B. Mann Consulting

After being really happy with the Nokia Multimedia Transfer app for OS X to get music onto my phone, and photos off it onto iPhoto, I started looking to solve the "where to get new music" problem.

Around the same time, I was playing with the Nokia Podcasting app. Put simply, it is a podcast browser / downloader, which you can set to automatically connect to a network connection and download new podcast updates at a specified time. I set my phone to charge overnight, and set it up so that it would auto connect to my home wi-fi network.

Then I found Hypemachine. Yeah, yeah, I'm not really a cool trendy new music guy, and I *had* heard about it before, I just never really used it: it's a giant blog aggregator that tracks mentions of music and links to MP3s. It also exposes all this music blog aggregation as a podcast, with enclosures to the MP3 links. Not a traditional podcast at all -- it's whatever the Hypemachine has auto aggregated during that time period.

So, every morning, my phone is loaded with brand new music. It's eclectic to say the least -- last Friday featured lots of 4th of July-themed songs. The first time I set it up, I got some nice Catholic-rock-band tunes. Last night, I copied that music back to my computer after about 2 weeks of doing this. 63 songs survived my listening over that period, and I cut that down to about 40 that I would keep / give at least 3 stars to.

I'm listening to a lot more music on the go with this setup, and am being exposed to lots of "new stuff". So far, I bought the new Cold Play "Viva la Vida" album (definitely not a "long tail" band), as well as Ra Ra Riot both as iTunes Plus downloads. But the majority of the bands seem to be ones that I need to point you to their MySpace page to listen to their songs -- see Hooded Fang for one example.

It's been a fun experience so far, and I always look forward to what the next night of downloading will bring me. This whole listening to music on the go thing might really take off one of these days :P

Where do you find new music? Where do you listen to it? Where do you buy it?

With the Apple event last week, I was a bit surprised at the ringtone announcement. At first glance, it seemed like a money grab. What, 99¢ for songs you already have? I don't get it.

Today I came upon the concept that music publishers consider a ringtone a "performance" of the song that must be licensed separately, hence there are actual costs to Apple if it wants to say "this is a ringtone".

For more background, read an "Ars Technica article from last year. The FAQ at Harry Fox Agency (the largest issuer of music licenses in the US) is interesting to read through as well.

Ringtones for 99¢? Apparently, we should be glad to be paying so little. Or being allowed to use them at all? In any case, it seems to be fairly simple to use some file renaming to make ringtones out of existing songs.

I've been listening to music before going to bed (and using music as an alarm clock). Last night I used iTunesShut, which lets you set a number of songs or a number of minutes for iTunes to play before it slowly fades out the music over time and stops. See the Macworld review for a longer explanation.

The songs? I just bought Feist's "The Reminder" and Mathew Good's "Hospital Music".

I installed an iTune's Alarm Clock last night, and was woken this morning by some electronica: Rising High Trance Injection: Perry and Rhodan - The Beat Just Goes Straight On & On.

Have a good day, all.

An article I wrote on Sharing iTunes and iPhoto libraries between users is consistently one of my most popular pages here. iPhoto's most recent versions has photo sharing on the same machine using the network capabilities, but the iTunes "solution" has always had major problems: you end up sharing the same ratings, play count, etc. etc.

Additionally, since I recently had some hard drive corruption (this has happened more than once...) we lost a big chunk of music: backing up 80GB of legitimate music is *hard* (never mind consistently keeping an offsite backup up to date).

Lastly, I've long kept a "subset" of music on my laptop (e.g. no country, no opera, no Ani DiFranco). I haven't been great about keeping this up to date, but using rsync basically works. 

I recently rediscovered MP3Tunes and the concept of a music locker. It's only $40US/year for an unlimited size locker and syncing between unlimited computers (there is a free 1GB account that you can experiment with). This was a Flickr-size investment, so I decided to just go for it. On paper, it seems pretty perfect. Here's what MP3Tunes does:

• It keeps your playlists and music in sync with a desktop sync client
• You can selectively sync subsections (solution for my laptop!)
• Sync can be bi-directional or uni-directional 
• You can access/stream your music from the web
• There is talk of a mobile client for Symbian Series 60 

Sounds pretty much perfect. The *only* downside is that protected/DRM'd music can only be played on authenticated devices -- i.e. no streaming of DRM music. That's fine, I'm mainly interested in the sync/backup functions anyway...I'm not sure if I'll use the streaming function (although it will mean that I likely put a lot less music on my laptop).

I suspect that this is actually a "Part I" type of post. It took the Oboe Sync client something like 24 hours to just scan my music directory, and the actual sync has been running for 1.5 hrs. The projected total is ~340hrs (!! -- seems to run at about 60KB/s).

