Inspirational Technology

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.

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.

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.

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.

Spookiest Song Ever

`97 Bonnie and Clyde from Tori Amos' album Strange Little Girls. This is an incredibly haunting version of Eminem's song off The Slim Shady LP. Stripped of the typical Eminem aggression it's stunning how effectively scary that song can be. Tori Amos set it in a very slow, basically spoken word style over a haunting string arrangement. It's very cool.

Review: Massive Attack 100th Window

Alright I'm in a review writing mood so I'll add a review for the album of the number 2 song on my top 25. Let's see what can we say about Massive Attack 100th Window? Well it's enjoyable, I've listened to it quite a few times, however it also doesn't stand out. In fact as I write this I can't mentally bring any tune from the album into my mind. The way I've been listening to the album is as something that is enjoyable without being too offensive and without dropping all the way to being just background music.

I guess this isn't a very ringing endorsement for the album but it isn't a horrible thing either. Even if the music doesn't stick, the album it self has made it into my rotation and is listened to quite a bit which means it is good.

Like previous Massive Attack efforts 100th Window is a downtempo album with electronic beats, mellow lyrics and a rich melodic backdrop of electronics and samples. It's music meant to be listened to when you're in a mellow mood. I suppose with the beats it's probably danceable in a slow vibe kind of way, but that's not really my thing. The songs are kind of orchestral in nature due to the samples used. This definitely isn't music that is meant to be played on the radio. I guess you could even describe it as being kind of new ageish, but with far more artistic merit. Hmm, that's a key word there, artistic. Yep, this album is artistic and that's why I enjoy it. What the music lacks in memorable riffs or lyrics it more then makes up for in depth. This makes it worth devoting time to explore, enjoy and just to vibe.

Previous efforts like Mezzazine and Blue Lines have had songs that were a little more memorable and have been high on my list of album picks for quite some time. I think 100th Window will make that list as well. Even if no single song stands out, the album as a whole is very enjoyable. It can take some time to appreciate it, but it's time that's worth it for any fan of downtempo electronic music.

Review: Metallica St. Anger

Well since the song Frantic from Metallica's new album made the No. 1 spot in my top 25 for the week I figured I should write something about the album as a whole. If nothing else
St. Anger is a controversial album. A lot of people really seem to hate this album and at first I couldn't say I cared much for it either. However after a few listens it started to grow on me and now I do like it for the most part.

The biggest thing that changed my mind is that the album has energy. Listening to it gets you pumped up. This is what metal should do and in that St. Anger succeeds where Load and Reload failed. The album is nice and crunchy with a very heavy sound and Lars absolutely wails on his drum kit. What's strange though is the sound of the drums, Lars is using a new snare that has a very metallic sound to it. I can see how this would be easy to dislike, it is quite different, but for me I like the change.

Unfortunately the album isn't without problems. The production quality isn't all that great and some of the vocals are pretty weak. The lyrics are often angry and uninspired. However, despite this I still enjoy the album and that anger provides some real drive, even when delivering lines that are otherwise pretty weak. One song in particular where this is evident is My World. This song is really weak in the first half, but the second half kicks pretty well with the delivery of the line "not only do I not know the answer, I don't even know what the question is".

This album is being billed as Metallica trying to get back to their roots and in some ways I guess it is. Is it on the same plane as the first four albums? Not even close, the songs simply are not composed as well as the earlier work. In reality this album is probably closer to Garage Days then it is to Master of Puppets or Justice For All. And like Garage Days that means St. Anger is an enjoyable album, but is not likely to have lasting appeal.

iTunes Playlist to Blog

While messing around today I wrote a little Python script to post an iTunes playlist to a Metaweblog API enabled blog (like MovableType). I'm toying with the idea of using it to auto-post a top 25 list of songs once per week or something. The script is available here.

Here's what the top 25 looks like for this week. This is from an iTunes smart playlist that shows the top 25 most played songs that have been added to my library in the last month. iTunes smart playlists are an absolutely great feature that I hope shows up in other places in Mac OS X, like oh maybe in the Finder as a smart list of files.

