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July 18, 2005
Yahoo! Music Unlimited Review
For the past five or six weeks, I’ve been playing with Yahoo! Music Unlimited, one of the first online music services to take advantage of Microsoft’s Janus technology. Janus allows for subscription-based digital rights management (DRM) – in other words, you can pay a monthly fee and download all you want. The new wrinkle, though, is that Janus is now supported by a small but growing number of portable players.
Napster to Go was the first in the field and Rhapsody’s subscription service followed soon after, both at around $15 a month. Yahoo!’s major innovation wasn’t the product itself, but the price: $60 a year.
For that $5 a month, you can download or stream as much of Yahoo’s music library as you want. The subscription can be activated on up to three computers (which is a little stingy) and uses the ominously-named Yahoo! Music Engine for downloading, syncing, burning and whatnot. The $5 only allows for downloading, streaming and syncing with devices. If you want to burn a CD, you’re in for $.79 a track or about $8 per album.
How does it compare to the iTunes Music Store?
The real question. Interface-wise, the Yahoo! Music Engine, which is still in beta, lacks a lot of the polish of iTunes and keeps the service from being a totally dominant product. Yahoo! clearly intends for users to download the player and use it to organize music (you don’t need to be a subscriber to use it), but it’s not best-of-breed. It’s still in beta, so hopefully some speed issues can be worked out, as well as a fix for an annoying tendency for the player to log you out of Yahoo!, even if you say to remember your username and password.
Aside from some clunkiness with the player, though, it’s a whole different world from using iTunes. You’ll never be satisfied with a 30 second clip again once you can download the entire album without paying anything extra. Double-clicking on the song streams it, while pressing a different button downloads the file into your music directory. The songs can then be managed and played in any program that works with Windows Media files including Windows Media Player or Windows Media Center.
The files themselves are 192kbps dual-pass WMA files (compared with iTunes’ 128kbps AAC) and, to my ear, sound excellent. Transferring them to a portable player or burning to a CD yields music that should be acceptable to anyone but a serious audiophile who shouldn’t be looking at lossy music anyway.
In addition to downloading or listening to songs on your hard drive, there are “radio stations,” which are fully interactive playlists based on songs that you’ve rated. Better still, the subscription gives you access to LaunchCast, another Yahoo! for-pay service that uses XM-style genre stations to let you listen to randomized music. A nice plus is that, if you hear something you like on one of the stations, you can rate or download it.
How’s the selection?
They have a lot of great stuff. No Bettie Serveert, sadly, but pretty much everything I like is in there, along with some great live stuff. Ben Folds, Son Volt, Wilco. If there’s something specific you want me to look for, leave a comment. They claim a million-plus songs and the catalog is very deep.
Does it work with the iPod?
Short answer: no. It doesn’t work with Macs either.
Unfortunately, the iPod doesn’t play WMA files and, in all likelihood, never will. Steve Jobs has said that he doesn’t believe in the subscription model (and, after selling 500 million songs on iTunes, he probably won’t), so iPod folks are out of luck. The Windows Media devices that work with Janus include the newer Creative, Rio and Dell products which lack some of the sex appeal of the iPod.
For my experience, I used a Dell Axim X50v PDA, one of the first to ship with Windows Media Mobile 10 and Janus support. It’s not quite as handy as my iPod, but the ability to dump hundreds of songs onto it for virtually no money outweighs my affection for the iPod’s spiffy design.
What happens if you don’t pay?
All of that music comes at a price, and that’s your subscription. You have to connect to the service at least once a month to let your music player check with Yahoo! that you’re still a subscriber. If it finds out that you’re not, your music stops working. Eerie, eh? Incidentally, it doesn’t seem to work if you’ve used Windows Media Player to transfer the music onto the device, so you’re better off using the Yahoo! Music Engine to do it. Hopefully that issue will get worked out before the product comes out of beta.
Is it worth it?
If you like to sample new music, it’s the best $5 you can spend. You could buy five songs on the iTMS or you can download as much as you want. If you find something you really like, you can buy and burn it. At 20 cents less per song than iTunes, it’s a good deal even if you prefer to buy a lot of music.
I’ve heard people say that they prefer to “own” their music and, honestly, I’d rather have a CD any day than a digital file, but if you ever find yourself buying music that you listen to for a week and forget, this is a great service that helps you “get songs out of your system” without having to pony up $15 for a CD or $.99 per track.
Posted by Lee Clontz at 10:50 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
July 14, 2005
Who's stealing Son Volt CDs anyway?
