Uneasy Rhetoric

I know, I know, on my little mission statement I indicated I would limit the amount of tech posts on this site. But I just had a frustrating time buying some music in such a way that I could actually listen to it that I had to post a rant.

I love iTunes. I like how easy it is to browse and to buy. What’s more, I like its simple library interface. It would be very easy for me to standardize my computer audio experience on iTunes. Skip crawling into the arcane structure of my “My Music” folder and just let iTunes do its thing.

Except that I don’t.

You see, I don’t own an iPod. Like thousands of others, including a minority of people at my gym, I own something else. It doesn’t really matter what else because they all play nice with Microsoft and won’t give Apple the time of day (yes, I’m aware it’s the other way around).

Back in the day, before iTunes 6.0, I was merrily giving Apple my cash 99 cents at a time because of a little thing called the Hymn Project. I would buy my songs on iTunes, run them through Hymn and, like magic, I had mp3s I could play on my non-Apple portable music player. I kept the m4p files for a rainy day. Even better, I could listen to them with Winamp, Windows Media Player, Quintessential Player (the beta for the next version looks very promising), iTunes, or whatever I was thinking sounded best that week.

But iTunes 6.0 came along and broke Hymn. It still hasn’t been fixed. So now, if I want to buy music I have to burn it to a disk and rip it back to an mp3. This wastes disks. There’s probably a way to do it without *actually* using a round piece of plastic, but it’s still a pain in the ass.

I could also run it through Audacity and record it as it plays — which brings back memories of making mix tapes with vinyl and cassettes.

Or, I could buy from one of the many WMA vendors.

I’ve purchased music from MSN Music and don’t much like it. It sounds fine, I can play it in everything except iTunes, but the interface and “value added” stuff like celebrity playlists and songs of the week and “essentials” collections aren’t as good. And by “as good” I mean they don’t make purchasing as easy as pulling a package of toilet paper off a WalMart shelf. And tonight, for some strange reason, MSN wouldn’t let me login. The page kept expiring. More important, MSN Music is Firefox hostile. Go figure.

And Windows Media Player is kinda clunky too. I did the burn CD/rip to mp3 trick so that I could play some iTunes purchases in WMP. It played just fine. Then I tried to sync those same files with my non-iPod and they wouldn’t sync. WMP said it couldn’t find the authorization. So, I manually copied the same mp3 files from my My Music folder to my mp3 player and guess what? They played just fine. Stupid WMP.

Before I close I should point out I do know about eMusic, and so should you. They provide DRM-free mp3s of many independent labels and lesser-known artists. And they’re cheap. The base price is $9.99 / month for 40 downloads. That’s 25 cents a song. This has been great for building my punk collection and feeding my Celtic rock fix, but when I want to rebuild my 80s pop collection or when my wife wants to buy mainstream country, eMusic doesn’t have it.

Vive la France!