Wordyard

Hand-forged posts since 2002

Archives

About

Greatest hits

Yahoo: Please fix MusicMatch!

by

Now that Yahoo has acquired MusicMatch, maybe they can fix the software.

I am a long-term user, I’ve paid several times for the product over the years, its basic interface works for me better than iTunes, and I’m used to it, I don’t want to change. But: In trying to turn a good music client into a boffo music store, MusicMatch has repeatedly broken its software. Most recently, the thing crashes whenever I try to copy a CD to my hard drive. This same bug existed for months last spring, then MusicMatch finally fixed it — now it has reappeared in the latest update. (The “volume leveling” feature, which would be highly useful if it worked, has also always crashed.)

Frankly, MusicMatch, I don’t care about your store. I just want your software, once the best of its kind, to work.

Fun with Flickr

by

At the O’Reilly Emerging Technologies conference earlier this year I was lucky enough to get a demo of Flickr, the photo-sharing software and service from Ludicorp. (The company’s president, Stewart Butterfield, is married to Caterina Fake, who did great design work here at Salon several years ago.) At the time I thought it was a neat little photo-sharing tool, but it seemed a little heavy on the Flash, which sometimes makes my head ache, and life got busy and I never got around to exploring it further. Since then Flickr has won much acclaim, and when I needed to figure out a simple way to share photos from a recent family trip, I thought I’d give it another spin last night. Turns out it has evolved beautifully since my introduction to it, and I ended up playing with it for hours, so let me now belatedly add my enthusiasm to the chorus.

It’s an exquisitely well designed Web application, certainly one of the best I’ve ever seen, full of smart interface choices and nice little finishing touches that let you know that the developers who’ve built it are also heavy users of their own handiwork.

Tiny example: I noticed Flickr was dating the photos based on the date I uploaded them, so I went in to change a bunch of dates to reflect when the photos were taken. The page contained this helpful message: “The date posted is the date & time you physically published your photo on Flickr, not the date the photo was taken. We are currently storing the date that your photo was taken in the database, so rest assured you won’t need to modify every photo later… There will soon be a way to sort your photos based on the date the photo was taken. Stay tuned!” So I didn’t waste my time. That’s what I call a considerate piece of software. And along the way you learn that Flickr is respectfully storing each photo’s metadata (date, type of camera used, all that EXIF stuff that you almost never need to look at, except when you do).

It’s easy to get started with Flickr, and then when you want to push it and do more with it, it leads you gently into its depths. It has a whole layer of social software — profiles, groups, and so forth — but since its primary function is photo sharing, that social software actually has a raison d’etre, so you don’t just sit there (as with so many other ventures in this area) and wonder “Now that we’re here and we know each other’s hobbies and marital status, what exactly do we do?”

I am generally distrustful of using Web applications as anything more than conveniences for away-from-home access. I want my data close at hand, and most Web interfaces are still too clunky to allow for fast and complex organizing of serious quantities of stuff. But I’m seriously thinking about making Flickr my photo home base — it’s that good. And if Flickr’s speedy evolution in a mere six months is any indication, the thing is going to improve — and grow — at an intense rate.

Link-o-rama

by

For the past several weeks I’ve accumulated a set of links that I wanted to present and comment on. Each could warrant a full blog entry. But since the chaos of my life and schedule means that instead I’ve just been sitting on them, I’m just going to post them in a big underannotated lump. Better than not posting them at all, and probably what I should have done in the first place, one by one. If you’re an avid follower of blogs you’ll probably have seen many of these already.

Teresa Neilsen Hayden’s amazing compendium of “Lord of the Rings” parodies provided me with a nearly inexhaustible supply of merriment.

The long view: Greg Costikyan, with whom I don’t always agree but whose thoughts I will always read avidly, points out that the U.S. will not always be the “sole superpower” — providing a good, self-interested reason for us to pay a little more attention to international law:

  We have a window of opportunity, now before our relative but precipitous decline, to establish clear and pervasive international norms of behavior, to persuade the emerging powers that it makes good sense, and is in their benefit, to behave like good global citizens. And to do that, we desperately need the good will and cooperation of our allies in Europe and Asia. As the “predominant world power,” it may sometimes seem like we can dispense with this, in the face of more immediate threats. But that’s foolish from a more long-term perspective.

Danny O’Brien posts on the elusive and increasingly central issue of just how much fame and celebrity will satisfy us in an era when the middle ground — famous for 15 minutes, famous for 15 (or 150) people — keeps expanding. (This is the aspect of blogging that professional journalists, used to measuring readership by commercial standards, typically miss.)

  There was a time, I think, in the industries where fame is important, that you had was famous, and not. You had big stars, and you had a thin line of people who had work, and you had failures, or people who felt like failures. But now the drop-off on that curve seems to be less precipitous. It feels, stuck here, so close to the machinery of the Net, that there’s a growing middle-class of fame – a whole world of people who aren’t really famous, but could spend their days only talking to people who think they’re fucking fantastic (or horrifyingly notorious).

