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R.I.P. Napster

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Today the Napster service was absorbed by Rhapsody in the United States.  I’ve been a long time user of Napster, and am really sad to see it go.

For those of you unaware, the original Napster program was basically a way to get free music.  You would connect to others and share MP3’s.  The MP3 format basically made it easy for anyone to rip a CD and make it available to the world.  So you could try any music you liked, but it also lead to rampant piracy.

Now instead of trying to embrace and extend the MP3 concept, record companies sued Napster into oblivion. It took a long time for music companies to come around.  And a lot of it had to do with Steve Jobs and Apple requesting that copy protection be removed from songs.  Once that happened, many services started to emerge.

Napster itself rose from the dead as a pay service for music subscriptions.  It had a better library than others as well as higher quality music files.  It also had the ability to download tracks for offline listening.  So I jumped back in, and got a subscription and have been a happy customer ever since.

But, alas, Napster sold its US assets to Rhapsody, so now as of today, I’m a Rhapsody customer whether I like it or not.  I’ll give it a fair shake as it’s been a couple years, but Napster has historically been a much better service.  We’ll see if Rhapsody has finally caught up.

If not, many other services have emerged.  Spotify, MOG, Rdio, Slacker and others are just waiting to fill my ear hole with tunes.  We’ll see which way I go.

Greyhawks Digital Music Class – 5 – Ratings and Smart Playlists

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In the last installment, I discussed what I think is one of the most important aspects of really managing your music library, and that is making sure the genres are correct and actually mean something to you as a listener. That lays the foundation to the next topic, and that is rating your music.

Most all music jukeboxes allow you to rate your music from one to five stars. This can help you manage your library in some automatic ways, and I’ll show you how. What I like to do is listen to a new album and then rate each song as I go through, here’s how I think about it.

***** Absolute awesome song – A top hit in my opinion that I could listen to any time
**** One of the best songs by this artist on the album, could be on the artists greatest hits album
*** Decent song that is listenable once in awhile
** An okay song that I might not skip while listening to an album
* I don’t use a 1 star rating at all, just the top 4

Now rating these this way affords me some luxuries when I create playlists. Lets say I only want to hear the most awesome Punk songs in my library? Well I can create a smart playlists that only includes songs in the Punk genre that I’ve rated at 5 stars. If I wanted the greatest hits of an artist, I could create a smart playlist for that artist that included all songs 4 stars and above. If I wanted to go deeper into the music catalog I could go lower on the star ratings.

The key here is the Smart Playlist. Basically a smart playlist lets you set some criteria and then it automatically makes playlists based on that criteria. So in my 5 Star Punk example, it plays all the best punk songs. If tomorrow I get a new Punk album and mark some songs as 5 stars, they automatically become part of the playlist. So once you set your system in place, and get your Smart Playlists set up, the only maintenance going forward is making sure that when you add new music to your library that you get the genre and star ratings correct. Everything else falls into place.

All of these things take awhile to set up initially, but once they are all ready, your library updates itself every time you add and rate a new album. It makes it much easier to find your favorite music, and that’s really what it’s all about.

Greyhawks Digital Music Class – 4 – Genres

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If you take nothing else away from my little music classes, at least pay attention to this one, as for me it makes all the difference. I truly believe that YOU need to decide how you classify your music in genres, and not let something like iTunes or the CDDB database decide. Let me explain…

When you rip a CD, the software goes to the internet and pulls the title of the songs, the artist, and the genre of the music. Sometimes those genres are spot on, sometimes they are laughably wrong and sometimes they don’t quite jive with how you think the music should be classified. So what you need to do is come up with all the ways that YOU classify music. Maybe you only think in Rock, Pop, Country and that’s all you listen to, and that’s fine. Maybe you are a big metalhead and want to divide things into Progressive, Thrash, Death etc. That’s the thing, you should classify music the way YOU think about music, and the way you’ll search for music in your library.

