Inspirational Technology

Tommy Lee Jones spoke to me in a dream and told me not to buy this CD

Tommy Lee Jones spoke to me in a dream and told me not to buy this CD
Letters Universal's price cuts universally laughed at [The Register]

Universal Music to reduce CD prices

Looks like Universal is finally starting to get that maybe extreme prices had a little something to do with the reduction in CD sales. All I can say is it's about time. $12.98 is a start, but is it enough?

If other labels also follow suit this will make the pricing of online services like the iTunes Music Store seem even more outrageous. There's still a very large gap between what the labels consider fair pricing and what is really fair pricing. I guess we have to take baby steps at first.

A new kind of eBook Reader

This is what I like to see, real thought given to the interaction model for new devices. I'd definitely like to see something like that included on a Tablet PC type device.

The Tablet PC is a very good eBook platform, although it's way too expensive to be used just for that purpose. What makes the Tablet PC such a good reader is that it's a general purpose system, this means that you can access eBooks in pretty much any format, including those like web pages that aren't really considered eBooks. Dedicated eBook readers are always limited to a small selection in proprietary formats and even if things like Open eBooks emerge there's still a lot of other things that you may want to be able to read in a portable fashion. The Tablet is quite good for that. There is hope for dedicated readers though, they just need to be vastly cheaper and have much better usability for the task then a more general purpose Tablet PC.

Review: Neil Young & Crazy Horse Greendale

For some reason I've never paid any attention to Neil Young. He's been around about forever and I'm sure I've heard many of his songs before but I sure couldn't name one. I listen to an incredible variety of music too, but there's a big hole around the country rock area, especially from artists that were big in the 70s. Neil Young definitely falls into that category, but a few days ago he showed up as the number one artist on Rhapsody. This piqued my curiosity, so I had to check it out. It turns out Rhapsody had released his new album Greendale a few days early.

At first listen I didn't care for this album at all. Neil Young's voice is well, let's just say it takes some getting used to. Coming into this album with no knowledge of prior work means it was all new to me. It turns out this is a concept album that tells the story of the Greens from a fictional town Greendale California. This makes the album a series of stories more then it does typical songs. This is clearly the country influence showing through. You could just as easily imagine Johnny Cash singing these songs as Neil Young. However, the music is different. It reminds me much more of modern delta blues then it does country. But that's more in feeling then it is in the actual notes that are played. This probably doesn't make much sense. Anyway, it's a dirty sound, driven forward by unrelenting drumming that constantly reminds me of people like R.L. Burnside and Junior Kimbrough. The guitar is particularly distinctive. I'm not too knowledgeable about guitar effects so I'm not sure if the effect is distortion or feedback or something else, but I really like the way it's used. I guess it's a common sound for Neil Young.

The production of this album is another thing that reminds me of people like Junior Kimbrough, meaning it's raw. For this album it shouldn't be any other way. This is music that's rough with a retro americana sound that blends blues, country and rock into a fascinating mix. I guess that describes most of Neil Young's output, so maybe this isn't much different. Particular standout tracks include Devil's Sidewalk, Double E and Sun Green.

In the end, even though I didn't care much for this at first, it's now moved into the top spot in my current rotation. I'm really surprised by this, but I absolutely love this album. If you check it out, just make sure you give it some time.

Now this brings up another one of the absolutely incredible features of Rhapsody. After starting to get into Greendale I decided I wanted to explore some of Neil Young's other work. In the past I would have had to go out and buy a bunch of CDs, now it's just a few mouse clicks to have access to virtually his entire recorded output. Rhapsody has 33 Neil Young solo recordings that can be explored to any depth. This is what I've wanted out of a music service, it's incredible. I can't even begin to recommend Rhapsody strongly enough. If you're a Macintosh user, just buy a cheap $100 used PC, slap Windows whatever on it, install the Microsoft Remote Desktop Client and follow my instructions for hooking up the sound. Rhapsody certainly can be improved, but as it stands right now it is absolutely worth the $9.99 per month.

Latest Rhapsody Discoveries

Just wanted to point out some more great music I've discovered through listen.com Rhapsody. There's so much great stuff there. This time around I'm recommending Fischerspooner and Yerba Beuna.

Fischerspooner is a group I just shouldn't like, but do. They play 80s style new wave/techno pop complete with all the blips and bleeps that were so common in that music. I don't know what it is about them that makes it work, but it does. i guess there's just enough fusion of elements from other styles of music that it keeps the music from sounding like a bad 80s rehash. I shouldn't like them, but for some reason I love it.

