Amazon.com MP3 Downloads

This weekend I got around to trying out Amazon's new MP3 download store. So far I've found a few albums that eMusic didn't have, so it's definitely worthwhile in that respect, in spite of being somewhat more expensive (though still vastly cheaper than CDs, and even somewhat cheaper than iTunes). I also appreciate it tying in to the whole recommendation system there, since I've got a considerable profile built up for that.

Just a couple peeves with it so far:

1. If I'm using Camino, Amazon doesn't believe I've installed their downloader application, so I have to switch to Firefox.
2. You can only download files once. They don't get saved in your account library or anything like that.

And one weirdness that I think (hope) was just a one-off: On one of the albums I got, all the tracks are shifted a minute and a half to the right. That is, the first track has 1'30" of silence before the beginning of the song, which then goes 1'30" into track 2. Then the last track is cut off abruptly in the middle. Pretty weird. Still waiting for customer service to get back to me about this, since I can't even try to fix it by re-downloading (see #2 above).

Update, 10/20: Support responded promptly, saying they were looking into the problem. So I waited a week and then wrote in again asking for an update. They responded again, saying they had taken that album down and would make it available again, at which point I could try downloading it again and see if it was any better. After a week of checking every day and finding it still unavailable, I wrote in again. They couldn't tell me when it would be ready, but said to just keep checking. Sigh. Anyway, it finally made it, and I downloaded it again, and the tracks are still screwed up. Back to the drawing board.

One other annoyance, too: They use browser cookies to determine whether you've installed their downloader app. If you happen to clear out your cookies, they force you through downloading and installing it all over again. Ugh.

Update, 1/10/08: I happened to check back today, after forgetting for a while, and found that the album in question (Jason Webley's "Only Just Beginning") is back up. I downloaded it and it all worked perfectly. So we got there in the end.

eMusic and Last.fm Recommendations

I don't know if this is new in eMusic or if I only just noticed it, but it's kind of cool. It generates recommendations of artists you might like based on what you've already bought, which is nothing new. But the visual display of it is pretty slick. You can see which recommendations come from which other users via which artists, and you can watch the connections change just while you mouse over the different names in all three columns. Plus, of course, you can play samples right there. Nice.



The problem here is that I don't really have a reason to care much about things eMusic is recommending based on just a couple months of purchases. What I want is this UI on my Last.fm recommendations, which is based on 3 years of what I've actually listened to. The Last.fm radio is cool and everything, but it would be fun to have this alternate way to browse recommendations more deliberately. Though with so many more recommendations, this design would probably get unwieldy, so you'd have to work out some way to just examine specific parts of the network at a time. E.g. limit it to friends, or neighbors, or tags, or using the obscure/popular slider.

Trying Out eMusic

Very belatedly taking a tip from Case, I went to check out eMusic.com yesterday. Initial impressions:

Pros:

• No DRM.
• Good prices (about 30-60¢ per track, depending on your plan).
• "Booster packs" to supplement your regular subscription.
• Pretty easy, smooth download process, once you've installed the Download Manager.
• 25 free songs for your trial period.

Cons:

• I had trouble at first figuring out how to browse their selection without signing up. (If you get the giant promo page, click through to the about page in the footer, and browse from there.)
• You have to subscribe to a monthly plan, which doesn't carry over after the month is up.
• The site wouldn't let me find any info on the booster packs until I'd already signed up for a paid account.
• You can't search their help site. Sheesh, people, come on.

So I got my free trial, and then went ahead and took their cheapest subscription as well (30 tracks/month for $9.99). That let me get all three disks worth of Tom Waits' Orphans set. I'm still browsing around to determine what sort of a selection they have to go with my tastes, but I'll probably give it a try for a while, at least until we see what sort of a digital music store Amazon comes out with.

The forced-subscription thing is my biggest peeve about this, especially when things don't carry over. I'd be more than happy to just live off their booster packs (units of 10-30 tracks at a time), as long as I could get them when I wanted and use them when I wanted. It's a pity you can't just get those without a subscription. On the other hand, if I have trouble finding new stuff that I want each month, I figure I can always use my monthly quota to legitimize those parts of my music collection that may have come from *ahem* other sources. And that would probably be a good thing.

Out of Sync

I got a new video iPod yesterday. Tripling the types of media I can keep on there is pretty cool, but I'm not sure I quite like the management options for it all. Or perhaps I just haven't yet figured out how to make it do what I want it to do.

I added all my photos to the iPod but then found out that I had a new, 4GB+ folder of iPod cached images or something like that on my hard drive. That's not the kind of space I want it taking up. Heck, I've got more free space on my iPod right now that my computer; it should put all it's cached files there or something. Anyway, I deleted that and also unchecked the "sync photos" option for the iPod. It seems to be okay with leaving the existing photos on the iPod in spite of that, which is what I want. I'll just have to go through the whole conversion/caching process again the next time I want to sync up my photos. So that's kind of annoying, but I not too bad. (And now that I think of it, I should have just copied that cache folder to the iPod disk space, and copied it back for the next sync, rather than just deleting it. Oh well.)

