Steve Jobs is personally responsible for killing the music business.

Jon Bon Jovi, via MSNBC reprinting the Sunday Times (paywalled)

A popular recent quote from a man who’s seen a thousand cities and rocked them all. I’m not a fan of Bon Jovi’s music, but I can’t really argue with what he’s saying in the above-linked article. There is a whole generation of people who think music is supposed to sound like it’s on YouTube.^[1]

The comparative high-quality of compressed music available in the iTunes Music Store and elsewhere is considered reference-quality for most people. As portable music goes, the quality of 320kbps, VBR-encoded AAC files or MP3s is pretty damned good. On a good pair of headphones or a high-end system though, the limitations start to become apparent.

When I first started listening to compressed music at the turn of the millenium, many people compressed around 96kbps. I tended to compress at higher levels and encoded my music in 160kbps rips from MusicMatch transferred to my Creative Audio Nomad Jukebox. A clunky, hard-drive-based music player with a horrible interface that I loved the hell out of at the time. People thought I was crazy for using such “high quality” mp3s.

As the years went on, I realized that the harsh encodings of 2000 sounded really bad on my improving audio gear. So I upped the bitrate and transcoded everything at 192kbps. This happened again later and I jumped to 256 and then 320. Now it’s happening again. I’m actually listening to physical media as my preferred media format. And re-ripping a large chunk of my library in “lossless” format. If it were available, I’d buy everything in SACD or some emergent blu-ray audio format, were such a thing to exist.

To FLAC or ALE?

Now that I’m considering doing the Lossless step, I’m faced with a somewhat difficult choice. FLAC or Apple Lossless Encoder? I think the “correct” choice would be FLAC, an open-source audio compression codec. Unfortunately, it doesn’t integrate very nicely into iTunes. There are plugins for it, but they’re hacky and Apple is bound to break them with every iTunes upgrade.

So, the great dilemma of the modern age: does convenience trump portability? In this case, for me, I think it does. There are tools to move from Apple Lossless (ALE) to FLAC (DoubleTwist for one) that should serve well enough if I ever do have to ditch the Apple platform at the cost of a few hours of scripting and re-encoding. The other “advantage” of ALE is that it’ll happily play on my iDevices if I ever want to take some with me. And iTunes makes it relatively easy to make lossy copies of ALE files for transport. If there’s another piece of music software out there that can do this with FLACs, I’d love to hear about it.

The Setup

I’ll be listening to music in the following places:

• My computer
• Home system (direct via SPDIF)
• My laptop with headphones (streamed via wifi)
• My living room (streamed via Airport Express)
• Anywhere else on my iPhone or iPad (via homesharing)

When I’m roaming, I’ll have my iPhone or iPad and headphones. In all of the above locations around my house, I want lossless audio served up from my main computer. On my iPhone and iPad, I want that converted down to some decent, high-quality compressed format like AAC 320VBR.

iTunes provides an option to convert music on portable players to AAC 128Kbps on sync. Unfortunately, this is woefully inadequate for me. This means storing two copies of music in my iTunes library: one uncompressed and one compressed. The best instructions on how to do this that I’ve found are on iLounge from 2004 (found an updated version from 2011 with no real new info). They recommend converting before sync and then deleting the copies again after you’re done. The old option on the iPod “classic” to “manually manage music” is no longer present on the iOS devices.

Another option is to keep multiple iTunes libraries. One for lossless streaming, the other for syncing to devices. This is not super groovy as it means shutting down iTunes and restarting it depending on what I’m doing. I also lose a lot of metadata by having separate libraries. Play counts and ratings in one library don’t automatically get linked up without some very clever (probably impossible) AppleScripting.

Speaking of AppleScript, I should probably mention Doug’s AppleScripts for iTunes. He’s got a ton of useful automation for all kinds of iTunes tasks including a script for re-encoding lossless tracks onto an iPod capable of letting your manage your music collection. (probably means iPod classic)

Where to from here?

I’m in limbo. I’m currently ripping tracks to lossless in iTunes and removing said tracks from my iPod synced playlists. Every disc I rip gets removed from my iPhone and iPad. I’m likely not going to replace everything in my library. Some things I just don’t have. Others probably wouldn’t benefit hugely from a lossless conversion due to weak recording. I’m toying with the idea of using my laptop for device syncing, copying compressed versions to that machine and keeping my desktop server as the lossless library.

