Rendezvous Streaming

In November 2001 I had just migrated from BeOS to OS X and was sorely missing the ability of my MP3 player to broadcast my home collection to work (see iTunes Needs Streaming). All the hubbub surrounding the new iTunes music store has eclipsed the news that it’s finally possible to do exactly that. I’m sitting at work right now listening to my home MP3s, and haven’t dropped a frame in two hours. All 16,000 tracks are immediately available, with all the usual search functionality. All my playlists (both standard and “smart”) are available. I’m in hog heaven.

If you set sharing on in the prefs, you can also provide a direct link into any point in your collection — Cmd-Click and select Copy URL. philm points out that it’s also possible to link to specific items in the iTunes store. Check these examples.

iTunes Compromise

A few follow-up thoughts on the iTunes integrated store:

– Some comments on last night’s post led me to check out eMusic and yup, it’s very cool. Great service. But for me (and I suspect many others) the integration of the store into iTunes just makes sense and is going to result in me buying more music. Possibly a lot more. I don’t know how or why — it just feels much natural to use that little iTunes search window I use all the time to search on music I don’t already have than it is to go to an external web site. Also, the flat rate at eMusic means I would feel compelled to spend time surfing for music whether I need music this month or not. Don’t have much time for that these days and prefer not to feel compelled to shop.

– There are a dozen arguments we can level against the first incarnation of the service (not available internationally, only offers Big Popular music), but the fact is that the war between The Labels and The People over digital music downloads has been going on for several years now, with no signs of abating. What we need are major steps toward compromise, so the labels, the artists, and consumers all get what they want. This is what that compromise looks like. Not perfect from every angle, but also better than what we have now, ie bidirectional animosity and ongoing war. The service will improve over time. It just launched.

– Several complaints about albums costing too much to purchase digitally. Yup, that’s true, I’d agree with that but add that half the point here is that you don’t have to buy the album – you buy the tracks you like. If you want the whole album, why not just buy the CD? On the other hand, if they can offer substantive discounts on whole albums, I would be more inclined. Just saying that my approach has always been to purchase the whole album if I want the whole album and download songs if I just want songs. Nothing about this store changes that.

Anyway. Despite its imperfections, I still think this service is going to make huge inroads towards cracking the great nut of electronic music sales. Done right, everyone wins.

Music: Johnny Mercer :: Strip Polka

iTunes 4 Headphones Station

Just spent half an hour surfing through the music store built into iTunes 4, and gotta say, it’s an intoxicating experience — like hanging out at the headphone station at the record store listening to sample tracks, except that the UI responds faster and there are way more albums. Around 200,000 tracks from the Big 5 labels to start with. Initial observations:

A) This changes everything. Someone had to “go big” and make a play for the paid music download proposition, and do it right. That someone may as well be Apple, and sure enough, they’ve done it right. The associative power between artists, genres, tracks, and databases of “what other people bought” is incredibly powerful. Throw in the ability to sample the first 30 seconds of any track and you get a very addictive, shopper-friendly experience (.99/track). In 10 minutes, I decided to purchase the music of Jack Johnson and Diana Krall — two artists I had thought of idly in the past without tasting.

B) Decided to, but couldn’t — a bug in confirmation of billing details for existing .Mac customers made damn sure of that.

C) 200,000 tracks is not really that many, and naturally, my favorite artists are not represented by the Big 5. “Beefheart” turns up nothing. Even artists as significant as Air are nowhere to be found. Similarly, only Radiohead’s lamest album (“OK Computer”) is present. Somehow, it’s more exciting to browse and be excited by the possibilities than it is to search for what you really like. But as a commenter at MacSlash put it:

Are you all retarded? The reason they used the top 5 lables is because they are THE TOP 5 LABELS. This is an opportunity to make money, not appease emo-pop indie geeks.

Exactly. And it’s probably a no-brainer that Apple will at some point offer a submission mechanism for “indie” artists. Meanwhile, it’s about time someone created a simple mechanism for people to get off on quick-n-easy music downloads without simultaneously reaming the very artists they allegedly respect and support. Turn that beat around… got to hear per-CUSSION!

I’ll test the new AAC codec support later.

