iTunes Plus Upgrading Finally Done Right

Apple or the record labels or whomever could make the decision came through for once. You can now selectively upgrade your iTunes purchases to 256k, DRM-free versions!

If you’ll recall, I did some serious lamentin’ about having to upgrade my entire library in one shot at a cost of almost $500. So, I upgraded nothing.

Now, a trip to the iTunes Plus page shows an upgrade button next to individual albums or tracks. I upgraded my “must haves” (desert island discs, if you will) to the tune of about $50.

It’s not $500 for the labels – but they weren’t going to get that anyways.

What I wish were different about the Mac OS. And by different, I mean better.

There’s a derogatory term used on discussion forums for people who blindly support an operating system and poo-poo its shortcomings and weaknesses, despite all reasonable evidence to the contrary: Fanboy.

I’m no Apple fanboy. Yes, it’s my operating system of choice, and I recommend it to people whenever I can, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t things about it that make me nuts. Now, I’m in “corporate IT guy mode” at the time of this writing, so I’m setting aside all the great things the Mac can do as a creative tool and focusing on the work-a-day aspects of it.

First-up: remote control. Quite frankly, Apple’s Remote Desktop feature is lame in many ways when compared to Microsoft’s remote desktop solution (based on the very mature and solid Terminal Services foundation). Apple RD is slow, allowing minimal customization of the remote view upon launch. You get a color slider, and that’s about it. Any adjustments you want to make to the remote GUI have to be done within the remote GUI. That’s absurd – why should I have to suffer through all those remote clicks and make trips to System Preferences? With a Microsoft RDC client, I can create a remote connection profile that specifies screen resolution, color depth, sound on/off, mapping local to remote drives, mapping printers, and more before I even connect. And the speed. Yikes. Microsoft’s RDC performs so well, sometimes I forget that I’m not actually at the computer I’m controlling.

Now, in fairness to Apple RD, it does do some things that Windows RDC doesn’t do. You can generate a variety of reports on remote systems, send application packages that automatically install software and reboot the remote system, and observe a remote desktop versus controlling it.  I just wish they’d fix the speed issue. It could be that part of that speed issue has to do with the Mac GUI itself. For example, there’s no way in OS X to turn off the fat, obnoxious drop shadows behind every window. Those drop shadows make remote control sessions slower, because the remote session has to draw that many more pixels.

Second – badly behaving network shares. Maybe this one should be first. Connect to a share on your network so that the remote volume mounts on your desktop. “Family Room iMac” for example. Fine. Now, go shut down Family Room iMac, return to your computer, and you’ve got about an 80-90% chance of staring at the bouncing beach ball for 2 minutes the first time you open a Finder window or click on the desktop (tip: force-quit the Finder to get out of this situation). Even if you don’t try to access that now-closed share. That’s ridiculous for an operating system with Unix underpinnings. Windows doesn’t do that. A Windows share does nothing at all until you double-click on its icon. And then, Windows just says “nope, that share’s not here” and lets you go about your business.

You can imagine how this little problem becomes a big problem in an office environment with 20 or more Macs connecting to each other, off and on all day. Invariably, somebody you’re connected to via sharing shuts down and goes home for the day whilst you’re still working. Grrrr.

Third – Apple really needs to fix the shortcomings of the Finder. There’s even a phrase that’s been coined for this desire: “FTFF.”  You can figure out what the abbreviation stands for, ha ha.

Sometimes when I have to spend all day working on a Windows system, I realize just how much better of a workhorse Windows Explorer can be. The Finder just has too many maddening little quirks that surface after hours and hours of heavy lifting.

For example, one thing I can’t stand is that if select a bunch of files from one folder, and drag to copy to another drive or folder, and one of those files can’t be copied for some reason (it’s corrupt, or has a bad filename, whatever) THE WHOLE OPERATION TANKS. On Windows, you’ll get an alert about each and every file that can’t be copied, and you can decide to continue the operation with the rest of the files or cancel.

