Google requires that you download a Music Manager application so that you can upload music to your Google Music account. While setting up, Google asks you what music you want since it will add some files to your folder for you. Very nice, I’ll take some AC/DC, please.

After you install and run the app, it asks you to log in and which folder you want to upload music from: iTunes, Music, or Other. At first I told it to upload my iTunes folder (17,000+ songs) just to see how well it worked. It scanned the files fine, and then….disappeared. I thought the app crashed. It turns out that on the Mac, the app changes to a System Preference pane without telling the user. Also, it uploads in the background even when you select “Upload Manually”. Some people have bandwidth caps and I don’t think it’s a good idea for Google to put together any kind of app that could strain a user’s connection without easily giving them a status icon in the system toolbar on the top of the screen.

After finally finding the preference pane, I found there was no way to stop the upload without logging out of the system or changing the folder to upload from. I was hoping that there’d be a pause button in case I wanted to clear up some upload bandwidth. Granted, on a 35/35 connection I shouldn’t need to do that, and I think I’m an odd case where uploading media would be a problem just for me, but it would still be nice for power users like myself. The app itself seems clunky. From my experience, it feels like a wxWindows app, an API wrapper that allows you to write once for Mac and Windows systems. I wouldn’t be surprised if this app was in fact written in wxWindows.

I felt that uploading my entire library would be a complete waste of time and effort so I decided to log out of the system to stop the upload, and tell Google Music to only upload from two folders: Nine Inch Nails and Steve Roach. I wanted to hear how the music sounds on hard rock and ambient music.

During the upload, Music Manager told me that 57 songs were skipped. It turns out that some of them had DRM due to buying them on iTunes, and all of NIN’s “Ghosts” wouldn’t work because Google Music doesn’t support either .wave files, or the format of the .wav files (24/96).

Now that I have  good amount of music in my Google Music library, I decided to take some of the tracks for a spin. One thing I noticed while uploading was that the playback was very choppy. It’s definitely not my connection, so I have to attribute it to either Google’s servers or my CPU doing enough to stutter the playback. I shut down all my apps and windows in Safari and the choppiness persisted, but only for a while. As I write this, I haven’t heard any chop for about ten minutes. I’m not going to make an effort to determine where the choppiness came from, but it was worth noting. Another problem with the system is that live albums like NIN “And All That Could Have Been” aren’t played back without gaps. There’s a gap of at least three seconds between songs which means that it’s not caching any of the music as it plays.

UPDATE: The problem seems to be with the way Safari distributes cycles to its own windows. If I fire up a web site with a lot of objects in it, leave it up for about thirty seconds, and close it, the music stutters a lot while the window is closing.

Songs have an icon which, when clicked, brings up a drop down menu that allows you to add the song to a playlist, delete the song, edit the song info, or shop the song. This icon isn’t available for albums or artists for some reason. If you select “shop”, you’re brought to a Google page where you can buy music from the artist. There doesn’t seem to be an actual Google store.

Control over the music doesn’t seem to work with standard keyboard controls such as the left and right arrows for skipping and the spacebar for pausing. This is mostly a problem for Mac and Windows users that have keyboards with specific controls for their music apps, Google Music won’t work with them.

The Settings for Google Music don’t offer much except the ability to deauthorize one of your devices. According to the page, you can authorize up to eight devices and have a maximum of 20,000 songs.

One serious problem I found is that when I want to pause music, I have to figure out what window or tab has the music player. There are ways to handle that such as putting everything in its own window in an easily accessible area of your screen, but if that’s behind two or three windows, it can get hard to find and become quite an annoyance.

Google hasn’t yet announced pricing on their service, but for someone like myself with a massive library, buying a hard drive-based iPod and keeping it up to date may be a more practical alternative.

I have to say that I like the idea of streaming all my music from anywhere I have a connection, but in time it can eat bandwidth. Apple’s service as we currently know it will require you to download the songs you want in the cloud to your device which is a nice alternative since you don’t have to keep streaming the same song over and over, and your device does have storage. Storage is cheap, and keeping all my music on at least one hard drive that isn’t dependent on an internet connection is quite appealing. Access is fast, and iTunes is as good of a music manager as I can find.

