Protecting those valuable family recordings
As it turns out, there are some challenges in solving this problem, but we believe we’ve dug up the best solution we can find. Our thanks to Erica Sadun of Ars Technica who wrote a post entitled “How to manage your iPhone apps in iTunes”. Written to great depth, the net of the article is that:
- Applications files are backed up by iTunes, but they are separate from the backing up of the application
- They are stored on your system with unrecognizable names
- They cannot be re-integrated back into your application if you are looking to restore your application for some reason
That said, all is not lost. In the case of our lullabies, we want you to be able to always listen to those beautiful recordings on the your PC or MAC even if your iPad, iPhone or iPod Touch has been lost or replaced with newer technology.
We have found a vendor that provides a solution to this problem. We have not run their software, but it does seem to provide the necessary capabilities. Reincubate, Ltd has a solution. The folder names for our Lullabies can be found below.
If you have a Mac, Erica has written a free application that you can also run to restore your files. Just follow these steps. We've added a few Info lines to take some of the mystery out of this.
- [Info only, you can skip this] When you Sync your device to iTunes the files are backed up on your system. To see them, open Finder and click to [your computer name – the home icon] – Library – Application Support – MobileSynch – Backup
- [Info only, you can skip this] Once at Backup you will see a line of letters and numbers (it’s hexadecimal) for each device you’ve connected to iTunes. You can click on each, scroll to the Info.plist file to see which is for each device. Your files are there but you cannot really figure out what it what. There is where Erica comes in.
- Go to Erica’s website to download a program called mdhelper. You can take the mdhelper ZIP file and open it or just download mdhelper. No matter what you do, just ensure that the mdhelper file is on your desktop.
- In Finder, under Places, click on Applications – Utilities – Terminal
- In Terminal, enter “CD desktop”.
- Then enter “./mdhelper -extract”.
- You will now have a folder on your desktop labeled: “Recovered iPhone Files”. Open that file in Finder and click on the device which has your lullaby recorded files. There will be a different folder name to open for each of our lullaby apps.
- Hush, Little Baby: AppDomain-88GG2QELC6.com.mytalesdigital.HLB001
- Sleep, Baby, Sleep: AppDomain-88GG2QELC6.com.mytalesdigital.SBS001
- Rock-a-bye Baby: AppDomain-88GG2QELC6.com.mytalesdigital.RABB001
- Click on the device you want, then click on Documents and you will see a long list of .CAF files (these are in Apple Core Audio Format). There is one for each singing of the lullaby and one for each page recording. If you recorded as “Grandma” then save that copy of GrandmaMusic.caf for her singing. Each reading page is saved as Grandmap1.caf, Grandmap2.caf, etc.
- You can double-click a file and you can hear it play. Now - since you went to all this trouble, back those files up!
Our thanks again to Erica Sadun and to Rose at iPadAppsHUB.com for being the enablers here. Of course this can be extending to saving files from any other app, you’ll just need to contact the developer to get the file names. There is a lot more information on Erica’s Ars Technica post including information on app file structure and the backing up apps themselves (if you don’t want to count on Apple providing this capability in the future).
If any other vendor would like to be referenced here, please contact us at support [at] mytalesdigital [dot] com.