Now explaining Yerba Beuna is tough, they're kind of a fusion between Santana, Beuna Vista Social Club, Nelly, Tito Peunte and maybe some Portishead. So I guess that makes them Latin Hip Hop Jazz Rock Trip Hop or something. I don't really know, but their sound has a really great vibe. The only thing that can be stated clearly is that they are latin music so if you don't like latin music you won't like this, also if you can't stand Hip Hop/Rap you probably won't like some of the songs either. Me? I think it's great.

Another Reason to Like Rhapsody

A new reason to really like listen.com Rhapsody is they've started to add exclusive live sets from some really interesting jam bands. So far I've noticed several different bands and I've been listening to The Slip and Three Degrees of Freedom, both very cool for jam bands. If you don't know, a jam band thrives on live recordings, the Grateful Dead is probably the most well known and Phish has been fairly visible of late. I haven't really gotten into Phish (I've only heard studio work and they're supposedly best live), but I do like The Slip and Three Degrees of Freedom.

The Slip have one studio album which is probably worth a listen if you don't have a Rhapsody account. Rhapsody has nine live sets from the Slip and two from Three Degrees of Freedom. It doesn't look like Three Degrees of Freedom have released any CDs into wide distribution, but they do have a site with samples.

Bought Eclipse in Action

To check out the Manning eBooks process I went ahead and bought a copy of Eclipse in Action. It's a straight PDF, no stupid DRM. That makes it a very good value and means I'll probably be buying more eBooks from Manning in the future. I still have my eye on AspectJ in Action, but the Eclipse book is something I have more real use for. I've never bothered to sit down and learn how to use Eclipse, now I will.

Hopefully, with my Tablet PC, O'Reilly's Safari service and other sources of eBooks like Manning I'll never have to buy another 2" thick technical book again.

Manning Publishing eBooks

I just noticed that Manning is publishing their technical books in PDF format. It looks like the book is typically 50% off the cover price of the print edition. You buy them directly from the publisher. Even better, if you then decide to buy the print edition later they apply the purchase price of the eBook to the price of the printed edition.

I'm not positive, but it also looks like the books don't have any DRM to screw things up. If that's the case, this is another great step forward for eBooks in the technical field. Of course they have a license agreement that goes with the books, but it's basically what you'd expect. I'm tempted to pick up a copy of AspectJ in Action to try this out. If there's DRM I'll be pissed.

Rhapsody Discoveries

While browsing around on Rhapsody I came across Eden Atwood. She's a fairly unknown Jazz singer along the lines of Diana Krall. Overall quite enjoyable when you want something soothing that doesn't go over the edge into complete tripe. It's real music.

Also discovered the new Patricia Barber album.

I discovered Partricia Barber when I got into vinyl a few years ago. Her albums sound really incredible on audiophile vinyl played on a good turntable. She's another female jazz singer, but a little more progressive then a Diana Krall or Eden Atwood. Overall great stuff. I recommend both of these albums, Cafe Blue in particular.

Ooh, just noticed Amazon also has these on SACD. That's almost as good as the vinyl. Expensive though.

Real closes on listen.com Rhapsody

Real has taken over the keys to listen.com Rhapsody, I guess it's time to count the days until it goes from being a great service to utter crap. I really like Rhapsody, even though it's windows only. Having access to such a huge library is incredible and is pretty close to what I want out of a music service. Unfortunately, Real Media isn't exactly known for providing quality services and I'm not at all looking forward to their influence on the service coming into effect. Usability of the current service isn't perfect, but I'll be very, very surprised if it actually improves under the control of Real. In fact I bet it goes to hell with all kinds of crap ads, cross promotion of stupid products, spam, spyware and who knows what else. It will be even worse if they try to change it into a pay-per download model, I'll instantly slam it and never go back. The model they already have is great, unfortunately things started out poorly and there's a lot of negative perceptions that need to be adjusted. Going to a stupid pay-per download model will just ruin it. Now that I've gotten that off my chest, Real does have a good opportunity. Taking the Rhapsody model and combining it together with the ability to purchase songs for download could be awesome. That's the model I want to see. I'd gladly pay Apple $10-$15 per month for this ability with the iTunes Music Store. To be able to listen to the whole catalog unlimited while at the computer and then have the option to buy tracks for download to take elsewhere or make CDs would be absolutely great. I think Apple missed the boat on this one. Of course if Real does it, the files will be in who knows what format and will have all kinds of nasty headache inducing restrictions that will ruin it. The model is killer though, and someone will eventually do it. Apple certainly could. It's a minor step from sending 30 second samples to sending full on demand tunes and the purchasing process already works great.

