Keys Corner

I can’t recall having seen such an idiotic idea for a long time:

Internet users could face an annual charge of up to £30 to download music, under plans to be unveiled today that aim to tackle illegal file-sharing.

[British] Ministers are backing proposals that would enable millions of broadband users to pay an annual levy which would allow them to copy as much – previously illegal – music from the internet as they wanted. The money raised would be channelled back to the rights-holders, with artists responsible for the most popular songs receiving a bigger slice of the cash.

Can you imagine anyone who can download unlimited music from the internet buying CDs as well? We buy most of our music from iTunes these days and only buy CDs rarely – and only if they are priced below the iTunes price of 9.99 Euro per album. Instead of supporting the music industry, this proposal will decimate it.

Where can I sign up? And when can I subscribe to unlimited film downloads too?

Update (2008-07-24 21:20 hrs):
Reading the BBC web site this evening, it seems the newspapers misreported the plans this morning:

Mr Taylor [of the British Phonographic Industry] said newspaper reports stating that online users could be subject to an annual levy to cover losses from file-sharing were incorrect.

Which is a pity, but does show that the industry hasn’t lost it’s marbles completely!

Bookpedia – you can also, of course display the catalog as a list!
Until now I have for many years used Readerware to catalog our (1100+) books and (800 or so) CDs, and Delicious Library to catalog our much smaller collection of DVDs.

The rational behind that was that Readerware is cross-platform (Windows, Palm, Linux and Mac) and we could upload our catalogs to our Palm devices, and it can scan the barcodes from the books and CDs using a cheap barcode reader which they supply with the software and then look up the barcode in various internet databases (including Amazon) to create records which include cover art, reviews, authors, titles and other information about each one.

I chose to use Delicious Library because although it was only available for the Mac, it accessed a larger number of databases to find the DVDs, and I quickly discovered that depending on the combination of languages and sub-titles (which differ in the different countries), often DVDs available in Germany or Spain were not found in the Amazon stores in the UK or USA because they had different UPCs (universal product codes). So a wide range of databases increases the chance of finding a DVD via it’s barcode. Delicious Library can also scan the bar codes, but it uses the Mac’s iSight to do it, rather than needing a barcode reader.

This weekend, however, I have exported all three databases as excel files and imported them into Bruji’s excellent products: DVDpedia, Bookpedia and CDpedia. These are cheaper to license than the products that I have been using and recommending up until now, and offer more extensive import / export functions, which is good if you want to make lists of your collections available to others. The programs only run on Macs, but that is fine for me, and we can read Excel files on our phones, so the lack of support for Palm or other PDAs is no problem. They all allow barcodes to be scanned using an iSight. The main advantage, however, is the larger number of databases on the web which the software can read to retrieve the item descriptions – not only a large number of Amazon sites, but also more exotic sites, such as Casa del libro to retrieve the increasing number of Spanish books we are buying and which we need to catalog. If you have a Mac: recommended.

Good news (the music is financed by advertising on their website):

As of today, you can play full-length tracks and entire albums for free on the Last.fm website.

Something we’ve wanted for years—for people who visit Last.fm to be able to play any track for free—is now possible. With the support of the folks behind EMI, Sony BMG, Universal and Warner—and the artists they work with—plus thousands of independent artists and labels, we’ve made the biggest legal collection of music available to play online for free, the way we believe it should be.

Full-length tracks are now available in the US, UK, and Germany, and we’re hard at work broadening our coverage into other countries…

Logitech took over Slim Devices some time ago. They are introducing a new product at the end of January, which looks like it will give Sonos a run for their money in the area of wireless streamed music at home.

The Squeezebox Duet offers much of the functionality of the Sonos gear for a fraction of the price – $399 for the controller and one receiver (Extra receivers at $150), compared to $999 for the Sonos starter kit (which contains a controller and two receivers, one with a built-in amplifier. Extra receivers from $349). It supports Mac, Windows and Linux platforms and a large number of audio formats including AIFF, WAV, PCM, MP3, AAC, Ogg Vorbis, MP2, MusePack and WMA. We’re waiting to see the pricing in Europe.

The Economist thinks that although last year was terrible for the music industry, things will soon be even worse:

IN 2006 EMI, the world’s fourth-biggest recorded-music company, invited some teenagers into its headquarters in London to talk to its top managers about their listening habits. At the end of the session the EMI bosses thanked them for their comments and told them to help themselves to a big pile of CDs sitting on a table. But none of the teens took any of the CDs, even though they were free. “That was the moment we realised the game was completely up,” says a person who was there…

More >

The US lobby group for the music industry, the RIAA, has excelled itself this time in its heavy-handed dealing with a customer. They are suing a customer who bought 2000 tracks on CDs and copied them to his computer for his own use. He didn’t upload them to the internet, just listened to them on his own computer.

I can’t imagine anything more stupid that RIAA could do. The only thing we can do as consumers is to switch from buying CDs to downloading tracks directly from the artist’s websites and their online download services, cutting out the established music industry completely.