Artist	Song	Album	Play Count
Metallica	Frantic	St. Anger	12
Massive Attack	Antistar	100th Window	11
Massive Attack	Butterfly Caught	100th Window	11
Massive Attack	Everywhen	100th Window	11
Massive Attack	Future Proof	100th Window	11
Massive Attack	Name Taken	100th Window	11
Massive Attack	Hymn Of The Big Wheel (Origin	Hymn Of The Big Wheel	11
Metallica	Dirty Window	St. Anger	11
Metallica	My World	St. Anger	11
Annie Lennox	A Thousand Beautiful Things	Bare	10
Annie Lennox	Bitter Pill	Bare	10
Annie Lennox	Erased	Bare	10
Evanescence	Bring Me To Life (Feat. Paul	Fallen	10
Massive Attack	Prayer For England	100th Window	10
Massive Attack	Small Time Shot Away	100th Window	10
Massive Attack	Special Cases	100th Window	10
Massive Attack	What Your Soul Sings	100th Window	10
Massive Attack	Any Love (Larry Heard Mix)	Hymn Of The Big Wheel	10
Massive Attack	Home Of The Whale	Hymn Of The Big Wheel	10
Massive Attack	Hymn Of The Big Wheel (Nellee	Hymn Of The Big Wheel	10
Annie Lennox	Honestly	Bare	9
Annie Lennox	Loneliness	Bare	9
Annie Lennox	Oh God (Prayer)	Bare	9
Evanescence	Everybody`s Fool	Fallen	9
Evanescence	Going Under	Fallen	9

What's funny is that I have a tremendous breadth of musical interest, but you sure wouldn't know it from this list. I bought a number of more popular albums a couple weeks ago which skews the results away from the more eclectic mix I usually get from eMusic.

Currently Playing "Marquis Cha-Cha" by "The Fall" from the album "Palace Of Swords Reversed", a little more eclectic bit from eMusic.

Politics: Orrin Hatch is part of the...

Politics: Orrin Hatch is part of the problem

So Orrin Hatch (R-Disney) thinks it's worth considering letting copyright owners launch attacks on computers they believe are holding their content. This, folks, is the chair of the Judiciary Committee of the Senate. One would hope that he at one time had a knowledge of due process. Apparently he has been influenced to forget it. He joins the rogue's galley of Fritz Hollings (D-Disney) and Howard Berman (D-Disney) as one who is willing to dispense with our rights of speech, innovation and process in order to protect Big Media's market position. It seems that they are equal opportunity employers, and have now cut the R's in on the action.

It's arguable whether the current system of copyright has reached its expired-by date in terms of economic utility. However, it's now evident that the economic power it has allowed to accumulate has become antagonistic to the remaining integrity of our political system, and our rights and liberties. It's going to be difficult to make this into a partisan issue with portions of both parties already suborned.

Our own reply must be in the marketplace: crash the economics of Big Media, and they will be able to buy less influence to be used against us. I am boycotting the music labels, from CDs all the way to iTunes. Please join me, it's a matter of all our freedom. Yes, I'm aware the problem goes further than that. Perhaps wrecking one segment of the industry will encourage the others to remember that they exist to serve their customers, not to throttle their liberties. [Due Diligence]

AlbumMagicWand 0.6

I've posted a minor update to Album Magic Wand, my little tool to use Spring as a download stash for the eMusic service. This version just fixes the problem that kept URL icons from displaying on songs and fixes a problem where some of the links on eMusic didn't have an http:// prefix.

Apple Woos Indies [Updated]

Will the Indies come to iTMS? [MacRumors]

Site in Spain to reign in MP3 playin'?

A new all-you-can-eat music download service that claims to take advantage of a loophole in Spanish copyright law will launch Tuesday and has teamed with Grokster for distribution. [CNET News.com]

This is an interesting twist on the unlimited download model. Great if you have broadband, not so great otherwise. Legal? Sounds fishy.

eMusic Adds Beggars Group

A couple days ago eMusic added a whole boat load of music from the Beggars Group of independent labels. Groups such as Dead Can Dance, Bauhaus, PJ Harvey, The Pixies, Cocteau Twins, Peter Murphy and many more. Tons of cool stuff that I've been overloading on over the weekend.

