Linkstew

Psh, talk about missing a golden opportunity:

More the second sentence than the first.

It only took them 3+ years, but as a comment on an old post points out, iTunes 7 finally has "Skip Count" and "Last Skipped" counters.

iTunes 4.5 is pretty nice and all, but two big pet peeves that have been around since the introduction of each feature sadly still remain:

1. The iPod Preferences dialogue still sucks: In particular, if you have a lot of playlists, that too-small scroll pane is a big pain to work with. Just making that dialogue resizable would solve a lot of problems.
2. On the other hand, the Smart Playlist preference dialogue has the opposite problem: If you add too many rules, the dialogue just grows off the screen, with no way to actually access the rules that are off the bottom of the screen. Those rules need to turn into a scroll pane at that point.

Besides that, iPod 2.2 still doesn't add the ability to delete entries from the On-The-Go playlist, or have multiple OTGs. Further, I'd like to have a "Party Shuffle" on the iPod, though the necessary editing features would be a little tricky to implement.

Feedback goes here.

Since I use Windows at work, I got to immediately download and try out iTunes for Windows. Here are my first three impressions:

1. While the installer asked me if I wanted it to put icons on my desktop, and use iTunes as the default audio player and use QuickTime as the default media player, it did not ask me if I wanted it to put iTunes and QuickTime in my Quick Launch toolbar. It just did it. Bad Apple.
2. The performance isn't bad -- it's a little sluggish at some interface tasks like resizing the window and scrolling, but it's not unresponsive or anything...
   • Subpoint: I'm fairly amused by the Aqua scrollbars for a Windows app.
3. The minimize/maximize features don't work like a normal Windows app. In fact, there's no way to actually fully maximize the iTunes Window -- all you can do is drag it so it's mostly full screen. Double clicking on the title bar toggles between default window dimensions / placement, and your custom window dimensions / placement. Clicking on the minimize/maximize button, meanwhile, toggles the iTunes window between the controller window and the full window.
   • Subpoint: The controller window lacks several features that Windows users will be used to from WinAmp: In particular, there's no way to dock the controller with the edge of the screen, and there's no way to make the controller float above other windows.

All in all, not bad for a first Windows version. It shouldn't send people screaming, and hopefully it has enough features that Windows users will keep it around. It's surprisingly faithful to the Mac version. I'll be really interested to see what Windows users think of iTunes.

Oh, and I'm still upset that I can't just re-download music I already bought at the Music Store on this computer. That would have been a really nice feature to have today, because I don't have any music on my work computer. It'd be great to be able to redownload, because then I could buy new music at work and listen to it, and then when I got home it would just be in my download queue on my Mac, and I could download it there and then put it on my iPod for the future. Well, you know what to do.

When Safari came out back in January, one of the features they touted was its "dynamic bookmark interface with a familiar single-window iTunes-like interface." Actually, here's exactly what the Safari site says (emphasis mine):

Many people don't even bother organizing their bookmarks because of other browsers' confusing, complicated interfaces. In Safari's Bookmarks Library, you'll find the familiar, single-window interface like iTunes, which lets you edit bookmark names and addresses in place as though you were renaming an icon on your desktop. You can create any number of folders in your library, and keep them in the bookmarks bar or menu, like the preinstalled news folder. ...

The problem is, Safari's bookmark features don't deliver on the promised "iTunes-like interface." The only resemblance they have to iTunes is the folder column and the contents column. Let's take the "iTunes-like interface" idea and run with it, and see what kind of bookmark management system we'd end up with:

The first thing we'd have to introduce would be the "Bookmark Library," which would contain the master copy of every item in your bookmarks. Each bookmark folder would then contain a subset of your Bookmark Library, much like a playlist in iTunes is a subset of your Music Library.

Your browser history would be automatically added to your Bookmark Library, so that an item in your history is in exactly the same place as any other bookmark.

In addition to that, we'd want to add a lot more meta-data about each and every bookmark. We'd want to add last visited, visit count, referrer information, how the site was left, keywords, comments, and even a summarized version of the text on the site (taking advantages of OS X's "summarize" service features.

Then, with all that meta-data, we could add "smart bookmark folders," like "sites I visit a lot but haven't visited this week," or "sites I visited that were linked from URL X," or "Prius sites I looked at last week."