Danah Boyd pinpoints many of the problems with the current wave of social software in her talk on “Autistic social software” from Supernova. Good reading for anyone who thinks that “social software” started with Friendster — but valuable as well for those of us who already know the longer history here:

  I’m often told that social networks are the future of the sociable Internet. Guess what? They were the cornerstone of the Internet, always. What is different is that we’ve tried to mechanically organize them, to formalize them. Doing so did not make social networks suddenly appear; formalization meant that they became less serious, more game-like. All other Internet social networks are embedded into another set of practices, not seeking an application to validate their existence.

Creative Commons is doing important work in helping keep open a space for creative reuse of content in an era of hegemonic copyrightism. The organization recently moved in to share the office space for Mitch Kapor’s Open Source Applications Foundation, where I’ve been spending a lot of time researching my book. Regular readers here know of my enthusiasm for the music of the Mountain Goats. So it tickled me to read recently on the Creative Commons blog that the Goats’ John Darnielle has okayed the hosting of a free archive of live shows at the Internet Archive. Darnielle has a low-tech preference for old-fashioned tape trading over the online approach — but the main thing is, he wants people to hear his music, and once they do, many will, as I have, become voracious purchasers of actual Mountain Goats CDs. Creative Commons, the Internet Archive, the Mountain Goats — how can you go wrong?

Hugh MacLeod, whose trademark art is drawing cartoons on the back of business cards, has posted an ever-evolving list of thoughts and ideas on creativity that’s great reading. For instance:

  The more talented somebody is, the less they need the props. Meeting a person who wrote a masterpiece on the back of a deli menu would not surprise me. Meeting a person who wrote a masterpiece with a silver Cartier fountain pen on an antique writing table in an airy SoHo loft would SERIOUSLY surprise me.

And, finally, a quote from Norman Mailer, via Jay Rosen’s commentary on Mailer’s coverage of the 1960 Democratic Convention — an old one, but, for me, in the “paste this one on your monitor” class:

  “Journalism is chores. Journalism is bondage unless you can see yourself as a private eye inquiring into the mysteries of a new phenomenon.”

Stop, hey, what’s that sound?

by

People are just beginning, it seems, to wake up to the fact that most digital music today doesn’t sound as good as it could. That’s because the most popular compression formats — including both the lingua franca MP3 standard and the standard Apple uses for its ITunes store — are “lossy”: To make the file size smaller, they trade off some loss of information (and therefore sound quality).

This latest round in the discussion seems to have kicked off with a Randall Stross column in the Sunday New York Times, but it dates back at least as far as Andrew Leonard’s early, groundbreaking coverage of the MP3 phenomenon in Salon. Stross points out that Apple’s choice of a good but still “lossy” compression standard for its music store means that — surprise! — you’re really not getting CD quality audio when you pay for your $9.99 album.

Continuing the thread, Tim Bray writes: “I used to think that if you were listening to music on headphones on a bus or train or plane or in a crowd, the MP3 lossage really didn’t matter much. But recently I’ve been listening to the Shure 3C phones, and it’s obvious that we really shouldn’t be ignoring these compression issues; in particular since lossless compression is available right here, right now.”

Well, yes. We have the technology! The problem here is not technical, it’s political, legal, financial.

The odd thing to me is that Stross’s column — which appeared in the Business section, after all — failed to mention the obvious: that the record labels are selling lossy versions of songs online because they still distrust the new medium, even when it is being used legally and when people are paying for their product. They’re more interested in propping up their sagging CD business than in quickly exploiting a new marketplace. So after years of dithering they figure, OK, we’ll sell our wares on the Net — but let’s only provide crippled versions. The crippling applies not only to Apple’s DRM schemes (lord knows whether you’ll still have access to that music, 10 years and three computers from now) but to the 128 kbps bit rate of the songs you buy. It was one thing to accept that tradeoff in 1998 when MP3s were underground, hard disks were smaller and most of the world was on dialup connections. Today, it makes no sense.

I don’t doubt that the DRM and bit-rate compromises were part of the horsetrading Steve Jobs had to engage in to get the record labels in the door in the first place. But it doesn’t make me want to sink my cash into purchases on iTunes. (At EMusic, by contrast — which I still subscribe to despite my hissy fit when they stopped offering unlimited downloads — I pay for music and receive it uncrippled by DRM and in a higher quality, though still not perfect, format.)

The prevalence of cruddy 128 kbps music in the online marketplace demonstrates that the music industry still doesn’t believe in online distribution: It still doesn’t trust us, even when we’re paying for the music.

