For those of you who came here originally from my personal blog, Smoke Rings and Coffee Stains, you know I’ve had that blog the longest. It is having major issues yesterday and today, with significant loss of data. I will be concentrating on fixing it.
You shouldn’t feel neglected. I was distracted by Harry Potter like everyone else this weekend. I’m all done now, though, as you can see by my brief review of the last Harry Potter book. That means I can concentrate on Apple news for you again.
If you were wondering if the iPhone would work well with your PC, the answer is apparently… kind of.
I have 4 Pownce invites left. First come, first served.
According to TUAW. Cingular/AT&T, Vodaphone and T-Mobile, proving it really might be worth the wait.
I am only marginally excited for this. When I tell you the reason why I can’t jump for joy yet, I just know you will laugh your collective socks off at me. Are you ready? No off button. I’m serious! Stop laughing! I am not in love with the sleep feature on the iPod. I don’t know about your iPod, maybe yours works just fine, but my iPod? Not so much. When it is on its own, not attached to anything, it shuts down like it is supposed to, eventually, but I consider the delay to be wasted battery minutes. When it is attached to my iHome in the kitchen or my iRiver in the car? It never shuts off. I constantly have to remember to take it out of the iHome or unplug it from the iRiver so it “knows” it should shut down. Eventually. After it wastes a few minutes of battery. It’s a small thing, I know, but I’d love to have the ability to just hit OFF already. Is that too much to ask?
Whew. Apparently I have strong iPod off switch feelings. Who knew? Back to the next generation iPod. It is rumored to have a large, more iPhone like screen in the works, which would be nice for video viewing. It is also rumored to run on OS X, another nice feature. According to the source web site, ArsTechnica, you should look for this in January. Knowing Apple, I’m guessing they will late but the 6th Gen iPod will be even better because of it. And if anyone at Apple reads this? Power. Button. Seriously, people.
I love it when a CEO or co-founder is involved with their product. In this case, the co-founder of SimplifyMedia, Paul Joyce, responded to my lukewarm response to his software as discussed in this post. Here is what he had to say:
Leslie-
Thank you for the mention and the excellent write-up on the importance of music sharing. My music collection is like yours: more than 2,000 albums on vinyl (no weeding), another 1,000+ cd’s and many iTMS tracks.
The reason I wanted to write is that our software’s memory use on your machine is very unusual. This isn’t something we have seen ourselves, and so far yours is the only report from the field. We would really like to understand what the problem might be. If you have it, someone else most likely will too. Do you know how much memory we ended up using? Less than 50MB while streaming is standard for us.
Also, on iTunes-purchased songs, we do let you stream you own songs to an authorized computer, just like Apple LAN sharing. This is a capability other streaming solutions do not have. Just log in on the remote machine using the same screen name. What we can’t do is strip the DRM out so that, in your example, Cyndy can listen. You can thank the DMCA for that. A great Cory Doctorow article from last year does a nice job of summarizing the many reasons DRM sucks.
Thanks again, and have a great weekend.
Paul Joyce
Co-founder, Simplify Media
I replicated the memory issue with Activity Monitor running this morning so I could provide an exact number. I’m not sure if the problem lies in memory use or in compatibility with other programs, however; here is the data pulled from Activity Monitor from just before the last incident:
%CPU 0.30, #Threads 18, RealMemory 20.62 MB, VirtualMemory 361.80 MB
Programs that were also running at the time of each of the incidents: FireFox, Adium, iTunes, ecto, endo, Thunderbird, Word
I don’t experience this issue with any other combination of programs, and SimplifyMedia is the only new addition to the MacBook lately. I hope that helps you plan for future instances. I appreciated your response to my post. Future users of SimplifyMedia should be confident using your product regardless of issues I’ve experienced, just knowing that the company is paying attention. Regardless, the fact that you can’t play iTunes files due to DRM issues is a real sticking point for me that has nothing to do with SimplifyMedia. I’d be interested to know if anyone has a workaround in the works for this problem that you can use with programs like this one.
