on my phone that don’t show the icon which means the matching algorithm isn’t all that thorough.

There are still many things I’d like to see Apple Music do that absolutely no one is doing. There is a lot of room to grow music recommendations as a feature, make the experience educational and engaging. Also incorporate it more with social and geo location.

This seems like a very safe attempt from Apple that leaves a lot of room for improvement and innovation. I wonder what expert feedback they got from the Beats crew or Trent Reznor that was so important? I just don’t see it.

The iPhone 5 had issues with lens flare. Many photos that had a bright sun in it managed to almost always blow the sun out into a purple mess. Apple’s response? Move the camera.

Now that the iPhone 6 is out I was curious how it handled similar shooting situations. Tonight I went for a run at Crissy Field towards the Golden Gate Bridge and took some photos when I reached the Warming Hut pier.

Lens flare is better but it’s still there and prominent enough that you may have to alter your shooting angle or do some post processing to remove it. There was always a small green dot in the frame that moved around depending on where the sun was. (See the videos below)

I took a photo with 3 different photo apps to confirm that it was something inherent with the camera and not something that the software was doing.

I used Apple’s default camera app ‘Camera’, Camera+, and Manual (Custom exposure camera). Here are the results:

Apple ‘Camera’ app:

Apple ‘Camera’ app (HDR):

Manual (Custom exposure camera) app:

Camera+ app:

I also shot a short video and you can follow the green dot as the sun moves across the frame.

I’m not surprised that the phone does this and I think it mostly handles bright light well for such a small camera but it’s something to keep in mind.

I listen to Seattle’s KEXP streaming radio fairly regularly and even when I’m not I like to know what they’re playing. I use GeekTool to display KEXP’s “Now Playing” song on my Mac Desktop.

Note that this doesn’t work anymore. If you have a way that works then please let me know.

curl -silent 'http://kexp.org/playlist/miniplaylist' | perl -l -0777 -ne 'print $1 if /<title.*?>\s*(.*?)\s*<\/title/si' | perl -MHTML::Entities -le 'while(<>) {print decode_entities($_);}'

For Spotify, I have this script:

DATA=$(osascript -e 'tell application "System Events"
set myList to (name of every process)
end tell
if myList contains "Spotify" then
tell application "Spotify"
if player state is stopped then
set output to ""
else
set trackname to name of current track
set artistname to artist of current track
set albumname to album of current track
if player state is playing then
set output to trackname & " | " & artistname & " | " & albumname
else if player state is paused then
set output to ""
end if
end if
end tell
else
set output to ""
end if')
echo $DATA | awk -F new_line '{print $1}'
echo $DATA | awk -F new_line '{print $2}'

There are a few places within the code where you can customize what appears if Spotify is paused or stopped. I have those set to be empty. (“”)

Edit – 2019:

I am now using a different application called Ubersicht. For Spotify I use this code:

command: """
read -r running <<<"$(ps -ef | grep \"MacOS/Spotify\" | grep -v \"grep\" | wc -l)" &&
test $running != 0 &&
IFS='|' read -r theArtist theName <<<"$(osascript <<<'tell application "Spotify"
        set theTrack to current track
        set theArtist to artist of theTrack
        set theName to name of theTrack
        return theArtist & "|" & theName
    end tell')" &&
if [ -z "$theArtist" ]
then
    echo ""
else
    echo "$theArtist - $theName" || echo "Not Connected To Spotify"
fi
"""

refreshFrequency: 2000

style: """
  top: 1395px
  left: 2300px
  color: #fff

  .output
    font-family: Helvetica Neue
    font-size: 15px
    font-weight: 100
    text-shadow: 0 1px 5px #111;
"""

render: (output) -> """
	<div class="output">#{output}</div>
"""

I haven’t found a way, or taken the time to script it up myself, but if you have a way to use Ubersicht for KEXP then please let me know.

Stereo is a new music player from Appothecary.

Stereo is currently at version 0.3.1 and is offered at “an introductory price” of $1.99, down from $3.99.

It’s designed to be a simple iTunes music player replacement designed to put importance on album covers. The interface is barebones and puts the album covers front and center. There are two modes, “detailed album art”, which shows larger album covers but fewer artist, and a “more artist” mode, which displays the albums much smaller in order to fit more artists on the screen.

It’s a fullscreen app that you navigate by either scrolling or by typing the artist name.

Detailed Album Art mode with The National selected

More Artists mode, with Autolux selected

Above is the album detail window where it shows you track info about the selected album.

It’s not at version 1.0 yet and has its share of bugs and quirks. It doesn’t always draw the album art, which requires either changing the view mode or scrolling. You can simply type an artist name and it’ll jump to that artist alphabetically. This is sometimes enough to force it to update album art. If an artist has more than six albums, it can be hard to tell without trying to scroll within the artist popup window.

It’s an interesting and simplistic approach. While it’s not designed to be a full-time replacement, at times I miss seeing song ratings and having access to other info like year released or song lyrics. With the current issues and with it not being at version 1.0 it seems over priced at $1.99. I don’t see it being worth a $3.99 unless there are some fantastic surprises to come, and I can’t imagine what those would be. $.99 or $1.99 seems fair compared to other apps.

You can check out Stereo here…

Beats Music is really no different than Pandora, Spotify, Rdio. Sure they all have their own recommendation methods but in the end they are quite similar.

None of them has done anything groundbreaking.