Help me! I’d love to hear your suggestions, no matter how outlandish. I am more than willing to throw iTunes to the kerb for a decent home streaming solution.

[1] – Sony killed the music industry in the 80s with The Walkman and tape decks so maybe it’s just the most-recent “death of the music industry”.

• iTunes connectivity – it already hooks into the iTunes Music Store via wifi, why not allow it to browse and playback music from shared iTunes libraries on the LAN? I would love to be able to access my music or friends’ music when I’m visiting and don’t have a laptop around. Syncing tunes wirelessly and sharing tunes would also be fantastic additions.

It was probably the feature I most wanted back then, and the last one to arrive. This pleases me.

There was one other item on the list that never made it, and that’s having access to the radio channels in iTunes. That feature’s largely been supplanted by the availability of 3rd party radio apps. Just as well too, since Apple hasn’t really done much with their radio channels and I’m honestly surprised they’re still in there. Now hopefully Apple can keep itself from killing off third content providers entirely.

What do I want next? Here’s a short list:

• “Lossless” music downloads in the store. Even better would be HD audio, DVD-A or SACD quality music. Unlikely given how uninterested the recording industry (and, I guess consumers) seems to feel about it.
• Multiple encodings. Like video, it’d be neat if I could store a lossless version of a track and a lower-quality compressed version for carrying around on my ‘pods. iTunes can do it with video so audio should be easy.
• Alternate formats. WAV, FLAC, WMA, OGG. Unlikely at best.
• Separation of services from the core of iTunes. App, Music and Movie Stores, Ping (I predict Ping’ll disappear altogether in a year or so), Books (?), TV and Movies…

iTunes has gotten hugely complicated and is the cause of many slow-downs and beachballs during the course of the day. Most of the time, I just want a music player. I never actually watch movies or TV in iTunes preferring other players. I only use it to get video onto my iP*ds but I’d much prefer not having to clutter up my computer’s storage with the extra video copies. Hell, while I’m thinking wishfully, maybe it’d be nice if Apple would let me play AVI/XviD, WMVs and WebM video while we’re at it to save me the trouble of transcoding.

I won’t hold my breath. All signs point to Apple locking down iTunes even tighter (and bloating it even further). Talk of removing optical drives on all future Macs and forcing users to buy everything through the iTunes Store is not that far-off considering some of the recent money grabbing. Then again, maybe they’ll get broken up for anti-competitive practices. I give that a couple of years at their current rate.

[update, official Rogers update available via this thread: http://communityforums.rogers.com/t5/forums/forumtopicpage/board-id/Android/message-id/927]

Now that Rogers has finally released a Froyo update for the Streak, I think my own upgrade exploits are a little less necessary for the average human. Or maybe not. I haven’t read any reviews of the Rogers version yet, but I have a hard time believing it works as well as DJ_Steve’s StreakDroid firmwares. I’m using 1.8.0 now (aka Chernobyl Meltdown) and it seems to work very very well. He’s done a great job of packaging up a ROM with useful features and software and I recommend it heartily.

My own upgrade path took me all over the internet. With some helpful pointers from @gav_taylor on twitter, I found the XDA forums and from there, links to a trove of firmware options tailored (pun!) to my very needs. I started with an O2 version of the ROM which made my radios think they were operating somewhere in England and unable to work in high-speed mode on Rogers. But at least I could see the device’s potential. From there, I upgraded to a stock Dell 2.2 ROM (v318) and finally migrated to StreakDroid 1.6 (still Froyo, despite the confusing numbering). It was tricky, required a lot of removing the battery, and felt like I was going to brick my device at any second. Since then, DJ_Steve’s had two more releases, 1.7.0 and 1.8.0. I just installed the latter yesterday and it doesn’t seem very different from 1.7.0. I think it’s mostly a bug-fix release. Battery life seems improved, I think. [and so does jdmcivic, it appears]

So now that I’ve got this Froyo thing what do I think?