So here’s what I do. I have decided what I want my genres to be, and any time I rip a CD or buy some MP3s from Amazon, I change the genre on those files to match MY list of genres. I have quite a few different genres, but you can have however many or however few you want. Just do what makes sense to you. But stick with it, and make sure that every bit of music in your library falls into the buckets you’ve created.

For me, I sort into the following Genres:

  • Alternative: Depeche Mode, Radiohead, Gnarls Barkley, The Kooks
  • Alternative – Adult: John Mayer, Colbie Caillat, Gavin DeGraw, Jason Mraz
  • Alternative – Heavy: Korn, The White Stripes, Breaking Benjamin, Saigon Kick
  • Classic Rock: Beatles, Aerosmith, The Eagles, The Doors
  • Comedy: George Carlin, Jim Gaffigan, Patton Oswalt, Eddie Izzard
  • Country: Johnny Cash, Dolly Parton, Carrie Underwood, Alabama
  • Cover Song: Any song covered by a different artist
  • Hair Metal: Poison, Warrant, Great White, Faster Pussycat, Scorpions
  • Hip Hop/Rap: Beastie Boys, Kanye West, Akon, Lil’ Wayne, N.E.R.D.
  • Holiday: Any Christmas or other holiday tunes
  • Industrial: Nine Inch Nails, KMFDM, Nitzer Ebb, Ministry
  • Jazz & Blues: Buddy Guy, Louis Armstrong, Harry Connick Jr., Dave Grusin
  • Metal: Pantera, Slayer, Slipknot, Therapy?, Type O Negative
  • New Age & Classical: David Lanz, David Arkenstone, Kenny G., Kitaro
  • Pop: Britney Spears, Gwen Stefani, Katy Perry, Natasha Bedingfield
  • Punk: Bad Religion, Bad Brains, Descendents, Black Flag, Ramones
  • R&B: Alicia Keys, John Legend, Barry White, Robin Thicke
  • Reggae: Bob Marley, Jimmy Cliff, Burning Spear, UB40
  • Rock: Cowboy Mouth, Sammy Hagar, The Hives, The Cult
  • Soundtracks: Self Explanatory

So if you look, I have three variations on Alternative. So I can separate it out by which type of alternative I like, or I can create a playlist that includes anything that contains Alternative in the genre. I also have what’s not really a Genre per se in “Cover Songs” I collect a lot of cover songs, and they are mixed in pretty much all genres, so I wanted a quick way to find them. So, one of my genres is labelled Cover Songs. You could do the same for live tracks or accoustic songs or duets. It’s really up to you. You use your music library, so you should be the one that classifies what the music is to YOU.

Take John Mayer for example. Some would consider him Adult Alternative, some might say Soft Rock, some might say Pop, some might say Top 40. Which is right FOR YOU? That’s all that matters, and if you take control of your Genres, a lot of other things start to fall into place.

So, make that change now. Change the genres to what YOU think they should be. You’ll thank me later.

Greyhawks Digital Music Class – 3 – Starting your Library

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Once you’ve ripped all of your CDs to MP3 and you have them on your hard drive, you’ll want to get them into a music library manager or jukebox of some sort. I’ve mentioned iTunes and Windows Media Player, but there are others like Songbird, MediaMonkey and WinAmp as well. I’m not going to go into all of the different pieces of software you could use. Google “mp3 library software” or “mp3 jukebox” to find all the various programs that might fit your needs. Also be aware that if you want to use music stores like Rhapsody or Napster, you could use their jukeboxes too. I’ll hit subscription services and online sales in a future article, but I wanted you to be aware that you could use them too.

Anyway, these programs should allow you change the metadata on songs (artist, song title, album title, cover art, track number etc.) create playlists of your favorite music, rip songs directly to your music library and easily move music into your favorite portable player. This is also the place where you will mainly stay when playing music or doing all of the above functions. Because of this, you want to make a decision early and try to stick with it as moving between software can lose data.