This is good news as it's been a rocky few weeks for eMusic. On May 1 they made some major changes to the service. On the good side they increased the quality of the files tremendously, going with VBR MP3s. On the bad side, they imposed the use of their, less then inspired, download manager and a new 45 track queue limit. At the same time they also had massive problems with their content delivery systems which made the service unusable for many people. Overall a none too impressive handling of a significant change in the service. It seems most of this is worked out and the new download manager is mainly an annoyance. However, It does provide an unfortunate precedent and sets the stage for further declines in the usability of the service. Fortunately, the service is so good otherwise it's tough to complain too much right now. I really hope eMusic continues to prosper. it's an incredible service. I'm absolutely loving all the great music that's available and the addition of Beggars Group is a tremendous boost. If you have any kind of an open mind toward music, eMusic is an absolute gold mine and definitely worth subscribing to.

Oh yeah, they've also started getting albums from Supraphon. An exciting source of classical music.

Napster reborn! Roxio buys PressPlay

No file trading, from sound of it [The Register]

A curious twist indeed. Hopefully they'll tweak the Pressplay model so that it actually works and then bring it to the Mac.

Mining the Vaults

While I'm continuing my quest to rip my entire CD collection into MP3s I entered a rarely travelled portion of the collection tonight. It's the stuff that's always at the bottom of the rack and rarely listened to. Mostly rock compilation discs and a bunch of random discs that I picked up who knows where. Well, there is some killer stuff on these discs. In particular I discovered a totally obscure disc by Chris Burke called Idioglossia. I had no idea what was on this disc, but it is absolutely killer. It's very cool, very experimental, electronic music built almost entirely from samples. I've had this disc for years and I don't think I've ever listened to it.

Overall this is something that I love more then anything else about music on the computer. It puts all the music on an equal footing and all of it is at your finger tips. Random playlists and iTunes smart playlists that show all the tracks you've never listened to give you a view into the music that just isn't possible with a CD based collection. So far I've discovered so many incredible pieces in my collection that I had no idea were there.

I've always known I have a huge amount of music that I've never listened to, in fact I'm guessing I probably have at least 200 CDs that have never seen the inside of a CD player. Some are even still in the shrink wrap. For instance I own a copy of the Complete Mozart Edition. 180 CDs of everything that Mozart ever produced and while I've listened to large portions of it, there are a number of the opera boxes that I never bothered to open. I'm really looking forward to the day when all of that will be on the computer and it will be possible to explore any aspect of the music at any time without having to swap discs. In my opinion, this is the real revolution of music on the computer.

Apple service changes industry outlook

[MacNN]

A sign of progress, maybe the record industry might actually get it some day...

Spymac iTunes Music Sharing

Spymac has created a directory for people sharing their iTunes music libraries. This is a fascinating use of this technology, and is very cool. Unfortunately, I suspect Spymac is just asking for trouble with it.

One kind of interesting thing about poking around in other peoples music libraries is how untidy they tend to be. Yet another cost of using P2P systems to get the files.

Tonight I went through and tried to replace the few P2P acquired tracks I have with legal copies from the iTMS. Not really very successful, I was only able to find five of the 20 or so that I looked for. All the tracks were for VERY popular music, this is the only thing I've ever bothered using P2P systems for. So I'd say the iTMS still has a way to go before it can be a good solution for replacing these things. Anyway, of the 7,715 tracks in my library, 18 are currently from P2P networks and will be replaced as soon as they're made available on iTMS.

I think my opinion of iTMS is changing. I still think it's too expensive and the DRM sucks, but it's just so damn easy to use. I swore I would never pay $.99 for a song, but so far I've bought 5 individual tracks and even worse 5 full albums through iTMS. This is the result of pent up demand and I won't be buying much else for a while since I really can't afford this right now. What albums did I buy? Heh, heh, 2 Eminem Albums, the 8 Mile soundtrack, Kruder & Dorfmeister G-Stoned and James Brown 20 greatest hits. The K&D and James Brown were impulse buys, the Eminem I'd actually wanted for a while.

One other interesting observation is that even though, in the last week, I've added roughly 1,800 tracks to my iTunes collection (I'm aggressively ripping my CD collection). 19 of the top 25 most played all time were purchased from iTMS. The other six were from eMusic.