There are tons of other Finder “issues” – so many, that there’s a software company out there who’s main product, "Pathfinder,” is meant as a Finder substitute. I’ve purchased and used Pathfinder in the past, and always end up disabling it after a few months because of its system overhead and quirkiness. But I see that they’ve got a brand-new version out, so maybe I’ll give it another shot. I do miss its tabbed Finder windows and ability to customize all text and icons with OSX.

And finally, peer to peer file sharing on a network, with trusted computers set up with shares which everybody should be able to read and write to, is NOT as simple as it should be. In fact, it’s downright maddening. In this case, Apple technology does NOT “just work.” It’s not the Apple way. It’s more like the “obscure Linux way” or something. I’m sorry, but Windows NTFS settings for permissions and file shares are much, much easier for me to work with.

I can imagine how somebody with less experience might go mad trying to sort out peer-to-peer sharing. I have issues on my company’s network with shared folders that I’ve never, ever been able to figure out, and believe me I’ve tried. Sometimes they work for one user, but not for another with the exact same setup. Sometimes you have to authenticate when you want to put a file into a Mac share that’s explicitly set to be wide-open. Other times, you have to enter a password to copy, move, or even open files ON YOUR OWN HARD DRIVE if somebody else put them there via file sharing.

How about you? Where do you think Apple could make improvements to its operating system – whether compared to Windows or not?

EyeTV: A Fantastic Addition To Any Mac

I’ve been using an Elgato EyeTV tuner for about a year now, and just realized that I should probably share a great product like this with y’all!

Not literally, mind you. I love mine way too much to part with it.

Anyways, the EyeTV is a small, simple USB device. Plug-in your coaxial cable and hook it up to your computer via USB, and you basically turn your computer into a TV. On my monitor, a 24” widescreen Dell, it’s like getting a brand new LCD or plasma TV at a fraction of the cost of a stand-alone set – and without taking up any more space. You can watch TV full-screen, or choose from a variety of sizes. I often have the news running in a small window, tucking it into the corner of my screen while I work.

Even better, it comes with Program Guide software that shows you a list of everything that’s on TV – and you can just click a channel to view. All you have to do is provide it with your cable provider info and zip code, and it does the rest.

You can also record programs, too – just click on the little record button on a show in Program Guide, or manually hit the Record button on the EyeTV “remote.” (Actually, it comes with a REAL remote as well, which works directly with the EyeTV box for changing channels and volume). You can save your recordings to a variety of formats.

And the EyeTV works like a Tivo – you can pause a live show and rewind, perfect for those quick trips to the kitchen.

The EyeTV Program Guide

There are a couple different versions to choose from. I’ve got the 250, which also gives you the ability to plug-in a VCR or camcorder and dupe content. The new EyeTV hybrid looks really, really interesting:

“New! Now with improved reception, FM radio, and TV Guide

EyeTV Hybrid turns your Mac into the world’s most affordable flat-screen HDTV and DVR. EyeTV Hybrid receives both analog and digital TV as well as FM radio, and can also record from a cable or satellite set top box, a video recorder, and a camcorder, using composite or S-Video (analog) connections.”

The only problem I’ve had with mine so far is that if I have it running and plug in my iPhone, it drops the cable TV signal. A simple restart of the EyeTV software is all it takes. I suspect this is probably more of a USB issue than anything else.

The only other problem with it – if you’re a Windows user, that is: this is a Mac-only product.

Windows Live Writer – Something New, Something Useful From Microsoft.

One thing I stumbled across when trying out Windows 7 was Windows Live Writer, part of the Windows Live Essentials collection which you can download for free from Microsoft. The Essentials collection, by the way, also contains Microsoft’s email, instant messenger, Movie Maker, and Writer programs for Windows 7. Those programs apparently will not be included by default with Windows 7, unless this has something to do with the beta period. Note, too, that you can run Live Essentials programs on Windows XP.

