My iMusic - iPod Experience. And further rambling on the music business & entertainment.

Sunday, February 29, 2004

A very good interview with Steve Jobs in Rolling Stone. . . I agree with 99% of what he says, particularly about large artist advances being the sources of "winner pays" syndrome. . .

- posted by c @ 11:12 PM

Here's an article decrying Apple as part of the "axis of evil" music-doer-executives. I disagree a bit (perhaps I'll expound at a later time; in very brief summary: The trouble before with music was twofold: Distribution and Radio. It seems to me, in 10 years, distribution will be quite simple: You put it up on iTunes (and whatever other version are around) and people can buy it. Apple doesn't care who sells music on its pages, Apple's in this to sell iPod's not music.

But the major record label stranglehold over radio stations is much more interesting and formidable challenge. Nonetheless, I like downhillbattle.org's page. . .
- posted by c @ 5:21 PM

Links to Others Like Me:

John Novak, -- talks about his uploading about 350 cds of his 500 cd collection. He hasn't posted in a few weeks. But, hopefully he'll tell us how its going using his iPod.

today I discovered I could simply drag albums into play lists and let the iMusic software simply push out music to me an entire record at a time. Fantastic. Listening to Poundcake one of the best bands no one's ever heard of (Clayton is now the frontman for another band: Francine). Boston kids, they are.

SHARING HARD DRIVES

Napster and Kazaa are cute, but it's not what I'm looking for. I went searching on the web for the underground iPod music version of "I'll show you mine if you'll show me yours." Basically, I already predict there will be a hotspot in LA (perhaps I'll organize it at the local coffee shop) of -- bring your laptop and external hard drive (i.e, your music collection) and we'll swap music all the way around. . .

It's one thing to "steal" a few dozen songs from Napster at a sitting. it's another thing to transfer 1,000 CDs (50 gigs) in a 20-30 min sitting. Give me a few hours, even in today's technology, and I think I can transfer ~250 gigs worth of material, which is 4-5,000 records -- roughly the rock collection at most record store chains. Give me a few days and a few more drives; and I can transfer a Virgin Records megastore collection. . . 2500 gigs, would allow 40-50,000 records, which would easily encompass every record in a Virgin Megastore and then some. . .

it's gonna get real interesting real quick. . .

--KC

- posted by c @ 5:01 PM

What I'm listening to today.

I'm letting my 5 stars play and I hear some tracks from Zeppelin II, Burning Airlines (Pacific 3xx is such an AWESOME song, and particularly great drum track). (Reminder: I need to find someone with the entire Burning Airlines and Jawbox/Jawbreaker collections so I can umm, download and listen to them myself).

Also heard some Neil Young (Keep On Rockin in the Free World) and a Sugarcult tune. It's true that we humans are simple: We set up playlists of songs we love, and then play it and sit around and say "How'd it know: I love that song!" And now I hear, Jimmy EAt World "It just takes some time. . . everyone everyone. . . "

What will be interesting is developing a methodology for getting my songs from my laptop to my iPod when I buy it. I sure as hell don't want to manully put in 10,000 check marks. . . there's GOT to be a simpler way. In the meanwhile, I'm happy to enjoy music coming from my laptop through my stereo. . .

kc.
- posted by c @ 2:54 PM

Hi,

Below is a document which is half essay and half email post. I should clean it up but it’s late and I’ve been futzing with iMusic for the past 14 hours and it’s 5a. So sue me . Wait a second, don’t do that . . .

iMusic

Thursday was more important than I realized. It was the day I downloaded iMusic from Apple. And the day the music changed. Forever.

It’s hard to quantify how much iMusic will change things for me, but I can already see it’s a radical transformation that will affect not only how I listen and buy music, but also will have great impact on the music industry as a whole. (For instance, if you can get your own distribution onto Apple’s iMusic website, what the is Atlantic Records going to do for you (other than get your song on the radio. . . but with radio being more and more splintered, and the web more and more robust, perhaps even the radio won’t wield as powerful an influence as it once had. . . to be decided later.).

The mechanics of the software and the iPod are important to go through I suppose.

I’m an atypical music purchaser. I’ve purchased probably ~2,000 cds in my life time (since approximately 1987 or so). However, at several points in my life, I went through my collection, did massive spring cleanings and got rid of stuff I never listened to. I have somewhere between 600 and 800 cds at this point.