Pandora has a rather limited library and has been living off of its Genome Project since its inception.

Spotify’s apps are interesting but make it cluttered and the UI is a bit of a mess. (Just how many ‘apps’ do we need for individual artists? Here’s a clue – ZERO) Its recommendation service and UI is rather disappointing. Maybe the EchoNest acquisition will help but they still need to implement it successfully into the already goofy UI, and that alone isn’t grand enough.

Beats Music seems to be hanging its hat on curated playlists. I see this as a smokescreen, or at least I hope it is. I hope that Apple and Beats Music aren’t putting that many eggs in the curated playlists basket. It doesn’t seem very innovative. Tonight during the Code Conference interview session Apple’s Eddie Cue and Beats’ Jimmy Iovine stated,

“We think that streaming services need curation. The album is going away. We all know that. The sequencing of an album used to be important. You need an hour’s worth of music. Some of the other services are just based on algorithms. That doesn’t work. Kids listen to programmed radio, and it doesn’t work. We wanted to fix that.”

Just how is Beats Music’s version of curated playlists really that much different than Spotify’s? Because they are created by ‘industry experts’? Spotify’s version is close enough, if not the same. There are celebrity and industry expert playlist on Spotify too. Here is an interview with Beats Music’s CEO Ian Rogers.

Check out some of these curated playlist on Spotify. There are thousands of them:
@indiesongaday – 1 song per artist
@indiesongaday – indie rock – best of 2013
@indiesongaday – indie rock for running

They all fail to create a whole package that is automatic, intuitive, AND complete. (I won’t go into what I think that encompasses here but would be happy to discuss further) Let me just say that they aren’t as successful with recommendations, education, notifications, and user effort/input as they should be at this juncture.

I don’t think Iovine and Dre understand that aspect of it either and I can’t believe Apple is making this deal for the headphone tech. I’d be shocked if Beats Music has a v3.0 waiting in the wings that will be substantially different than the current version which is rather lackluster.

Music technology has been treading water for almost a decade now, and that includes today’s release of Beats Music 2.1. All of these companies are leaving features on the table that I feel could really upset the industry.

I downloaded the Comcast iPhone application excited to see what, if anything, it had to offer. I’ve become a bit jaded with Comcast over the years due to the lack of a real technology push.

I’ve always wanted set top box built-in picture-in-picture and the ability to set my DVR from the internet or my phone. My parents, who live 3500 miles away, have Comcast and built-in PIP but it’s borderline useless. The small picture is stuck in middle third of the screen in the same position if you had it in the corner of a standard definition TV. At least they have it.

I opened the Comcast app and it wouldn’t recognize my comcast.com login, which is my yahoo email address. I verified that I was using the correct login and pass yet the iPhone app still wouldn’t accept it.

I called Comcast and was initially told, “we only support login problems online and internet connection problems”. I explained to the rep that this was a Comcast provided service and she didn’t seem to understand that I wasn’t asking for support with my cell phone itself. After speaking with a manager, they found a buried ‘support request’ page for “comcast mobile”. I filled out this form and went to bed.

Today I tackled the problem again realizing that the support request I filled out last night might’ve been a complete waste of time. I figured that the iPhone app is requiring a comcast.net email which I had never configured or used. I called Comcast again and we reset my comcast.net email password and I verified that I could access it online.

A few minutes later I tried to login to the iPhone app using my comcast.net email and it finally worked.

Comcast, please fix this problem and train your support staff.

This weekend we went down to Mountain View to see Nine Inch Nails and Jane’s Addiction. We went into the venue through the VIP gate and went up to the bar to get our drinks. We noticed that sitting down near the bar with a few friends was Steve Wozniak, Apple cofounder. We got our drinks and went on our way.

We walked across the venue to the other VIP bar and went down the ramp backstage. It was nothing special. Just a bunch of unknown people standing around chatting. The lone exception was Kevin Rose, digg.com founder.

The tour manager told us that Trent Reznor was getting ready to go on stage so we’d have to come back after the show. We walked back up the ramp to find our seats.

Our seats were in one of the box seat sections in the middle of the two reserved sections. We noticed that Steve Wozniak was seated right in front of us. We also noticed that he and his buddies were playing Tetris on a Gameboy. Somehow I noticed that Kevin Rose was seated behind us. I feel like nerd for knowing this but whatever… I work in tech… and know someone who works at Digg.

Nine Inch Nails came on within five to ten minutes. I kid you not, Wozniak and his friends played Tetris for the ENTIRE SET! It was hysterical. He didn’t look up once.

Kevin Rose is in the black sweatshirt. Click on the photo to enlarge.

After the NIN set we left our seats for backstage. We waited around casually for quite a while. Jane’s Addiction had taken the stage and we could see their set from the backstage televisions.

Eventually we were told that Trent Reznor was available so we were led back to his trailer. I have to admit Shoreline doesn’t keep the nicest of rooms for their guest. Very ugly 1970s wood paneling everywhere. We talked with Trent for a few minutes, took some pictures, and made our way back to our seats to pay our tab so we could leave before Jane’s Addiction finished their set.

Back at our box, I noticed “WOZ” in large letters indicating Wozniak’s box in front of us. We also noticed that Wozniak was STILL playing Tetris. Probably through the entire concert except to eat.

MacRumorsLive has been hacked during the live keynote. Various ads and bogus announcements, such as “Steve Jobs Just Died”.