Obsolete music stores

I spent 12 hours yesterday converting CD music to formats of FLAC, OGG,
MP3 and AACPlus. Programs used in the process are ExactAudioCopy,
BulkRename, MP3Tag, MediaCoder, and foobar2000. Most of the effort is
in editing and formatting tags. Net reduction with so many different
formats is only about 15%. And there's already hundreds of hours music
on my 60Gb iAudio I've not got around to hearing. (And my podcast
subscriptions -- oy vey!)
How absurd is this process, or so will it
seem in a few years with everyone able to get wireless broadband. Local
storage of music on mobile players will be replaced by on-demand access
to streaming content like what XM and Sirius Satellite already play --
or the In2TV streaming telly programs AOL just introduced. And yet
there's no sign of Apple preparing for a world where iPods will be
thought laughable fossils.
And we can be pretty sure the tag
information will be as accurate as what XM and Sirius now provide. In
fact, I suspect that the corrupted info in the online Gracenote and
freeDB services that is supposed to aid us is deliberately created to
enhance the appeal of subscription music or, at least, buying music
online.
I was in two of Manhattan's biggest CD stores the last few
days and it was so comically obvious that these stores are obsolete.
Indeed, I've little doubt Spitzer is right in saying online music
pricing has been set by monopoly conspiracy. How can one equate costs
of music on discs in a huge store with rent, staff, electricity, etc.
with the reduced form delivered by the iTunes store?
I believe a
price equating the two delivery forms would be 20 cents per download.
It's fairly clear that Tower Records isn't financing itself and I think
it most likely the RIAA and record companies are supporting the chain
as part of the conspiracy to maintain an inflated price structure for
music.

AOL streaming media

AOL is trying. They added two XM stations to the Radio@AOL lineup --
the 128 kbps LC-AAC feed for subscribers, not the low qualty
open-to-all online version). The channels are XM Big Tracks and Chill,
though the latter has now stopped working. In fact Chill disppoints me
since it is mostly lounge with little sign of the electronic ambient I
best like.

March 11 saw start of beta testing "AOL Hi-Q Video" which uses Kontiki
DRM stuff. I had problems with "Delivery Service" software. Fast
enough,
though, since 43 minute, 430 mb WMV, episodes of "La Femme Nikita" were
pushed to me in a bit more than 30 minutes. They expire June 1.

I couldn't download more than two episodes without having to
force close AOL and reboot to download another two. So I couldn't
simply have all episodes consecutively download.

Not worth the effort since one can only play shows (after closing
Zonealarm) in AOL's wrapper of WMP 10, which precludes pan/scan.
Quality was poorer than XviD.

But, this seems promising of what can be accomplished. With the right
codecs, one could view HDTV-quality shows, likely even having them
streamed real-time. I'm surprised ITV and Sky don't offer such a
service to the US and Canada, though time zone differences make it more
desirable that downloads occur while subscribers sleep. "Hex" is a natural for American teen girls...

But bogging down PCs with complex new DRM software will surely deter users.

BTW, why do we need BluRay? Reduction of over 75% is obviously possible
with the best codecs; i.e., current movie DVDs could hold 37Gb of info.

Samsung to murder iPods

Samsung today announced the SGH-i310 Smartphone which supports songs encoded with the super-small-size HE-AAC codec, also known as AACPlus or AAC+. The phone can hold about 6,600 "songs" in that format.
Why would anybody carry an additional iPod for music?

Failures of Firefox 1.5

Firefox 1.5 ought to have been wonderful and it certainly is anything but.
What qualifies me to say such a thing? I'm not a programmer and the HTML skills of most 16-year-old bloggers are above mine. But, I live on the web and I've used nearly 2,000 builds of various Mozilla/Gecko browsers over the last five years. In particular, I have vast experience in the creation and maintenance of "profiles" for the browsers. Indeed, I think profiles are one of the greatest benefits of these browsers because they always allow one to get a fresh start. And, I guess the firstmost tip to any Moz user is to get the MozBackup program and run it regularly.
Firefox 1.5 leaks and crashes when it does the things its natural constituency wants most to do. That natural constituency consists of bright young people who mingle through web social networks and professionals with an interest in the cutting edge of technology, currently implying Web 2.0 apps. The former is best known as the MySpace crowd, who like to look at one anothers' pages of pictures and dog's dinner pages of plugins and effects. Let's not argue about whether it's good but just accept that this is an important part of growing up in the 21st Century.
The testers for Firefox daily report in to forums at Mozillazine about problems when they visit sites like CSS Zen Garden. Never have I seen a posting: "Firefox crashed when I visited Samantha's MySpace page!" Regardless of how poorly Samantha's page is created, Firefox should not crash. And can we reasonably expect Samantha's friend to go through the incredibly bureaucratic ordeal of creating a Bugzilla report?
The Bugzilla system was created to keep developers in an ivory tower protected from the scruffy masses of users. I recall once in the forums complaining about difficulties uninstalling a prior version of (what was then called) Phoenix and Blake Ross asked what my problems were. He was immediately chided by a couple of other developers not to respond to queries from the public. And a fine irony in all this is that most of Blake's career as a Netscape/Mozilla/Firefox developer has been as a teenager.
So, here's where something can be done: create forums especially geared to young, non-technical users where they can also socialize but be listened to by developers. Perhaps there could be developed a streamlined form for reporting bugs and crashes frequently encountered. Let's not get bogged down in details, simply think about how to get a community of younger people involved with reporting the bugs in Firefox.
I've got plenty more to say, but looking back over this, I'm quite pleased with how I articulated the problem while offering the glimmerings of a solution. So, I'll just say...
....................................................................To be continued..............................

My first blogger post

This is it!