This web site has a nice write up on 5 things you can do to use your iPod to its full potential. Subway maps? Dictionary? Match maker? Jogging/Walking route planner? Doom player? This site has links to them all. I doubt I’ll be installing Linux on my iPod anytime soon (to play Doom), but the others I may give a go. Two thumbs up for these links to some excellent iPod hacks.
By now everyone knows that iTunes stores your personal information into the DRM free version of their downloads. This little tool will strip your private data from each file. It’s a bit awkward to use, as it only offers a per song interface, but if you’re diligent about stripping each song as soon as you buy it it won’t take too much time.
Microsoft busted blatantly ripping off Apple’s Universal logo by this Flickr user.
This mod from Mod Your iPhone shows how to get the AT&T carrier text off of your screen.
The web site Hack The iPhone has published a two pronged hack for the iPhone that will give you the ability to add custom ring tones. You can find it here.
iPhone, Hack iPhone, Custom Ringtone, iPhone Custom Ringtone
The RIAA seems hell bent on preventing people from finding new music the old fashioned way – by sharing it with friends. I wouldn’t listen to music at all if I had been restricted to what the radio programming manager decided should be the handful of songs in rotation in any given week. My entire life I’ve never been a fan of what’s on the radio. I love punk, goth, alternative (real alternative, not the current umbrella category) and other off the wall choices. Would I have found the music I love in public consumption? Hell, no. I had to turn to my friends for that. They’d make me mixed tapes, and I’d go buy the albums if I liked the songs. I’d say what the RIAA considers illegal music sharing in analog form is what got me to the point where I own (as in paid for, you RIAA fucktards) over 400 cassettes, 800 CDs, nearly 800 records (it was 1000 – I weeded) and tons of iTunes and eMusic mp3s (over 1000 so far and still going). Tally that up, you narrow minded corporate drones – I may be one person, but that is a LOT of money spent on music over the years.
Anyway, RIAA rant aside, we are still left with the problem of how to share the music that we legally own. Playing a song for your friends, no matter where they are, is definitely fair use in my book. Not only that, it is fair use that leads to sales – it’s how we discover new talent. There are a few things you can do to find new music. You can listen to internet radio, assuming the RIAA doesn’t destroy that also in their quest to homogenize the planet and control the airwaves. Internet radio is full of stations that play truly alternative, cutting edge music. Streaming one of the stations, even the ones you see on iTunes radio, is a great way to find something new to love.
You can try programs like SimplifyMedia. My friend Cyndy and I tried this last night, and she wrote a review of it in her Web 2.0 series on Profy. She liked it better than I did. I give it points for catering to the voyeur in me – snooping around someone else’s iTunes and judging them for bonding with them over their taste in music is always fun. Plus you get to see the guilty pleasure songs they never allow to pop up on their iPod and tease them about it (she got to see my Johnny Cash hiding in my playlist, I got to see her show tunes). SimplifyMedia has a couple of major drawback though. First, you can not see the music you bought using iTunes. That is a huge blow against this software for me as I’m a big believer in fair use once I’ve paid for something. Second, while the program doesn’t take up much room on your hard drive, or use much bandwidth, using it really blows up your RAM consumption. I have 1.25 GB in my MacBook, and I found I had to close programs to keep the stream going – not cool.
You can share music the old fashioned way, by burning your friend a CD or emailing them a song. That works for real life friends, but what about interweb fwenz? That puts them completely out of the picture. You can push your luck by using an old fashioned service like Napster used to be, but I wouldn’t recommend that. It puts you at risk for RIAA attention, of course, but also for viruses hidden in files – it just isn’t smart in either case. I believe you should be able to share music that way if you want, again because it drives sales, but this is one case where the risks outweigh the reward. I’d stick to email or CD “mix tapes” instead.
My current favorite way to share music is Mog. This new social network allows you to create a profile and place widgets on both the Mog profile and your web site (you can see my “currently playing” widget in the lower right sidebar). You then make friends, similar to Myspace, Friendster, FaceBook and others but with a much less obnoxious interface. what I love about it that you can blog your music on your Mog profile and upload songs, alum art and videos to support your review of the artist. Then you can embed the player in your blog or web page, giving you another way to point to your review and expose your favorite music to the masses. I’ve done this a couple of times, and know for a fact it resulted in sales – the people who bought the songs would not have heard of them otherwise. It’s easy, they do all of the work for you, and it doesn’t require any software to be installed on your computer. Both Mog and SimplifyMedia work on Macs without a hitch.