It makes a helluva difference for starters. It takes this smallish slab of metal and glass and plastic and turns it from being a cumbersome, graphically antiquated toy to something you can actually use and even enjoy. Froyo looks good and works well on this device. DJ_Steve’s tweaks make the Streak feel like a pretty capable device and adds some extra glitz to the environment. App switching is instantanous. LauncherPro (thanks for the rec, madhava!) with all the eye candy turned up to full is silky smooth. It runs very well, but is a little battery intensive (more on that in my review of the hardware). The Gingerbread keyboard is a huge improvement, especially with swype disabled.

There’s already a huge array of software available for Android. I was amazed to see the number of entries in the store is comparable to the iTunes app store, if not ahead of it now. Of course, there are some caveats. Not all of the software I’ve tested is as high quality as most of the featured items on the iTunes app store. The bar to entry feels a bit lower. That said, there are whole classes of application available for Android you just can’t get on iTunes. File managers, wifi hotspots (unnecessary with Froyo which has that capability built-in), rooting tools for the hacker-minded.

Appz

Like the iTunes App Store, one of the weakest aspects of the Android Marketplace is the application itself. There is a cool alternative for Android users though. I recommend AppBrain for managing your applications. It has some extra features like notifying you when your apps have updates and the ability to sync your installed apps. Highly recommended.

For music players, WinAmp seems like a pretty capable player. I haven’t played with the desktop version yet on Windows which will allow syncing and file management, but it looks like a pretty solid player. It comes with some widgets for controlling the app from your desktop launcher too. There’s also Songbird which I was surprised to find in here. There are various built-in music player apps as well.

Some apps have jumped  the AppStore boundary and are available in both Android and iTunes. Kindle for one I’ll be watching closely over the coming months as Apple’s tyrannical bid for Moar Monayz unfolds. I will say that the Android version feels like it’s a bit behind the iPhone version. Some features are missing (syncing books not purchased from the Kindle store) and some of the polish on the iTunes version. The music identifier Shazam is also here as well as the omnipresent Angry Birds. I haven’t tested either of these, but it’s nice to see that some of my favorites are on both platforms. It’ll make the eventual total migration less painful.

One completely absent category is the media player. Whither video players galore? I was totally shocked to see that the base media player that ships with Froyo is a really basic, incapable device mostly included to play recorded videos from the camera app. Apparently Android is turning on accelerated video in some future release of Android. I have no idea what codecs that will include (hopefully WebM?) or what that’ll mean for video apps like VLC who I hear is working on a port. This is kind of a deal-breaker for me as one of the best parts of my iPad is its ability to play glorious, high-quality video (admittedly after some transcoding in Handbrake). I have no doubt it will come, but it’s absence feels strange and unexpected. It is a let down.

Also exciting to see several web browsers on offer. The two I’ve been playing with most are the Firefox beta and Miren. I hear good things about Dolphin too. All of these are easily better than the default browser that Android ships with and it begs the question: Do Android devs talk to Chrome devs? Then again, I’m happy to have Firefox there so I don’t really care.

On the surface, this would seem to be the easiest of the different streaming types to achieve. In iOS 4.2, we have “Airplay” streaming to connect to an Airport Express or Apple TV. It works fairly well, but I get occasional glitches causing drop outs in the audio. Less than ideal. I’m not sure if this is because of network issues or because the devices themselves are too resource constrained to provide a continuous stream of bits.

Airplay is even worse if you want to try playing a video game to your home stereo. I was getting lag of around 2 seconds while playing Orbital. Stick with headphones or plugin directly to some speakers if you want big sound.

For streaming music, I usually use the Remote app on my iPhone or iPad to send music from my home machine to the Airport and it works much more reliably.

But what if I want to use my headphones? I could sync the music that I want through iTunes, but that’s slow and annoying. I’d still like to be able to browse my home machine and stream music directly to my device like I can in OS X. We keep hearing rumours that Apple’s working on building a cloud storage service for your music. With nearly 200GB of music on my network and limited upstream bandwidth, this would be impractical. I’m fine with keeping a limited selection of music on my devices when I’m out in the world, but having full access to my music when I’m on my home network from all of my devices would be awesome. Using a feature like “Back to my Mac” to be able to stream from my home collection when roaming would be great for bonus points.