The real issue for the recording industry has never been loss of profits due to piracy, because no one has ever proven that there is a direct connection between piracy and declining CD sales (in fact, quite the contrary). What the industry fears is loss of control. Individual consumers — like Andrew, who wrote a column about this last week — want to buy their music and then do whatever they want with it: Put it on an iPod, put it in the car, burn new CD mixes, share with friends. It’s what we’ve always done with our music, after all; we just have better tools today.

There are audiophiles out there, of course, who turn up their noses at “CD quality” — which is itself “lossy” compared with higher-quality audio formats. But meanwhile, the vast majority of music lovers who are reasonably content with their CDs aren’t getting their money’s worth when they buy online.

So remember: when you rip your own CDs to MP3, use at least a 160 kbps rate, or higher if you’ve got a big disk, or a “Variable Bit Rate” if your ripper supports that. The added file size is negligible given how cheap storage is today, but your ears will thank you. And the next time you think of buying music from an online store, tell them you won’t settle for anything less.

Main squeeze

by

Several weeks ago I wrote about the fun I was having with the open-source Slimserver software for streaming your music collection to any other networked computer. An alert person at SlimDevices, the company that develops the software and also produces the Squeezebox computer-to-stereo bridge, e-mailed me to ask if I wanted to review the product. It took me about 30 seconds to say yes.

The Squeezebox — a small black box about the size of a book, with a bright, readable display — sits at your stereo and pulls in, over your existing Wifi network, any music file or playlist sitting on your computer’s hard drive. The Slimserver software sits on the computer and talks to the device. Mine set up very easily, with only one glitch (the box immediately wanted to upgrade its software, but had trouble getting the upgrade downloaded automatically). If you had the modest skill required to set up a wireless network, you won’t have any trouble getting the Squeezebox running. It may not be for total neophytes, but, in my home at least, it didn’t require full system-administrator chops, either.

Once set up, the Squeezebox instantly transformed my music-listening life: suddenly, all the music I’d been listening to on mediocre computer speakers, or on my Ipod, was available at the click of a remote on the much more pleasing living-room stereo that had fallen into digital-music-age disuse. (It probably helps that my kids are finally past the maximum-childproofing-level stage and so I’ve recently removed the extra door from the stereo system cabinet!) I loved it so much, I bought my review copy.

This week Walt Mossberg reviewed another product from a company named Roku that seems to do pretty much what the Squeezebox does. I haven’t used it, and it may be really good (Walt didn’t like how it handled the security on his wireless network), but as far as I can tell, it’s more expensive, it doesn’t have wireless built in and it’s not even quite available yet (ships mid-July, according to the Roku site).

I’m happy with my investment in Squeezebox, not only because it’s changed my music-listening life, but because I know that, if the tumultuous tech business crushes the small company that makes it and orphans the device (it’s been known to happen in the Valley!), there will most likely be a core of enthusiasts who will keep working on upgrades for the software. For consumers buying on the bleeding edge, that’s becoming an important “feature” in its own right.

COPA coverage

by

Here’s the AP on the COPA ruling. Says it was a 5-4. Court upheld the original injunction against putting the law into effect. Could conceivably go back to lower court for full trial if the Ashcroft Justice Department chooses to — then we’ll be fighting this poorly conceived and written law for another five years. Another area where a change in administration might be salutary — though Clinton signed the original COPA, it’s not at all clear whether a less porn-obsessed Justice Department would have pursued the case as avidly as Ashcroft has.

More on COPA

by

MSNBC just sent out their news alert on this opinion under this headline: “Supreme Court blocks Web child porn law from taking effect.” As has been the case from day one of this matter, COPA gets labeled inaccurately as a “child porn law,” when in fact it has essentially nothing to do with child pornography, something that is already seriously outlawed. COPA is about censoring the Internet — ostensibly it aims to protect children from porn, but in reality its provisions are so broad and riddled with holes that, while it could be used to harass legitimate Web sites fostering grownup debate on controversial issues (like Salon), it would be entirely useless in actually keeping real porn away from kids.

Supremes’ COPA decision

by

I don’t have details yet, but Ann Beeson of the ACLU, who has represented Salon and many other plaintiffs in the long-running litigation over the Child Online Protection Act (COPA), just sent out the following: “We just learned that the Supreme Court struck down COPA. Justice Kennedy wrote for the majority in a 6-3 opinion in our favor.” I wrote about the Supreme Court arguments in March here. More info when I get a copy of the opinion.

Andrew Leonard on Social Software

by

Even if you’ve been following the social-software boom for the last couple of years, you will probably find some eye-opening insights in “You Are Who You Know,” Andrew Leonard’s great two-part feature on the subject in Salon this week (part one, part two). If Friendster and its spawn remain a mystery to you, the series will be even more essential to you. When Andrew took up the editor’s hat here, Salon (largely) lost a great reporter and writer. Good to have him back in such fine form.