I honestly think I could walk into a Virgin Records and leave 8 hours later with 5-10,000 cds. I have wide ranging tastes and prefer entire albums rather than songs as a rule (and eschew greatest hits records). A frequent question I’m asked is: How do you ever have time to listen to all of the records? Surprisingly, when I’ve gone through ripping these CDs, it’s surprising how just a few notes into the song, I immediately say to myself “yep, I really like that song; or I know that song, don’t like it so much, I give it two stars”. So, I do in fact listen to what I have in my collection.

So, for me, the question with MP3s, was always limited capacity. Indeed, even downloading songs off the internet seemed quaint and I tried it, but quickly lost patience, typically I couldn’t find entire records, nor could I locate some songs I actually wanted. I often experienced errors in downloading – overall, I viewed it as a big headache and not worth the trouble. However, with the iMusic software, I can buy songs (or albums) at a low cost, or, more preferably, I can rip my entire collection.

For me, the iPod is an incredible economic device. But that gets ahead of it a bit.

I’ve always felt that music was important; and the technology that brings that music to life, is also quite important in my view. The iPod will rapidly change the landscape of the entire music in the next year or two, mark my words. Read on. . .

Why Digitize a Music Collection?

Digital music collection are easy to manipulate and reconfigure to your desires. IN particular iMusic offers tremendous flexibility in creating playlists you want to hear (I have a play list that is for Boston bands between 1998-2004 with songs that are rated (by me) four or five stars). And whenever I add new songs, the list automatically updates itself. I also keep lists for decades (60s-70s-80s-90s-00s). I can also keep a five star list across all times. . . If I really love the list and want to share it with my mother, I can burn a CD and send it to her. And there are other good reasons.

I probably purchased my CDs (all 2,000 of them) for roughly $10-$14 a piece (I always shopped (emphasis added) at used record stores to keep the dollars lower). Though I’ve pared down to 800 CDs, that still means, I have somewhere in the neighborhood of $10,000 worth of CDs. If there’s a fire, I know my insurance company would give me a hassle about it. Now I can back everything up and send it to a friend or relative in another state and know that if a bad earthquake strikes, I can get all of my songs back, including the songs from local artists I worked with in the late 90s in Boston – guaranteed those CDs are out of print!

Of course, when I send the hard drive of my 800 cds to friends, I think it will be nearly impossible for them to resist uploading a few (hundred) of my cds to their own drives so they can listen in on the fun as well. Of course, this violates any number of copyright tenets, but you can bet this will happen with increasing frequency.

Cost of Conversion

The heaviest conversion cost is actually my time (especially at a premium due to grad school heating up). Nonetheless, I need to purchase the following in order to run my CDs from their new digital hard drive home:

1. RCA Y-Connector Cable, 6 ft. One for the bedroom and one for the living room (~$6 each at Radio Shack); and
2. RCA extension cord 16’, ~$15 at Radio Shack.
3. Digital hard drives (one for CDs, the other as a back-up of the CDs); approximately $1 per gig, probably buy either two 80 gigs or two 120 gig drives.

(See below for storage calculations).

Eventually, I will actually buy an iPod, but probably not until the majority of my collection has been ripped and put on a hard drive that functions and does everything I want. Besides, it’s becoming more clear to me that it’s going to take multiple weeks to get my entire collection ripped down to a hard drive; so no great hurry to buy the iPod just yet .

Even after I do buy an iPod one gadget I’d be interested in is this: A transmitter FOR THE HOUSE that will transmit my signal, from one central point (and preferably I can pull songs from the hard drive, through the laptop, through the iPod to the FM transmitter, rather than JUST from the iPod). If the iPod will throw out this limited FM signal I can then dial that signal from any of my devices in the house: Living room component stereo, shelf unit stereo in bedroom; kitchen or bathroom boomboxes. That would be perfection.

Benefit of Conversion

One of the Huge Benefits is I now can have access to all of my songs whenever I want (more or less). My CDs weigh about 150 to 200 pounds, they get a little heavy to lug around. If I was really gung ho, I could lug around a 120 gig hard drive and have unlimited access to music; instead, I’ll probably end up hauling a 15, 20 or 40 gig iPod instead. I bring my laptop to school every day, so I can comfortably keep ~15 gigs on my hard drive at any one time. That’s about 250 CDs, that should hold me during lunch break .