Yeah. Now that would be putting an iTunes-like interface on the tried and true bookmarks interface, and it'd rock.

While the "play count" and "last played" features of iTunes and my iPod are very useful for telling me which of my 10,000 songs I really like and obsessively listen to, they really don't help at all when I'm trying to figure out which songs I don't like. While iPod 2.0's ability to rate songs on-the-go helps track down songs that made my ears bleed, it doesn't help much with songs I just get bored of and don't particularly notice either way. And if you tell me that song ratings should do the trick, let's see you try to listen to 10,000 songs and rate them all.

So I know what songs I listen to obsessively, and I know what songs make my ears bleed, and I've rated maybe 25% of my music, but that still leaves a pretty big gap in the data I have about my listening habits. It seems like the solution for this is obvious, and this is definitely one of the top 5 features I'd like to see in iTunes 5/iPod 2.5: Skip count and last skipped.

I don't know about you, but it seems like a smart playlist of songs where last played is newer than last skipped would be a pretty good indication of what songs I actually like listening to. And as soon as I skip a song, it'd be kicked out of that playlist.

While I could write a "skip and count" applescript that would implement a tiny portion of this functionality in the same way that play counts were implemented before iTunes 3, it really needs to be in the app and on the iPod to realize its full potential.

As usual, iTunes feedback goes here and iPod feedback goes here.

The iPod and iTunes both have a "Shuffle by Album" feature that I'm pretty fond of, because some albums just work that well as a cohesive whole, and the songs are that much better when there in place besides their brothers and sisters. But this is where the "but" goes, because why would I have bothered to write that first sentence if there wasn't one?

"Shuffle by Album" is a very nice feature, but both the iPod's and iTunes' implementations of the feature have implementational problems. iTunes' problem isn't that big a deal; it's just a minor irritation. The only way to switch between "Shuffle by Album" and "Shuffle by Song" is by opening the preferences, going to "Advanced," and switching the little radio box there. As problematic as the weird three state behave of the repeat button already is (it switches between no repeat, all repeat, and 1-song repeat), I think they might as well just make the shuffle button be another three state button that just cycles between no shuffle, shuffle by song, and shuffle by album.

The iPod's problem with Shuffle by Album is much more significant, in my opinion: Just like iTunes, the iPod only shuffles the tracks or albums in the current context. The problem is, if you "Browse by Album" with the iPod to select what album you want to listen to, the context is just that single album, so when the album is over, the iPod doesn't have any other albums to shuffle to, so it stops playing (unless you have repeat all on). To get it to actually shuffle through albums, you have to browse by song and then select the first track of the album you want to listen to. When you have 8,000 songs on your iPod, this is a little problematic (to say the least). I suppose you could just click on any song of the album, and then hit back a few times until you get to the first track, but that kinda sucks. Unfortunately, I don't think there's any way to present a consistent interface and make the Shuffle by Album really work. The best solution might be to introduce another setting for "Repeat" in addition to "Off," "All," and "Songs." The new setting would jump into your entire song library after it finished playing the songs in the current context.

The work-around I've been using on the iPod for the Shuffle by Album problem is this: I add the albums I want to listen to to my On-the-go playlist, and then it's a much simpler matter to find the first song I want to listen to. The only real problem with this solution is there's a bug with the On-the-go playlist. Once you start playing a song from OTG, it caches the context the OTG playlist was in when you started playing. Because of this, even if you add more songs to OTG, they won't get added to the possible songs that will be selected by shuffle until you manually go and select a new song under OTG. This seems like an obvious holdover from when the playlists on the iPod couldn't actually change. Hopefully they'll fix it soon.

Oh, another possible way to solve the iPod's Shuffle by Album problem besides another "Repeat" setting is this: Add a "Browse" feature to every "playlist" you can get to, so that if you select "Browse -> Songs," there will be a be another "Browse" menu that will preserve the context of "all songs" (or whatever playlist you happen to be in), but will allow you to select an album. This would closely mirror the way iTunes Artist/Album browser works. This would show up under everything, including anything already under "Browse," and any playlist you're looking at, including the OTG playlist. The only real problem I see with this is that the number of "Browses" deep you are could get pretty confusing pretty quick. But this would solve other issues I've had with being able to navigate some of my larger playlists, or with wanting to find the first song of an album in one of my "by artist" playlists. I think this is a reasonable idea, but the particular interface presented needs little more thought than I've given it here.

iTunes feedback goes here, and iPod feedback goes here.