Voice over IP

Dan Gillmor: "In the past month, I've done my part to undermine a monopoly. How? By making phone calls." [Scripting News] This is an interesting read on the state of voice over IP (VOIP) services. The linked article that reviews the Vonage service is also a good read. VOIP has been around for quite a while now and seems to be a good example of a slowly maturing technology. I have looked at it a couple different times (demo units from 3com and Intertel) and generally written it off as a nice idea that just doesn't work. However, now it looks like if the companies can just keep plugging away at it, eventually the services might actually become a suitable replacement for the local phone company. This is a bit surprising to me as the previous demos I've had were really quite horrible.

Backing up an iTunes Library

As I've been ripping my CD collection (1,000 ripped so far, about 1,500 still to go) and downloading from eMusic I've built a quite large library of music. This represents way too many hours of time to reproduce so it's pretty critical to back it up. I've struggled with this issue for a long time and have been mainly relying on multiple hard drives to handle backup duties. This is actually the most cost effective mechanism, but at the rate I'm consuming disk space it's also problematic. I'm currently up to about 100GB of data and will probably consume another 150GB before I'm done with my CD collection. I'm also uncomfortable with having everything tied to the one machine. So I finally broke down and bought a DVD burner so that I can have a portable non-HD based backup. I picked up a Pioneer DVR-105 at Frys for $179, this is basically the same drive as what Apple calls the Superdrive and will work with iDVD if installed internally in the machine. I don't really care about iDVD, but it's nice to have it available.

Tonight I started the process of backing everything up. I figure it will take about 23 discs to handle the current data and then I'll add discs as necessary going forward. I'm looking at doing the backups in iTunes and the process I'm using seems to work fairly well. Here's the process as it stands.

• Create an empty playlist
• Add the entire library to the playlist (just drag the Library icon)
• Set Preferences/Burning/Disc Format to Data CD or DVD
• Use a blank DVD-R and tell iTunes to burn the playlist.
• iTunes asks if you want to burn it as a data DVD which you do.
• ITunes then tells you the entire playlist won't fit and asks if you just want to burn the part that will. So yes.
• When the disc is done iTunes automatically mounts it and switches the view to the disc.
• Find out how many tracks burned on the disc.
• Go back to the backup playlist and select the first track in the list.
• Scroll until you find the number of the last track that was burned. This will be the same as the number of tracks on the disc.
• Hold down shift and click that track.
• Hit delete to remove all selected tracks from the playlist.
• Burn another DVD and repeat the process until all the tracks are gone.

For ongoing backups I'm planning to leverage iTunes smart playlists by creating a smart playlist that shows all tracks added since the date of the last backup. Using that playlist I'll then use the procedure I outlined above. After each backup I'll just update the date on the smart playlist. I'll probably do this about once per month and rely on HD backup during that period.

I figured this is a much easier way then trying to backup from the file system directly. The problem is spanning discs and keeping track of where you are in the process. It will also be kind of a pain going forward as you add more tracks

Hopefully this will work fairly well. The one thing I'm a little concerned about is restoring the discs. The files are written to the discs in a flat manner, rather then using the directory based mechanism iTunes usually uses. What I figured I'd do was just reimport the files off the DVD into iTunes. This is the one problem with these discs though, as I'm pretty sure it will import the file as a new record in the iTunes database. This means you'll lose all the existing metadata that is associated with that song. This is one advantage to just backing up the files from the file system directly.

Does anyone know of a better way to handle this kind of thing without resorting to a backup program like Retrospect?

Two Computers, One Set of Speakers

Since I've been using my Tablet PC a lot to listen to music from listen.com Rhapsody, I wanted an easy way to share the speakers that are hooked up to my desktop Mac. My first thought of course was to just run a splitter to the speakers and then hook it to both systems. My second thought was that that is probably a bad idea, but I tried it anyway. It of course isn't a good idea. The much simpler solution is to run the line out from the Tablet PC into the line in on the Mac. You then just need a simple piece of freeware called LineIn to pass the line in through so that it can play through the Mac's speakers. This works quite well, so now anytime the Tablet is docked it plays through the speakers on my Mac and then if you undock it you can just plug in headphones to continue listening. It also allows you to control the volume using the keyboard controls on the Mac.

