DigitalHobbit

TechCruch’s Michael Arrington posted an interesting (and controversial) article on the future of the music industry: The Inevitable March of Recorded Music Towards Free

Definitely some good points, and an interesting read (although I haven’t had the patience to troll through the numerous comments…). I am not sure I completely agree with the fact that the price of music will inevitably be free, although I can follow his reasoning. But I for one am definitely willing to pay a reasonable amount of money for music if the conditions are right, even if I could easily download it for free. An amount of $5 per album (in high quality digital form, and of course without DRM) seems fair, as long as the majority of this money goes directly to the artist.

I also loved hearing Trent Reznor’s (aka Nine Inch Nails) take on this issue.

This morning I turned on my iPod after not having used it over the weekend, and I was surprised to find that it had been completely erased, as if I had restored it to factory settings using the iPod updater. It prompted me to select my language, I had to re-enter all my settings, and all my songs and podcasts were gone. I had used my iPod on Friday without any problems, and I hadn’t used it since then and not even plugged into my PC or anything. The battery meter was still almost full.

This is the second problem that I’ve had with my iPod, and I’m slowly losing confidence in it… At this point I would certainly not entrust it with any important data that is not backed up elsewhere, for example by syncing my digital camera to it while traveling. I wonder if this is a hardware problem and if I should try to get it replaced by Apple. sigh…

I just had a chance to catch up with the tech news from the past week or so, and I almost couldn’t believe what I read about Sony’s trojan-horse rootkit that was shipped on over 50 CD albums. Apparently this malware searches your computer for illegally downloaded music and reports this to Sony. And not only does the actual rootkit compromise your PC, but the removal application that Sony later issued under pressure from the public leaves your PC in a highly insecure state. I suppose that’s what you get for doing the right thing and purchasing a Sony CD rather than illegally downloading it…

BoingBoing has posted two great roundups on the issue: Part 1, Part 2.

The EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) also stepped up and issued this Open Letter to Sony-BMG.

The sad thing is that being the huge media corporation that it is, Sony is probably going to get away with this…

Even though I only listen to MP3s at this point, I generally prefer purchasing audio CDs and ripping them to MP3 myself, as I refuse to pay a premium price (about $10 per CD on iTunes, for example) for DRM-crippled tracks when I can buy a physical CD for $13. But with practices like this, that may not be the best approach for major label CDs any more. I for one am not going to buy Sony CDs any more.

Luckily, most of the music I listen to is released by smaller independent labels. I really hope that musicians will start selling (non DRM-crippled) downloadable music on their websites, bypassing the record labels entirely. Some independent artists (such as Project Pitchfork) have already started doing this, and hopefully many others will follow.

For a little over half a year now, I’ve enjoyed owning the top of the line iPod model, the 60GB iPod Photo. Sure, there had been a few interesting new models (such as the iPod Nano), but if you were looking for a large storage model, the 4th generation 60GB iPod Photo was the best you could buy. Apple has now released new iPod models to replace the previous 30GB and 60GB models. I have no idea how they managed to pull this off, but the new iPods are significantly slimmer and lighter. The width of the 60GB iPod was reduced from 0.75″ to 0.55″ (less than the previous 30GB model!). The weight has been reduced from 6.4oz to 5.5oz. These alone are some pretty impressive improvements! Additionally, Apple has increased the size of the color screen from 2″ to 2.5″. It pretty much takes up the full width of the iPod now. And while I’m not fully aware of the exact specs, it appears that (as many people have predicted), the new iPod supports video in addition to photos. Like the iPod Nano, it now comes in both white and black. Last not least, the battery life was increased by 33% from 15 hours to 20 hours.

Very impressive! Good thing I’ve been a geek for long enough to be used to the rapid pace at which new gadgets become obsolete… Still, it was nice to own the top of the line model while it lasted.

Awesome idea: Do-It-Yourself iPod Stand, based on a printable PDF template.