Syncing movies seems more problematic. I keep most of my music on my computer, and most of my movies on my external hard drive. I want music to sync automatically, because there's so much of it that I don't want to keep track of what's new and needs adding. But I want to sync the movies manually, so I can just add new ones without it deleting old ones (because I've removed them from my iTunes library and put them back on my external HD). But iTunes makes both music and movies follow the same manual/automatic setting and I can't separate them. I've played around with the different syncing options (like only sync selected movies) but that doesn't seem to do the trick.

Has anyone figured out a good way to set this up? The only workaround I can think of is keeping a separate folder on one of my drives just for iPod movies, then copying them in to iTunes each time before I sync up, then removing them again. Kind of a pain. Otherwise it's a matter of having more stuff on my computer's HD than I want, or less stuff on my iPod.

Synergy is my new X-Tunes

When I got my new MacBook, I lamented the fact that I couldn't get X-Tunes to work on it. But thanks to Case I recently discovered Synergy, which seems to be just what I needed. It took a bit of configuring to get it the way I wanted, and I can't get the keyboard shortcuts to precisely match what I was used to, but I'm liking it nonetheless. This kind of thing is practically essential if I want to listen to music at work. I don't like leave my music playing while I'm not listening to it, but I also need to be able to turn it off at a moment's notice to pay attention to folks asking me questions and whatnot. With some quick keyboard shortcuts, it's a snap. I'm using Cmd+Opt as the modifier keys, with Return and the arrows, for pause/play, volume and track skipping. My main feature request is to show the amount of time elapsed or remaining on the current track when you're viewing the floater display. There are probably some other niggly little things I'd enjoy, but that's what I most miss.

BookMooch

This is a cool idea: BookMooch.com. It's a points-based book trading system. You can list books you own and want to give away, then when someone requests one, you send it and earn a point. With each point, you can request someone else to send you a book. The only cost is the postage. If you sign up and list 10 books to give away, you get a starter point to get you going before you even have to send anything out. Should be good, assuming they get enough people and books in there to have a decent amount of interesting things available. I'm going to try it out.
[via Lifehacker]

Update: Within a day of signing up, I sent off one book, got credits for two more, and requested one to be sent to me. Good start!

P.S. You can view my wishlist if you want to send me something, or see the books I have available to trade in my inventory.

Sirius Black and X-Tunes

I got my new MacBook last weekend. I'd been waiting very patiently for the MacBook Pros to come out in something smaller than 15" and the un-pro-ified MacBooks are still a tad bigger than my old 12" Powerbook, but close enough. I went with the black version rather than the white, though I'm bummed they don't have these in titanium. The white ones look a little too Fisher-Pricey for my taste, but the black is kind of cool. And that means I can name it Sirius Black. (Naming is always a very important part of getting a new computer.) Also, the two partitions on my external hard drive are now called Padfoot and Prongs. (Yeah, I'm a Harry Potter geek. So sue me.)

The overall transition has been pretty easy and painless, and I love having a zippy new machine with fewer problems. The only thing I'm really missing that I can't get to work is X-Tunes. That's a little iTunes controller that lets you just hit a key combination and then use Return and the arrow keys to play, pause, skip and change the volume on iTunes tracks. It's absolutely fantastic, but doesn't appear to work on the new Intel Mac system. Not only that, but the email address on the site bounces, so I can't contact the guy who developed it. Phooey. Anybody else know any cool little iTunes controllers like this? I was just going to use the Dashboard widget, but that doesn't accept keyboard commands, which is really the important part.

Musical Signatures

So this is kind of cool. The iTunes Signature Maker will analyze your iTunes library and make a short sound file merging together parts of various representative songs, choosing a set number of them by play count, or rating, or other options. It actually comes out with some pretty interesting stuff. This is my favorite result from my iTunes library so far. For the options on this one, I used 40 songs, chosen by play count, five second clips, up to five overlapping at once. I thought the overlapping might be too much, but I actually kind of like the density of sound it creates. Another version has 30 songs, with four second clips, and no more than two overlapping at once. How many of the separate songs can you recognize?

Last.fm should totally integrate something like this with user profiles.

(Link via Lifehacker.)

Audible.com Getting Better?