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Post tags: amazon, Apple, Google, google music, iTunes, itunes match, Music, streaming

For example, I would sometimes buy music at work. In order to use that music at home, I’d have to remember to copy the songs to my iPod’s file system manually, and then drag the files off the iPod to my computer at home later that day. Now, when you buy music from the iTunes store, that music is available for download from iCloud on any of your iOS devices.

When you go to the iTunes home page, you’ll see a new item called “Purchased”. This gives you a list of all the music you’ve ever bought, and whether it’s on your current device or not.

From the Purchased screen, you can see all the music that you’ve bought by selecting “All”, or just the music that’s missing on the current device by pressing “Not In My Library”.

Most desktop users won’t see much missing from the “Not In My Library” menu, but as you can see here, there was one album I never moved over to my desktop library from when I bought it at work. From here I can re-download the album.

This first step into moving the music to the cloud is an important one. While this isn’t the music streaming service we had hoped for, I believe we’ll get there eventually. I would think that cell carriers wouldn’t be too pleased with all that data going across their systems just yet. Device storage space is cheap, and while I’d personally like a streaming option, this is a great alternative.

When iTunes Match is released in the fall, which allows you to match music you own to music on Apple’s servers, and upload your music they don’t have for $24.99/yr., then I’ll get excited. There are so many times I’ve wanted an album with me in the car only to find that I didn’t sync it with my iPhone. Now I’ll be able to download it when I want.

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Post tags: Apple, cloud, icloud, iTunes, itunes match, Music

When CDs were introduced in the early 80′s, they were marketed as having better sound because they were digital versus their analog vinyl counterparts. The reality is that CDs cut off the music at 16 bits, so although the CD was portable and dust-proof, it was still limited in sound quality when compared to vinyl.

With the digital age, I was hoping for years that we’d finally get 24-bit copies of the music we want to buy. Sure, some people won’t care because they listen with their earbuds, but for people like myself that invested a lot into audio playback, this is something I’ve wanted for a long time.

CNN is reporting that Jimmy Iovine, a long-time record executive, is working with Apple to bring 24-bit quality music to the iTunes store. “We’ve gone back now at Universal, and we’re changing our pipes to 24 bit. And Apple has been great,” Iovine said. “We’re working with them and other digital services — download services — to change to 24 bit. And some of their electronic devices are going to be changed as well. So we have a long road ahead of us.”

This means that right now, playback on some devices isn’t possible. I’ve synced my library with some devices that tell me the 24-bit music I have which works on my Mac won’t work on older iPods. That’s ok for now, but it’s going to be an issue moving forward, especially for third party devices if you want to play 24-bit music through them.

As for the cost, a CD at my local Best Buy costs about $13-$15, and that same album is about $10 on iTunes. I’d easily pay CD prices for a 24-bit digital download of that same album without blinking. It’s been said for years that CDs were overpriced so why not finally get master quality for that same price?

I’m hoping this happens sooner rather than later. I implore anyone that’s interested in music to find a friend or a store with a good setup and listen to the differences between CD and vinyl, or a 24-bit audio file and see if you can tell the difference. If you can, perhaps you’ll be more interested in higher quality music.

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Post tags: 24 bit, album, Apple, cd, iTunes, Music, Vinyl

iTunes 10 dropped for us around 10pm on Wednesday night. I quickly downloaded it, set up my Ping account, and was completely underwhelmed. At first it just gave me a list of artists to follow. I followed Lady Gaga, and that was about it for me. What I was expecting was a service similar to last.fm where the songs you’re currently listening to are listed in your friends’ feed. Although this feature wasn’t stated during Steve’s keynote, it just seemed like a logical extension of an iTunes-based social network.

There needs to be an option to not list these people

Ping gives you a list of genres to pick from, but you can only select three. I found this to be extremely limiting since I listen to a wide range of music types. I had to settle for the three I listen to the most, but would have liked five, or more.