I just got the weekly "New Music Tuesdays" email from Apple's iTunes Music Store, and even though I still don't plan on using the music store, I must admit it does have a certain draw. Thanks to this week's email, I found out about Live's new album (Birds of Pray). Clicking on the link in the email opened the album in the iTunes Music Store (admittedly, jumping in the way of whatever I was already doing in iTunes), and from there I was able to listen to 30 second previews of every track on the album. And if I'd liked at that point, I could have downloaded the whole album for $9.99 right then. I could have gone from knowing about the album's release to buying it in about 5 minutes. Pretty slick.

Of course, if they'd had Weird Al's newly released Poodle Hat, I might have bought it. But they don't have it, so I'll just have to wait until tomorrow. How terrible.

I got my new 30 gig iPod today, and while I don't plan on rambling on as long as I did in my review of the original iPod, I've still got a few things to say.

The first thing to notice about the new unit is definitely the button placement, and I think that's probably one of my most significant points of contention with the redesign. I don't care for the new button placement either aesthetically or functionally. Aesthetically, I thought the old buttons offered a unique visual style that was unique to the iPod, and their locations mapped well onto their functions. In their new locations, the buttons are fairly boring. Functionally, the new button location is very frustrating, but I'm wondering how much of that is because of muscle memory. If I'm holding the iPod in the palm of my hand, I've got to learn to reach to a different place for the buttons, and I can no longer tell the buttons apart by their shape and location.

The thing is, trying to tell the buttons apart by shape wouldn't work with the new iPod in the first place, because the buttons are no longer physical buttons. Instead, they're now touch sensitive buttons, so there are no moving parts. Unfortunately, they're very touch sensitive, and I've already accidentally skipped songs several times. Of course, they're only touch sensitive if you touch them: My old method of controlling my iPod by pressing the buttons through the material of my pants is no longer a viable option, because even if I could tell which button is which, it wouldn't respond.

Right after the iPod 2.0 was announced, I had a few IM conversations, and we couldn't understand why the buttons were moved around on the face of the unit. While I'm still not happy about the rearrangement, now that I've used it I at least understand why the locations were altered. If the new touch sensitive buttons were in their old locations, people would accidentally activate the buttons all the time while using the scroll wheel. The touch sensitive buttons just wouldn't have worked surrounding the scroll wheel, so they had to move somewhere. Of course, I think the only reason they switched to the solid state buttons in the first place was so that they could add the completely frivolous orange button backlight, but don't start me down that topic of discussion.

From the sounds of things, the iPod 2.0 is pretty unusable for my method of operation, eh? Well, what saves this redesign from Benjy's Book of Disaster is the iPod Remote. The remote serves all of my song skipping playing pausing needs from wherever I choose to clip it. Better still, I can enable the hold switch on the iPod and still use the remote to manipulate my iPod (the remote has its own hold switch), so that I don't accidentally skip songs when taking the iPod out of my pocket.

Of course, the remote itself has a few flaws, but most of them aren't resolvable. I still haven't settled on a final place to clip the remote, but the best place I've found so far is just along the bottom of my t-shirt. Unfortunately, when it's clipped there, it's so close to the iPod that I end up having to stuff all of the extra cable into my pocket. And between that and taking the iPod in and out of my pocket and the inability of the remote cable to rotate, the cable ends up getting wound up if I accidentally rotate my iPod while putting it in my pocket. I'm sure I'll work out a solution to these problems, but for now it's kind of irritating.

Another minor complaint about the remote is just that the buttons are fairly tiny. As is, the forward/back buttons are smaller than the tip of my pinky. It seems like there would have been room to make them a little bigger than they are. Also, it feels significantly more fragile than the iPod itself, which makes me afraid of breaking it. And a $40 accessory -- especially one that is apparently going to be integral to my usage of the device -- isn't one I particularly want to break.

Another concern I discussed with friends on IM was the fear of getting pocket crap into the newly positioned bottom port on the iPod. But not to fear, because Apple bundled a couple of little port covers in the box... which will be great until I lose both of them...