Windows Live Essential Options

Anyways, Live Writer gives you a word processor style tool for editing content on your blog. Just give it your blog address, username, and password, and it downloads the theme so that you can work in WYSIWYG mode. And it’s a way better typing/editing environment than the browser, at least for me.  Inserting images, tables, and lots of other goodies looks to be really easy.

Below is a screen snap of the very window I’m writing this blog post in right now. Careful – it’s like that looking in a mirror into another mirror trick; you might get vertigo.

WYSIWYG Editing with Live Writer is sooooo much nicer than using the Web interface

Very, very handy tool. It looks like it covers all the bases for editing your blog, including downloading your tags, showing a preview version, saving drafts, etc.

I with there was something like this for OS X. Maybe there is. Until now, I haven’t thought to look for ‘cause I didn’t know such a thing existed. Mac-using bloggers – anything out there like this for OSX?

I think I’ll install Live Writer into my main Windows XP virtual machine. It’s the first program to come along in a long while to give me a little touch of Windows envy, and it makes blogging – a task which I enjoy but still takes a lot of work – a little more pleasurable.

Browse or search all your blog posts & choose one to edit. Sweet!

"OS Rot" - Like vulgarity, it's hard to define. But you know it when you see it.

I don’t think there’s a single Windows-using tech support customer of mine out there who hasn’t heard me talk about Windows “OS Rot.” I’ve even blabbed about it in other blog posts.

There’s a great piece by Adrian Kingsley-Hughes at ZDNet called “Windows Bit-Rot: Fact or Fiction?”  He takes a look at whether OS Rot is real, imagined, or mainly just used as a way to justify getting a bigger-better-faster new PC.

Turns out the debate can really come down to semantics. Yes, if you install tons of badly-behaving applications over the years, uninstall things, and generally junk up your computer, it will get slower and less reliable. But some would argue, that’s not really the operating system’s fault per se.

Anyways, check out the article and the discussion thread that follows it. Some good reading for computer nerds to be sure. However you define it and determine what causes it, the results are the same: if you actually USE your Windows computer, it will eventually start to slow down. The only way it stays as fast as the day you took it out of the box is if you don’t use it.

And by and large, in my experience this simply does not happen on OSX. Maybe the upcoming Windows 7 operating system will make bit-rot a thing of the past. I’m not betting on it though.

Still using XP but thinking of upgrading to Vista?

Not so fast there, my pioneering amigos and amigas.

If your computer is running Windows XP fairly well right now, you might want to skip Vista and wait for the Next Big Thing from the folks in Redmond: Windows 7.

Windows 7, scheduled to be released either later this year or early 2010, is getting some pretty good reviews. Although it’s available in public beta right now, I haven’t downloaded and tried it out yet. I plan to this weekend. 

Everything I’m reading tells me that Windows 7 will be a much better release than Vista. 

For starters, Vista represented a major re-tooling or re-write of the previous operating system, Windows XP. Early adopters had to put up with a lot of compatibility issues (drivers, etc). The road to its launch was filled with potholes and there was some sufferin’ early on.

Windows 7, on the other hand, is more of an incremental upgrade. Microsoft is supposedly really focusing on making sure it’s compatible out-of-the box with current hardware and software. 

They’ve also been working hard at improving performance. This is the stuff I can’t really claim to understand. But suffice it to say they’ve found ways to cut-out inefficient code and just make it work better (like OSX, ha ha). Testers have reported faster startup and shutdown times and overall zippiness when working with applications and files. Sweet.

They’ve also added a slew of useful control panels and other applets. One new feature called “Peek” does pretty much what Apple’s “QuickLook” gizmo does - let you click a single button to get a preview of what a file is, without having to launch its corresponding application. Also on tap are new home networking features, something called “Jump Lists,” new gadgets (think: Apple Widgets), multi-touch support, and improvements geared specifically to notebook and tablet users.  

Finally, Microsoft is said to have listened to customers when it comes to all the things they dislike about Vista.  The Start menu area has been simplified, the Taskbar improved, and the much-aligned UAC system is more tweakable. 