However you do it, don’t stop sharing your music tastes with the world just because the greedy people at the RIAA want more of your money (and believe me, it is the RIAA who get the money they sue for, not the artists). I tallied up the total spent on music from my list above and using average costs of cassettes, CDs and records at the tie of purchase, plus iTunes songs, I figured I have spent an average of $26,170 in music since the age of twelve. that’s more than my car costs, people, and yet the RIAA is still being greedy. Shame on them. If you have a favorite way to share music with friends, let me know in the comments. Shoot, if you like the kind of music I do, go ahead and recommend music to me in the comments – I’m always looking for a new earworm.
If you just want to add me to your Mog friends, click here for my Mog profile.
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Technorati Tags: Music Sharing, RIAA, Fair Use, Mix Tape, Music, Online Music Downloads, Streaming Radio, Mog, iTunes, iPod
Blendtec features the iPhone in an episode of their famous vlogvertisement series “Will It Blend“.
Well, I upgraded to iTunes 7.3 and can safely say no ring tones are evident as speculated earlier. What’s more, other sites are now saying that once the ring tone feature is active in later versions, you will a) only be able to make ring tones out of songs purchased from iTunes and b) will get charged an extra 99 cents a song on top of the original cost of the song to make a 30 second ring tone. If that is true, that’s a multi-level rip off that really pisses me off.
First of all, that first 99 cents a song should cover all fair use of the song. Including making a damn ring tone if we want to. Second, what about my other music services and my CDs? eMusic is a favorite of mine for songs, and I have hundreds of CDs. You mean to tell me that if this rumor pans out I can’t use any of that music to make ring tones for the iPhone, which will only be compatible with iTunes? What a crock. That would make me a really unhappy Apple customer.
It seems that so far Apple is missing a big boat with the iPhone not being able to use a full song from the iPod/iTunes library on it as a ring tone, not to mention the choice of AT&T as the carrier. If the grapevine speaks the truth they can chalk up another strike against them on this, which is too bad. I was hoping they’d be innovative and lead the way on songs as ring tones and other features.
Tags: iPhone, Ring Tone, RingTone, iPhone Ringtones, eMusic, AT&T, Cingular, ringtones, ringtunes
Thanks to Amy for the linky goodness:
According to MamaPop, all it took was five minutes playing with an iPhone to make a hardcore PC code monkey fall in love and buy one. Any Apple lovers out there just thought “well, no shit, sherlock”, but PC lovers may be confused. Without becoming one of those Apple users, let me just say that the reason Apple’s tag line is “It Just Works”… is because it’s true. And now I want an iPhone even more. Save faster, self!
So what in the world possessed him to cross over to the dark side and plunk down several hundred dollars on a phone we totally do not need?
Simple. Because he spent five damn minutes playing with one at work.
That was all it took to turn an eye-rolling skeptic into a panting, wide-eyed lunatic who HAD TO HAVE AN iPHONE.
One of my favorite selling points of the iPhone, according to MamaPop? Settling fights in bars. Now that is a reason to have an iPhone this AppleGrrl can really get behind!
The web browser is freaking mind-blowing. It took me forever before I could use it without my jaw dropping and my tongue rolling out. The last time I had a reaction like this to a piece of electronics was the first time I hit the pause button on my brand-new TiVo. Like, holy shit. It’s the goddamn Internet. On my phone. Tap and zoom and scroll and resize the page…all with your fingers, with no stripped-down text-only versions of the websites to struggle through. It’s easy and intuitive and looks gorgeous. The iPhone will let you surf IMDB and Wikipedia the way God intended and for their true purpose: to settle fights in bars.
Seriously, go read the blog at MamaPop about their amazing new iPhone. Heck, you should be reading MamaPop anyway – those chicks are on the cusp of pop culture – the cusp, I tell you.
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