The portable player you use can really make a difference in this choice as well. Even though you can get an iPod to sync with software other than iTunes, it’s generally a pain in the ass. So if you want an iPod, the easiest choice for you is, in fact, iTunes. You plug in your iPod and iTunes syncs it automatically. It couldn’t be easier, but try using iTunes with a Creative or iRiver player and you’ll have huge problems unless you install third party programs to hack the syncing together. So figure out what hardware you want to use, and make sure your software supports it.

Now if you are using the same software to manage your library as you used to rip your collection, the software probably knows all about your songs already. If your library is empty, you need to add the songs into it so the library software can manage it. In iTunes, clicking File, Add To Library will allow you to choose songs or folders to import. Once the music is in the library, you can now start working with it. Making sure the metadata is correct and creating playlists and the like. You can get more info on starting to use iTunes here.

Now the thing about these jukebox applications is that they use internal databases to track information. Some of the information lives in the MP3 file itself and some of it lives within the jukebox database. For example things like the Artist, Song Title, Album Title, and musical Genre are built into the MP3 file itself. Cover art CAN be embedded into the MP3, but many jukeboxes put the art somewhere else on the hard drive of your computer. And then things like ratings, when the song was last played, and how many plays it’s received are all stored in a database in the software.

We’ll start touching upon the various metadata items in our next installments. Stay Tuned.

Greyhawks Digital Music Class – 2 – Digitizing your Music

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Okay, so you have a large collection of music, and we’ll assume that it’s on CD at this point. You want to get your music into a format you can play on your computer and other digital devices. You do this by converting (or ripping) the songs on the CD to your hard drive in some computer format. There are tons out there: Ogg Vorbis, FLAC, AAC, WAV, MP3 etc.

Each format has strengths and weaknesses. I myself am going to recommend MP3. For me the choice to do so is pretty simple. MP3 can pretty much play on anything. Computers, home media streamers, all music players including iPods, Xbox, Playstation, many new car stereos etc. MP3 is simply the most supported format for music in the world. It will give you the most flexibility to play pretty much wherever you want because it has no Digital Rights Management (DRM) tacked on.

Now MP3 is a lossy format, which means that when you convert a song from your CD to MP3, it’s going to lose some quality due to the compression. If the best quality is all you are after, then you will want to look at lossless music formats. Just be aware that many of those will NOT play everywhere, have much larger file sizes and will probably limit you quite a bit.

Okay, so if you trust Uncle Greyhawk, you’ll choose MP3. Now you have to get music off of the CD and into the MP3 format in a process commonly called “ripping” the songs. If you look it up online, there are TONS of rippers and jukeboxes you can use. You can do the research and find the program that works the best for you, or you can even use the program that came with your computer. On Windows it’s Windows Media Player and on the Mac it’s iTunes. These programs generally want to rip to their own formats, but if you look in the preferences, you can change them to choose MP3 as your format of choice. Here’s what the changes look like in iTunes.

Now, when you choose MP3, there is also a thing called bit-rate. Without getting into particulars, just know that the higher the number, the better the sound quality. It also makes the file size larger as well, so you’ll want to find a quality/size balance. My recommendation is 192 kps. But, you can try for yourself. Try ripping one of your favorite songs at 128 kps, 160 kps, 192 kps and 256 kps. Listen to them all and see where the quality is acceptable for you. When you find the quality you like you can set it and forget it.

So now all you have to do is put your CD in the computer, the ripper will try to figure out the names of the artist and the tracks, and then you rip the songs to the MP3 format somewhere on your hard drive and we’re ready for the next step. Starting your library. Until Next time, play it loud…

NOTE: I know that people will want to know how to get cassettes and vinyl and mini-disc and the like into MP3 files. I’ll get to that later.

Greyhawks Digital Music Class – 1 – Introduction

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Welcome to Greyhawk’s Digital Music Class. I decided to start writing some posts after several people (in the blogosphere and real life) asked me how I manage my (hedonistically large) music library. I’ll try to put these posts out there once in awhile, and I hope you get something out of them.