The Dock is a fairly nicely designed hunk of plastic, but I don't see it fitting into my current iPod usage scheme. If I had a desktop, I could definitely see leaving the dock plugged in and just dropping the iPod into that each night, but with my laptop in bed next to me at night, my iPod just usually ends up plugged into that and under a pillow or something, and the cable is fine for that. One subtle feature I do like about the Dock is that it has a line out, so I could leave speakers hooked up to the dock and then use the docked iPod as a little stereo. Maybe once I get a job, I'll leave the Dock at work or something. Of course, that'll require me dropping $20 on an extra cable so I could just keep my primary cable at home so I wouldn't forget it at work...

And finishing up on the hardware side of things, I actually tried using Apple's headphones today, and they were alright. I think my ears must be different sizes, though, because while the right bud stayed in my ear just fine, the left one kept moving around and falling out. Maybe putting the foam covers on the earbuds will help things... I guess I'll stick with the Apple ear buds for awhile to see how they work out.

On to the software side of things, the very first thing I checked out was the On-the-go playlist, and it works as advertised. And actually, it's even better than that, because when you're browsing, you can just hold the select button on any artist, album, genre, etc, or even another playlist, and it will add that whole set of songs to your On-the-go playlist. My only complaint about the way they implemented the On-the-go playlist is that there's no way to remove individual songs from the playlist, and the only option is to "Clear all." It'd be nice if holding down the select button on a song when in OTG would remove the song, but instead it just ends up playing it. Another nice option might be to "Remove songs after they've played."

Oh, I guess one other really minor complaint about the OTG playlist is that I can't sync the playlist back to my Mac, but I don't think that's a feature I'd ever actually want to use.

The second software feature I checked out was the ability to rate songs on the go. Getting to rating features was fairly intuitive, and I figured it out on my first try: From the "now playing" screen, click select once to switch from volume to seek, and click select again to switch from seek to rate. But then the problems started: First, the scroll wheel is really really sensitive on this operation, and with a twitch of my finger the rating flies from zero to five. Okay, so I started to very slowly move the rating back, only to have the iPod suddenly switch back to controlling volume instead of rating, and I ended up turning up the volume very suddenly and blasting my ears.

That's not so good. And actually, I noticed a few other spots where the iPod doesn't pay attention to the fact that you're actually using it and it probably shouldn't change the mode just now. In particular, the back light will turn off regardless of the fact that you're actively spinning the scroll wheel, or playing a game, for example. So, the iPod could do with a slightly better idle time detection method.

Speaking of the backlight turning off, when it turns off automatically, it doesn't just turn off suddenly. Instead, it does a very cool fade out as it turns off. And speaking of the backlight, as I mentioned above, the buttons on the iPod are now backlit. La-de-da. Y'know, if I could tell them apart by touch they wouldn't need to be backlit. Bah.

Here are an assortment of other observations:

• The iPod can finally be operated while it's plugged into my computer, which was especially handy while writing this review, because I was able to play with its iTunes integration and the iPod itself without unplugging it repeatedly.
• There's now an option to have the clock in the title of the now playing screen, which is pretty convenient.
• Though I can now customize the main menu, I just wish I could put the "Shuffle" options at the very top of the Settings menu, like it used to be before the 1.1 firmware update. I miss just being able to double or triple click on "Settings" to change my shuffle options, considering how often I do it.
• The second time I plugged my iPod into my laptop, after I listened to it all day, it showed a graphic of a magnifying glass and a spinning disk, which I can only assume was some sort of fscking... I never saw my old iPod do this, and it took about 30 minutes... I can't imagine why it decided to do it then, considering I hadn't forcefully reset it or anything... Hopefully it doesn't have to do that very often, because it took way too long, and I couldn't figure out any way to cancel it.
• It's really nice to not have to use the broken "playlist selection" dialog in iTunes now that all of my music fits on my iPod. Of course, that doesn't change the fact that the "playlist selection" dialog is still practically useless. I filed feedback about this at least 3 times regarding iTunes 2 and 3, but now I guess I need to file some more. I really hope that dialog is fixed before I have to use it again.
• One thing that they did fix that I filed feedback about was when iTunes finished updating your iPod, it would forcefully switch you back to the iPod playlist, which, if you were doing anything else in iTunes, was really frustrating. Of course, it still forcefully switches you to the iPod playlist when you first plug in an iPod, but at least that's in response to some user action, so it's less infuriating.
• Another thing they (sort of) fixed that I filed feedback about was the "Some of the songs in the iTunes music Library were not copied to the iPod because they could not be found / cannot be played on an iPod" dialog. Before, that dialog did not tell you what songs were causing the problems, and it offered you the option of "Do not warn me again." Thankfully, in iTunes 4.0, that dialog is a little improved, and now reads "Some of the songs in the iTunes music library, including the song "Ant", were not copied to the iPod because they could not be found." Okay, that's very helpful, but note the part of the dialog that reads "including." Yes, that's right, more than just Ant can't be found, but that's all it's telling me about. It'll pop up one of each type of dialog, and after I resolve those and attempt to sync again, it tells me about the next problem songs. And for reference, the song it tells you about seems to be the one that is the first problem song based on the current column you're currently sorting by in your music Library. This is stupid. Obviously it should just list all of the songs that can't be found. How hard could that be? Feedback!
• Syncing 27 gigs of music takes a long time. Admittedly, thanks to Firewire it was only about 30 minutes, but that's still a lot longer than it takes to upload 5 gigs. Of course I was expecting this, but it was still notable the first time I had to do it, and I was waiting anxiously to play with the iPod while my entire music collection was copied over.
• When I was first browsing the freshly copied 27 gigs of music on the new iPod, it was very slow. I had to hit play several times before it started, and it took 1 or 2 seconds to change screens while browsing, compared to my old iPod which was pretty much instantaneous. However, the next time I interacted with it this had resolved itself. But just now when I was playing with OTG playlists, it paused for a long time and then jumped around in response to some input which it had queued up. So it seems like it has some performance issues at times... Hopefully they optimize the software more.

Overall, I'm happy with it just for the ability to have all of my music on my iPod and the On the Go playlist. I'm very relieved that I now have a copy of all of my music on my iPod, because I haven't had a backup of my music since back in November when I bought my Powerbook. Needless to say, I was pretty worried when I spilled soda on my PowerBook in March and it was in the shop. And the On the Go playlist makes my 27 gigs of music manageable, allowing me to easily pick albums or artists that I feel like listening to and then listening to those on shuffle or shuffle by album as appropriate. And once I get bored of what's in there, I can just add more!

Sure, I've got minor problems with it, but I'm left wondering if they're actually significant problems, or if the small problems are all that's left to complain about next to the relative perfection of the rest of the unit, or if the minor problems just seem that much worse because I use my iPod so often. Whatever the case, they're there, and they're going to annoy me until Apple hopefully fixes them. In the meantime, I'll be regularly filling out feedback forms.

I guess the only real question left to address is whether you should get a new iPod or buy a used old iPod. If your music fits on one of the older iPods, then the only reasons to get a new iPod would be the On-the-Go playlist and the possibility that future Apple software updates will add more features. And if you don't have that much music, then you can probably make some pretty good playlists that you can copy to the iPod, and those will be good substitutes for the On the Go playlist. So overall, I'd lean towards recommending the good old faithful original iPod over this revision.

Heh, and in the end, I wrote 100 more words here than I did in my review of the original iPod. I've now written 5,000 words of iPod reviews... So much for not rambling.

Apple's iTunes Music Store has been available for a couple of weeks now, and so I've had a while to stew on it. In my first impressions I said I was going to stick with CDs, and though I've been tempted a few times, I managed to resist the bait. Admittedly, I bought a few tracks that were available exclusively through the iTunes Music Store, both because I wanted the music and because I had to buy something to really see how the system stacks up. The short version is that not only does the iTunes Music Store not live up to what the ideal downloadable music service could be, but it has a few crippling limitations that will keep me from using it.

Let me preface this by saying that I don't think any of these failings are Apple's fault. I suspect that the issues I have with the store are signs of the contracts Apple signed with the record companies. Regardless, these problems are reason enough for me to stick with CDs.

There are three main problems I have with the store: 1. If you've already bought a few tracks off of the album individually, you don't get any discount towards buying the full album. 2. The more I look around, the more often I find albums that are more than $9.99, or that are only available as "Partial Albums," which would require a 99 cent purchase on between 12 to 20 tracks to buy the "whole album." And most importantly, 3. If you lose the file of a track you've already purchased, you have to buy it again.