I logged in to Audible.com for the first time in a while last night, and they've changed up a bunch of stuff since I saw it last. I haven't done an exhaustive investigation yet, but I like what I've seen so far. In particular, several old pet peeves are now (finally) solved:

• Links have been unjavascriptified, so you can do normal link things with them, like open them in new windows/tabs, etc.
• It might be possible to link directly to particular books now (try it out on one of my favorites). I've been having mixed luck with it though, and I think my browser cookies are confusing the issue, so I'm not sure. Try it. It's kind of sad when something like that would be an improvement, rather than taken for granted, but oh well.
• The ridiculous session timeout (which didn't even require you to sign in again, but just screwed up your navigation) doesn't seem to happen anymore.
• Sound samples now open in a little flash player in a new window, rather than making me download a RealAudio file and play it in another app.

Unfortunately, downloading is still kind of messed up. They still don't give plain old links that I can right-click and save-as, which means Safari opens them in iTunes automatically, even if I just want to save them. I need to go through Firefox and get prompted for each one if I don't want my iTunes interrupted while I'm listening to something else.

Anyway, though, it looks like they're on the right path. Hopefully they'll keep going.

10.4, 10.4, Burning Bright

I installed Tiger, the new version of Mac OS X, last night. I had just enough time to glance over it and drool a bit before I went to Friday Night Waltz (an extra one for National Dance Week) but I've gotten to play with it a bit more today. I'm definitely liking it so far. I'm completely sold on Spotlight as a Launchbar replacement. And having Spotlight in Mail.app along with the new Smart Mailboxes seems like you could get it to behave a little more Gmaily, which would be cool. (Still, it's not quite the same as having labels, though. Too bad.)

For sheer, widgety fun though, the Dashboard is the most addictive new toy. It's full of customizable (not to mention very pretty) little mini-applications that popup and disappear at just the touch of a key. Some of the defaults are very useful (like weather forecast, dictionary lookup, stock prices, phone book, etc.) but there are also lots of extras you can download. Some of the ones I like are a wikipedia.org lookup, and a mini-wiki, which is like sticky notes on steroids. There's also, of course, DashBlog for posting to your Blogger blog. No fancy stuff at all, but very quick and easy for short posts, if you do a lot of that kind of thing. I was a little bit bummed about the default iTunes widget, since you can't control it from the keyboard, so I'm not quite ready to give up X-Tunes for that yet. But all in all, I could probably spend ages playing with the Dashboard and all the possible widgets. It's just fun that way.

Some things I haven't gotten around to yet but that look like fun: Creating new Dashboard widgets. Writing Automator scripts (maybe there's a good way to get all of my old archived email from Mail.app to Gmail). Safari RSS (not that I need another feed reader, but it's cool to see a browser-intergrated approach to it). And probably lots of other things that I'll continue to discover as I play with it more.

Wireless

Thanks to housemate-network-guy-Dave, we now have a wireless network here at home. This is very exciting, and not only because we can connect to the internet again. It also means that I can get rid of this darn ethernet cord that comes out of the ceiling in my closet, goes under my bed, under my rug, and across my floor before it reaches the computer at my desk. It will be strangely satisfying to roll that up and out of the way after almost two years. I think I'll go do that now.

The Arrival of Phileas Fogg

I have a new computer! A 12" 1GHz Powerbook. Very spiffy. Thanks go to Dom and Eric for helping me get a very good deal on it.

I'm naming it Phileas Fogg, after the protagonist of Around the World in 80 Days, since this is my first laptop, and thus the first of my computers to have the potential to travel (and I hope it will get the chance to do so). The name also follows my tradition of naming my computers after characters from books. My retiring computer's name is Florean Fortescue, after an obscure character selling ice cream on Diagon Alley in the Harry Potter books. No real reason for that, other than the fact that I liked the name. I actually renamed him Florean Fortescue II, after installing OS X. Before Florean was Zaphod Beeblebrox, President of the Galaxy in Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker series. Zaphod was my first good, new computer and I named him for the idea of having a lot of power but not really knowing what to do with it. My very first computer was a hand-me-down called the Dread Pirate Wesley, from the line in The Princess Bride stating: "No one would surrender to the Dread Pirate Wesley."

Hmm. If I really want to take the current theme as far as possible, I could start naming my peripherals. To go along with Phileas Fogg, I could call the keyboard Passepartout, the mouse Detective Fix, and the monitor Aouda. But maybe that would be a bit much....

A boy...

One of our computer programs at Project Read is called Rosetta Stone, and one of the activities on it lets students hear and read words or phrases, then match them from a selection of pictures. We've used it on the Macs for a while, but it's supposed to work on PCs, too. So tonight we were trying it out on our new PC ("new" according to the amount it's been used, not the amount of time we've had it). The first round on level one had four pictures: a boy, a girl, a dog, and a cat.

Computer types: a boy. Computer says: a boy. I click: a boy. Ding! Life is good and I move on.

Computer types: a dog. Computer says: a boy. Uh oh! Panic situation! I click the boy. Nope. The dog. Yep.

Computer types: a girl. Computer says: a boy. The girl wins.