In closing, let me link to Streampad. I was checking this service out and it integrated with MP3Tunes lockers. Doing a little more investigating, it might going somewhere interesting. Here's what Fred Wilson had to say about it:

The primary objective of Streampad is to build an iTunes like service in the browser. Not as a browser (like Songbird is doing which is also a neat idea), but in a browser.

You can go to Streampad at any time and listen to services like hypemachine, internet radio, etc. But if you install the Streampad server on the computer where your music library is, you can listen to your entire music collection anywhere, from inside a browser.

Music anywhere is definitely an idea whose time has come. More interesting things to come, I'm sure (Last.FM integration to show what music I actually own?).

Ethan Kaplan is doing an awesome session at Gnomedex. Here are some awesome quotes:

Pop is a machine

Monetizing beyond the physical 5 inch

And of course, go off and check out the Drupal-powered Headautomatica that Ethan put together. It's using the hall of fame module to have people vote on aggregated items from everywhere.

Photo by noded on Flickr 

The short answer: you can't. Actually, you can't even listen/view an enhanced podcast without iTunes or an iPod.*

What do I mean by an enhanced podcast? Check out such podcasts as the CBC Radio 3 show, Podguides.net, or the fabulous Montreal-based Vu d'ici for some examples of integrating music, time markers, pictures, descriptions, and even web links. Apple enables this with its crazy ChapterTool, but your best source of information on creating enhanced podcasts is the Voxmedia Wiki Podcast Chapter Tool page.

So...what's the big deal? Well, we need an alternate, open format, and we need alternate players. Microsoft is, in all likelihood, going to come up with something based around RSS and Simple List Extensions. Hmmm...wait...except for the part where all the data is actually bundled inside the audio file format itself. So, some sort of Windows Media strangeness? Or follow Apple's lead and use the MPEG-4 packaging format. Will this be open enough? Somehow, I suspect not.

Maybe Yahoo will come to the rescue; Bryan Rieger points to a brand new initiative called XIPF, or eXtensible Interactive Packaging Format. Actually, following that train of thought, XSPF, the XML Shareable Playlist Format might be trivial to use directly as the basis for an enhanced podcast standard, since it supports images, links, etc. already. Imagine every Webjay playlist as an enhanced podcast.

The iTunes support for mobile phones begins today, with Apple's partenership with Motorola's ROKR E1 and the US cell company Cingular.

The big question is of course...can we use it in Canada? Well, the Motorola ROKR is a GSM phone that also supports international networks. Being a GSM phone, it means it also uses SIM cards to activate the phone -- meaning you could use the card from any network provider. Cingular may be distributing the phones as locked, but it probably won't be more than a couple of weeks before a firmware upgrade will unlock it, making it capable of being used on any GSM network. Here in Canada, that's only the Rogers/Fido network.

Update: Mark Evans says the ROKR will be available through Rogers by mid-September, although he doesn't name a source.

Elsewhere, Michael Gartenburg covers the iPod Nano -- for us Mac folks, the Windows announcement might get lost in the shuffle: "With the integration with Outlook with iTunes 5.0 and the small size, I can even see folks using this as a personal information manager."

Colin mentioned an excellent use case for microformats to me: a standardized way of displaying information about music, most likely a direct one-to-one relation in XHTML of the ID3 data that is embedded in MP3 files today.

Since audio files are binary files, in many cases quite huge, having basic crawlers parse them to get this ID3 would introduce a ton of overhead. Having this available in a human-readable way that is also parse-able would be great.

I'm sure Colin will expand on this mini-post (nudge, nudge). Update: He did - Micro formats and audio = peanut butter and chocolate

What's going on? Microsoft releases an extension under a Creative Commons license, and Apple gives us a PDF download? Hmm, I'm not impressed. Why couldn't we have had a "podcast" namespace, instead of the Apple-specific "itunes"? I'd ask Apple what I asked Dean and Amar when they were on stage: where's the community process? But I guess we got the answer already -- there isn't one.

Update: Marc does good pointers to Dare and Danny...and thinks we should all support Yahoo's mediaRSS.

Below are some round up links to iTunes podcasting support.

• Michael Gartenberg: iTunes 4.9 is here with Podcasting support but wait... there's more: "In short Apple's done for podcasting the same thing they did with RSS in Tiger. They made it usable by the mass markets and at the same time, they have the what is going to be the most widely used podcasting client on both Macintosh and Windows and that will make their directory the one to be listed in."
• Scripting News: Apple has defined a namespace for...: "Apple has defined (PDF) a namespace for podcast info. Just took a brief look. Net-net, it would have been a really good idea for them to get a community review, like Microsoft did, before shipping. We could have done a lot better."
• walkah.net: itunes phone?: "while there are a couple other posts I've been meaning to do lately... this little snippet caught my eye and has me all excited this morning. from macrumors.com"