Rush my money to the record shops
Jul. 14th, 2004 10:16 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ventaI'm at work, I've fortified myself with my morning dose of tea and toast-and-evil, and I still don't quite feel like taking on the kernel locking primitives which are waiting for me.
So instead, I think I'll wax gently wrathful about iTunes.
Those of you who follow the minutae of my life (a) should get out more, and (b) will be aware that I recently downloaded iTunes just to get hold of their exclusive Pixies' single. (Incidentally, apologies to those I to whom I offered an mp3, the continued delay is because bastard Evesham still haven't given my laptop back.)
Although iTunes does offer itself as an all-in-one music solution, I decided I'd prefer to continue using Winamp as my main music player. iTunes' format is proprietory, so I can only listen to Bam Thwok with iTunes, but that was pretty much the only thing I intended to use it for. I played around briefly with it, failed to be able to work out how to generate a playlist, and shut it down.
I'd unset all the "make this my default player" options, but it still started up every time I put a CD in the drive. I closed it every time. One time I failed to close it swiftly, and as I watched, my open directory of mp3s all changed icons. Away went the little orange zigzags of Winamp, and in came the blobby green notes of iTunes.
A quick glance through file associations confirmed it - all my audio format did indeed belong to iTunes. I've got them all back now to where I want them, but it took a while. iTunes was very much in disgrace.
But I thought its online music-purchasing aspects deserved a fair chance. Unfortunately it didn't do what I'd hoped - the music it offers for sale is mostly the mainstream things you could find in any record shop anyway, not the obscure stuff which I'd have thought it would make sense to offer. After all, deleted albums which are now unavailable should be cheap to offer, and people would want them. Fair enough, I suppose, but it was disappointing. As it was to discover that with a popular album, the "known" single is often only available as part of the album, not as an individual download.
Now, every Tuesday iTunes mails me to tell me about their newly available stuff, and to let me know what the free-to-download single of the week is. Two weeks ago, the free-to-download single didn't actually exist when I searched iTunes for it. Last week, clicking on the link from the mail displayed me a crashed page of XML. When I tried later, I got a popup saying the store was unavailable.
This week's mail listed a Barenaked Ladies album among their new releases. Now, a new Barenaked Ladies album is the sort of thing that one could get quite excited about on a Tuesday morning, so I followed the link - only to be told the album wasn't available in the UK store, and they had no details.
So. I am in all ways officially unimpressed. I dunno where the online music revolution is, kids, but it's not hanging around at iTunes.
And now - I realise as I come to fill in the 'current music' field that I'm not listening to anything. So I hunt out a suitable morning album, and discover that once again all my .m3u playlist files are displaying the iTunes icon. Bastards. Fortunately, the Winamp context menus seem stronger, and I'm still offered the 'play in Winamp' option. So I am doing.
And by the way, don't put St Ivel Gold low-fat edition on your toast. Work usually provides us with some form of butter-substitute-for-the-gullible, but this week we have St Ivel. It's an odd texture, and it doesn't melt properly, and it sits on your toast and mixes up with whatever else you're trying to spread on it in quite an unpleasant way. Bah.
So instead, I think I'll wax gently wrathful about iTunes.
Those of you who follow the minutae of my life (a) should get out more, and (b) will be aware that I recently downloaded iTunes just to get hold of their exclusive Pixies' single. (Incidentally, apologies to those I to whom I offered an mp3, the continued delay is because bastard Evesham still haven't given my laptop back.)
Although iTunes does offer itself as an all-in-one music solution, I decided I'd prefer to continue using Winamp as my main music player. iTunes' format is proprietory, so I can only listen to Bam Thwok with iTunes, but that was pretty much the only thing I intended to use it for. I played around briefly with it, failed to be able to work out how to generate a playlist, and shut it down.
I'd unset all the "make this my default player" options, but it still started up every time I put a CD in the drive. I closed it every time. One time I failed to close it swiftly, and as I watched, my open directory of mp3s all changed icons. Away went the little orange zigzags of Winamp, and in came the blobby green notes of iTunes.
A quick glance through file associations confirmed it - all my audio format did indeed belong to iTunes. I've got them all back now to where I want them, but it took a while. iTunes was very much in disgrace.
But I thought its online music-purchasing aspects deserved a fair chance. Unfortunately it didn't do what I'd hoped - the music it offers for sale is mostly the mainstream things you could find in any record shop anyway, not the obscure stuff which I'd have thought it would make sense to offer. After all, deleted albums which are now unavailable should be cheap to offer, and people would want them. Fair enough, I suppose, but it was disappointing. As it was to discover that with a popular album, the "known" single is often only available as part of the album, not as an individual download.
Now, every Tuesday iTunes mails me to tell me about their newly available stuff, and to let me know what the free-to-download single of the week is. Two weeks ago, the free-to-download single didn't actually exist when I searched iTunes for it. Last week, clicking on the link from the mail displayed me a crashed page of XML. When I tried later, I got a popup saying the store was unavailable.
This week's mail listed a Barenaked Ladies album among their new releases. Now, a new Barenaked Ladies album is the sort of thing that one could get quite excited about on a Tuesday morning, so I followed the link - only to be told the album wasn't available in the UK store, and they had no details.
So. I am in all ways officially unimpressed. I dunno where the online music revolution is, kids, but it's not hanging around at iTunes.
And now - I realise as I come to fill in the 'current music' field that I'm not listening to anything. So I hunt out a suitable morning album, and discover that once again all my .m3u playlist files are displaying the iTunes icon. Bastards. Fortunately, the Winamp context menus seem stronger, and I'm still offered the 'play in Winamp' option. So I am doing.
And by the way, don't put St Ivel Gold low-fat edition on your toast. Work usually provides us with some form of butter-substitute-for-the-gullible, but this week we have St Ivel. It's an odd texture, and it doesn't melt properly, and it sits on your toast and mixes up with whatever else you're trying to spread on it in quite an unpleasant way. Bah.
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no subject
Date: 2004-07-14 04:41 am (UTC)Can you explain what you mean there, please ?
Having done nothing more complicated that rip mp3s to play to myself on a Windows machine, I've no idea what you're talking about.
no subject
Date: 2004-07-14 09:07 am (UTC)The About Xiph page explains why this is a bad thing for the world in general, and why Xiph produce open formats such as Vorbis, FLAC and Speex (for audio) and Theora (for video) which are free from patent encumbrance. As far as I understand it, Xiph patent their work, then "donate" the patents to the public domain so everybody can use them (but nobody else can patent it).
As for why some of us think this is important, it's worth reading this editorial from BoingBoing, even though it concentrates more on DRM lock-in technologies such as that used by the iTunes Music Store rather than patents which are used to achieve the same lock-in effects through legal rather than technical methods (and the legal methods are possibly even more effective) but the basic upshot is the same - lockin, however it's achieved, is bad for the artist and bad for the consumer and should be opposed. It's why geeks like me get up in arms about things like the European software patent legislation and bad legislation like the American Digital Millenium Copyright Act (which came over to Europe in ther form of the European Copyright Law Directive) and the proposed and utterly insane INFRINGE act (why does all American legislation have to have funky names now?).