Music: David Bowie :: I’m Afraid Of Americans

iPhoto Acid Test

Put iPhoto’s slideshow feature to the public test last night. Mimi Chakarova came back from India with hundreds of incredible images (not yet online). Arranged them in iPhoto 3 and added another hundred slides of text blocks – captions, poems, etc. Set the interval and timed the segments, then ripped chunks of audio tracks in iTunes and stitched them together in QuickTime Pro. Told iPhoto to use the resulting audio track as the sound track for her album. The result was an absolutely breathtaking 25 minute presentation, which we output through a high-quality projector and very good speakers to a room of around 100 people. Went off without a hitch. Nobody was more amazed than her – she had never done anything remotely multimedia before, but pulled this off in two days with about 30 minutes training.

Music: The White Stripes :: Little Acorns

Safari beta 2

New Safari beta out yesterday… maybe this will quiet all the tab freaks. I started using Safari as default browser with the first beta, so I’m not in the “is this good enough to switch for?” camp. Of course it is. One complaint about the tabs implementation though: Having trouble getting used to the fact that Cmd-click opens the link in a new tab but doesn’t bring the new tab to the front — Cmd-Shift-click does that. Cmd-click has always opened a link in a new window in IE, Chimera, Safari… so this seems like a departure, an unwelcome extra step. Is there a UI reason for this? Anyone else have trouble with it?

Update: Aha — in the prefs, turn on “Select new tabs as they are created.” Enabling this option changes both the behavior and the hotkey mapping, so all stays copacetic. Bril.

Music: Screamin’ Jay Hawkins :: Just Don’t Care

Sakoman Back at Apple

One for the BeOS folks: Steve Sakoman has just made the round-robin from Apple to Be to Palm and back to Apple. Sakoman was always my favorite Be executive. Brilliant man and great programmer, but he also had a wonderfully kind, avuncular manner. He once told me that he bought a copy of every piece of shareware that emerged for BeOS, just to support the development community. How many high-level execs out there think that way? Question now is, will the next version of Mac OS include a port of the CodyCam?

Music: The Phenomenauts :: Robot Love

Fixing the iLife Backing Store

ORA blog: Time for iLife Apps to Share a Unified Media Database?

To me, all of these database issues point to a similar need — find a more efficient backing store for the iApps. The more I ask around, the more it seems that XML is the smoking gun on iLife performance drags – it’s a great format for interoperability, but horribly inefficient and resource consumptive. Maybe, just maybe, it’s time to reconsider using XML for the iApps. Maybe, just maybe, Apple should consider using some of the highly efficient open source database code out there — MySQL would do nicely I’m sure.

And since the iLife apps are all so wonderfully integrated now, why not place all of my media in a single, integrated media database? Whether such a database would store media objects themselves (allowing full export to original formats of course) or just references to them (with iTunes-style non-breaking inode references) is unimportant to me. With modern Mac hardware, I should be getting modern media database performance where it counts the most — when using my Mac as the digital lifestyle hub it’s touted as.

Music: Frank Zappa :: The Legend Of The Golden Arches

.Mac Address Sync

.Mac will now sync with your address book. Even better, it will do it across multiple machines, which is the real beauty part. In conjunction with iSync, it will work across multiple machines and your handheld, using your .Mac acct as a backing store. Works and looks fantastic – this could be the “killer app” for .Mac. Chalk up another one for Web Services, the RCA phono jack of internet computing. The missing bridge for me is that I’m using Entourage rather than Mail.app and Address Book. So the bridge I really need is Entourage —> .Mac —> handheld.

Apple is doing better in the server market than analysts expected. Personally, my itch to own and operate an XServe is getting scratchier by the day.

Music: Mable John :: Same Time Same Place

Hyatt on RSS in Safari

Three days after my post predicting that major browsers would have embedded RSS handling capabilities within six months, Safari developer Dave Hyatt is discussing the idea in his own blog. The question is whether browsers should handle RSS feeds or should RSS readers display HTML previews? The latter seems like a no brainer, but the former is where I’m hoping to see all of this go. Thanks Sean for the headsup.

Music: The Incredible String Band :: There Is A Green Crown