Yesterday afternoon we drove back from San Diego to San Francisco. Overall, the trip was pretty smooth – except for one major annoyance. I had brought my laptop along, and the day before the trip back I had downloaded some podcasts for myself as well as my kids. However, when I synced those to my iPod using iTunes, something went wrong, resulting in a corrupted iPod. The iPod still showed that it was half full, but none of the music showed up. iTunes completely hung when it tried to connect to the iPod, and Windows Explorer wasn’t happy either. I suppose the database on the iPod must have gotten corrupted somehow. I have not yet tried resetting the iPod and uploading my music again, but I hope that that’s all there is to it.

The bottom line is that we were stuck listening to the radio, as we hadn’t brought any CDs along. I had forgotten how much radio sucks… It seems like the radio stations on the route between San Diego and San Francisco only play Mexican folk music, christian rock, country, oldies, and hip-hop – none of which I care for. In the end I settled for a couple of classic rock stations, which seemed like the least bad of the bunch. It got so far that I was actually happy to hear Guns N’Roses…

In my case this was just an annoyance, but it definitely raises some concerns about using the iPod for more serious data storage. For example, there are adapters that allow the iPod to synchronize with digital cameras. While this sounds like a very convenient solution for long trips on which you don’t want to carry your laptop with you, I would be very careful about storing a whole trip’s worth of pictures on the iPod without having another backup. I suppose as long as you have access to a networked computer, you could always transfer the pictures from the iPod to another source, such as an FTP server.

While looking for some quality examples of applications built using the Ruby on Rails framework, I came across Odeo.

This San Francisco based company organizes, synchronizes, and publishes podcasts (although it it still in beta and the publishing part isn’t live yet). I’ve only briefly looked at it so far, but it looks very promising. Individual podcasts are tagged, similar to the way bookmarks are tagged at del.icio.us. I have not tried this, but apparently signing up allows users to assign their own tags to podcasts.

Podcasts can be previewed right in the browser (although some previews sound like chipmunks, which according to the FAQ has something to do with sample rates and the flash player). Podcasts can also be subscribed to. Once you have subscribed to a bunch of podcasts, you can automatically download them using Odeo’s Syncr tool, which is available for Windows and Mac, and Linux. Alternatively, you can apparently add your Odeo queue directly to iTunes (only 4.9+), which is most likely preferable to using yet another synchronization tool if you already use iTunes.

The publishing tools sound very interesting as well, although they’re not live yet. These will allow you post podcasts using a browser based interface – no separate audio tools necessary. You can also post a podcast by using your phone to leave a voicemail. And of course you can also post your own podcasts if you already have existing audio files.

I’ve only recently become interested in podcasts (admittedly largely because this functionality is now built into iTunes 4.9 and therefore easily accessible). iTunes podcast interface is very nice, but browsing the hundreds (probably thousands) of podcasts can be a bit cumbersome. I’ll be keeping an eye on Odeo, which seems very usable due to its clean UI, the powerful tag concept, and search functionality. Being able to continue to use iTunes to handle the actual synchronization of podcasts to my iPod, while using Odeo to discover and manage podcasts, sounds like an ideal combination.

In addition to a new iPod update, Apple also released an updated version of iTunes (4.9). The main feature that this version adds is built-in support for podcasts. This is awesome! Podcasts can be selected and subscribed to using the Music Store interface (don’t worry, they’re all free). Once subscribed, podcasts can be configured to automatically be synchronized with the iPod. When a new edition of a podcast comes out, iTunes automatically downloads it and syncs it to the iPod the next time it is connected. There’s a huge amount of podcasts to choose from, ranging from music to news, audio blogs, comedy, audio books, and more.

I only checked out a few podcasts so far (listened to some this morning), and it’s pretty cool stuff. If a podcast consists of multiple sections, the iPod can jump from section to section. Even better, my iPod photo will display a unique picture for each section of the podcast (again, of course only if the podcast is setup accordingly).

My only regret is that I waited until podcasting became truly mainstream to play with this technology.

Maybe I should have checked Apple’s website before posting my previous blog entry. It turns out that the iPod update that came out a few days ago does in fact address the problem with compilations that I mentioned. This makes a huge difference browsing music on the iPod!