Rethinking Digital Music Services

Lately I've spent a bit of time looking at the various legal music services. In particular listen.com Rhapsody, Pressplay and eMusic (which I subscribe to). I've posted several times that I'm a big fan of eMusic and it's a model that I'd love to see replicated with services that have access to the catalogs of the majors. However, from a business perspective I also have to say I don't see that as a practical idea.

I've never been a fan of services like Pressplay. This is mainly because it just feels like an artificially hindered service compared to what is possible (which it is). The restriction to WMA files that have to call home once per month to renew their licenses is just annoying. However, given their new pricing model this isn't really a terrible thing. For $9.95 per month you get unlimited downloads. What makes this model still seem undesirable is that all those downloads become useless if you cancel the service or if the service goes under. The question is why is this a problem? It's all a matter of perception. I believe they're actually shooting them self in the foot by focusing on the idea of downloads.

The other service I've been looking at lately is listen.com Rhapsody. This service doesn't offer downloads at all. It's more a music on demand streaming service. This means you need a connection to access the music. They do allow you to pay extra to burn tracks to CD, but do not offer any way to download a portable music file any other way. Now even though this is technically more limiting then Pressplay, I find the service more appealing. Why is this? I think it's because I feel I like Pressplay is trying to misrepresent what it is they're offering. They aren't really offering downloads, they're offering streaming music on demand service that just happens to cache on your hard drive in WMA format. This just feels dishonest and smacks of trying to pull the wool over the eyes of the consumer. In contrast the Rhapsody service doesn't claim to be anything other the a streaming service and at $9.95 per month for unlimited streams it's actually not a bad model. You just have to compare it to services like satellite radio to understand the value. XM radio is almost the same price (more if you factor in hardware) and you have no control over when and what music you hear. With listen.com you have access to a large catalog and can choose exactly what you listen to.

For me, when I think about why I like digital music so much, it's all about convenience and quantity. I like being able to call up just about any music that I get curious to hear with just a few key strokes. I've always wanted access to any kind of music, it's why I own so many CDs. Now if I can have access to huge amounts of music without having to worry about storing all of it, why wouldn't I go for that? So to me listen.com Rhapsody actually looks like a really interesting service. I haven't tried it out because it's Windows only, but someday when something like this comes to the Mac I'll be waiting. I'm changing my feeling about these services. I don't really care now if they offer unlimited downloads, all they really need to offer is unlimited streaming and a HUGE catalog that extends deep into their vaults. If I get curious to know what some obscure blues artist from 1922 sounds like I should be able to just call it up and listen. I don't need the MP3 file for that, a stream is fine (as long as it's high bit rate). That's a service I'd absolutely love.

So here's my new wish list in a legal music service.
- Complete access to the full catalog of as many major and independent labels as possible. I mean everything. If an album is there, the whole thing should be there.
- Solid well designed and easy to use software for Mac OS X
- Unlimited streaming of at least 128kbps.
- $9.95 per month
- The ability to purchase unhindered MP3s of songs for $.20 per song. (I doubt this will happen, but it'd be nice and isn't a deal breaker)
- No ads, no cross promotion of partners crap, no SPAM or anything else that distracts from the purpose of the service.
- Not marketed as a download service.

The last point is the one that will be most difficult to get people used to P2P to accept. These services need to focus their marketing on their strengths and downloading songs isn't one of them. Convenience can be though, and for the people who are actually willing to pay for music anyway, it's worth paying for convenience. So now listen.com comes close to what I want, and I'm hoping the rumors about Apple coming out with a service are true.

Genghis Blues

First it was Kronos Quartet recording a classical set with the throat singers of tuva, now I just discovered a blues recording with Paul Pena and some tuvan singers. eMusic is great for finding fascinating music like this. It even includes a blues styled version of Kongurey which is the song Kronos recorded. A tune I've always really enjoyed. Fascinating stuff, the tuva singers are like nothing else. Great stuff if you have an open mind.

Free content: Why not?

