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Napster 2 Go Reviews Start

Boing Boing links to a Washington Post review of Napster to Go. Let’s just say WaPo found it… wanting. Napster’s PR firm has been running full steam lately with numerous mentions in the press (after their post-Super Bowl Ad) where they’re trying to show the math hat an iPod with 10,000 songs = $10,000 or Napster can get you the same thing for $15 / month. That is, $15 / month for forever. Because once you stop paying your songs go poof.

Now I have a friend, who shall remain nameless, that loves Napster for their streaming service. He’s had various MP3 players over the years, but they were clunky, so he bought an iPod mini mid-last year. Loved the Apple experience when it came to digital music – he’s fairly technical but Apple made it easy to get and transfer music. Yet he comes back to Napster to use their radio stations. For $10 bucks a month (or whatever it is, somewhere in that ballpark) you can listen to any song Napster has. You want to burn it? Just like iTunes, that’s 99 cents please. So Napster to Go will be the premium version of their monthly fee based service.

I can see both sides – if you have a Microsoft powered (codename Janus) player, or in Microsoft marketing speak, Plays for Sure, Napster to Go can fill up your MP3 (or should I be saying WMA?) player until you stop paying for Napster. That’s pretty cool – I can get thousands of songs to go work out to, or listen to my car, my choice of songs, for $15 month. Compare that to Sirius or XM, and it could be a better option that satellite radio.

But on the on the other hand – DRM makes bad business sense as I’ve noted before. Think about it, as Xeni points out so eloquently on BoingBoing:

What if Napster To Go were Napster The Grocery, and milk you bought could only be consumed from proprietary square mugs (known for continually sprouting holes you have to patch on your own), and milk cartons vanish from your refrigerator shelf if you don’t re-up your subscription? You’d get milk elsewhere.

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I’ll let you figure out the allegory on your own.

The 2nd best Christmas Present I received

The 2nd best Christmas Present I received was a book from a co-worker: The Daily Adventures of Mixerman, by Mixerman.

The book tells the story of Mixerman, a sound engineer in Los Angeles hired to mix a new up and coming band’s CD. This dysfunctional band, signed to the label after a bidding war, has been locked away by the music label for 2 years to write a “radio hit”. Everyone in the book is anonymous, including the author, to protect the band’s identity. From Willy Show, the big time producer, nick named because his contract to produce the album isn’t done and he doesn’t show up for a week, to the aptly named Dumb Ass, the drummer who can’t do anything right.

The book is a hilarious look at everything that can go wrong in a recording session, and a behind the scenes look at the music industry. Originally posted almost as a blog in 2002 (before blogs were cool), the book contains all of the blog entries, and the missing final entry. It was easy reading, and will keep you laughing the whole way through.

Jinzora

Interesting… Jinzora, an open source music web management system, has announced they are working on version 2.0, that will offer an option of their normal PHP scripting, or a MySQL option.

A MySQL option is very intriguing, as I may be able to replace Netjuke, which has had one update to CVS in the 4 months as they work (or not work) on Netjuke 2.0.

I’ll have to keep an eye on this, and maybe even test out the current 1.1 version of Jinzora.

My Music

So I have a lot of music. With over 700 CDs ripped, and some other misc. music, it’s quite a bear to manage it all.

For the last few years, I’ve used Netjuke on my Linux server. During the upgrade process this past spring, I put my music on two seperate hard drives, seperate from the third which holds the OS. What I love about Netjuke is that it’s database driven, making it very easy to search, and a nice web interface, that is semi-skinnable. It’s also GPL.

The downside is that Netjuke 2.0 has been in development for almost (or just over?) a year. Netjuke 1 was released in Aug. ’03, and no updates since. Netjuke 2.0 development has been quiet for almost 6 months, with no updates, and the CVS is unusable. And there is talk that it will be propietary, not GPL, which doesn’t make me happy.

I’ve been looking at other projects, first Andromeda, which is a PHP script that is not database driven. I had used Andromeda before Netjuke, and purchased it again this past spring when I had some installation problems with Netjuke 1.0, but still wasn’t happy with it.

On the Netjuke forums, I came across Jinzora, which looks similar to Andromeda, but has more functionality through PHP scripting. Features include ID3 tagging, server side playback (which Netjuke can do kind of), file downloading, RSS feeds, and a slim version for adding via an iframe.

