Zombies Run and iTunes

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Hey all,

First post here after searching in vain for the solution. Hoping you folks can help out.

Using the awesome running app, Zombies, Run! It lets you import iTunes playlists to listen to while running, which seems great - BUT - iTunes music absolutely will not cooperate.

I realize this isn't a high level of detail, but does anyone have any clue as to what the issue could possibly be (protected music maybe?) and could offer a possible solution?
I even converted a few songs to mp3 without success. I really don't know what else to do and as much as I love Apple products, the restrictions iTunes has levied are pretty frustrating.
 

robduckyworth


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iTunes doesnt use protection on their music anymore. So we could probably rule that out. Im not familiar with the app, but i can possibly get a little closer to the answer for you.

What exactly does the app do when trying to add itunes music?
 
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Thank you for the quick response!

I hit 'Start Mission' and it tells me in a pop up window: 'Unplayable Music' and below it in the text box: Some music in your playlist will be ignored by ZR's (zombies run) built in music player because its DRM protected or hasn't been downloaded. If you are using iTunes match, make sure your music is downloaded to your device. For more info read iTunes Match and DRM on the settings page.

Then it gives me a giant bloody list of what can't be played. :(

Having said that, I have most of my music downloaded already. I'll double check before I make a fool of myself, but the DRM has been an issue for some time for me. If the problem IS the DRM, is this beatable?

Thank you again.
 

bobtomay

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iTunes allowed upgrading to DRM free for all of the older music several years ago.

Don't know if that is still going or not.
And sounds like it won't work unless your music is on the device - not in the cloud.
 
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Well I think I have an actual answer for you :)

I'm having the same issue. At first I thought it was some type of issue with the music, but I knew it wasn't DRM. But I was getting issues on different songs from different sources with different bitrates and encoding. I couldn't find a pattern.

Zombies Run also takes a LONG time to parse your playlist. In trying to shrink down my large playlist, I found that different songs would get flagged as unplayable each time the app parsed my playlist.

I kept dividing the playlist to isolate the "bad songs" and suddenly there was no problem. I'm of the opinion that this is a bug in Zombies Run (v 1.5) that presents similar to an array overrun issue. Random songs are reported as unplayable as the list size increases. Once the playlist is down to 31 items or less, I stopped seeing any issues.

Other things I tried but didn't have luck with:
- The "Legacy iPod Player" option plays music just fine, but the game's audio tracks cut out - it just doesn't work.
- Creating a "smart playlist" in itunes to get a random segment of your big playlist doesn't work. The songs won't reshuffle. The "apple" solution is to include a last played > 30 days restriction in the smart playlist. However the ZR player doesn't update the last played times for the songs!

What I finally did was to create a master playlist with all the music on my iPod. Then create 4 smart playlists, each with a 31 song random subset of the master list. Then to shuffle the 4 smart playlists, install this applescript in iTunes:
Code:
tell application "iTunes"
	delete tracks of playlist "iPhone 31a"
	delete tracks of playlist "iPhone 31b"
	delete tracks of playlist "iPhone 31c"
	delete tracks of playlist "iPhone 31d"
end tell
This will delete the current 31 random tracks and itunes will immediately repopulate them with new random songs. (Then Sync.)

For instructions on installing an applescript for itunes, see: Doug's AppleScripts for iTunes ♫ Download Faq
 

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