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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Re: Oooh, wow, you guys won't like the new Ipod Killer, then
Date: 2004-07-14 05:48 pm (UTC)Not sure about playlists and such- I tend to either listen to albums, or just let it browse round my entire collection at random (and hit the forward button if it comes up with something I don't like), but I assume they work.
It's also got a couple of fun features, such as the ability to change the speed tracks play at without messing up the pitch (the Creaming Jesus version of 'A Forest' at 150% speed is mighty fun...), and it's got disk space for an awful lot of stuff (mine's currently got ~4000 tracks on it, backups of my Zim collection and a fair chunk of season 3 of 24, and a few other bits and bobs, and it's still less than half full).
For in-car use (on the rare occasions I drive a car), I got one of those tape deck converter widgets, so when driving anywhere I can just hook it up and not worry about anything for the rest of the journey.
Searching really hard, the only things I can think of that make it slightly less than perfect are 1) The driver software isn't Microsoft certified, so XP whines when you install it. Seems to work perfectly though, and 2) Windows can't talk to it directly as a removeable hard drive, so you can't just plug it into any computer and grep stuff off it. The software does come with an explorer type app that you can use though, so that's only a problem if you need to plug it into any computer without putting the driver software on.
All in all, I'd deeply recommend it. Some might say it's not as cute as an IPod, but I actually quite like its look (it matches my Palm Pilot case), and you can laugh at them for getting something that costs more and doesn't sound as good...