I’ll give you a little background on myself and on my music collection. First off, I’ve been a music fan since my first 8-track at 5 years old. I’ve always loved music, and have been a collector since I started saving money. In college I became a disc jockey at both the college radio station and the local 100,000 watt classic rock station. Through my (five) years of college, I did every job they had at the college station including two stints as the station manager. I also worked nearly 40 hours a week at the classic rock station. Sometimes it was commercial copy writing and production, but mostly it was on-air jocking.

During this whole time, I continued to amass titles in my collection. I would snag freebies any time I could, and at the college station, I worked with record company reps that liked me enough to send me multiple copies of every new release. That allowed me to have one and another could go to the station. During that time I also got on the guest list of hundreds of live concerts. The point it, music is a lot of what makes me, well… me.

I’ve tried a lot of things to manage the collection. In the past I’ve done things like have three 400-disc CD changers tethered together and to a computer to be able to manage it all. Besides the cost and the sheer size of that solution, it just became too cumbersome to find the music I wanted at any given moment. In recent years I’ve taken the majority of my music library and digitized it into MP3 format so I could catalog it and use it anywhere. This has freed my musical spirit considerably. I can listen to whatever I want whenever I want, and I can even transport almost my whole collection on a single 160GB ipod. It’s liberating. I’ll help you get to where I am, and avoid the pitfalls along the way.

In the next installment we’ll talk about how to get your current library into the digital realm, without DRM.

Amazon.com’s MP3 Store and Killer Customer Service

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Recently, my beloved Yahoo Music Unlimited decided to shutter its doors and move all of us subscribers to Rhapsody. That’s all fine and dandy, but I thought that I might check out Amazon.com’s MP3 store as well for another alternative.

You see, Amazon has the support of all the major labels, and sells high bit-rate MP3 files with no DRM. That means I can download it and play it on pretty much any device out there without restriction. It’s the way music SHOULD be.

Anyway, I bought five albums last night and shuttled them over to my iPhone. When listening today, I realized that one of the albums I had bought was a CLEAN version. That basically means it was edited to take out the cuss words. In my case it changed the line “you’re such a fucking hypocrite” to “you’re such a little hypocrite.” Kinda changed the impact for me, and being a collector, I want originals anyway, not edited versions.

So I looked on Amazon and they made no mention of it being edited, they just had another version called EXPLICIT. Ahhhh, so if the album has bad words, it will say EXPLICIT. Cool, my bad. But I figured I would see if there was any way I could get the explicit version. So I sent a nice quick email to customer support to see if anything could be done. I also suggested that they might be able to allow us users to set a preference to only see the actual version or the clean version, or maybe make some denotation if the version you are buying is edited.

I fully expected a nice response saying sorry, but we can’t exchange downloaded MP3’s. I was surprised when i got this instead:

Thank you for writing to us at Amazon.com.

 

I am sorry to learn that you have made an incorrect purchase. As a standard policy, Amazon MP3 Music Downloads are not returnable.

 

However, because of the circumstances I have made an exception and issued a refund in the amount of $9.99 for the item “Finding Beauty In Negative Spaces” by ‘Seether’. This refund should go through within the next 2 to 3 business days and will appear as a credit on your next credit card billing statement.

 

Once the refund has been completed, I’d suggest you to return to our website and place an order for the correct album.

 

It is always important for us to hear how customers react to all aspects of shopping at Amazon.com. Strong customer feedback like yours helps us continue to improve the selection and service we provide, and we appreciate the time you took to write to us. I’ve passed your feedback along to the Amazon MP3 Music team.

 

I hope that this is a satisfactory solution.

 

Thank you for shopping at Amazon.com.

Um, hell yeah. That solution exceeded my expectations by a mile, and as soon as I get home tonight I’ll be downloading the correct version and deleting the wrong one. Amazon.com has made it SO easy to buy and enjoy music. And after downloading your files, Amazon can put them right into iTunes or Windows Media Player for you.