I tried liking albums in my library, but I found that you can’t do that from your library. Despite what Apple claims about this being a social network, it’s more than that – it’s more about turning its users into promotional tools, and they prove that by forcing you to like items that are only in the iTunes Store. That means I can’t like anything by AC/DC, nor can I like “The Wall” since it’s not in the iTunes Store.

Liking albums and songs aren’t very well thought out either. In order to like an album or song, you need to go to it in the iTunes Store, and then click on the little triangle next to the price. There you’ll find the “Like” item. The same goes for songs, just click on the triangle next to the price for the same menu.

Pro tip: If you want to Like albums by a specific artist, search for that artist and click on “Show All”. There, you’ll see all the albums by that artist, and it’ll be much easier to click on the triangles of the albums you want to like.

Once I liked a bunch of albums, I took a look at my own feed. It was nothing but a list of individual “likes” for each album. I was hoping to maybe see them bunched up, but I think Apple set it up that way so you can post comments on each one. The problem is that it looks spammy, and if you like more than ten albums, the list starts to fall off since it only shows you ten per page. I would like to have a section for each artist or genre I like. There, people can see all the Rush or Nine Inch Nails or Iron Maiden albums I like.

I remember seeing that Ping allows you to see what concerts your friends are going to. I clicked on “Concerts” in the Rush section above and the show I’m going to tonight was listed. You can click on a button called “I’m going!” and the concert will be listed on your profile.

After Krissi and I tested the system out for about an hour, I was very unimpressed. This is supposed to be a music-based social network! I want to know what people are listening to, what their favorite albums are, what praises they’ve sung for specific songs, and have it all grouped by genre or artist. I’d also like a list of matching favorites; I may not know that someone listens to NIN also. Friends should also feature albums to their friends with a post saying “this is why I think this album is freakin’ awesome!”. You can add a post to an album, but once that liked album falls off the current list, friends won’t see it unless they find it on the page it’s on. I’d also like Apple to allow us to list albums that aren’t on the iTunes store. Not only does that limit what I can post, but it makes the service as a whole seem a little disingenuous since I feel they only made this to sell music, and not because they love music as they claim.

I’ll continue to use Ping, but I’m not as excited about it now as I was two days ago. Apple should listen to its userbase now that they’re in this space and build the network to something that we’d all expect from Apple.

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Post tags: Apple, iTunes, Music, ping, social network

What set Lala apart from the other services was that it had a library of music on its servers, and matched your music with theirs. If you owned a track, you and you could listen to that track whenever you wanted. If Lala didn’t have it on their servers, you could upload the track to them. This allowed you to put your entire music library in the cloud, and not worry about storage since Lala already owned a lot of music themselves.

There were two flaws to this service. One, you needed a WiFi device in order to stream your music away from your computer. Even though I have an iPhone, I use my iPod every day simply because it has much more storage and the volume’s a little louder on it. The second flaw was that there was no iPhone app, and since Lala relied on Flash, there was no way to stream the audio to your iPhone/iPod Touch, even if you wanted to. An app was in the works, but scrapped after Apple bought Lala.

Apple also once allowed users to stream music from their Macs, treating them like servers, but once Apple got wind of how users were using the service to share music outside its intended scope, Apple turned that feature off, leaving it only for a closed network. A Lala-based service could bring that service back without worry of sharing the music outside its intended recipients.

So that brings us to today. iTunes is up to version 9.2, and hasn’t had a major upgrade since 09/09/09. iTunes 8 had a one-year lifespan, so it’s possible that iTunes will get bumped to iTunes 10 (X?), and feature a streaming service. The new music streaming service Rdio got a lot of traction recently, but I haven’t signed up simply because I wanted to see if Apple would come up with something. It looks like we may see the fruits of that on Sept. 1.

Oh, and I also predict cameras in iPod Touches.

What are your thoughts on this? How would it affect both WiFi and home bandwidth? Could this be banned by workplaces? Talk about it in our forums.

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Post tags: Apple, iTunes, lala, Music, streaming

Before you begin: note that iOS 4 will not run on a first generation iPhone.

