Rush my money to the record shops

[venta]

I'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.

Comments

Re: Oooh, wow, you guys won't like the new Ipod Killer, then

[onebyone.livejournal.com]

My MP3 player isn't as good as great, but it's close to meeting my requirements.

I have an Archos 20GB Jukebox, which is 2 1/2 years old and died on me a couple of weeks ago. The problem with Archos is that their build quality sucks - my previous 6GB Jukebox died after a year, so I got a refund and spent about the same amount of money on the 20. In both cases "dead" means "won't switch on no matter what you do".

However, I very cleverly bought a 3 year warranty on the second one. So once I get round to taking it in either it'll be fixed (unlikely, I reckon), or I'll get my money back (in which case I've had 3 1/2 years free use of an mp3 player), or else they'll replace it (possibly with this, which is the updated model currently running at 150 quid (i.e. significantly cheaper than an iPod or Creative player of the same capacity).

So I think I'd recommend the Gmini, with the reservation that you may have to be a bit patient with it at times (both my Jukeboxes occasionally had mornings when they had difficulty getting out of bed), and that you really want to buy it from somewhere that'll do you an extended warranty, because you could well need it. The other downside is that it's a bit chunky, because it's basically a laptop hard disk in a box with a screen stuck on the front.

The upside, though, is that it's a USB 2.0 storage device that can browse music files and playlists fairly happily. It plays MP3, WMA and WAV. Mine supports M3U playlists, which is really useful to me, and personally I'd want to check before getting a replacement that the new one does too. It's a reasonably open platform, and I've seen (but never tried) a number of different amateur firmware versions. It doesn't do the exciting iPod thing of listing all your music by artist, but then that seems to me to be a dumb way to list a large music collection anyway.

Archos do various more exciting models that record sound, play videos, etc. They're about to release an all-singing thing that has some kind of TV-in so that it can record video, with a 100GB hard drive. That should be enough for most music collections, but will cost lots.

Re: Oooh, wow, you guys won't like the new Ipod Killer, then

[onebyone.livejournal.com]

Oh yes, and although the Archos gadgets come with MusicMatch, I've never needed to even install it, so no proprietary lockin at all. As I said, the device is a bog-standard USB storage device, so you drag and drop files from Windows Explorer (or linux, or probably MacOS), then the interface on the device is just that it shows you the directory structure to browse. Does mean you have to be able to remember roughly where you keep everything.