The first two problems kind of go hand in hand, and they're just issues with the way the store handles buying an "album." I pretty much entirely blame the record labels for this, but it's still really irritating. The price of $0.99 for a single song is about right, and the price of $9.99 for an album is about right, but all of the outliers are frustrating, irritating, and hopefully people won't buy them and the record companies will see statistics and come to their senses.

But I could deal with those album pricing discrepancies if I could redownload music files I've already purchased. I can see a list of songs I've purchased in iTunes, but there's no option to redownload them. If I go click "buy song" again, it prompts me with this frustrating message:

You have already purchased the song "XXX". Would you like to buy it again?
If you buy the song again, you may have duplicate items. If you've already purchased the song but can't find it in your purchased music, make sure it's been downloaded by selecting Check for Purchased Music from the Advanced menu.

And from the Apple knowledgebase article "iTunes 4: How to Locate Downloaded Files," we have this quote (emphasis mine):

Be sure to make regular backups of your music files (in your iTunes Music folder) by copying them to an external hard disk or other media. If your hard disk becomes damaged or you lose any of the music you've purchased, you'll have to buy any purchased music again to rebuild your library.

So basically, the iTunes Music Store is selling bits instead of rights. I'd wager this is a contract issue, but that doesn't stop me from thinking its a stupid contract. I might be okay if Apple offered a redownload for some minimal fee to cover bandwidth. But making me pay full price again is just infuriating, especially since they taunt me with a dialog reminding me that I've already bought something.

So, not only will I not buy new music at the iTunes Music Store, but more importantly, they're missing out on the opportunity of people like me buying music I already own from the iTunes Music Store. If I could redownload the songs over and over, I'd be willing to buy music I already own, just so I wouldn't have to keep physical backups around anymore, and I wouldn't have to fret about my laptop getting stolen or damaged when I send it off for repairs. Instead of spending hundreds of dollars on the iTunes Music Store, I'm going to stop at the $3.96 I've already spent.

So, everyone should go voice their dissent! Even you Windows users, because Apple's bringing iTunes and the iTunes Music Store to Windows later this year. Wouldn't you like to have something closer to the IDMS by the time it reaches your platform?

And yes, I realize that I said that I think this is because of the contract with the record companies and I'm asking you to file feedback with Apple. I'm (perhaps foolishly) assuming that Apple will take this kind of feedback into consideration and hopefully take it back to the record labels.

I might have more to say about the iTunes Music Store and how it lives up to my idea of the Ideal Downloadable Music Service in a few days, but for now, here are my first impressions of Apple's new offerings:

• I was half excited by the announced ability to create On-the-Go playlists (god that page is busy) on the iPod, but after installing the iPod software update, apparently it doesn't work on my older iPod. Also, what I actually want is the ability to enqueue -- "Play on shuffle, but let me tell you which song to play next if I so desire." That way I could have my Cake and listen to Cibo Matto too.
• Unfortunately, the other new features that I was excited about in the iPod -- the ability to rate songs on the iPod and auto-updating of smart playlists -- also don't seem to be supported by my old iPod.
• Which means I guess I'm faced with getting a new iPod if I want those features. The 30 gig model would hold all of my music (right now), but I don't know how much I like the new button layout on the front of the iPod, and the docking station is really irritating. It better ship with both a docking station and a firewire to dock converter cable.