More Music Service Changes

Well it looks like the wave of changes to legal music services is really picking up steam. Pressplay is going to be relaunched as Napster 2.0 with a hybrid subscription/pay-per download model (how this differs from the current Pressplay model I have no idea, but they're saying it's different). MusicMatch is also adding a pay-per download option to it's service. From the second article an interesting quote:

Beyond the pricing issues, MusicMatch chief executive Dennis Mudd told the conference that the crucial key to a successful music service lies in portability -- the ability to move music beyond the PC and on to devices in the home and in the car.

Yep, so how about just getting rid of the stupid DRM then? That's all that's necessary to turn the current ho-hum services into home run services. Put in the same DRM like BuyMusic.com and well you may as well not even bother.

Use a Linux box as an iTunes music server

Mac OS X Hints has a nice tip on running an iTunes music server on Linux. This isn't just sharing the files via Samba or NFS, it's to enable the music to show up as a shared library in iTunes just like if you were sharing music from another Mac. Very cool.

When DRM goes bad and some alternatives

There's a follow up from the person who was having trouble with the iTunes DRM when he moved to Canada. It appears Apple is trying to make it right, but this is just further evidence of why DRM on purchased music is simply not a good idea. He points to eMusic and Magnatune as legal sources of music in DRM free MP3 format. I've recommended eMusic many times, but wasn't aware of Magnatune.

Magnatune is a label that publishes music for purchase electronically. The music has no DRM and when you purchase you can choose either MP3 or uncompressed WAV files to download. They even let you choose your own price, with options ranging from $5 to $18. $8 is the recommended price on everything I looked at. Overall a pretty interesting experiment and something we will hopefully see more of. I've been sampling a number of their artists and there's some pretty interesting stuff there. The artist gets 50% of the album purchase price. I haven't bought anything yet, but I probably will. Obviously it's a small label and you won't find any major artists there, doesn't mean the music is bad though.

More BuyMusic.com Rumblings

Well there's sure been a lot of discussion about buymusic.com in the last couple days. None that I've seen has been the least bit positive, including my own opinions. Here's a particularly interesting post from someone who actually bought something from the service, to say the experience appears to have been painful is an understatement. It also seems that they've tightened up the site so that you can only view it with Windows IE. This is quite simply foolish, although I'm sure all the negative things being said by people coming in from Macs hasn't made them too happy. If you really want to visit the site you can either turn off javascript or change the user agent in the browser, but who cares, there's really no reason to visit the site.

This is critical though, it's extremely important that windows users don't use this service. People need to make it clear to the RIAA, once again, that this is not what people want. DRM on purchased music is simply unacceptable, even the relatively liberal DRM on the iTunes Music Store purchased music is proving to be problematic on some unexpected levels. What's going to happen five or ten years from now when you try to play this music that was purchased? It seams the only way to ever get this message across is to insure that all these services continue to struggle until they bend to a point that is consumer acceptable. Right now the iTunes Music Store (iTMS) is close, but it's still not good enough. BuyMusic.com is a massive step backwards.

If you're a windows user who wants to listen to digital music legally, use Rhapsody to find and listen to the full length recordings and then order the actual CD from half.com or some similar place. Rhapsody has by far the best selection of any service, is only $9.95 per month and is reasonably friendly to use. Just don't think of it as a download service. That's not what it is. It will give you the instant gratification to hear the music before the Cd arrives and it will save you money by allowing you to ignore all the CDs that turn out to not be all that great when taken as a whole. I was highly skeptical of the Rhapsody service, but I've grown to really like it. Also eMusic is another great service that is actually multi-platform and has no DRM. I personally love the selection, but it isn't for everyone.

Legal sources of digital music are slowly getting better, but as consumers we have to speak loudly by rejecting the services that are not any good. BuyMusic.com is not any good.

BuyMusic.com or err... um OK you can't actually buy it.

I mentioned this in my previous post, but I thought it was so funny I had to mention it again. The name of the site is BuyMusic.com, but from their Terms of Use:

All downloaded Content is sublicensed to End Users and not sold, notwithstanding use of the terms “sell,” “purchase,” “order,” or “buy” on the Site or this Agreement.

So on this great service called BuyMusic.com you can't actually "buy" music. Great, just great, doesn't anyone care about how the customer fits into this equation?

Oh yeah, one more thing. They're incredibly deceptive with the $.79 per track price, almost nothing on the site is actually $.79 cents. And even if all the tracks were actually $.79 it's still a horrible value with all the DRM restrictions. The pricing on the site is all over the map and there's no consistency at all. Many full albums are as much or more expensive then the CD. This place is NOT worth giving a dime to.