Here are a some possibilities that cut out the greedy record companies and pay their artists fairly:

• CD Baby
• Magnatune
• Or use the RIAA Radar to check if the album you plan to buy is issued by an RIAA member company (And yes, you can find music by artists who don’t release their music via RIAA members!).
• Or chose from the RIAA Radar Amazon Top 100 chart list and support the top artists whose labels are not RIAA members (updated daily).

Update (2008-01-01):
Looks like the original story may have been wrong, although the RIAA has shifted its position to claim that MP3s ripped from legally owned CDs are illegal copies.

There was quite a lot of publicity earlier this year, when Apple struck a deal with EMI to sell their entire music collection without DRM (copy protection: digital rights management) on iTunes. And I have mentioned a couple of times, that you can buy albums without DRM from magnatune at a price which you choose.

I noticed yesterday that CD Baby also offers high-quality DRM-free downloads of albums in MP3 format. The nice thing is, the artist sets the price and gets 91% of that price passed on to them by CD Baby, who only retain 9% to pay for the bandwidth. The albums are mostly priced at around $15, which makes them a great deal for all the parties involved.

For years we have used remote control units that allow you to control more than one device in the TV/hi-fi rack, thus avoiding the need to have 4 or more controllers in the lounge.

I probably don’t read the right magazines, because it was pure chance that we recently bought the Logitech Harmony 525 unit you can see above. It was only when I got it home that I realised there has been a major advance in controllers while I’ve not been looking. The Harmony unit doesn’t just allow you to control the TV or the DVD-player, it groups the devices by the “task” you want it to perform (watch TV, listen to radio, use AppleTV, etc.) and switches all the necessary bits of equipment on – sat tuner, TV, amplifier, for example. When you set up the controller, you specify in this case whether you want to control the volume using the TV or the amplifier.

When you use the controller, you first tell it on it’s built in menu what activity you want to do, it switches the various bits of equipment on, and then you don’t need to think about which device you are controlling, you just hit the volume up/down, channel scan or whatever button and the controller figures out which device should get the command and sends it the signal.

I don’t have any brand loyalty – each of our hi-fi and TV components comes from a different manufacturer – and the Logitech unit controls them all. The set up of the unit is done on a PC or Mac using a USB cable and software which comes with the device, and Logitech provides frequent updates to cover new hi-fi components as they are released.

After a couple of months using it, there is no way I’d consider going back to an unintelligent remote control.

This 29 second family video clip of an 18 month old boy which has a barely recognizable rendering of a Prince song playing in the background resulted in Universal filing a court complaint against YouTube to get the video taken down.

I think the music industry has completely forgotten who funds their profits and is living on another planet in another universe. What pity they don’t just stay there all the time.

We’ve had the Apple TV for a couple of days now – the 160 GB version, which means that everything can be replicated to its hard-disk. So how do we feel it compares to the Roku SoundBridge, given that we bought both devices as music players and don’t need to synchronize the broadcasting of music to more than one room (in which case, other devices might offer a more appropriate, but more expensive solution)?

Both devices get their music from a dedicated Mac mini server in our office which runs both iTunes (for the Apple) and Firefly (for the Roku, which will now be moved to the cellar to continue its service there). The Roku has no local storage, so always streams from the server; the Apple TV can stream if the music isn’t already on its hard-drive, otherwise it plays from its own disk. In practice we never had any problems streaming to the Roku although the server is on another floor, separated by a reinforced concrete floor. Both can update their software from the internet at the touch of a button. Both are extremely simple to set up and should cause a non-techie no problems to get up and running, and both have active, helpful user groups in the internet if you do have any questions.

The Roku can only serve music, audio-books and podcasts, in various formats including WMA, FLAC and OggVorbis; the Apple TV can also serve music, audio-books and podcasts (but only those formats that Apple supports), but in addition TV-series or films (bought from iTunes), You-Tube videos, or your photo albums. The Roku can use iTunes libraries via Firefly, which means that it can (like the Apple) understand and serve up the smart playlists you have set up in iTunes – even if iTunes is not running on the server at the time.

The biggest difference is that the Apple has an iTunes-like display (on your wide-screen TV) of all the album artwork, so you can scroll through the artwork by album (or by artist or playlist) and pick the music you want to play. That is what sold the Apple TV to Ruth of course, although if you’ve seen her comment on the previous post about the Apple TV, you’ll see that she doesn’t think she’s agreed to move the CDs out of the lounge! Navigation on both devices is simple, but the Apple has the nose ahead here with the huge, easy to read display on the TV. It also has a nice screen saver, which cuts in after a couple of minutes with no input from the remote control, that can be configured to show your CD cover artwork or a selection of photos from your photo-album.

The one thing the Roku has, which we both really miss on the Apple TV, is the ability to build a temporary playlist on the fly using the remote control – the Apple TV can only offer you the existing playlists from your iTunes on the Mac. That is a major disadvantage, as we used the generation of a temporary playlist all the time on the Roku – the playlist is available until you stop playing it. I don’t see any reason why the feature couldn’t be added to the Apple device, so we are hoping it might come along in a future software update.