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Apple Ping Is Barely Half-Baked

// September 8th, 2010 // 3 Comments » // Social Networks, stupid

After fighting it since the announcement, curiosity got the best of me and I turned on Ping in the new iTunes v10. I only did so after confirming that there is an easy way to turn it off, so I figure I don’t have anything to lose. After trying to use Nokia’s various Ovi services for a few years, I firmly believed that no one could release a service that was as half-baked as those, until I tried Ping.

In case you’re not technically inclined (but somehow reading my blog), Ping is billed as a social community built around music. I’ve used something similar – called Last.FM – for years. It’s really quite brilliant – you simply listen to music as you normally would, and automatically share your listening habits with your friends. They can see what you’re listening to, you can see what they’re listening to, and you can each comment on each others’ stuff. If you listen to a ton of music like I do, it’s really quite brilliant, and definitely helps me find new music when I want to.

So….Ping, then. Getting started is pretty easy – you login with your Apple iTunes account, setup a super-basic profile, including a photo, your location, a short description of yourself, and then you choose 3 of your favorite genres to start things off. Shortly thereafter, you’re taken to the recommendations screen, which for me, looked like this:

So, there are 2 major things wrong with this screen:

1. Nothing in my library indicates that I should follow 50 Cent, Daddy Yankee, or Lloyd Banks. I’ve never even heard of the latter two. Out of the 1,586 artists in my iTunes library, Ping only found 37 to recommend?

2. The only ways I see to connect with my friends are by searching for them by name or by inviting them via email.

So, I have fully established contact lists on Twitter, Facebook, and Google, at the least. I’ve spent a while building these, curating these along the years. Regardless, Apple hasn’t offered me the ability to search these contact lists for other people I may know using Ping. This would be forgivable if there was an easy ‘share my profile with my friends’ link that I could post to Facebook or Twitter – no such luck.

There is a dedicated link to my Ping profile that I can share with others – mine’s here – but I had to dig around a bit for it. I can assure you my parents wouldn’t have found it, nor would most of my ‘normob’ friends – the ones interested in Ping.

Another one of the major ‘features’ of Ping is the ability to follow your favorite artist, to see what they’re up to. I can’t really think of a good reason I would want to do this, but for the sake of the experience, I’m following a few of my favorites. How do I find my favorite artists? The same way I don’t find my friends, apparently – searching one-by-one. Amazingly, Apple hasn’t built a way for me to let iTunes analyze my library to see which of my 1,586 artists have the most playcounts and then see if they’re on Ping yet.

I’m not going to give up on Ping just yet – I’ll give it a fair chance, but the first impression is pretty pathetic. It definitely feels half-baked, which is odd for Apple. I’m definitely going to keep using Last.FM – the service is too valuable for me to pretend Ping can replace it. Have you tried Ping on iTunes? What are your thoughts?

Why I Bought An iPod

// August 27th, 2010 // 5 Comments » // annoying, Mobile, technology

In college, I bought a 4th generation 20GB black and white iPod at Sam’s Club (the HP Edition, actually). Back then, my music collection was only 10GB, and I figured that gave me plenty of room to grow. While using that iPod, I developed a pretty simple, yet strict method for keeping my music library clean and fresh. This system requires two pieces of metadata – star ratings and playcount/last played – to be synchronized between my portable device and my desktop computer.

For star ratings, I use this differently than most people. When I’m listening to music, if I come across a track that, for whatever reason, I don’t want to have in my library, I give it 5 stars. Why 5? Because on an iPod, that’s the easiest rating to give something, no matter what else you’re doing (driving, walking, etc). I can use my iPod all day long, rating tracks, and then synchronize with my computer, sort by star rating, and delete the 5′s. Super easy, and I’ve still got 1-4 stars for an actual rating system.

Playcounts/last played come into effect when I want to keep things fresh. My music library is now coming up to 20,000 tracks, and let’s face it – there’s no easy way to manage that. What I’ve done is setup playlists for each genre – these smart playlists are automatically populated with tracks that I haven’t listened to in the past XX days. The timeframe isn’t really important (sometimes it’s 30, sometimes it’s 60), but what’s important is that it’s music I haven’t heard in a while, conveniently packaged in a playlist.

These playlists are also useful on phones that have limited storage – rather than painstakingly trying to figure out what to transfer (or worse, risk the ‘random’ sync and take up space with junk), I can limit these playlists to ~1GB in size and have several of them on an 8GB microSD with plenty of extra room.

Since that original iPod died several years ago, I’ve tried in vain to replicate that system using various phones as MP3 players. I’ve tried every version of Windows Mobile since 2005, Symbian (various versions), Android, and even BlackBerry, and no phone that I’ve found is able to synchronize star ratings and playcounts/last played back to the desktop, which is the core requirement for my system to work.

Windows Mobile does synchronize this, but Windows Media Player on the desktop is such a pain to use, I just couldn’t handle it. My last-ditch effort was to try the new DoubleTwist player on my Nexus One. They advertise full synchronization of both ratings and playcounts back to iTunes, so I figured it was worth a shot. I’ll be honest, I never synced my phone twice. The DoubleTwist app on my computer is slow as molasses – it has to re-load *ALL* of my music every time I launch it – that takes quite a while when you have 120GB. Further, once it’s done loading all your stuff, it has to talk to iTunes to find out any changes to your media there. It’s easily 30-45 minutes of ‘loading’ before I’m even able to use the app, much less synchronize anything with it.