BuyMusic.com steps up to the plate, swings and ... nothing but air.

Buy.com launched their competitor to the iTunes Music Store (iTMS) today. I'm really quite perplexed by this service. I don't at all see how it is any better then any of the other music download services that have come before. The files are in Windows Media format and are heavily restricted with DRM. What's even worse though, the DRM varies widely across different files. Talk about a headache. I'm unhappy about the level of DRM in the iTMS, but at least it's the same for every file. With BuyMusic.com you have different restrictions for downloads, burns and transfers to portable devices and each file is completely different. Who wants to keep track of that kind of thing.

There's also a distinction between whether a computer has a primary license or a secondary license. The computer you buy the music on has the primary license and it looks like you can't directly transfer files to another computer without re-downloading them again so that you can get a secondary license. A secondary license just allows you to listen to the music on that computer, you can't transfer it to any other device or burn it to CD. Also, not all songs are licensed to allow you to access them from more then one computer. For instance, 50 Cent Get Rich or Die Trying. Even though it allows unlimited burns and transfers to portable devices, only allows one download. That is something that really doesn't make much sense and is massively limiting. Here's another, Norah Jones Come Away With Me, only 3 burns or transfers and one download. This is horrible value when you're paying $.99 for a song.

The existing services like Rhapsody and Pressplay are way better value then this. Sure you don't "own" the music, but read the terms of use on the BuyMusic.com service and you'll see you don't "own" the music there either, it's "licensed" to you. I'd much rather pay $9.95 per month for unlimited access to the entire collection on Rhapsody, then pay $9.95 or more for one albums worth of songs from BuyMusic.com. So what if it's tethered to the computer, at least that way if there's something that you find out you really, really want to own then you can buy it online and get the actual CD. You still get instant gratification to listen to the music and you can be sure you're really going to like it. The CD will probably be cheaper too, as on BuyMusic.com full album prices vary wildly. For instance that Norah Jones CD, if you want to buy the whole thing will set you back $13.59, which is actually $.10 more then the real CD on Amazon. With all the restrictions this is not good value, not at all.

There's also the interesting quirks, like having one of their top downloaded albums not even available for download as a full album. And you can't even actually buy the whole album through the service since one of the tracks isn't even available.

So as far as I can see this service has all the problems of iTMS (partial albums, too expensive, DRM), but with none of the benefits (easy to use, tight integration with iTunes). Just for good measure they also throw in extra headache inducing DRM, that's far worse then that in iTMS and don't even support the most popular portable music player. Music selection isn't any better and is certainly far worse then Rhapsody. So I guess the one redeeming quality is that it works on Windows, well so does Pressplay and Rhapsody and who knows how many other mediocre services.

People seem to forget that this model has been tried and tried and it just doesn't work. A friend of mine worked on a site for Virgin, I think four years ago, that sold music just like this. It failed horribly. What makes the iTMS work, isn't the fact that it's selling individual song downloads, it's the entire package that matters. The iTMS is only successful because it's extremely easy to use, convenient, and isn't horribly draconian on the DRM front. Take away any one of those and iTMS would flop just like all the others that have come before. BuyMusic.com has none of those things going for it, I think you can see what the conclusion is.

Billboard online downloads chart

Looks like Billboard has launched their chart for online downloads. Should be interesting to watch this and see how it compares to the offline version. Although it also looks like they've already been posting charts on an individual service basis, looks like this new chart is a premium content option on their website.

What's really interesting, the Slate article mentions that the No 1 song ("Crazy in Love," by Beyoncé with Jay-Z) only had 1,500 paid downloads compared to 317,000 album sales in the same period. They also mentioned that an influential blogger could probably put a particular track into the number one spot. It'd certainly be funny to see some one try.

Review: Listen.com Rhapsody

I'm a big music fan, no really I mean a big music fan. I'm one of these people who devours music, lot's and lot's of music in all different genres. I have music playing just about all the time. I have a huge CD collection and have been building an even larger MP3 collection from eMusic, the iTunes Music Store and any other place that I can find legal music. To this point eMusic has been my favorite service, since I'm just the type of person who can appreciate the selection that they have to offer. However, last week I finally decided to give LIsten.com Rhapsody a real try.

