Entries Tagged 'Digital Music' ↓

If you’re a Bob Dylan fan, you must read Lee Abrams’ series, The Dylan Diary. It’s the story of how this longtime radio exec, who now works for XM Radio, managed to convince Dylan that he should do something for XM:

Getting through was not easy. The label was pretty useless. Of course the label usually owns the plastic…the managers own the artist…in Bob’s case it was appearing that Bob owns Bob, and there lies the challenge.

From Part 2:

This ain’t no radio show. This is an epic. We talked through the vision. I Was expecting to guide then through the process, but in reality their vision was exactly what I hoped it would be. Theater-of-the-Mind. Americana radio. The glory of an AM from 500 miles away at 3am. Whacked humor. Ear Candy. Arthur Godfrey meets Bob Dylan…in 2006. Eddie Gorodetsky, a legend of his own, was brought on to help Bob produce the show. Jeff Rosen was deeply involved. Their team is set to make magic. Eddie’s request for tapes of old jingles, air checks and ads so hokey that they are genius made me very confident.

We first got copies of the song lists. For technical reasons we need to make sure they are in our system. As deep as the XM library his, they had us stumped on a few. Good! Symbolizes that the musical direction will break every radio rule. Perfect. In fact that they have no clue about what a traditional radio show should look and sound like means that the show WILL be a PURE reflection of Bob and uncompromised for mass consumption. I believe that because the show IS so unusual that it WILL be mass appeal…but certainly not by trying to be.

And my favorite part:

Last Friday I had the chance to present the idea to the ENTIRE XM marketing force. Had a five minute demo that included dozens of major artists talking a bout Bob that we culled from our Artist Confidential series. Priceless comments from Coldplay, Paul McCartney, Willie Nelson, Judy Collins, Phil Collins and many more. At the end of the CD there was BOB DYLAN talking about the show. Surreal. It really was Bob. And he was talking about the show. Had a PowerPoint, but kind of tossed it to wax on about the show hopefully better than A PowerPoint.

I only hope there will be some way to time-shift this. As much as I’d love to sit down every week and listen to the Bob Dylan show, that isn’t the way the world works anymore. I want to record it, save it, carry it on my portable music player, put it in my car for a long drive.

Are you listening, Lee?

(via Doc Searls)

I suspect that every couple faces this problem, to one degree or another. So I thought I’d throw it open for comments and suggestions.

I like my music. My wife likes hers. There’s some subset of tunes that we both enjoy equally, but it’s a classic Venn diagram.

Our entire music collection is digital (thanks to a marathon CD-ripping session in the fall of 2004). I tagged all those ripped files meticulously, and I’m equally careful when I download new tracks from eMusic or rip a new CD to add to the collection.

It’s a huge collection – more than 14,000 songs in all, in who knows how many albums. And we can play any track, any album, or any custom playlist throughout the house, thanks to Windows Media Center and a couple Media Center Extenders.

Now, Judy would be extraordinarily happy if she didn’t have to listen to another Grateful Dead song as long as she lives, so I listen to those songs in my office or when she’s away. And she knows that she and the cats can listen to Cher’s Greatest Hits and anything by the Pet Shop Boys only when I’m away. Preferably far away. On the other hand, that section in the middle is pretty big: We both like Bob Dylan, Shannon McNally, Steve Earle, Ry Cooder, k. d. lang, and Yonder Mountain String Band, to name just a few artists.

On a shared computer with separate user accounts, the solution is easy: Put my songs in my user profile, put Judy’s in her profile, and put everything else in the Shared Music folder.

Unfortunately, our Media Center setup doesn’t support multiple accounts, so there’s no “yours, mine, and ours” option. (If you have a Roku SoundBridge or a similar device, you have the same problem.) So how to filter the list? I have a few ideas I’ve thought of using, all of them a little on the kludgey side:

• We could repurpose the 5-star ratings system that Windows Media Player uses. My music could be rated 1 or 2 stars, hers 4 or 5, with anything rated 3 being “ours.” With a few well-named auto-playlists, it would be fairly easy to sort things out. But we’d lose the option to actually rank tracks by how well we like each one.
• We could invent some new genres. Instead of assigning conventional categories like Rock, Pop, Jazz, and Classical, we could tag my albums with a custom genre that includes my name and tag Judy’s with a complementary category. But the “ours” list would still include all those tracks.
• We could build custom playlists for every album in the collection and then edit the names of “his” and “hers” albums to include a prefix (ZZ and ZZZ, for instance) that sorts them to the end of the list. That wouldn’t be as complicated as it sounds, but it would be a hassle. And the trouble with using playlists is that you don’t get to see the album art when you browse.