Thus, after fighting it for several years, I finally broke down tonite and bought the 160GB iPod Classic. I’m not really happy about it, and I’ve had to switch from MediaMonkey back to iTunes for my desktop solution, but I finally have just that – a solution, instead of a clunky workaround. I bought the 160GB iPod Classic mainly because it’s pretty mellow – there’s no frills, and this is purely a functional toy, I don’t need a touchscreen or any apps and such. Second, I bought it because, at least currently, I can fit my entire 120GB music collection on it – which means I always have my entire collection with me, which is something I’ve missed since I’ve been using my phones, even the N97 which had 32GB of internal storage and a microSD card slot.

It’s really unfortunate, honestly. There are so many benefits to using your phone as your MP3 player that it’s not even funny. I really find it quite depressing that no one in the mobile industry is working to address these two small (but incredibly important) issues. I’ve spoken at length with the http://blog.ovi.com/2009/11/12/welcome-to-nokia-ovi-player/ team about this, and they’ve simply (repeatedly) said it’s just not on their roadmap right now.

I’m keeping my eye on DoubleTwist, though – with a few speed improvements, they could finally be the key that I’ve been looking for. In the meantime, I’ve got my 160GB iPod Classic, and I’ll be using it to weed out the crappy music tracks I’ve accumulated over the years, until someone else is able to compete.

Have you found a way to synchronize ratings and playcounts/last played with anything other than an iPod? What do you use to keep your music library fresh? Have you given up on locally-stored media and gone cloud-only with Last.FM or Pandora?

Microsoft Going With Simple Advertising

// May 12th, 2009 // 4 Comments » // marketing

Let’s face it – Microsoft is not exactly known for great advertising campaigns, specifically when it comes to consumer electronics such as its Zune MP3 player and music store. For several reasons, the iPod has dominated the MP3 market, mainly due to its tight integration with iTunes, and that application’s robust feature set. However, the iPod/iTunes habit is an expensive one, without question, and Microsoft is finally taking advantage of the current economic environment to remind consumers that being an Apple fan is expensive.

Take this latest ad, comparing the Zune and Zune Pass to the latest iPod. Both the 120GB iPod Classic and the 120GB Zune MP3 players are priced at ~$230 on Amazon, currently. The Zune has TONS more features, but we’ll ignore that, for now. In the ad, Microsoft points out – correctly – that in order to load that 120GB iPod Classic up with a full 30,000 songs, it would cost…well…$30,000. Alternatively, the ZunePass is a subscription service that gives you unlimited downloads each month.

Yes, there are several caveats to the ZunePass – DRM-protected, limited device support, etc. However, you could easily argue that most people with an MP3 player are listening to their songs in one of 2 places – on that MP3 player, or on their computer. For a large majority of people purchasing either a 120GB iPod Classic or a 120GB Zune, this comparison is tough to argue with.

I like this ad because it’s loud, but not annoyingly so, and because it’s simple. It doesn’t take much to see the sense in the argument, and there’s a really simple call to action – go check out the Zune. Easy as that. There’s no question left in the viewer’s head as to who the advertiser is or what the promised benefit is. The only real question in my mind is why Microsoft hasn’t released a Zune app for Windows Mobile that allows you to play ZunePass content on your smartphone. What do you think?

MSN Music UK Is Ignorance Defined

// January 21st, 2009 // 1 Comment » // Mobile, stupid

Today, in the ‘stupid’ category, I present MSN Music UK, which just started offering mobile music downloads. Sounds cool, right? Who wouldn’t want instant access to over 1 million tracks, 25,000 ‘realtone’ ringtones, and even 10,000 music videos? Well, for starters, me. I don’t, not at these prices, and with these restrictions.

Let me spell this pricing out for you – first off, it’s all DRM’d. DRM stands for Digital Rights Restriction Management, and basically makes sure that you only play back your media on specific devices. Imagine if you bought a CD, but it would only play in the car you were driving when you bought it. To play it in your friend’s car, or in your home stereo, you would need to purchase a new copy. Completely silly. With MSN Music’s new tracks, they’re DRM’d to only play on the DEVICE you bought it on – yeah, that’s right, you can’t even back it up on your computer to play back there, or move it to a new phone without paying.

So, now that we understand the ‘freedom’ in the music, surely it’s cheap, right? Wrong. You’re looking at 1.50 GBP for each full music track, 3 GBP for each Realtone ringtone, and 2 GBP for each music video. Wait, what?! Yes, you would pay twice as much for the ~30 sec. ringtone than you would for the whole stinkin song. Amazing.

Now that we’re apalled at the pricing by itself, let’s compare to some other online music stores. First up, the requisite iTunes: .79 GBP per track, with DRM that allows for multiple devices and computers. Nearly half the price of MSN Music. Amazon.co.uk is as cheap as .59 GBP, and those are actually straight up DRM-Free MP3s, you can play them on nearly whatever you want.

Anyone noticing a trend, here? It sure looks to me like DRM’d music is MORE expensive, increasing with the level of restriction. Amazing. MSN Music U.K., you’ve failed. Miserably. And you Brits out there, if any of you purchase anything from MSN Music, you’ve failed, too. Congratulations.