UAC, short for User Account Control, is one way Vista is supposed to be more secure than XP. With UAC prompts in Vista, you’re notified when system changes are being made. The process takes over the desktop until you decide what to do).  Apparently you have more control over UAC in Windows 7.

Side note: I’ve always thought that people were a little hard on Microsoft over Vista’s UAC. Yes, it can be annoying sometimes. But try running a computer loaded down with malware and spyware, if you really want to be annoyed. Besides, if they didn’t put in the UAC controls, people would complain that Microsoft still wasn’t taking security seriously).

Anyways, like I said - I haven’t gotten my hands on Windows 7 yet. But when I do, I’ll take it for a spin and report back. It’s an interesting time for computing - a new version of both Windows and the Mac OS are forthcoming, USB 3.0 devices are starting to appear, storage keeps getting bigger and cheaper, bad guys find new ways of attacking us on the Internet, and Google keeps rolling with the punches. 

I guess I won’t have many excuses for posting to my blog so infrequently!

The iTunes Music Store: DRM-free, yes. Stress-free? Not so much.

So another Macworld has come and gone, with less fanfare than usual because Steve Jobs wasn’t there. Oh, and there weren’t any bombshell product announcements. But mainly, His Steveness wasn’t there.

But something pretty significant did happen that will affect millions of consumers - and maybe you, too: the iTunes store has gone totally DRM-free with all its music offerings. Well, almost. 8 million songs are now available without DRM, with 2 million more to follow by April.

(For the less technical readers in the crowd, relax - I’ll explain what DRM is shortly).

Are you one of those music consumers? Are you wondering what all this means to you? Let me try to help you out. I think the best way to explain all this is to look at it chronologically. I’ll make some gross oversimplifications for the sake of brevity.

When the iTunes store was launched in 2003, it was, how shall we say, “interesting.” There were a LOT of naysayers at the time. But there were also many of us who saw how this could turn into a pretty big deal, real fast. Consumers could finally purchase music online - quickly, easily, and legally. Through the iTunes interface, you set up an iTunes account by simply creating a username and entering a credit card number. Within minutes, you were shopping for music online. Impulse shoppers and instant gratification seekers, lookout!

So you browsed the iTunes store, previewed some tracks, maybe read some of the reviews. And then you simply clicked the little “buy” button next to an album or song, and viola! Your purchased music began downloading. You could play those songs on your computer, copy them to your ultra-cool 5 gig iPod, or burn a CD.

Those purchased MP3s were 128 kbps-quality MP3s. Not great, but workable (by comparison, a “factory” audio CD is 1400kbps). But people didn’t seem to care. It was so much more convenient to be able to store thousands of songs on your iPod, complete with album and artist tagging, playlsts, ratings, and so forth. This period was the beginning of the end for the bulky, skippy, battery-eating Sony CD Walkman. Remember those?

Anyways, more significantly: those songs were "wrapped" with invisible DRM code. DRM stands for Digital Rights Management. Apple’s brand of DRM technology is called “Fairplay.” (other companies have different names for their own versions).

The purported goal of DRM was to lock content to its purchaser, thereby preventing or at least hindering piracy. Because those songs were wrapped with DRM, you could only play them on your computer, or up to 4 other computers which you previously authorized with your account and credit card.

If you copied the DRM'd iTunes songs to my computer, they wouldn't play. iTunes would “phone home” to the iTunes Store and pop-up some sort of error about the track not being authorized for my computer.

Despite the DRM and low audio quality, the Apple iTunes store became insanely great. It has sold 6 billion songs so far, which is 70% of all online digital music sales worldwide. It’s the largest legal music retailer on the planet, a busy hub for all kinds of content, including TV shows, movies, “Essentials” collections, celebrity playlists, etc.

Over time, other online music retailers started offering music without DRM - Amazon, for example. It’s not clear why they were able to do this, while Apple’s offerings remained “hampered” with DRM. Some speculate that it was a way for the labels to keep Apple from becoming too powerful. It had become the 800 pound gorilla in the room, especially considering (or maybe because of) the iPod’s dominance in the MP3 player market.