Listen.com Rhapsody is a music on demand service that gives you unlimited access to their entire catalog for $9.95 per month. You use their proprietary software to access the service, select the music you want to hear and play that music back. The service also offers the ability to burn individual tracks to CD for $.79 each, although not all tracks are available for burning.

The first catch with Rhapsody is that I'm a Macintosh user and the Rhapsody software only runs on Windows. Fortunately I also just acquired a Tablet PC with one the specific goals of it being to access services like Rhapsody. What makes this workable is the Microsoft Remote Desktop Client for Mac OS X. I don't often say nice things about Microsoft, but the Mac RDC client is quite nice and makes it perfectly livable to have a Windows PC to complement your Macintosh. I basically treat the RDC client as if it was the Rhapsody software running on my Mac and it works quite well. Of course, I'd much prefer to have a native Mac OS X client for the Rhapsody service, but as it stands the current solution works.

Anyway, on to the actual service. First we have to be clear, Rhapsody is not a download service. It's a music on demand service. This means you have to have a computer connected to the network to listen to the music. For people who spend large amounts of time at their computers like, well, me for instance. This isn't really a bad thing. However if you're the more mobile type who actually has a life away from the keyboard it might not be as appealing. The Rhapsody service does offer the ability to burn CDs, but I'll offer my opinion on that feature later.

For music on demand you browse the collection of music and add tracks or albums to your playlist and the client then on demand downloads the song and begins playing. While you can think of this as a streaming service, it's not really streaming in a technical sense. It's simply downloading the file when you ask to play it and then beginning play before the download is complete. Because of how this works the software does cache some number of the downloads, so playing a track again does not necessarily result in it being downloaded again.

On my Cable modem connection the performance of this mechanism is pretty good. However, all is not perfect and this is where we encounter our first glitch with the service. Since it's downloading each track individually there is a pause between tracks while it buffers enough of the download to begin playing. This pause can be very distracting on some albums where the tracks are intended to play together with no breaks. I first noticed this while listening to Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon and it was very annoying each time a song changed. On most albums this won't be a problem, but for people who like music put together in longer forms, like much classical music, it will be a real problem. It's unfortunate that the service is marred by this problem as they clearly have ways that they could have minimized the problem with a little extra work on the client. Starting to download the next track on the playlist before the current one finishes playing is one obvious alternative.

For the most part playing works pretty well. I've experienced the occasional glitch where it seems to not quite download the song fast enough, but that's been pretty rare. The experience on a lower bandwidth connection may be a different thing altogether.

Since Rhapsody has licenses from all five major labels and a number of independents the selection on the service is pretty good. Obviously, no service has everything yet and Rhapsody is no exception, but of the services I've tried so far, it does seem to have the overall best selection across all genres. It's also not plagued by the partial album problem as much as the iTunes Music Store (iTMS). In addition, because of the nature of the service, when you do encounter a partial album it's no where near as annoying as it is on iTMS. Here you're paying $9.95 for unlimited access and you're not actually buying individual albums. On iTMS when you encounter a partial album it means a waste of money to buy the partial set of tracks if you think you still might want to hear the whole thing. On Rhapsody there's no incremental cost involved so it isn't as big an issue.

Particularly notable artists that I've found on Rhapsody include: Wynton Marsalis, Annie Lennox, Doc Watson, Johnny Cash, Mogwai, The Mahavishnu Orchestra, Stevie Ray Vaughn, Son Seals, Jack Johnson, Coldplay and Mono. Some that are missing that I would love to see added include: Goldfrapp, Evanescence and Lilith. Obviously this is a small set of what exists, and it seems that they're adding a couple hundred albums a week. Jazz looks pretty good and classical is better then most services, but not great (the pause between tracks is an issue as noted), Blues is good for the modern stuff, less so for older recordings (eMusic is particularly strong here), folk and country look fairly good though I'm a bad judge for country. Rock/Pop is of course well represented with the usual suspects missing (Metallica, Madonna). Overall the selection is good, if still very incomplete.

I used to be an audiophile, however, I hung up my golden ears when I decided to trade quality for convenience and move to 100% computer based music. Given this, to me the sound quality of the service seems quite good. I believe the files are encoded at 128kbps, I'm guessing in Windows Media format, but the exact format isn't really clear. All I can say is that I've been quite happy with the sound quality for how I use it. I've mostly been listening through a pretty good quality set of Sennheiser headphones that are fairly revealing and I haven't noticed anything annoying about the quality. It seems at least as good as the 128kbs AAC files from the iTMS and I haven't noticed any major difference with the 192kbs AACs I've ripped from my own CDs. Is it CD quality? No, certainly not, but it's good enough for the type of service it is. Definitely better then any FM radio and better then the digital music services available from digital cable companies. Plus you can't argue with the ability to select whatever music you want and play it on demand with no waiting to download the entire thing.