Upgrade iTunes to 9.2. Without upgrading to iTunes 9.2, you won’t be able to upgrade to iOS 4. If you connect your phone and haven’t upgraded iTunes, you’ll get the following dialog:

NOTE: As I wrote this, the Mac I was using with iTunes 9.1.1 died and I can’t get the screenshot off the hard drive until later.

Essentially, it says “Starman’s iPhone can’t be used with this Mac. Please upgrade to iTunes 9.2″

Backup your iPhone. This can be crucial in case of a failure while upgrading. When you connect your iPhone to iTunes 9.2, it will mount as a device. Right click on the iPhone’s icon and select “Backup”. It will take a while, but when it’s done, everything will be backed up. If something goes wrong, you can restore your phone using this backup and you won’t lose anything.

Sync your important information. I use an app called PhoneView to back up my notes. iTunes will back up your contacts, music, movies, and pictures. Still, I like to run the apps and make sure the information’s there before doing something like wiping my phone for an OS upgrade. This step may seem redundant if you already backed up your phone, but I’m not one to take chances. You can skip this step if you wish, but I’d suggest doing it.

Once you’re confident that all your information is backed up, connect your phone, and click on “Check for Update” which you’ll find when you highlight your phone’s icon in the devices list. iTunes will warn you that you’re about to lose all the information on your iPhone. Since you backed it all up, you should be good to go. Tell iTunes to upgrade your OS and let it run. My upgrade took about 15-20 minutes since it had to do the iOS 4 install, reboot, restore my backup, and another reboot before I was able to use it again.

© June Sixth Productions for Geekistry: It's all geek to us, 2010. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Apple, ios 4, iPhone, iphone 4, iTunes, upgrade

• Chat with us on USTREAM while we’re recording
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Post tags: chat, contact, email, Facebook, feedback, geekistry, IRC, iTunes, live, Podcast, Twitter, ustream

Up for grabs are some essentials that Krissi and Michael feel every geek should keep close at hand for good geekistry

$25 iTunes Gift Card autographed by us

$10 Starbucks Card

1 Year Subscription to WIRED Magazine

Here’s how to win!

1. Write a blog post, send a Tweet, or post a Facebook note about something you enjoy that you consider to be ‘geeky’. Please include the link-back to this post using the shortened URL “http://bit.ly/geekistryftw” – invite your readers to visit us, too!
2. After you’ve shown some geek love, leave a comment here on this post (be sure to use your real email* so we can contact you) with the link you’ve added to your blog, Twitter, or Facebook (hey, we like to re-Tweet/post you, too) and you’ll be entered into the to Epic Name Change Giveaway. You’ll also be added to our newsletter list that you’ll be seeing in your in-box, soon.
3. Want more than one chance to win? Every time you write a new blog post, send a Tweet or update on Facebook that links to this post (leave a comment or ping-back each time) you’ll get an extra entry.
4. We will announce the winner on the second podcast using our new name (effectively podcast episode #23).

Winners will be chosen by random drawing using the Random.org tool.

Good luck and let the best luckiest geek grab the goods!

———-

*You can trust us! Like you, we don’t like spam and we promise not to give your email to anyone else. By the way, if for some reason you decide you’d rather not receive any correspondence from us, request the removal of your email from our list and a real, actual human being will delete it ASAP.

———-

2010/06/08 @ 8:00pm EDT – Comments and entries are officially closed. Thanks for all who participated; the winner will be announced tonight on the live recording of podcast episode 23 http://bit.ly/geekistry-live

© June Sixth Productions for Geekistry: It's all geek to us, 2010. | Permalink | 13 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: blog, contest, delomni, Facebook, iTunes, starbucks, starman, wired

What sets Lala apart from other services is that you can upload your music to their servers, and they’ll either match your songs with theirs and mark the songs as owned by you, saving time and bandwidth, or you can upload the music they don’t currently have. From there, you can have your entire music collection on a service that can stream it anywhere at anytime for free. Whoa.