I’m tempted to use the middle option. Re-tagging files with a new genre is a trivially easy drag-and-drop operation, and it makes it easy to filter the list in lots of ways.

Am I missing any options? How would you solve this problem?

Forbes reports that Apple’s Steve Jobs is about to jack up music prices.

Well, I wasn’t about to pay 99 cents to Apple (or anyone else) for a low-quality, DRM-crippled copy of a song. So now that the price is going to be higher, I don’t think I’ll be slipping into the Steve Jobs reality distortion field any time soon.

Fools.

In the comments to Charlie Owen’s post on the Media Center code in Windows Vista, a commenter asks:

Here’s a simple question that hits at the heart of things, I think: have you ever, EVER gone to someone’s house and seen them sort their CDs by album title? When you go to a record store and look in the jazz section, is it EVER organized by album? No on both counts: people organize around artists, even if by artists within a genre. So why in the world is MCE focusing so much on albums, other than the pretty graphics?!? Why, when going to My Music, do we see 27 tiny pictures rather than a list that will help us quickly find what we want to hear?

In the current version of Media Center, you can sort by artist or by album. You can also right-click to display the album view as a list rather than a bunch of album covers.

I think the overall point is a good one, though. I have about 1200 albums in my Media Center collection and navigation is a major pain.

More on this later.

Through a random series of links, I read about a new service called MusicGiants, which recently opened its “high definition” digital music service. The online store offers tracks in Windows Media Lossless format (450 - 1100 kbps) instead of selling compressed MP3, WMA, or AAC tracks, as other music services do.

Good idea. On audiophile-quality equipment (including a Windows Media Center PC), I can hear the noticeable difference between a 128K MP3 and an original CD or a track ripped in lossless format. Those lossy files are fine on a portable player, but not in my living room.

And I really wanted to like MusicGiants. But after reviewing the terms of the deal, I give it a big thumbs down. What’s not to like? Plenty:

• The software only runs on Windows XP or Windows 2000. Not a deal-breaker for me, but still, not a user-friendly approach.
• There’s a $50 annual fee. The fee’s waived if you buy $250 worth of music per year, and you get a credit equal to the value of the fee for the first year, but still…
• Each track costs $1.29. An entire album costs $15.29. By contrast, I just paid $10.99 for the new Neil Young album, Prairie Wind, from Amazon.com. I regularly buy used CDs from Half.com for much less. Charging this price is ridiculous. Especially when …
• The tracks are “protected” with Windows Digital Rights Management. In exchange for accepting the restrictions on my right to listen to the music I’ve purchased, I should get a hefty discount, not pay a premium.

In fairness to the company, they’re probably not setting the price. Since they have deals with the big record labels, they’re not going to get a deal that’s any better than Steve Jobs got.

But then I read this profile of the company in Business Week:-Is This Digital Music’s Future? And I think the company may be truly clueless:

That’s why MusicGiants plans to sell a $9,500, 400-gigabyte device called the SoundVault that would sit in the stereo cabinet, just like a CD-player or receiver. (The package includes hardware, a high-end sound processing card, and networking gear.) That way, MusicGiants’ customers could bypass their PCs and load songs directly into their living room stereo. “It’s hard to sell gas, if no one has a car,” says [founder and CEO Scott] Bahneman, who hopes to get out of the hardware business as soon as other gear starts to appear.

$9500? And then another $6000 to fill it up? Please send me a bag of whatever this guy’s smoking, because it must be truly mind-bending shit. If anyone out there is willing to pay 15 grand for this product, I’m in the wrong business. I can build a super high-end Media Center system and fill it with perfectly legal lossless music for … oh, let’s say about $5000-6000. And it would also replace the TiVo and the DVD player and do digital photography too. If I can sell one or two of these babies per month for the price that these guys want to charge, I can make a pretty fabulous living.

Anyone want to take bets on how long this company lasts?

[Cross-posted at Ed Bott's Windows Expertise.]