Even though the service is primarily a music on demand service, it does offer the ability to burn CDs of tracks from the service. This ability has an additional fee attached, currently $.79 per track. With this you can burn one copy of the selected tracks. Any additional burns incur an additional charge at the same rate. The price just covers burning to a CD, it does not cover retaining any kind of digital format file on the computer. I haven't actually used this feature, because I find it to be a poor value. In fact I think the service would be better off without this feature, because I believe it skews peoples perceptions in a negative way. The $.79 per song burn price is a very poor value, but the $9.95 music on demand service is an excellent value for what is actually a very good service. The problem comes in trying to compete with free downloads and this is an unfortunate situation. The Rhapsody service can't offer the same kind of capability while retaining reasonable pricing and in making that attempt the real value of the service can easily be lost in the negative feelings brought on by the poor value of the burn capability.

Other then the poor value of the CD burn feature, Listen.com Rhapsody is an excellent service for music on demand. If nothing else, it's worth $9.95 per month just to be able to preview the full length album prior to purchasing it someplace else. I enjoy the service greatly. I do wish they would release a Mac OS X client, but as it stands the service is usable and a good value. Since I spend so much time at the computer I actually prefer this service to the iTunes Music Store and it makes a good complement to the more eclectic selection found on eMusic.

There really isn't a single service that is perfect. Fortunately, it's fairly inexpensive to subscribe to more then one and by using them together you have access to a library of music that is vastly larger then anything previously available. I personally own ~2,500 CDs, and the selection within that collection is vastly smaller then what is already available in these services, this to me is truly exciting and I look forward to the day when the RIAA finally decides to allow the construction of a complete music service. Until that time Listen.com Rhapsody is a pretty good start and I highly recommend it.

New Free eBooks from Microsoft

Microsoft has posted the next batch of free eBooks in their summer reading program. Last week the titles weren't too interesting, but this time around it includes The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams, The Flying Book by David Blatner and The Face in the Frost by John Bellairs. All three look pretty interesting, and the Douglas Adams is a book I've wanted to read for, well ... for years. I've picked it up in the bookstore many times, just never managed to make it to the counter with it for some reason.

Right now I'm still in the process of reading A Short History of Nearly Everything. This was part of the first weeks promotion. It's turning out to be really interesting, but kind of slow going. It's a very good book and I definitely recommend it. It's just not the riveting kind of thing you would get with a fiction novel so it's not that kind of suspenseful page turner.

For the last year or so I hadn't been reading nearly as much as I used to, now with eBooks I'm starting to get back to my old ways. In fact I now actually prefer eBooks to paper books. Even with the limitations (some still significant).

Tablet PC and O'Reilly Network Safari: a perfect match (almost)

A couple years ago when I was working on a book for O'Reilly I was given an account on the Safari Bookshelf service. Safari is an online service that allows you access to a large library of technical books, including it appears the entire O'Reilly library. I really didn't care much for the service. At the time I had a clear preference for paper books and reading at the computer was just not pleasant. I saw the value as a reference, but the price wasn't appealing since I was still buying a lot of paper books.

Technology has advanced since then and display quality has improved quite a bit. My current 20" Apple Cinema Display is vastly more readable then the 19" Sony CRT monitor I was using at the time when I tried Safari. Even more importantly though, I now have a Tablet PC and this finally makes the Safari service a must have if you're a technical user. Reading on the tablet works very well, and allows you to comfortably take your reading away from your desktop system. This was always a big reason I preferred paper books. Sitting at a desk and reading long passages just doesn't feel comfortable, but reclining with a Tablet PC works perfectly well.

Interestingly, the Safari service is also a place I would actually like to see DRM applied. The one big limitation with Safari is that you have to have a network connection to access it. You're given bookshelf space based on the service level you subscribe to. For instance for $14.95 per month you get a 10 slot bookshelf. You can swap the books at any time as long as the book your replacing has been on your shelf for at least 30 days. Basically it's a book rental service and as long as you're the type who accesses lots of books and swaps the books out often it presents a good value. With the Tablet PC it would be very nice to be able to download books in PDF format that could be accessed anywhere. Since you're basically renting the books, it would be perfectly acceptable to require the books be renewed once per month to continue using them. Buying books with DRM is a bad use of DRM because it takes value from the customer, but using DRM to enable an alternative service model that gives value that wouldn't otherwise exist can be a very good thing.