And so on. At this point, were I trying to learn English, this would seem to me like a very cruel joke. Luckily, this was just a test drive, so I just found it funny. It was even worse when I set it to the mode that only spoke the words, and didn't display them. Spot checking the rest of the CD showed a red car, a horse jumping over a fence, and the number six, a man brushing a woman's hair, and two different kinds of fish. All were referred to as "a boy."

I think I'll just stick with the Macs, thank-you-very-much.

Earth-unlinked

Our DSL modem decided to completely stop working yesterday. Daniel was going to be spending some more time on tech support today to try to get it fixed, but given all the hoo-hah we had to go through with Earthlink just to get it working when we first got it, I'm not going to hold my breath. So anyway, if anybody sends me emails that I don't reply to, that's probably why.

Darned Cross-Browser Compatibility

I've been having some fun playing web-designer today, but these browser issues just really bug me sometimes. I can get stuff that looks good in Safari and Mozilla, but then IE always just screws it all up. I'm trying to do it completely in CSS, so part of the problem may just be that there are things I don't know about that yet. But even when I know what I'm doing, the browsers just render things differently. The bane of every web-designer's existence, I guess. Sigh. But enough of that for now. I'll have plenty of time sitting in front of a computer when I go back to work tomorrow.

I taught my first computer class tonight. Unfortunately, attendance was less than overwhelming, so it ended up being less like a class and more like a small number of private lessons taught by me and Georgina. I feel like I actually teach better one-on-one, but it was a bit disappointing that more people didn't show up. I think we need a different approach to recruiting people. We basically just sent out flyers to all our students and tutors, letting them know this was happening, but the flyers really weren't very descriptive. I expect most of the tutors saw it and assumed they didn't need the class (which most of them don't) and most of the students saw it and didn't understand it, or didn't want to come alone or whatever. What we ought to do next time is to talk to the tutors directly, and convince them to bring their students. I think that would work a bit better. We should talk to the students who come into the lab, too, but they're less likely to need a class (seeing as how they're already using the computers). It's trickier to bring in the people who don't use computers at all. In hindsight, this is all fairly obvious, but at the time we were too busy creating flyers and lesson plans to realize it.

Anyway, this was a pretty basic class, but it went okay. The woman I spent the most time with still seems a bit tense around the computer, but she seemed to be getting a decent understanding of things like opening folders, clicking vs. double-clicking, getting CDs in and out of the computer, etc. Just those basic things people need to know to use our programs. (That probably sounds insanely basic to most of you, but it's been an interesting change of perspective to work with people who literally don't know any of this stuff.) I do hope to teach something a little more interesting at some point, like an internet or word processing class, but first priority is still probably just getting more people to learn the basics. Maybe later we can get some more advanced people together for a different class.

I spent a couple hours tonight going through Project Read's old computer junk that's been stashed on shelves and under desks for a long time. I was just generally clearing things out and organizing but it was like a small archaeological expedition. There was some really old, useless stuff in there. Manuals for software we don't have, equipment that we can't connect to any of our computers, and even things I couldn't really identify. It was kind of interesting, though. And now we have several boxes of stuff to get donated or, more likely, recycled. The stuff we could ever conceivably use now takes up about one shelf.

In about a week and a half I'm going to teach my first computer workshop. So I've been preparing for that a bit, and I've got bilingual handouts and everything (though Georgina will probably do any on-the-spot translating that's needed). It's a little hard to anticipate what it will be like, though, since we don't really know who's going to show up. I'm figuring on having this lesson be absolute basics -- as in "this is how you turn it on," "this is a mouse, it doesn't bite," etc. -- since we know there are plenty of people who need that. But if a lot of people show up already knowing the basics, I need to be prepared to teach more. That shouldn't be too hard, though. And then after this lesson, we'll decide if we need to do more like it or move on to more intermediate things, like word processing or using the internet.

I'm looking forward to teaching the class. Being the computer lab volunteer (and now, part-time staff) has kept me a little more involved with the computers than the actual students. I knew that when I took the job, of course. The tutors are the ones who spend the most time actually teaching and I do a lot of computer and software setup and maintenance. It's been good, though, because I feel like I've really done a lot to make everything more manageable -- we don't have as many problems as we used to, and it will be easier to maintain even after I'm gone. But it is nice to do some teaching, too.

Speaking of teaching, though -- it's harder in Spanish. Thelma always helps me practice my Spanish when she's in here, but today I was trying to explain things about Microsoft Word and saving files. That's not the sort of thing I learned in highschool :-)

Blogging is in slow-mode right now. I installed Mac OS X just the other day, so most of my computer time is being spent futzing with that. Fun, though.

So now we have everything set up for the DSL and the blasted thing still won't work. I was all ready to forgive Earthlink, too, since the other delay turned out to be UPS's fault. But Daniel spent half the day on tech support today and they still can't get us online. I don't know what's going on. Argh.