• Also, I really don't like that the data port is now on the bottom of the iPod -- dirt and crud from my pocket is going to fill that thing up.
• Oh well, nothing to worry about right now, considering I can't afford it anyway.
• The new iTunes doesn't fix a lot of the interface issues I had with it. Notably, it still doesn't support emacs-like key bindings for text editing, and the iPod management window still can't be resized and still doesn't show playlist size / current available space, making manually managing my iPod playlists a pain in the ass.
• Of course, they managed to create a few more problems: Now, if I use the search box to restrict what's displayed in a playlist and then switch to another playlist and back to the first playlist, my search has been cleared, so I have to retype it. This sucks if I'm comparing songs in a playlist and a subset of my library and switching back and forth. update: It only clears the search field if music is not playing. That's ... inconsistent and confusing.
• On the bright side, they did fix the annoying behavior where iTunes would forcibly return you to the iPod playlist after it finished updating the iPod, no matter what else you were doing. That drove me nuts and interfered with my workflow so many times it's not even funny.
• As for the iTunes Music Store, my first impression was that there's a lot of interface craziness going on.
• My second impression was that there were a lot of errors. When I first tried to "Sign In," it asked me to enter my Apple ID and other information, but when I tried to complete the last step, it gave me an error. Now it just says "Credit card processing is currently unavailable. Please try again later." I also got a lot of errors just trying to browse around the store. So much for first impressions.
• The selection of music isn't complete, but it's acceptable... None of the things that I've been on the verge of buying are there, though, so even if I could download anything, I wouldn't have.
• It looks like there's a discount for full albums, but not every album is complete (Look at Beck, for example -- there isn't a complete copy of "Mellow Gold," so I'd have to buy the 11 tracks (of the 12 on the album!) from the album that are available for $0.99 each, which is more than the $9.99 album price. Also, not every album is available at that price: Pink Floyd's 9 track Dark Side of the Moon is listed as $14.99.
• And only being able to browse the store in one window is a real drag.
• So, overall, I'm not thrilled with this yet, but some people might like it. Right now I'm thinking I'm going to stick with CDs for awhile longer.

Blah. Anyway, the feedback forms are here (iTunes/Store) and here (iPod). It looks like I'll be filing lots of feedback in the next couple of weeks.

I just read Kevin's article about how hopeless DRM currently is and how it relates to Apple's (fairly strongly) rumored upcoming iTunes-integrated downloadable music service (probably to be announced on Monday), and between that and the subsequent conversation I had with Kevin, I got to thinking about what features the Ideal Downloadable Music Service (hereafter referred to as IDMS) would offer.

I was an emusic subscriber for awhile, and contrasting my emusic experience with what I expect from Apple's upcoming service offers a couple of significant insights into what the IDMS would offer.

The first thing a downloadable music service needs is music to let people download, and while emusic obviously had some music, in the end their song selection was just not enough. Sure, there was still a lot of music there, and I downloaded a lot from them while I had my subscription, but even more of what I wanted was not there, and that's why I ultimately cancelled my subscription. This issue will be addressed immediately by Apple's service, because the rumor claims that they've gotten all five major record labels to agree to make their music available through the service.

The IDMS would, of course, have as many songs available as possible, if not every song, ever.

But just because it has every song ever doesn't mean that the system is going to be useful. No, the system is also going to need to be easy to use. Here, I'm going to draw on both my experiences using emusic and my experiences with peer to peer file sharing programs.

With P2P, there's a lot of wasted time involved. First I have to find someone who's offering the song I want at a decent quality, and I have to hope they don't go offline before I finish downloading it. And of course, this doesn't even get into the issues of trying to find entire albums -- First you have to find a track listing for the album so you know what you're looking for, and then you have to start looking for all of those tracks, and you usually end up getting them from different hosts so the quality and consistency of the files can be all over the board. And neurotic as I am, I always end up going and immediately listening to the songs when I download them, to make sure there aren't any problems with the rip. And don't even get me started on mislabeled songs...

Basically, once you add the "time is money" factor to the P2P equation, the music you're getting isn't actually free. And the frustration involved in using P2P will probably cut years off your life.

On the other hand, there was emusic. If they had the music, they always had the full album, and there were never any flaws in the files, but all the files were only encoded 128kpbs. The big problem was that the default interface of having to download these files with a web browser was very tedious, and even with a third party tool to help me download whole albums, it was still a time consuming multi-step process to go from finding the songs to downloading them to putting them into my music library. Considering I was already paying for the service, the additional time is money factors left me even more irritated with the process.

In contrast to both those, the IDMS needs to seamlessly integrate into your music listening flow, allowing you to easily and reliably find and download high quality music (as individual songs or complete albums) directly into your music library. The only way a pay to download service is going to be successful here is by making it so much easier and so much more reliable than the other options that it will win users by allowing them to immediately purchase, download, and listen to what they want, without wasting any time with the problems of P2P systems that I described above. I expect Apple's upcoming service will meet most of these criteria fairly well.

