Insanity Part 2.0

Well, it seems my blog has already gotten some unwelcome spamming, which is interesting because while I’m pleased it’s actually discoverable (“netscape 8 sucks” seems to be a popular search query, how did I manage to get a high google rank for that?!), it’s pissing me off because it’s spam. So I’m probably going to do something to try and make spam less possible. Hopefully it won’t break commenting for everyone. Email me if it does.

Here’s some of my random impressions of the music services:

Rhapsody

• Rhapsody just seems to have a better collection than everyone else. Take for example, the fact that Neutral Milk Hotel recently became available on Rhapsody for streaming and downloading. I just checked and they’re still not available on Napster yet. For most major label releases most of the music services seem about on-par, but the indies make a difference. (FWIW I’m not yet impressed by NMH, and I don’t quite see where the Decemberists comparisons come from)
• The software has gotten weirder lately. For some reason it seems to perpetually eat 10-20% of my CPU (when idling, which means 600MHz)
• Rhapsody streams songs on their Radio that may not normally be available on digital music services. Take for instance, Dave Matthews Band. On every service they’re marked as “album only,” and no one can stream them. Except on Rhapsody, you can get individual Dave Matthews songs streamed as part of the radio service. You don’t get to choose which songs get streamed obviously, but this is a huge step up from no songs at all. I haven’t checked whether this exists for other groups like the Beatles.
• My Rhapsody is actually kinda cool. It seems to take the music that you listen to through streaming, and makes recommendations based on that. However, its actual function is slightly unclear, as I don’t know if it makes recommendations based on music that you import and/or download through Rhapsody. Its function could definitely be improved if this is the case.

Yahoo also just came out with a music service lately, and it’s also interesting. Caveat: Yahoo actually had the foresight to mark both their software and service as beta, which is a good idea.

There are two parts to Yahoo Music’s strategy: the “music engine” and the Yahoo unlimited music service. So far the main draw is that Yahoo offers a Janus-compatible service at $5/mo if you buy a whole year, which is a lot cheaper than Rhapsody/Napster’s $15/mo.

The music engine is the only way to access the Unlimited service, and is fairly good with features. It’s tied in to Launchcast and Unlimited, and is most useful if you use these, but is capable as a standalone. Most interestingly, it supports MP3, WMA, AAC, and Ogg Vorbis. This means that other than Winamp (and iTunes with a crappy hack), I can have my entire music collection actually available to me in one program. Two problems:

• Loading times are slooooooooooow. Switching between different panels in the program is slowwwwww. Loading anything takes foreverrrrrrr.
• If you say, sort by Artist, it only sorts by artist. It doesn’t then sort by Album and Track number, like iTunes does (making for a very nicely organized list). Actually maybe it does sort by Album after that (I’m too lazy to check) but it certainly doesn’t sort by Track number after that, and that’s pretty unhelpful as far as I’m concerned.
• Mini-mode is a joke. Compared with iTunes’ mini-mode (I swear this was as small as I could get YME to go):
  

The music service itself is ho-hum, without too much that I can say about it except for one thing: Yahoo’s customization options are excellent. Yahoo lets you rate music that you listen to from the service based on Song, Album, or Artist, ranging from don’t-ever-play-it-again (null) to 4 stars. Music that you import from your hard drive can only be rated based by song as far as I can tell, which makes for an interesting disconnect when you own music but can only say you love the album or artist by navigating to their page on the music service (which, as I’ve mentioned already, takes foreverrrrrrrr).

So what do the ratings do? Not much other than control your shuffling (the software’s shuffle control is actually pretty good), and…your Launchcast Station. Unlike Rhapsody, you only get 1 custom station (as opposed to however many you want), but it plays tracks based on your preferences and similarities to your preferences, which works out fairly well. I can’t compare it to My Rhapsody just yet though, as I just discovered that one.

All in all, not bad for a first Yahoo effort. It’s going to take a while (and a big speed improvement) before I put down any actual money for it though.

On that note, Real.com’s running a promotion where you get a 14-day trial on Rhapsody and 50% off for the first 3 months.

I just discovered that some program has decided to re-tag all my songs so that artists like “The Decemberists” are now “Decemberists, The.” It was either Yahoo or Rhapsody. If it was either case, fuck you.

See how many typos you can find on the back cover of our $102 E&M Waves textbook.

USATODAY.com – Cable TV tells parents to ‘Take Control’

The campaign also will make program ratings, such as TV-MA for mature audiences, more prominent. Now they are displayed for 15 seconds at the start of a show. Starting June 1, the icon will be enlarged 70% and also will appear after each commercial break.

Have you seen these? They’re kind of ridiculous. They’re almost big enough to take up an entire corner of the screen. I didn’t think the old ratings were that hard to spot to begin with either.