But interestingly enough, it does make the decision of which iPod version to buy a bit more interesting – Indeed, maybe I don’t even really need one at all at this point in my life. My life at this point centers around school, I’m almost either at school or home; I have no real commute (I ride my bike the 0.9 miles back and forth to school, so no time to listen then). I can keep probably 1/3rd of my collection on my laptop; though management of how to keep the 1/3rd of my laptop collection in order may be a bit too tricky – we’ll see how that plays out. I do drive a bit, but I could, in a pinch, take my laptop with me and generate music into a tape input in my car – or to a FM modulator – fine by me. Might be a bit hard on the laptop though, and perhaps unnecessarily expose it to hard wear/tear and perhaps theft. Then again, I only drive, believe it or not, a few times a month, even in LA!

Because I’ll have my entire CD collection either in my iPod, Sony Laptop (PCG-FRV25 Notebook), or in a separate hard drive, I see no reason to retain the CDs themselves. They seem to draw (particularly in large quality collections, which I have) ~$3 per cd, so I can probably get $2,400 for my collection.

How Long Will It Take To Convert My Collection?

I have about 800 CDs, give or take. I rip the whole CD, it just makes it easier.

Unfortunately, my laptop doesn’t connect to the internet when I’m home – only at school. I don’t want to futz with the card to try to make it work here too, it’s often more of a headache than it’s worth. Otherwise, the moment you put the CD in, it asks you if you want to upload the info about it, and iMusic names the CD and songs you are about to rip. Nonetheless, my method only adds another couple of second to the entire process (basically as the CD uploads track no. 1, I’m already keying in tracks 2-12, and finish long before the CD is done being ripped). In the end, it takes between 5-7 mins to upload a CD; and in an 8 hour stretch, I seem to be able to upload about 50 CDs. Sunday at 5a, I already have ~125 CDs in and I started Friday night in earnest. Nonetheless, it’s clear to me this isn’t even a weekend project – this will take WEEKS to get my collection into the database. (Though I did consider taking 100 cds with me to school and trying to automate the process a bit more. . . we’ll see).

How much space does a CD take up?

100 CDs take up ~6 gigs (therefore, 1 cd takes up ~0.06 gigs, which is roughly 60 megs). I would venture that the vast majority of people could comfortable fit their entire music collection on the average laptop today. But what is interesting is one can buy a 250 gig hard drive for about $250; that laptop will hold about 4,000 cds; at retail of $18 per cd that is $72,000 worth of material.

I have a prediction about all this by the way. This is big time trouble for the music cos. Of the world. Apple has finally lured the large collectors (me) into the pond. And we bring awesome resources to the deal. I can put my 800 cds up. How long do you think it will take me to find someone else with a few thousand CDs on their hard drive? Since it’s a viral linkage how often before I have 10 generations of CDs on my hard drive which encompass the vast majority of rock records recorded in the past 40 years? Let’s look at the math.

I figure, roughly, the past 30 years or so, since the 33 1/3rd LP, musicians produced about 10,000 “listenable” records a year. That’s about 300,000 records. To store 300,000 records requires a disk drive which is 18,000 gigs in size. That drive is probably a few years away from production; at the outside it’s five years away. Which means, one will be able to easily store the ENTIRE music collection in a hard drive that is portable and easily transferred from one drive to another. This will dwarf Napster. I sort of imagine walking into Starbucks, meeting “Joe”, paying “Joe” $20 bucks, and having the entire CD collection of all of American rock downloaded to my drive in a 20 minute sitting. . . or perhaps over the internet if the connection speeds ever catch up to the processor speeds of the machines connecting.

Of course, music first, then DVDs/movies next; and perhaps even TV to some degree after that. Because once we start talking about 20,000 gig drives, I imagine one will be able to digitally transfer (via TiVO perhaps) the entire Seinfeld collection to a hard drive – and, for instance, give it to your mother for Christmas, who will give it to her friend Marge and Marge gives it to her daughter, ad infitum. Perhaps even with commercials edited out with our own digital editing software on our own computers.

The world has changed irretrievably.

My Swapping Plans

Since my general identity is fairly safe, I’ll share with you my swapping plans: I know of several classmates who have significant libraries of music on their hard drive; for the small collector, they’re going to burn a few CDs that will provide ~70-80 CDs at a time (roughly). For the larger collector (one known at school) I’m going to ask him to burn me a copy of his files onto my external hard drive via a USB port.