I still have some questions that the FAQ, Wiki and forums didn’t answer around multiple directories (I have my Ogg and MP3 files in seperate directories, but those directories have identical artists, but different albums).

I still have some work to do to finish cleaning up some ID3 tags, and getting some newer music on the site and syncing it all up, but this is another project to add to my list. I still have to figure out why the ID3 tags for some live Dave Mathews stuff isn’t working in Netjuke too.

In addition, I need to get a linux box up with a sufficiently big enough hard drive so I can rsync nightly or weekly to back it all up. My Mirra won’t back up a network drive, and I had mapped my music directories on my linux box over Samba to my extra Windows box hoping it would. Dammit.

Speaking of music, I need to find out how Windows serving works. A while back I received Omnifi for the car and my home receiver. While pretty cool to transfer my music to my car’s hard drive, the car version was way to sensitive and doesn’t work. I still have the set top box hooked up to my home theater, and that works streaming from my extra Windows box where I have some of my music duplicated from my server. The downside is that Omnifi uses software to manage your music collection called SimpleCenter. This is one of the worst designed music interfaces ever created. The one neat feature it has is “Watch Folders” where you point it towards your music folder, and it automatically notices when you add music to that folder and adds it to your collection. It does not support Ogg, but does support Rhapsody and some internet music stations.

I had purchased The Killers new CD, ripped it to MP3 (bleh) and put it on my Windows box. Firing up the Omnifi, lo and behold I see a Musicmatch server on it – sure enough, from my Linksys boombox installation, Musicmatch has the identical ability that SimpleCenter, including watch folders, and what not. So I import all the music on that Windows box into MusicMatch, and can use that on my Omnifi. From managing my music on my PC, I prefer the MusicMatch interface – it’s not my favorite either, but it has some better features built-in including ID3 tagging, and the interface is cleaner to use, but it has too many advanced features to get you to buy crap.

So the questions becomes what is the SDK that they’re using – terminology is identical (Watch Folders, etc) and what would it take to get it ported to Linux. If I could have my whole collection on my server serving my house (with the exception of Ogg dammit, and I’m not re-encoding that stuff), I would be golden.

So much work, so little time.

Ears Ringing

I got to see Lenny Kravitz up close and personal tonight at a work event. Lenny rocked the house. Amazing show. Can’t say enough about it, it was quite loud, and very entertaining. Played my favorite song, Again.

B-52s and Lenny Kravitz, both up close in less than 6 days. Good week!

Let the music play

And the music server is back!

At a slightly different address, but symlinks worked perfectly.

I’m still using Netjuke to power the site. I’m disappointed, the developers have been promising Netjuke 2, with a tentative date of July 15th which came and went without a peep. Love Netjuke 1, I’m just disappointed they haven’t communicated anything yet.

Let The Music Play: Join EFF Today

Top 5 80's Albums

One of my favorite parts of Nick Hornby’s great book, High Fidelity (and the movie adaption with John Cusack was pretty good too, but his books are better), are his Top 5 lits.

So here’s my first one. Inspiration hit me last night when flipping through the radio dial (If I hear Coldplay’s new live song one more time….) and I heard Prince’s Purple Rain.

Here we go, Top 5 Albums (yes, I said albums, this is the 80’s, and I’m talking a complete record here, not one with just 2 good songs, in no particular order:

  1. Prince – Soundtrack to Purple Rain

  2. INXS – Kick

  3. Def Leppard – Hysteria

  4. Van Halen – 1984

  5. Depeche Mode – 101

There’s so many other ones that I could mention, but those are my personal faves.

My Neuros

So after, what, 2 months? I got my Neuros portable MP3 player working with Ogg files!

Using the latest beta firmware (1.40a), and the Neuros Database Manager, an open source Java interface for the Neuros, Ogg files seem to be working fine.

Pretty darn cool.

Now I just have to:

  • Mow the grass with the 128mb player today
  • Get the 20GB Backpack working
  • Load it for my trip to Columbus this week
  • Get MyFi working for my drive to Green Bay next weekend
  • Listen to Oggs!

Oops, I did it again

Did anyone besides me watch the NFL preseason show tonight on ABC?

Britney Spears had to do the worst lip-syncing I’ve ever seen. At one point, she is trying to put the mic on a mic stand while putting a glove on her hand. Her voice / inflection never changed as her head moved back and forth from the mic.

She really looked like she wasn’t even trying. And at the end when she thanked the crowd, there was an almost noticeable pop from turning the mic on.