Apple’s never really done much with their built-in streaming radio service in iTunes either, and I’m a little surprised it’s still included at all, given their push towards moving everyone into the iTunes Music Store. I still use it and have a few channels I still listen to regularly (hello GrooveSalad!). It’s surprising that I need to install a 3rd party app to do this, and to be honest, I’ve never found one that I actually like. I’ve tried Fstream and a couple others whose names escape me, they were so underwhelming. Dedicated channel apps like CBC are great for individual radio streams, but are of varied quality and fill up my home screen with multiple, redundant apps.

One feature I never looked for but now have access to is AirPrint. Apparently with a few select HP printers, I could print directly from my iPhone to a networked printer. Even if this feature worked with printers I actually own, it’s not something I could see myself ever using. I am so close to being a paperless being, I think I only ever print things when dealing with government agencies and insurance companies. For printing photos, I need a real computer with a calibrated monitor and gamut-proofing tools.

Having used iOS 4.2 for a couple of months, I’m happy to say that it’s a big improvement over the 3.2 OS that the iPad shipped with. Multitasking makes the iPad feel more like a real computer, though app switching is somewhat awkward. I love the brightness control in the little “iPod control area” in the multitasking … app bar? dock? I don’t know what to call that area — in the left-most area. I still have no idea if keeping many apps open eventually bogs down the operating system or not. I tend to scan through this area every so often and close down apps that I’m not using. On the iPhone, the differences are less noticeable, but an incremental improvement nonethless.

I was going to write a little thing about how fun the ngmoco game Topple was, maybe even with an accompanying screen shot, but the App Store is still ridiculously slow here.

Instead, I’m going to write just a little bit about monocultures and why they suck. When everything works, you can almost believe that owning an iPhone and using iTunes is the bees’ knees. “It just works” is a popular phrase bandied-about among Apple fans. Apple just posted a huge $1.6bn profit for their last quarter. Apple is on more desktops and in more go-bags than ever before.

But it doesn’t always work. Systems are bound to fail sometimes, and when a central one like the App Store is inaccessible, it can feel like your device is broken. Sometimes, that little badge on the App Store icon can remind you that you’ve got outdated apps that you can’t get to. There are a couple of apps I wanted to try out and even pay money for (mobile Colloquy for one, Rolando is another) but I can’t get at them. “Try again later” is the antithesis of the impulse purchase and that is largely what the whole iTunes Music/App Store is based on.

Fortunately, the internet came to the rescue and can at least provide some iPhone app shopping happiness even when the mothership is leaving orbit. App Shopper, which I believe I’ve mentioned before is a great web-based app-search system. It even lets you sort by price and view price changes. Right now, I conducted a little experiment, clicking on an App in the (finally loaded) App Store and then typing in and searching for the same name on App Shopper. App Shopper won hands down but clicking “Buy” still takes you to the iTunes store.

is listening to ‘Future In Computer Hell’ by Junkie XL from the album, ‘Saturday Teenage Kick’

PS, get well, Steve.

I suspect the problem lies with akamai somewhere.

Oh, and happy new year.

listening to Filler Is Wasted by Snowden from the album Anti-Anti

udpate! Appears fixed now. And that’s not because I could find a place to lodge a bug on Apple’s Support page.
Saturday, January 17, 2009 13:08:53

I’ve babbled about how DRM is bad for consumers and bad for the world before. I think it’s important to keep in mind that when one person/business/entity holds all the keys to entry, it stifles innovation. Apple has built themselves a tidy little walled-garden and if they’re not careful with how they tend it, they’re going to find a lot of unhappy … garden gnomes.

On a related topic, I listened to a great podcast about copyright this week when I saw it mentioned on Michael Geist’s blog. Well-worth listening to.

Who Owns Ideas?

(Grab it soon before it disappears)

And, while we’re bashing Rogers, this piece bubbled up in the CBC this afternoon: Internet founder blasts ISPs for hurting national interests. The CRTC’s investigation into net neutrality can’t come soon enough. With some luck, they’ll have their report finished by 2015. I’d just like to have some competition in this vast country of ours. NB Power, I’m looking at you.