Signing up is easy, and free. You don’t need to pay or upload anything to start searching for music and listening to it immediately, Lala has an extensive collection of licensed music that you can get started with. The first group I searched for was Journey and their best hits came up immediately. I was skeptical that I wouldn’t get to listen to the whole song, I was expecting to only listen to a partial clip. To my surprise, the entire track of “Don’t Stop Believin’” played in full, as did “Separate Ways”. This is free…and legal? Apparently so, but there’s a catch. Unless you tell Lala that you own the song by either buying it from them for 10 cents for unlimited streaming, paying a fee of around 89 cents to download the MP3 and mark it as owned by you, or uploading it from your collection, you can listen to any song only once for free. If you listen to a song once and then upload it from your collection, it’s marked as owned by you and you can listen to it as many times as you want.

While this may seem attractive to some for new music, I’m not so sure that streaming is a viable option just yet. Sure, it’s cheap and attractive, but is it practical? In order to stream, you need an internet connection at home which I’m sure anyone caring about this service has, or you need a device that can either stream over WiFi, or 3G and use Flash. I couldn’t find the promised iPhone app which was more than likely delayed due to Apple buying Lala, so I couldn’t test how well the service works over 3G. If you want to use this in a car, a service like this may work depending on where you live and what carrier you use.

The concept of streaming your own music isn’t exactly new, I’ve been playing with Simplified Media for a long time, but you have to leave your computer on in order to serve the music. Also, Simplified Media would take a long time to read in my library every time my computer booted, so over time I used it less and less.

I used their Music Uploader app which takes a folder on your computer (which is ususally the root folder of your entire music collection), and scans your music to see if the songs match the licensed songs on Lala’s servers. If there’s a match, the file isn’t uploaded. Instead the song is flagged as being owned by you which saves time and bandwidth. The current implementation of the Music Uploader app doesn’t tell you what files were skipped, so you have to go through the laborious process of figuring out which files weren’t uploaded. I found this to be extremely frustrating when uploading my Steve Roach folder, it skipped 130 files. It didn’t tell me which files were skipped, and I had to decide which was more important – getting the files on the servers, or just forgetting about it.

Once the files have been uploaded to Lala’s servers, you can listen to your own music whenever you want without having to pay for it since it’s marked as owned by you. The problem I had was that despite my fat Comcast pipe and a beefy Mac Pro, there were times when the music would hiccup a bit. It wasn’t often, but it made me wonder what the point was since I can listen to this on my own computer and devices without hiccups at all. I tried to see if it was a bandwidth problem or if my Mac’s CPUs were running too much at once (I was running Photoshop and some other apps at the time), but this is simple music streaming with a good buffer and hiccups shouldn’t happen for something as trivial as this. I concluded that it had to be my Mac for some reason since I was overtaxing it with so much at the time; the buffer was ahead 10-15 seconds.

Unfortunately, Lala requires Flash to stream the music, much like blip.fm does, so any mobile device that doesn’t have Flash support won’t stream your music. I suppose the Lala app is getting rewritten for other mobile devices and will be coming out soon, but in the meantime, if your mobile device doesn’t support Flash there’s no way to listen to your music.

Lala truly revolutionizes music ownership and streaming. Despite its current model of requiring Flash to play, I’m hoping they move to native apps or a more supported model such as HTML5 so that this service can work on more mobile devices. For now I’m going to stick with the music on my 160GB iPod, but I’ll keep an eye on this service for when they support more mobile devices. I can’t wait to see what Apple does with this.

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Post tags: Apple, delomni, flash, iTunes, lala, mp3, Music, starman, streaming

There were two major arguments for CDs against vinyl. First and foremost was the fact that you never had to clean the CDs. Vinyl’s biggest issue has always been its scratches and pops which may appeal to some as giving vinyl its “charm”, but I always found those defects to detract from listening to more quiet music. Second was the portability of the CD. Vinyl albums were 12″ in diameter and required a physical needle to play the music on it. That made carrying them around impractical and gave way to the success of CDs.