If you need to buy music, I would really like you to try Amazon. You get higher quality files without DRM that can play anywhere, even on that iPod of yours. Don’t think you NEED to shop at iTunes for your music. You don’t. And if Amazon keeps up with customer service like this, they are going to steal a LOT of sales from Apple.

And so it begins…

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The unboxing photos are behind the link. I’ll give you a review once I get a chance to really dive deep into all the features. I am totally stoked though. Been wanting one since before they were even released!

Still draconian…

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I was really hoping that the new Napster would maybe lean a little more to the LESS restrictive side of things, but it sure doesn’t seem like that’s the case. Check this out:

A “Purchased Track” is a Track that you may (1) save to your hard drive and play back at any time, (2) burn to a CD and/or (3) transfer to a compatible portable device. Any security technology that is provided with a Purchased Track is an inseparable part of it. If you have Purchased Tracks, it is your responsibility not to lose, destroy or damage them. Napster shall have no liability to you in the event of any such loss, destruction, or damage.

You may burn each Purchased Track to a CD up to five times as part of any particular playlist of songs. A “playlist” is a discrete group of Purchased Tracks that are arranged together in a particular order. Once you have burned a Purchased Track to a CD, you agree not to copy, distribute, or transfer the track from that CD to any other media or device.

Dammit. When I purchase a music track, I want it to be MINE. I want it to be easy to play it in my car, or on my computer, or on an iPod or similar device.  Why can you only burn a track 5 times?  Why make that limitation.  Maybe I want to make several mix CD’s and there is a song I’d like on all of them. When I hit 5 it should just die stop allowing me to burn it? I don’t get the music industry AT ALL.

And since it’s legal to record music off of the radio you don’t own, AND it’s legal to copy a CD or make a mix CD for a friend, then why all of a sudden is it illegal in the digital world? I know that due to the internet you can share with millions of “friends” at once, but I really don’t believe this is hurting the industry.

Last year the record industry released fewer titles (less music to sell) and had raised prices, all while in a recession. BUT, according to them, their numbers are down solely due to illegal music sharing. I don’t buy it. And I won’t buy their on-line services…

Music and the Internet

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Well, tomorrow Napster will be re-launched as a pay service. Arguably, Napster is the most well known brand name of P2P services that have come out since the advent of the MP3. When Napster was first out, I used it quite a bit. It was an exciting new way to obtain music. Now before some of you call me an outright thief, I want to explain myself.

First of all, I am a huge music fan and collector. I own over 2000 CD’s, 500 tapes, 200 vinyl records and about 50 mini-discs. On average I spend about $100 a month on music. What I used services like Napster for were to download rarities, live cuts or simply digital versions of many of the old music I already owned. I also used it to sample music from albums before I decided to buy. To me, the digital revolution of music was a godsend.

As evidenced by the money I spend on music, I don’t have a problem paying for downloads. The problem I have with the music industry are the draconian controls they are trying to place on online music services.  Most of these paid services severely limit your ability to use a simple MP3.  Through some sorts of digital rights management, these companies are only allowing you to have the song on a couple of devices or machines, and some even limit your ability to burn the music to a CD.  This is absolutely insane to me.

If I buy a music file, I want to be able to use it on any device or machine I have.  I want an unrestricted MP3.  I mean, the companies doing this are idiots anyway. For example, I can always record the ANALOG stream of music and save it as an unrestricted file. I can get around their controls so easily that it is laughable. So WHY put them in place in the first place? If the industry would just concentrate efforts on producing better product and adding value-add to CD’s, they would do so much better than limiting music downloads and suing their customers.

I could go way more in-depth, but I’ll hold off for now. What do you think? Are you on the “all P2P users are thieves” camp or the “screw the RIAA” camp?  I’m interested to know what my Domino geek peers think about this…