Argh...
I bought the new Son Volt CD, "Okemah and the Melody of Riot," at Best Buy last night. Seemed a good deal -- $11.99 for the DualDisc version with a bonus live DVD. The DVD side of the DualDisc has the album in 5.1 audio and a 30-minute documentary which I haven't listened to yet. Despite the ominous warning on the back of the label ("The audio side of this disc does not conform to CD specifications and therefore will not play on some CD and DVD players."), I wasn’t worried because Ben Folds' "Songs for Silverman" had a similar label and played fine.
Whatever they've done with this disc, it's a problem, and a bad one.
I tried to play it on my car's CD player this morning and it skipped. It usually won't even get recognized by the CD/DVD drive in my PC at work and when it does, it plays very stuttered. It seems to have played all right on my Mac, but I haven't listened to it through yet (I was almost hoping it wouldn't so I could say I have a defective disc).
From what I've read, it sounds like the ability to read it varies from drive to drive. I understand the desire for copy protection, but this is insanity. I could have listened to it streamed for free on the sonvolt.net site or for free on Yahoo Music, but I bought the disc and I'm treated like a criminal.
Other similar reports on the JayFarrar.net message boards. Here's one.
Caveat emptor, yo.
Posted by Lee Clontz at 2:10 PM | Comments (0)
July 12, 2005
New Videos
Shot some video last week of Riley playing basketball, reading in the tub and reading "Green Eggs and Ham" after his bath (this is the g-rated version).
Posted by Lee Clontz at 9:40 AM | Comments (0)
July 6, 2005
Let the whining continue
The folks at Slashdot are all worked up that the head of Go, a company that was doing work on pen computing in the late 1980s and early 1990s, is suing Microsoft over crushing his business.
It's really getting pathetic, folks. Whether you believe Microsoft to be a monopoly or not (it's not -- they're an exceptionally powerful company, but hardly a monopoly), it certainly wasn't a monopoly in the late 1980s. Like most successful technology companies, MS plays hard -- sometimes too hard -- but all these companies (like Be, who's technology was so terrific that Palm bought it and never used it) coming out of the walls to collect some free settlement money really need to suck it up.
Posted by Lee Clontz at 3:09 PM | Comments (0)
Get It Now
Pleonard is very excited that the loathsome T-Mobile -- their new marketing message being "Great service unless you want to use your phone indoors" -- is moving to Google for their mobile Web service.
Clearly, Pleonard has never experienced the sublime joys of Verizon's "Get It Now" service which, in addition to having the catchiest name of any of said services, has the kewlest interface ever.
(Seriously, I wish I could find a screenshot, because GiN has the tackiest interface ever. It's like the unholy love child of Game.com and the GIMP.)
Posted by Lee Clontz at 2:22 PM | Comments (0)
July 3, 2005
Thygeson's Disease
I have been having intermittent eye problems over the past month or so and went back to my eye doctor, who is just amazing. My left eye has been blurry and uncomfortable, rather like a chlorine sting. She diagnosed me with something called Thygeson's Disease which, fortunately, is more irritating than threatening to my vision. I did some reading and, while it's not terribly common, it doesn't seem to have any long-term effects, though they say that it can recur over a year or more.
Doctors think it's caused by a virus, since it attracts white blood cells to the eye but doesn't respond to antibiotics (hence, it's not bacterial). I'm using Restasis for a week to see if that helps; otherwise I might have to use a steroid in the eye. Not a cure, but it alleviates the symptoms.
Here's some info I found:
Posted by Lee Clontz at 11:49 PM | Comments (0)
ColdFusion Screen Scraping Blog-Rebuilding Script
Ugh: my soon-to-be former host, AffordableHost, somehow torched my MySQL database that had all of my MovableType databases earlier this week. All that was left was mt_blog, mt_category and mt_author -- the three easiest tables to manually rebuild. Fortunately, the blog couldn't be rebuilt, so my static pages were untouched in the /archives directory.
In the interest of my own sanity, I wrote a screen scraping script in ColdFusion to go through each page and dump it to an SQL file with the appropriate INSERTs. If you're interested, I put the two scripts (minus any self-referencing parts) in the extended entry below. Enter your site in the ***YOUR SITE HERE*** area and it will dump your blog into a TEXTAREA with MySQL-friendly syntax. It should properly handle escaping quotes and whatnot. Worked fine for my 150-ish posts, but your mileage may vary.