But finally, in early 2007 Apple announced a new offering - iTunes Plus songs and albums. iTunes Plus tracks were DRM-free, and at 256kps they were twice the quality. But, only one label - EMI - was onboard. The other labels were still holding out. So the iTunes Plus initial offering was quite small compared to the overall size of the store.

At first, iTunes Plus songs cost $1.30 per track, which was higher than the cost of “regular” DRM’d music. But you could upgrade any EMI tracks to DRM-free by paying the difference of 30 cents per track, or about $3 per album. You clicked on the new iTunes Plus icon at the music store, and Apple would check your purchase history to see which songs were eligible. You could upgrade all your DRM’d content to DRM-free in one shot. The new, better quality versions downloaded and replaced the old versions automatically.

Again, the catch was that only songs from the EMI label were offered. If your purchases were from Warner, Virgin, Sony, or other labels, you were still stuck with DRM. I did the upgrade, and I think it cost about $70 at the time.

In fairly short order, the price of brand-new iTunes Plus content came down to match the normal content; you still had to pay the smaller fee to upgrade existing songs, but anything you bought brand-new in the iTunes plus category cost the same as DRM’d stuff.

Which brings us back to the Macworld announcement. All the major labels are now onboard, and the entire music catalog on the iTunes store will soon be DRM-free. Once again, users can click on the iTunes Plus icon in iTunes, and Apple will look at your purchase history and figure out what you’ve purchased that qualifies for upgrades.

Naturally, I did this. And the grand total to upgrade all my iTunes store DRM purchases to iTunes Plus? $421.08. Yikes! (at first, it reported almost $700, but then it dropped to $421. Not sure what’s up with that, but it’s likely to go up again after the other 2 million tracks are added. I’m havin’ a conniption either way).

Anyways, I know that I’ve purchased a lot of music from the iTunes store over the years. So this shouldn’t have been a shock. But still, that’s a BIG chuck of change for an upgrade to music tracks which I already own and can still listen to and enjoy.

My biggest beef is that I can’t SELECTIVELY upgrade. I have to upgrade EVERYTHING, including albums I don’t like or no longer listen to, and tracks I purchased to burn to a CD to give as a gift. It doesn’t even matter if the songs are still on my hard drive anymore; Apple looks at your purchase history.

Also, although the sound quality upgrade to 256k would be a huge improvement for most of my tracks, it wouldn’t be for EVERY track. For example, I sure would like to exclude some of the early Frank Sinatra albums from the upgrade. They’re mono recordings, and I seriously doubt they’d sound any better at 256 than 128.

I don’t fault Apple or the labels or whomever for charging for these iTunes Plus upgrades. After all, these tracks are in essence new and improved products. In the rest of the consumer world, new and improved versions of things come out all the time. And converting everything to the new format was likely an enormous undertaking, not to mention the bandwidth charges Apple will incur as people upgrade their libraries.

I’d just like to be able to choose what to upgrade. Right now, it’s all or nothing. Which means in my case, Apple gets nothing. Talk about bad timing - how many people, in this shaky economy, are going to pay for something a second time, especially something so plainly discretionary as music?

The other aspect of this which people don’t talk about much is the DRM system on Apple’s side. Once everything is DRM-free, Apple is not going to want to maintain its expensive DRM infrastructure forever. It’s gotta be a vast enterprise. At some point they’ll want to shut it down. Does that mean your DRM’d music will no longer work? Maybe.

Yes, you can always burn your DRM tracks to an audio CD, then re-import as standard MP3s with no DRM. But that’s a hassle and it reduces sound quality. And I’ll bet a lot of people just won’t do it, either because they don’t know how - or they don’t realize that their “Right” to play content with Digital “Rights” Management will eventually disappear.

If Apple decides at some point to shut down its DRM servers, we can only hope that they’ll at least give us a free utility to remove DRM from existing tracks in our libraries, without necessarily upgrading quality. That sounds like a fair compromise to me - what about you?