So far the IDMS has every song ever, and it's a one click operation. But if every song cost $2, who would use it? So, the IDMS is going to need to be sufficiently cheap per song to entice listeners to purchase more songs than they otherwise would, allowing the IDMS and the record labels to make money through bulk sales. Because each additional song sold only costs the IDMS a miniscule amount in bandwidth, the more they sell the better. This point is all about bulk bulk bulk. Heck, it'd be nice to entice people with an unlimited download subscription option. And I think I'd actually be upset if buying the entire album wasn't cheaper than buying individual songs. And on this point, I have no idea what to expect from Apple's service, but more than a dollar per song is completely unreasonable, and even a dollar per song is way too much in my opinion.

Before I go on, let me share a couple of quick anecdotes about my experiences with the three primary forms of music distribution I've been dealing with lately:

I still buy a moderate number of CDs, and the first and last thing I do with a new CD is rip it before tossing it onto the shelf. Of course, sometimes I have to go rerip the CD when something goes funny, but the big problem is if I lose the CD and lose the mp3s, then I've lost the music and would have to buy a new copy of the CD. Or if I lose the CD and some fantastic new digital music technology comes along, I'd have to buy the CD again and rerip it into the new format. Bah and Bah.

With P2P, if I lose the files, then I'm going to have to go through the frustrating process of finding them again. Blah and blah.

And perhaps worst of all in this arena is emusic: My subscription allowed me to download unlimited music for $10 a month, but since I've cancelled my subscription, I can now no longer redownload the songs I've previously downloaded. This is worse than you think, because before I subscribed, I bought a few TMBG albums from them individually, and though I paid for those independently of my subscription, I now no longer have access to those files if I somehow lose the mp3s. I've written them a few angry emails about this, but with no luck. Boo and boo.

So, while what I described above is a downloadable music service that I'd probably use, it's still not the IDMS. In particular, here's the killer feature that would put the I in the IDMS:

Once I've bought a song using the IDMS, I should be able to download it as many times as I want. Now, you might think this is obvious, but first of all, note that I emphasized the word "song," and second of all, the possibilities for this are pretty amazing.

Remember above when I mentioned having to rerip CDs if a better music technology became available? Imagine just being able to download a smaller, better sounding copy of a song you already bought instead. Heck, have the IDMS notify you about this if you want. (Though it'd kinda suck if the new technology had some foul DRM in it, but we'll hope for the best)

The emphasis on this feature is that the user buys the right to download that song as many times as he wants, and not just the right to download that particular copy of that song.

Imagine being able to walk into an Apple Store or Apple Cybercafe with just your iPod, sitting down, logging in with your .mac account, plugging in your iPod, and downloading and putting some different music you own on your iPod.

Imagine being at a friend's and saying "dude, you have to hear this song... hold on, just let me download it from my library... I already bought it."

Imagine promotions based on songs you've already bought -- free remixes, etc.

The trick is, the features of the IDMS would be so useful and the price for songs so cheap, that DRM won't ever even be necessary. People will want to pay to use the service because of the advantages it offers in their music listening lifestyle. I actually believe that people would prefer to just use the IDMS than to mess with trying to find songs via P2P programs. If built correctly, the long term benefits of the IDMS would outweigh the short term advantage of the "free" aspect of the P2P system. Not only that, but the IDMS would be better in the short term in a lot of ways, as described above.

Of course, the IDMS has a lot of room to be evil, too, so here are a few of the gotchas to possibly look out for:

• Forcing users to upgrade their songs when a new technology comes along that has "better" DRM protection.
• Selling user's purchasing patterns to marketers. While this has always been a danger with online shopping (and credit cards, etc), this would be more problematic in this case because the IDMS would have easy access to all of your music purchasing history.
• As soon as your music library is hooking into the net, the possibility of having the IDMS client detect "possibly illegal" songs in your library gets kind of scary.
• Some way for the IDMS to "revoke" a song you purchased would be very unhappy.
• And on.

As absurd as it sounds, if a service came out that had the features of the IDMS I described, it very well might convince me to buy music I've already bought, because it'd be the last time I'd have to buy it. I'd happily pay for the peace of mind in knowing that if my laptop were destroyed, it would be a trivial matter to rebuild my music library the next morning, rather than a painstaking process that'd take weeks or even months, and who knows how much money. (If you think that sounds strange, just remember how many albums you owned on both vinyl and tape or tape and CD, or even all three).

Of course, some of this is probably a pipe dream, but a boy can look at the stars, can't he? For now, we'll just have to wait and see what Apple actually offers.