Now that I’ve gotten pretty far with ripping my CD collection and properly tagging the MP3s I already had, I ran into a minor iPod annoyance. I have about 20GB and more than 3300 songs in my iTunes library at this point, all of which I sync to my 60GB iPod. A bunch of my albums are collections from various artists – mostly industrial / electronic / goth samplers, 80s collections, tribute albums, etc. This means that there is a huge (one might call it inflated) number of artists in my collection. The actual number of artists of whom I own at least one full album and that are currently in my iTunes library is 97. The inflated number that includes artists of whom I only have a single song on a collection is more than twice as much, 227.

Within iTunes, I have checked the “Group collections when browsing” option that limits the list of artists to the 97 artists I really care about, and groups all collections in an entry called “Collections”. This is the perfect solution to managing my music collection.

Unfortunately, the iPod does not support this feature and insists on displaying all 227 artists. This is particularly annoying as the iPod with its more constrained UI (compared to a desktop app such as iTunes) is where a streamlined interface really matters. Cyling through the artists on iTunes is one thing, but doing the same thing using the clickwheel on the iPod is quite another one. Furthermore, I usually don’t cycle through my library looking for a particular artist, but rather browse around to see what I might feel like listening to.

Hopefully a future iPod firmware update is going to fix this…

Today I went to the Apple Store and bought an AirPort Express Base Station. I had been looking for a good way of listening to MP3s in the living room, and after my boss mentioned how we was using an AirPort Express and a set of PC speakers to stream music into his kitchen, I decided to give it a shot.

I have to admit that I’m very impressed with this little device. Setting it up on my existing wireless network (using a D-Link DI-624 wireless router and a couple of Windows laptops) was a snap. A few minutes later, I was streaming music from iTunes into my living room stereo. I ran into some slight issues afterwards, as the AirPort Express would happily play music for a minute or two, and then lose its network connection until I would power-cycle it. I’m not sure what exactly fixed it in the end, but after configuring my router to assign the same static IP address (static DHCP) to the AirPort (after having noticed that it had acquired several different IP addresses during my initial attempts), as well as enabling the enhanced interference tolerance (don’t remember what exactly the option was called), things started working perfectly.

I still need to set up my Linux box as an iTunes server, enabling me to play my entire music collection on the living room stereo from any computer in the house. There are still some problems with my Linux configuration, mostly the way it deals with German umlauts (see my earlier post). Hopefully I’ll be able to figure out a solution to this problem soon. In the mean time, I can still access all my music through a file share. Even better, I can listen to streaming Internet radio in the living room. There are many preconfigured channels within iTunes, but I was happy to discover that Shoutcast streams work in iTunes as well, as many of my favorite Industrial / Electronic / Goth channels are in Shoutcast.

I guess it says something about Apple’s strategy that neither of the first couple of devices I bought (an iPod Photo, an iPod Mini, and now the versatile AirPort Express) were computers. I have a feeling that my next major purchase will be an Apple computer, such as a PowerBook or maybe even a Mac Mini. They definitely know how to make things that just work…

I could have just used my Tivo to play MP3s, but that would have meant figuring out how to manually upgrade my hacked Tivo to the latest version, as it is unfortunately stuck with an earlier version of the operating system that no longer supports the home media option. That’s too bad, as there is some interesting Linux software for this as well. Maybe some other time. And because the AirPort Express is so small and easy to use, I can even use it as a portable media player (in conjunction with some PC speakers) in other rooms, when traveling, etc.

I received my iPod on Wednesday and wanted to briefly share my first impressions (mind you, I have only used it for about 2 days now, and I haven’t really had a chance to load it up yet).

The iPod is a very nice gadget. It is extremely well made and has a very intuitive user interface. My 60GB version should have enough space to store my entire mp3 collection, as well as the remaining CDs that I haven’t had a chance to rip to mp3 yet. The main challenge with this huge amount of data is how easy it is to access it from the iPod.