Venture capitalist Greg Blonder says there are hard-headed business reasons that support the notion of giving away music. [CNET News.com]

An interesting idea. The current music distribution model is definitely doomed. MP3s are just too convenient. Services like eMusic show that wide availability of large collections of music is an outstanding value.

File sharing networks are a waste of time. If I could spend $20-$30 maybe even $40 per month for unlimited downloads of unrestricted MP3s from ANY label I'd jump on that in 2 seconds. And guess what, that's $20-$30 more then the record companies are getting from me now. I was one of their best consumers, 2500 CDs worth proves that, but I'm not buying anymore. They've priced them self out of the market and their greed just makes me sick. I remember the days when CDs were new and tapes and records cost $5-$8 while CDs were $12-$15. I remember the promises that it was just the cost of new technology. Well, bah, I can produce a CD on my computer for less then a dollar it can't possibly cost them more then 10 cents in bulk. So where's the price reduction? Heh, price increases are all they've been doing. New releases are now $19 for some labels at full retail.

What really sucks is that they're using this artificially inflated pricing to determine value for their online services. Basically trying to make the price of the files purchased online to be equivalent to the price of an inflated CD. Yeah, right. Here's the deal $.99 per track is too expensive. Want to create a killer service? Flat rate all you can eat pricing and unencumbered MP3 files. Get major label music on there and music consumers will line up to buy it. The rest who actually have the time to waste on file sharing networks? Forget about them, they're not buying music anyway. A solid easy to use service is worth paying for.

If CD sales are dropping maybe they should look a little more at their value proposition. They're actually punishing the people who like to buy music. I like to buy my music, I believe the artists should certainly be well compensated. The record companies though, well I certainly won't be heartbroken if they disappear. For the time being I'm sticking with my current CD collection and enjoying greatly what eMusic has to offer. If prices on CDs come back to earth, maybe I might even buy a few again.

The war of art

A friend writes,

Thought you'd be interested in the online music distribution channels that're popping up to route around Big Media's disinclination to air anti-war songs. Artists are taking it directly to the people (listen to REM's "Last Straw" at http://www.remhq.com/finalStraw/finalstraw.html) and at least one new site has sprung up: http://www.protest-records.com, from Sonic Youth guitarist Thurston Moore. Take that, Clear Channel.

[Doc Searls]

I have no interest in talking about the war, but music is interesting. I'm downloading a few tracks from the protest records site now.

My Music System

While wringing my hands over whether or not to buy a new Powermac I rearranged my apartment to solve the hum problem I was having with the audio out of my Cube. It turns out it was the poor quality cable I was using so I juggled things so that I could use the cables I still have from my old high-end audio system. This meant I switched from using a small Rotel integrated amp to my really old Yamaha MX800 power amp. The Yamaha is something I've been hauling around for about 15 years and was part of my first component stereo system. It's a pretty decent amp though the Linn and Musical Fidelity amps I used in my last system definitely sounded better. Anyway, activating the Yamaha and my old speaker cables also allowed me to activate the other remaining piece of my system that I still have, my Martin Logan Aerius i speakers. It just feels wrong to have these things setup in my crappy apartment and I may put them back in the box because of this, but man I'd forgotton how great these things sound.

This change has also made me completely dependent on the computer for all media since I don't have a preamp to use for switching sources. Surprisingly the CD drive in the Cube doesn't sound all that bad. Of course there's a huge difference between the CD and an MP3 made from the CD. There's simply no depth to MP3s, they don't sound terrible, but for serious listening the experience is definitely lacking. Well given that CDs don't have that great of depth either, maybe the MP3s are terrible, oh well MP3s are about convenience not fidelity.

With my new Powermac I also ordered two 80GB drives that I'm planning to run in a mirror configuration for some redundancy. I've been worrying about how to backup my MP3 collection since I started creating it and mirroring the drives is actually the cheapest way to do it now. My estimate is that it will take a little over 100MB to store my entire CD collection in MP3s so I'll have to add more space later, but it will be a very long time (if ever) before the whole collection is ripped. Of course I've also already downloaded nearly 7.5GB of MP3s from eMusic and that number will continue to grow in the future. Now that I'm actually spending money on MP3s rather then just ripping my CDs the need for some kind of duplication is pretty important. Previously I always had the physical CD for backup, now I'm getting a large amount of stuff that's just gone if the hard drive goes and eMusic were to shutdown. This is a big reason I've always disliked buying stuff that just exists in digital form. Now though, I'm seeing it's a hell of a lot easier to move a harddrive or two then it is to keep hauling around the 20 or so boxes of CDs I have.