It may seem strange that this presents good value, but you have to consider the particular market this is playing in. Technology books are expensive ($30-$60) and go out of date extremely fast. Very few maintain their value past about two years and will generally be updated in that time (requiring another full price purchase). They're also often big and heavy which makes it impossible to carry a library around with you. In the past I constantly ran into problems where I would own a book on a subject, but that book was not where I needed it to be. The Safari service solves this, as long as you have a network connection. Using DRM and the PDF format would even enable this limitation to be removed without spoiling the basic business model. I've reduced my book spending considerably, but I still spend hundreds of dollars per year on technology books, in the past I actually spent at least $1000 per year (usually much more) on technology books. I now have boxes and boxes of tech books that just aren't worth anything because they're so out of date. Just giving them away is painful considering how much they cost. The Safari service allows you to keep an up to date library, accessible from anywhere there's a network connection without the problem of storage and disposal of paper books. Considering this, the Safari service is an outstanding value. Hopefully the service will be able to offer the same value and eliminate the need for the network connection by leveraging DRM in a good way.

Oh, yeah, just thought of something else. The Safari service will also allow me to get rid of all the other books that I'd been hanging onto, "just in case". Those books are out in the garage right now, there's not much value in that.

The shortcoming of ad programs like Google Adsense

Mac Net Journal is wondering about the value of Google Adsense. There are clearly limitations to the program, especially for site that are very focused. This is particularly bad for Mac oriented sites, as Google always seems to serve the same 5-10 ads. Most of which are for Mac hardware. It's not particularly conducive to drawing clicks from people who probably already own a Mac.

So far the ads on this site have seen enough clicks to make them worth having, but not enough to really make a difference. Fortunately I write about enough different topics that there is some variety once you get off the homepage. For me it's been pretty interesting, as I've actually learned about a number of pretty interesting products through the Google ads. This is especially true on the XML pages where the ads have a little more variety. In particular, I've found a couple new XML databases that I wasn't aware of.

Free eBooks from Microsoft

To spur the interest in eBooks, Microsoft is running a promotion giving away three eBooks each week. They're in encrypted/encumbered Microsoft Reader format of course, but you can't complain too much for free. The first three books are online now.

One of them is A Short History of Nearly Everything, which is a title I was pretty interested in reading so I was happy to see this.

Lately, I've been doing a lot of reading on my Pocket PC and I'm really starting to like eBooks. Well at least the ones that have reasonable or no DRM like those for the Palm Reader. Palm Reader books aren't tied to the continued existence of any particular service. They're encrypted with the credit card number that you used to purchase them. That makes for a pretty effective deterrent to sharing them and it still gives you control over them. The only problem is that over time tracking the keys will be a problem as CC numbers change and they are of course dependent on the continued existence of the Palm Reader software.

Unfortunately, future proof is something that just doesn't exist when formats are proprietary and that makes me very hesitant to spend any real money on digital formats. I'm trying to keep an open mind and explore all the angles, but it's tough when the formats are not designed with the concerns of the consumer in mind.

Apple Tablet Rumblings (again)...

MacRumors is reviving the rumors of an Apple tablet. I'm of course am absolutely dying to buy something like that. However given what I've said about Tablet PCs I also have to feel the same way about Apple's prospects for launching a device into the category. It's just doesn't appear to be a winning market.

It seems what uptake of Tablets exists is occurring mostly in the corporate arena, not exactly Apples strong area. I think this is primarily based on price, as in reality I see the Tablet being something that should have strong appeal to the home user. At least it probably would if it was even slightly marketed toward that arena.

For me the appeal of the Tablet is for media (i.e. digital music, movies), web browsing in a relaxed manner, holding a digital library and note taking. Of these only note taking is probably outside the realm of what most people would do with their home computer and that's not entirely outside it either. The tablet form factor should also be very good for digital photography and video editing. Neither of those generally require significant amounts of text editing (at least they don't with decent software). Combine it with wireless printing and the ability to hook up to a TV and it should be a pretty compelling solution within the home.

Hmm, now that I really think about it, maybe Apple should make a tablet and aim it at this market. Of course if PC makers can't get the price down, it's not too likely Apple will either and tablet prices are still way too high. Ugh, all I know is I want a tablet. I'd much, much rather have one from Apple, but I fear I'll have to settle for a Tablet PC.