Both the iPod and iTunes rely heavily on ID3 tags. In theory, this is very nice, as it means that we’re not constrained by file names and folder hierarchies. On the down side, this works only when all mp3s have proper ID3 tags and causes annoying side effects when this isn’t the case (which is unfortunately the case for many of my mp3s). For example, my mp3 file names are normally prefixed with the track number, ensuring that they always get displayed in the proper order in the filesystem, as well as by most mp3 applications (e.g. Winamp). The iPod seems to rely purely on the track number in the ID3 tag. When this doesn’t exist, it resorts to sorting the tracks alphabetically by title, rather than by file name (in fact, once a song is uploaded to the iPod, it no longer has a notion of file name), resulting in a random (for all intents and purposes) order that bears no resemblence to the proper order.

This is probably my biggest gripe so far, although there are some related problems. Songs from the same album are only properly grouped together when all songs have the correct ID3 album tag. If even one of the album names contains a typo, the iPod considers it a different album and both show up in the album list, each containing only those songs with matching album ID3 tags.

Ultimately, I believe that this approach will end up working well for me. In the mean time, I guess I have to bite the bullet and clean up my mp3 collection. Luckily, there are several promising ID3 tag management applications (both for Windows and Linux) as well as services (such as freedb and MusicBrainz) that provide metadata for music and even (in case of MusicBrainz, although I haven’t tried it yet) claim to be able to automatically identify a song based on a signature that is calculated from the mp3.

On the positive side: As I went with the 60GB version, I am planning on simply syncing my entire music collection to the iPod (rather than picking individual albums and songs), which should make it really easy to simply re-sync everything whenever I’ve made significant updates to the ID3 tags. Until then, I guess I can live with a little bit of chaos in my music collection.

I finally gave in and bought an iPod, kind of as a belated birthday present to myself… Most of my colleagues have one, and I guess I was feeling left out.

I think my timing was pretty good, as Apple just restructured the pricing for their numerous iPod models. In particular, the regular 40GB model that I probably would have bought if I had bought my iPod a few weeks ago, has been phased out and replaced with the 30GB and 60GB iPod Photo models. Of course, I couldn’t resist the temptation and decided to go for the 60GB iPod Photo (which at $449 costs only another $50 more than the now obsolete 40GB regular iPod). If you’re thinking of buying an iPod anytime soon, do yourself a favor and get the iPod photo from buy.com in the next week or so, as they still sell the version that includes the accessories (dock, firewire cable, etc.) that Apple no longer includes with the new models. The actual iPod is the same as the previous model (the iPod photo only came out fairly recently), so you get the same improved battery life, etc.

At this opportunity, I also went ahead and bought a 6GB iPod Mini for my wife. She does not listen to as much music as myself, and therefore should benefit more from the extremely small and convenient size of the Mini than the sheer capacity of the regular iPod or iPod photo.

According to pretty much everybody else I know who has an iPod, this is how it starts, and we should expect to turn into Apple fanatics very soon… I certainly wouldn’t mind to have a nice PowerBook instead of my WIntel laptop…

In the mean time, I need to track down some good software for managing my iPod (which is due to arrive tomorrow) under Linux. It’s too bad that there’s no Linux version of iTunes, but it looks like there are some decent alternatives. In any case, I don’t expect to do a whole lot of syncing once I’ve loaded up my 60GB iPod.

iRiver recently announced the impressive PMP-120 audio / video player, which looks very exciting and has a long list of features. It plays all the relevant audio formats (including MP3, Ogg Vorbis, and WMA), as well as video formats (including Mpeg, DivX, and XviD). It has a built-in speaker as well as a 3.5″ TFT screen, but you can hook it up to a TV as well. Apparently it will initially ship with a 20GB hard drive, but a 40GB version is planned as well. The advertised battery life is pretty impressive, with 16 hours of music or 5 hours of video. Unfortunately, there’s no pricing information just yet. At a reasonably low price (maybe $400 – $500), this could be a real iPod killer. We’ll see… I certainly would not say no to this gadget, at least if it’s as good as it sounds.

There’s some more information in this article.