What threatens CDs now isn’t even tangible. Yes, you do still need a physical device to play your music, but the music itself has been compressed to a small group of lossy 0′s and 1′s so that you can cram hundreds of albums onto a portable hard drive. Even worse, you don’t have to buy a physical CD anymore, you can download the file directly to your device. In fact, you can use services like Pandora to stream music to your device and not have to download anything at all.

What we’ve learned in these twenty-five years is that vinyl hasn’t really gone away. Purists knew all along that the dynamic range of the analog album was far superior to the lesser quality of the CD, but convenience ruled. Now vinyl is back with a vengeance, but it’s not going to retake the throne of king of physical media ever again. CD sales are declining in the face of what it killed vinyl with – convenience. Today we can go to the iTunes or Amazon stores and download albums immediately. I have to admit that as much of a purist I am, I chose to buy an album on a Tuesday on iTunes rather than go to a store after work because I wanted to hear it as soon as I could get it. I never felt that way before downloads, I always knew that the CDs would be there on the shelf for me later. Downloads feed your need to listen to your music now, and listen immediately. I go for walks at lunchtime which is a perfect time to listen to an album. Unfortunately, there are no major record stores near work so I can’t go out at lunchtime and pick it up then.

There’s one other factor that pushed CDs ahead of albums which I didn’t mention and that’s the “extra track” factor. CDs sometimes had an extra track on them which studios used to entice people to buy the CD instead of the vinyl. It sure worked, I bought a lot of CDs because of that, but I haven’t seen that tactic used until this past week. I had mentioned on Twitter that I finally had a chance to listen to more of Lady Gaga than just “Poker Face”. I generally don’t care about modern music since I feel the old school style of writing a song has been lost, but Lady Gaga’s music had that old school feel to it, so I decided to pick up her album. I found that the track listing on the deluxe version of “The Fame Monster” on iTunes was different than the physical CD in the store. The CD seemed more like an EP companion to “The Fame” so I checked iTunes to see if buying “The Fame” and “The Fame Monster” was a good deal. What I found was that there were two tracks on the iTunes album that weren’t on the CDs. To make matters worse, those tracks were listed as “album only”, so I couldn’t buy the CDs in the store and then buy the two tracks off of iTunes. Without thinking, I decided to press the “Buy Now” button on my iPhone and let the album download over 3G while I looked at other CDs in the store. I had to pause to think of what just transpired. I almost felt guilty that I was buying an album over 3G while standing in a CD store, but by the time I left I had the whole album on my phone and ready to hook up to my car stereo.

The advantage of convenience got turned on its head the next day when I wanted to listen to the album on my home stereo which was never wired for a digital device since I bought most of my music on CD. I had the wiring, that was easy, but I didn’t have a line level connector so I had to do the whole thing in analog without overmodulating the output from the iPhone. I know there are line level adapters for this, but I never had to get one. It was the first time I played a paid-for MP3 on my home stereo and I wasn’t sure that what I bought was worth the money. I could hear obvious limitations in the songs and that the quality wasn’t up to what I expected.

So that made me wonder: is this 1986 all over again? Does the convenience, but lesser quality of MP3s mirror what the CDs did to vinyl? With vinyl coming back, what does that say about the longevity of the MP3?

Personally, I think this is a step backwards. We can download so much so fast nowadays and storage space is so cheap that we should be getting higher quality versions of songs, not lesser. If you think about the steps we’ve been taking compared to the technology out there, we went from high quality vinyl to capped CDs to lossy MP3s. However, we have the ability to listen to quality such as 24 bit/96 kHz audio with lossless compression, and we don’t. Unfortunately, I think that there’s no market for it since most people listen to music with earbuds or in their car, but I think a market of high quality audio can thrive if it isn’t botched with competing formats like the DVD-Audio and SACD issues we had.
Today we have Blu-Ray which has the ability to be a transport for the audio quality we want. It’s an accepted format for home theater, and even if people believe that downloads are the wave of the future, quality should still be the paramount issue.

So before you ditch your CD player for a digital download, ask yourself if the convenience will be worth it in the long run.

© June Sixth Productions for Geekistry: It's all geek to us, 2009. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: CDs, delomni, iTunes, Music, starman