Either way, it's good to be back. I'm on with PowWeb now, which has a vastly improved package compared to AffordableHost's (which has really gone downhill since it was purchased by DotCanada earlier this year). Hopefully I'll continue to be happy, but the package is pretty killer.
Okay, here's the form page:
<cfsetting enablecfoutputonly="Yes">
<cfif not isdefined("form.sitename")>
<cfoutput>
<form action="" method="post">
Site URL: <input name="sitename" type="text">
<BR>
Subdirectory for archives: /<input name="archives" type="text" value="archives">
<BR><input type="submit">
</form>
</cfoutput>
<cfelse>
<cfoutput>Generating content for #form.sitename#...
</cfoutput><BR><BR>
<cfset allMyChildren = ArrayNew(3)>
<cfoutput><textarea rows=80 cols=120></cfoutput>
<cfloop from="101" to="185" index="fred">
<cfset currentFred = fred>
<cfif fred lt 10><cfset currentFred = "00000" & fred>
<cfelseif fred lt 100 and fred gte 10><cfset currentFred = "0000" & fred>
<cfelseif fred lt 1000 and fred gte 100><cfset currentFred = "000" & fred>
</cfif>
<cfset currentURL = "http://www.***YOUR SITE HERE***.com/archives/" & currentFred & ".html">
<cfinvoke component="rebuildmt" method="getAllFiles" returnvariable="allFiles">
<cfinvokeargument name="mySite" value="#form.sitename#">
<cfinvokeargument name="myDirectory" value="#form.archives#">
<cfinvokeargument name="whichfile" value="#currentURL#">
</cfinvoke>
<cfoutput><cfif allFiles[1] neq "NULL">INSERT INTO mt_entry VALUES (#fred#,1,2,2,0,0,'__default__',NULL,'#allFiles[2]#','','#allFiles[3]#','','',NULL,NULL,NULL,'#allFiles[1]#','#allFiles[1]#',NULL,NULL,'');
</cfif></cfoutput>
</cfloop>
<cfoutput></textarea></cfoutput>
</cfif>
================================================================
And here's the .CFC it calls:
<cfcomponent>
<cffunction name="getAllFiles" access="public" returntype="array">
<cfargument name="mySite" type="string" required="true">
<cfargument name="myDirectory" type="string" required="true">
<cfargument name="whichFile" type="string" required="true">
<cfset myPath = mySite & "/" & myDirectory>
<cfhttp url="#whichFile#" method="get" resolveurl="yes" />
<cfset thisfile = cfhttp.FileContent>
<cfset allMyChildren = ArrayNew(1)>
<cfset headlinestring = "<h3 class=\Stitle\S>.*</h3>">
<cfset headline = ReFindNoCase(headlinestring,thisfile,1,"true")>
<cfif headline.pos[1] neq 0>
<cfset headlineOutput = #Mid(thisfile,#Evaluate(headline.pos[1]+18)#,#Evaluate(headline.len[1]-23)#)#>
<cfset headlineOutput = #Replace(headlineOutput,"'", "''","ALL")#>
<cfset headlineOutput = #Replace(headlineOutput,"'", "''","ALL")#>
<cfset allMyChildren[2] = headlineOutput>
<cfelse>
<cfset allMyChildren[2] = "NULL">
</cfif>
<cfset bodystring = "</h3>.*<a name=\Smore\S>">
<cfset body = ReFindNoCase(bodystring,thisfile,1,"true")>
<cfif body.pos[1] neq 0>
<cfset bodyOutput = #XMLFormat(Mid(thisfile,#Evaluate(body.pos[1]+7)#,#Evaluate(body.len[1]-23)#))#>
<cfset bodyOutput = #Replace(bodyOutput,"'", "''","ALL")#>
<cfset allMyChildren[3] = bodyOutput>
<cfelse>
<cfset allMyChildren[3] = "NULL">
</cfif>
<cfset datestring = "date=">
<cfset date = ReFindNoCase(datestring,thisfile,1,"true")>
<cfif date.pos[1] neq 0>
<cfset dateOutput = #Mid(thisfile,#Evaluate(date.pos[1]+6)#,#Evaluate(date.len[1]+14)#)#>
<cfset dateOutput = #Replace(dateOutput,"T", " ")#>
<cfset allMyChildren[1] = dateOutput>
<cfelse>
<cfset allMyChildren[1] = "NULL">
</cfif>
<cfreturn allMyChildren>
</cffunction>
</cfcomponent>
=========================================================
Enjoy!
Posted by Lee Clontz at 2:52 PM | Comments (0)