Matisyahu's Blog

Apologies for the lack of a short and snappy title but I’ve been pulling my hair out trying to find out why ptpcamerad kept relaunching every time I killed the process – one option was to run this command in the background:

while ; do; kill -9 $(ps aux | grep “[p]tpcamera” | awk ‘{print $2}’); done

Now, that kind of worked but wasn’t exactly an elegant solution. I then tried disabling it from the terminal then reboot:

sudo launchctl disable gui/501/com.apple.ptpcamerad

The problem with that is that although it was disabled at boot time the problem is that it kept being launched by an application wanting that service to be enabled. With some more Googling I quickly found what the culprit – Google Drive app that one uses to synchronise on macOS – it did ask me whether I wanted to synchronise my photos and I said to ignore it thus I made the assumption that it shouldn’t interfere with OpenMTP or any other application that was trying to connect to my phone using MTP – how wrong I was. Once I quit out of Google Drive I then tripped over another issue which was MTP appears to have issues with files that have “, !, * and ? in the file name so then I had to do a bulk rename to remove all the “, !, * and ? out of file names which then allowed those files to be copied across (it appears to mirror the Windows file system restrictions restrictions).

On a side note, I don’t use YouTube Music to store my music because unfortunately it re-encodes even if the file format you upload in is a streamable format. I could handle that if it was possible that I could upload my music collection that I keep as a backup in FLAC format (ripped from my CD collection) that I keep in the cloud on my Google Drive but the problem YouTube Music still has a limit of 300MB for a file and one of the tracks is 306MB. Long story short, this is the reason why I needed to get the issue sorted out with OpenMTP and my phone so that I can copy my AAC music collection directly to the device.

I also don’t use the YouTube Music app on my phone because it doesn’t handle large library of music stored locally all that well – indexing the music, very slow to navigate etc. I guess Google probably assumed that most people don’t have large music collections like me or use music subscription service (where all the indexing etc. is stored on the server and kept track 0f) so it is rather a none issue. Instead of using the YouTube Music app I bought a copy of Poweramp Music Player (it’s NZ$7.99 so it isn’t going to break the bank) – it handles my large music library perfectly, it has a great equalizer (I like to boost the bass), the navigation is fast and fluid (there are some negative reviews but one thing to keep in mind that because Android runs on many different hardware combinations then add OEM customisation, what may impact one end user may not necessarily impact others).

The one thing I do need to buy is a USB-C to 3.5mm headphone jack. With my workplace moving into Wellington next year and me deciding to take the train into work each day, I want the ability to listen to some music on my ride in (which can take 35-40 minutes). On the good side though, when I go into work and come home I’m travelling on the off peak times so I get those cheap fares which work out cheaper than taking my scooter.