ON LIVING THROUGH A MUSIC REVOLUTION (Part II)

CHOICES, CHOICES

Reader Dave had a detailed response in a comment to my post yesterday on the complexities of discovering, buying, maintaining and enjoying music in the midst of the music distribution revolution.  He has some good advice:

"First off, quit buying anything with DRM and consider that you've learned a foolish expensive lesson on previous purchases. Something not available without DRM you say; hogwash, buy the CD and rip it! You are using the LAME encoder, right!?!?

Second, put all of your CDs together in large plastic bins, then put them in the garage or somewhere out of the weather, but not in living areas. You need that Billy Joel CD, you know where the CD bins are and can have the song ripped in a minute or two (once you find the correct bin). I have way over a thousand CDs, but I know where all the bins are in the loft if I'm missing anything.

Third, standardize on the mp3 format; it's the defacto standard, don't fight it. MP3 formatted files play on all devices worth using. Add all devices that can't play mp3s into the same e-waste bins that your Sony MD players went into.

Fix your network server disk format or get a proper one that can talk to Macs and PCs. Most SOHO NAS devices can do this and are O/S agnostic. Centrally store your music collection; hard drives very cheap and managing a large distributed collection is too painful.

Don't ever use iTunes for a music server with a large music collection. It's designed for a casual music listener with a meager music collection. You have the right idea with the Sonos system (I prefer SlimDevices, but 6 to 1, half dozen to another). Sonos (and Slim) do not need iTunes. The only purpose for iTunes is to change the content on an iPod!"

He goes on with additional advice on maintaining the collection, including the all-important backup.

The thing is I've followed most of his advice for some time now.  The difficulties arise in the trade-offs that arise between pragmatism and convenience.  Allow me to explain.

I do prefer buying CDs as my first option.  The problem arises when you want just a track or two and don't want to pay the $10-15 for the whole CD.   This is increasingly an issue as one can pick and choose just the track that catches one's fancy off a post on a music blog, or in a TV commercial or a show.

After all, that's one of the primary benefits of the digital download revolution.  You can buy just the song you want, not the collection of songs the artist and/or the label wants to package for you.

Then one faces a series of searches to make the optimal choice in buying that one track. 

Buying the track in MP3 format is always the first choice here, as Dave aptly suggests.  So one searches for the track on eMusic, and recently on Amazon's MP3 download service.  If it's a relatively popular tune, it's likely not available on most of these services as an MP3 download.

So one searches next on iTunes, or any number of other services that offer digital downloads of single tracks with DRM protection.

iTunes will charge $1.29 instead of the traditional $0.99 for a DRM-free track, IF available, but it's worth it of course to get a non-DRM track.

More often than not, the only digital download available is in a DRM protected format.

Notice that for each track, one needs to search for the best deal as it were, in format and price, on multiple online music retailers.  This can often take 5-10 minutes per track, with multiple tabs open in a browser.

Gets pretty tedious when trying to buy a handful of tracks.

As yet, there's no meta-search engine that I'm aware of, which searches for the best deal on a track across various online retailers.  So it's a hunt and peck process on every track.

The other issue one runs into in choosing to buy a CD or a single track, is the convenience of immediate gratification.  Often, one wants the music without waiting for Amazon to deliver the CD, or without the hassle of driving out to the local Walmart or Target.

Dave's advice on using iTunes for just changing the content on an iPod is also on the mark.

Again, the complications arise when one has to manage a handful of iPods for several users in a household.

Why not just use one iPod or other MP3 music player?

Because we now have different iPods for different types of activities.  One may want a specific set of music and TV shows for one's iPhone, a different set of workout tunes for the iPod Shuffle or Nano, and yet another one for the voluminous iPod Classic or large-screen iPod Touch.

Music players are getting specialized for different applications, just like our cars, our computers, our watches and other daily tools.

It gets even more complicated when you start getting into managing play-lists.  For now, the playlists are best created and managed on the PC or Mac synced with a particular iPod or MP3 player.  It's pretty complicated trying to copy playlists from one iTunes on one PC to another.  You quickly start to drown in managing .itl and .xml files.  I'm pretty resigned to re-creating the same play-lists on different versions of iTunes around the house, and hope for the best.

Dave and other commenters to yesterday's post have suggested using a centralized library off a NAS server that's connected to both the Windows and Mac computers on the network.  I tried that for a while, but it got pretty complicated getting the iTunes clients on two of the main computers to sync properly with the centralized NAS server file folder. 

It had to do with the FAT32 file format off a Windows-administered NAS server not being compatible with the Mac file folder system.  An Apple Genius no less told me there wasn't a clean work-around this problem.  If anyone has a suggestion here, I'd as always be most appreciative.

