Apple Grrl

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.

SimplifyMedia, iTunes, DRM

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