iMic

Since I've been listening to so many MP3s, I've finally run out of patience with the poor quality audio out on the speakers that came with my Cube. When I moved, I expected to mainly be listening to MP3s and had been slowly ripping my CD collection for this reason. I figured, I really didn't want to unbox my CDs. Unfortunately, there was always a really annoying hum coming from the speakers and the levels just weren't good. So out of the boxes came the CDs. Now I'm hoping to remedy this with an iMic. I ordered one tonight, from reviews it seems like it does the job quite a bit better then connecting through the pro speakers. MP3s, even with the undeniably poor quality in comparison to CD, are just so convenient. Especially when you have a large collection of what can be considered archival material (i.e. pre-WWII blues).

BTW, I think CDs don't sound all that great either. I spent much time with CD, Vinyl and SACD sources and good quality vinyl on the Gyro SE table I used to have, killed CD everytime. I was extremely surprised by this, as I was definitely a member of the CD generation and had only owned one record when growing up. I went in with an open mind though, and I was sold almost instantly. Oh well, it's back to all digital sources now. My days as an audiophile are over, which isn't such a bad thing.

eMusic Country Blues

eMusic may not have much in the way of popular music, but damn the blues collection available is stunning. Well it is if you're one of the rare people who totally digs country blues recorded early in the 20th century. I'm one of those people and it's thrilling to have access to so much of this stuff. I've been an avid purchaser of country blues recordings, but there was always so much more that I wanted to hear. Once you start tracking this stuff there's always an interesting web of influences that is fun to follow.

eMusic is perfect for this stuff, even though they're only 128kb MP3s it doesn't matter one bit because so much of this stuff is of such poor sonic quality anyway. Anything recorded before 1940 or so is pulled from 78s, many of which were of extremely poor quality even when they were brand new (i.e. Charlie Patton). The music is what's important though and there is some truly great stuff available.

Charley Patton
Blind Lemon Jefferson
Tampa Red
Lonnie Johnson
Blind Blake
Brownie McGhee and Sonny Terry
Ma Rainey
Blind Willie McTell
Mississipi John Hurt
Skip James

Also not quite as early, but by far one of my favorite blues artists Rev. Gary Davis. Been listening to this stuff a ton and it's incredible, in particular Blues and Ragtime.

Ugh, I had so many things I wanted to do this weekend, didn't get much done. Oh well, it was fun.

Krishna Das

Heh, heh I downloaded a disk from eMusic by Krishna Das. I had no idea what it was, it turns out it's Hare Krishna music, heh, heh. It's actually not that bad, except when they start singing Hare Krishna, Hare Hare Krishna, ugh. Looking at the song titles would have of course revealed this, oh well. Wouldn't recommend it, but taken simply as music it has some OK qualities.

eMusic Picks

Here's some music picks for an early Sunday morning. Available through eMusic.

James Browne - Hot Pants - This is in my collection on vinyl so it's really great to finally have some James Brown in digital form. It grooves.

Ravi Shankar - Ragas - I'm a big fan of indian classical music and Ravi Shankar is one of the greatest in the genre. I have quite a bit of Ravi in my CD collection, but more never hurts. Just got done listening to Raga Bilashkani Todi, excellent.

Jimmy Smith - Organ Grinder Swing - And swing it does, the track Organ Grinder's Swing is easily one of my favorite jazz pieces and swings like nothing else. I have that track on a compilation CD and this album on vinyl so being able to listen to the whole thing is great. When I was buying vinyl a lot, Jimmy Smith was always one of my most sought artists. He's made a ton of albums.

The Hub - Trucker - This is a new find. It's avant-garde jazz along the line of John Zorn. I've only actually listened to one track off of this so far, but that track was killer. This kind of music can be tough to take for the uninitiated, but if you're a fan of John Zorn like I am then you'll love it.

50 Cent - Guess Wh