SUCK IT, APPLE, YOU LOSERS, YOUR AIRPLAY PIECE OF CRAP IS FIXED.

Ahem. That is to say, I found a way around one of AirPlay's known persistent bugs. Since this calls for both gloating and some documentation, here we go.

AirPlay (Apple's stream-music-over-wifi protocol) has two known bugs that are incredibly annoying and have not been fixed for twenty years. (Cue gnashing of teeth, etc.)

1: You can't edit a song's metadata in iTunes/Music while AirPlay is enabled. Want to change the genre? Add a comment? Fix the artist's name? Too bad! Even worse, sometimes it will look like the tags were changed, but the change will not actually be written to the file, and as soon as you turn AirPlay off five years worth of changes will disappear and leave you screaming into the void. Just as a totally random example. All you can do about this is turn AirPlay off every time you want to edit the metadata, so the changes take.

2: iTunes/Music has a setting that will normalize the loudness of songs--that is, adjust the gain so they all play at about the same loudness regardless of what the actual file is recorded at. But this setting doesn't work while you're using AirPlay! So if you have, for example, playlists with songs from different artists, it's very likely you'll either constantly be adjusting the volume or just living with the nails-on-blackboard unevenness.

I have over 9000 songs in my music library and mostly listen to mixed playlists, so you can imagine that this became fairly critical when I finally decided AirPlay was the best option for my upstairs speakers. Thankfully, while I still can't do anything about 1, I have found a solution for 2. It requires several steps, and that you be on a laptop/desktop rather than a tablet or phone.

( details below )

Of course, I'm going to need to do the mp3-conversion and normalizing steps again every time I add new music, but between Audacity's batch conversion and MP3 Normalizer's batch conversion, this should not be onerous. Annoying, but not onerous.

HA! YES! SUCK IT, APPLE, I'M GOING TO CHANGE MY SYSTEM FOLDER ICONS WHETHER YOU LIKE IT OR NOT!

*breathing hard*

For those who have updated to El Capitan and lost their custom icons:

-Shut computer down.
-Hold down Command + R and restart (release buttons once the gray apple icon appears on the screen)
-Wait for the dialogue box on a dark gray screen; bypass the dialogue and go up to the menu bar and select Utilities > Terminal.
-Type in: csrutil disable
-Hit return. Close Terminal and select Restart from the apple icon on the menu bar.

-Fire up LiteIcon or whatever icon swapper you use and swap out icons.
-To do it by hand navigate to System/Library/CoreServices/CoreTypes.bundle; right click and select "Show Contents" for CoreTypes; navigate to Contents/Resources; replace the system icons by hand.

-Now do that reboot, Cmnd+R, Terminal song and dance again.
-This time, type: csrutil enable
-Close out and restart, and lo you will have both your custom icons and your system integrity protection.


This process complicated, in my case, by the fact that none of my computer's boot screens will accept a tap on my trackpad as select/enter, and I had to go fish out my spare mighty-mouse from way back when to actually CLICK on anything.

*gives Apple two middle fingers, quite vigorously*