Once that’s done, I’ll take my back up drive and ship it to my brother (different state). He’ll upload his collection, which he will have already gathered from his group of 10 or so close friends, one of whom, like me, has several hundred CDs already uploaded to their drives. After that I’ll have my brother send the drive directly to two more friends in the northeast. The drives will first have their “cargo” offloaded” to my friends (and now my friends get my data, and my brother’s data). I, in turn, get data from the new friends in Boston/New York. Then the drive gets returned to me – probably with another 1,000 or so CDs added. Once those CDs are added (and edited to some degree), I will then share this newfound drive with a few select classmates again at school – who will likely have done much of the same thing as I have. . . and then the process will likely repeat itself in a year or two. . .

Eventually leading to serious collectors (like me) realizing their dream of having access to 1,000s (ok 10’s of thousands of records) to find the great music of the world. For instance, I imagine in a day in the near future, it will be quite easy to have your buddy download for you the ENTIRE Motown collection – this has tremendous value for me.

In some measure, the gods are fair: the licensing rights at the last format change (LPs to CDs) allowed record cos. to charge consumers twice. We all bought a right to the music when we purchased LPs; of course, we were charged again for the license for a CD the second time around. And, consequently the record cos. Got fat from the extra “found” gold.

This time around, it appears most CD collectors won’t need to pay the usual toll: Find someone with similar musical tastes and swap.

I honestly envision hang outs at local underground record stores; I also see a day where literally, you know a guy named joe who for $20 bucks will let you copy whatever files you want from his hard drive: and his hard drive has EVERY song ever produced (except very obscure local artists perhaps). But even that is is tricky: I have multiple local Boston artists that are being burned into my collection; whenever my collection is shared, it will include those records; so long as people don’t delete those files, obscure local artists from Boston in the late 90s will show up in the collections generations later.

Sound Quality of Apple Files vs. MP3s; and bit rate conversions

Ironically, despite the title, I didn’t even try to convert my files to MP3s. There’s great talk abounding currently about what will happen with the Apple files and compatability issues. I don’t buy it. The iPod already has incredible market power – and in a few short months already has a market share of over 30%. It’s incredibly easy to move an audio signal out of a device into another system (via a 1/8” audio in, RCA cables in, or via an FM signal, so no worries there).

I spent a few years as an avocation running a recording studio, and while I don’t have golden ears, I have pretty good ears. I can easily pick out all the instruments, parts, vocal harmonies, panning, and quality of recording – and subtle difference in level changes. (It’s actually a blessing and a curse, because when I start talking to people about songs, I point out things, they’d never considered. . . and I think it annoys them more than anything.). Anyhow, though I consider to have good ears, I honestly can’t reliable discern the difference between 128 bit and ~180 bit. And challenge yourself before you upload your stuff.

For me, I sampled a Joan Osborne song twice, once at the ~180 bit rate, the other at the 128 bit rate. I then put them in one folder and told iMusic to randomly choose which one. I stood in my family room, sure I could discern the difference. I couldn’t. I failed time and again. I put headphones on. I played it loud medium and soft; I didn’t have it. So screw it, I’ve been burning at 128. Maybe my ears are simply too fried, but what matters is what differences **I** can hear, rather than the differences someone else who isn’t going to listen to my collection can hear.

A few words about Napster, Kazaa and other crazy forms of music sharing.

I’ve never been a big fan of music sharing. Seems like mostly a big headache the few times I’ve tried it. It’s actually rather painfully slow at times (minutes for one song); and seems to focus on songs rather than entire albums (which is ENTIRELY what I want). And there’s always some hassle with it – at least every time I tried it. Not with iMusic. I downloaded a song for $1 in about 25 seconds flat. That’s service.

Further, the real problem with Napster and other forms of file sharing, was: What should I do with my large collection in the meanwhile? Well, iMusic solved it, I can easily and seamlessly transfer it down to my own drive and then move it as I see fit (and indeed, REAL file sharing is when I can give someone a copy of my 800 cds in a 20 minute file transfer as we chat over lunch. . . a mission which Kazaa is miserable at accomplishing.

CONCLUSION
I post this with the intent of reserving the right to later revise it to (mostly for clarity and “neatness”) as well as to encompass more of my thoughts on this whole thing that Apple has brought to us. And more refined thoughts on how my transition is progressing and mistakes I make along the way.

Love to hear others stories, trials tribulations.

Kc.

- posted by c @ 5:33 AM