One saving grace in all this is that Sonos is great about copying over your play-ists from iTunes onto the various Sonos controllers.  Although if you sync various libraries from various computers onto the Sonos index, you can quickly get many copies of the same play-list like "Recently Added".

iTunes is not yet set up to manage multiple music collections and play-lists across multiple iPods for multiple users.  It can be done, but it requires a disciplined set of procedures and rules, not to mention turning off the automatic iPod syncing and management that iTunes offers for users with just one iPod on one computer.  And it all gets tediously geeky in a hurry once you start manually managing multiple iPods for multiple people.

And they get unruly when most of the users (aka civilians) in the household don't care for all the rules in order to keep the collection organized and well-maintained.

Again, the usually self-appointed CTO of the household, the Chief Tunes Officer, has to deal with managing the complexity of managing all these disparate pieces.

And we're a ways away from this stuff really being as easy as it should be.

Comments

[candice]

As a 26 year old, my entire exposure to Casey Kasem is driving home from the diner at 6am in college after a night out and needing anything annoying enough to listen to stay awake...

I have no suggestions, either, as I too am stuck in multiple-itunes installation hell.

[Dave]

Michael writes: "And we're a ways away from this stuff really being as easy as it should be."
I'm in complete agreement with you here. I've had these same discussions with my retirement aged parents who also have a voluminous music collection and the hell my computer neophyte father has gone through to embrace digital music. He'd be the first to give you a loud deep AMEN to your closing statement. My benchmark to measure against is if my parents can use it without me acting as tech support, it's properly designed and is as easy as it needs to be.

I'm happy my comments could spark some more creative discourse over the issues us music loving consumers are facing.

I diverge from one of your main problems simply because of music tastes. Since my music tastes are very eclectic, unique, and are not big label based, I typically enjoy (and want) the full albums of artists I enjoy. These albums typically have a flow from one track to the next, therefore I don't want individual tracks. Also, it was such a rare occasion when I could find music I wanted in the local big box stores, so I don't bother to check anymore. I'm already conditioned to never receive "the convenience of immediate gratification". Perhaps my eclectic tastes forces me to be patient. Emusic caters to my tastes and Amazon frequently has what I'm looking for. With that said, I've gone through the same situation with other online purchases hunting for best deal, multiple tabs open in browsers going crazy. Yuck! While I'm optimistic for more retailers carrying greater variety of artists in DRM-Free high-bitrate encoded MP3 files, I cringe thinking about the great bargain hunt for single track purchases. Will one of the retailers create a frequent buyers club? Price match other (legitimate) retailers? Amazon, are you listening??? Which VC will fund the next pricewatch web site that aggregates the best prices of legitimate mp3 songs for sale? (make sure it's a web 2.0 company ;*)

Michael, FAT32 on a NAS??? If one of my friends actually admitted this to me, I'd probably retort in my best David Spade imitation "Hey, uh, 1998 called and it wants its technology back!" All of the SOHO NAS devices I know of are running a Linux kernel with one of the various robust file systems that will allow clients from any O/S to read from them. They'll also allow you as the "CTO" to make them read-only to all clients except the CTO, reducing your admin woes. Investigate your NAS's user guide to see if it supports better file systems and agnostic client connectivity. If not, I'm afraid it's time for you to post about requesting SOHO NAS recommendations.

I have a hate relationship with iTunes, especially more so now that we've added an iPhone into our household with its crippled dysfunctional relationship to iTunes. If you have a tiny music collection that could fit entirely on your iPod, I can see why people love iTunes. For those of us with iPods that can only hold a tenth of our collection however, Apple could not have made it more difficult if they tried. Attempting to remove and organize content is a PITA. There once was a brilliantly wonderful mp3 player called empeg whose creators made it as simple as possible to use. Simply copy the directory tree of the music you wanted onto the player's USB mounted hard drive. No playlists were required. If you did want a playlist though, it was incredibly easy. Use winamp or any other playlist editor and create/edit the simple m3u files. These playlists just simply referenced the directory tree you maintain and copied over to your player. There was none of this music stored in some funky unmanageable DB format structure on the player. I don't even bother to maintain playlists for iTunes, I just create them on the fly when adding new content. A drag and drop of the music files from windows exploder into the new playlist folder of iTunes gets the job done. I can only imagine the hell you must go through trying to manage iTunes playlists on multiple computers. I'll skip my long-winded rant about changing content on the iPhone.

Again, you've got a wonderful Sonos system for your house. If you can somehow escape from iTunes playlist management hell, you can move back to using a NAS device for the Sonos, have centralized storage, then let your in-house music consumers manage their own iPods on their computers by dragging and dropping files from the NAS (READ-ONLY) music share into their computer's iTunes. Let your consumers maintain and manage their own playlists (CTOs delegate :-).

Lastly, the San Jose MLK library has a vast (albeit old and disorganized) CD music collection. Not a bad place to visit with the family and a laptop, putting our tax dollars to good use.

All the best to you and Viva la Música Revolution!

[mr-ipod-person]

The ipod as a music server warning caught my eye.
What would you say is itunes' limit?

I agree that itunes can't manage easily multiple ipods, but I was amazed how many people find it hard to manage just a single ipod with itunes.