I’ve written before on this site about my love for digital media, especially music, and my technology adventures in our new house, setting up whole-house audio and worshipping my iPods. Yesterday, however, I ran into the biggest, most frustrating aspect of all this technology. Its complexity is enough to make a seasoned geek like me go ballistic. And for someone like Teresa, who is technically savvy but not necessarily in this digital audio arena, it’s horrific.
In the new house, we have an older desktop PC in the office that I store all of our music and photos on. Originally, I had ripped our CD collection as MP3s, but when iTunes started to support Apple Lossless, I because to re-rip our favorite disks – and any new disks – in that format. I also bought a couple of Airport Express units to get the music pumped from iTunes through our stereos.
When I’m using my iPods, everything is hunky-dory. My 10gig 3G is big enough to take the lossless files directly, and iTunes re-encodes the files for my Shuffle. Beautiful music, anytime, anywhere.
The issues begin when Teresa wants to take music with her to the gym. She has a Rio S35s she got a few years ago. Back then, I loaded it up with some favorite work-out MP3s, but she wanted to change out some of the music now. Given that we had a WiFi network throughout her house, and she has her own laptop, this should be a no-brainer. Unfortunately, the only no-brainer parts are the software designers’ choices for home networking, audio encoding, and digital rights management.
A simple goal: Let Teresa choose music that we already own on CD to the gym.
The complexities:
- Windows XP on the office PC and her laptop won’t see each other for file sharing (even though iTunes can share directly, I can ping both machines, we’re in the same workgroup, and I’ve walked through every file-sharing troubleshooting article on the web).
- To get around this, I installed BadBlue personal which lets her surf to the office PC and download songs she wants.
- iTunes doesn’t work with her Rio. She has to use Rio Music Manager, so she has to keep copies on her PC.
- The Rio and its software don’t work with the Apple Lossless encoded files. She can only choose from the MP3 format files unless she re-encodes – which she doesn’t care to know about. All of our newest music – and many of our older favorites – are in the wrong format for her.
Everyone involved in the digital music revolution wants to lock us into their particular solution. I just want universal access to all the music I already own, put it on whatever player/stereo/computer/home network I want, and not have to worry about what format the friggin’ files are in or which software can see which computer/player. I love Apple’s software and design, but I’m tired of the lock-in. I like the openness of open source like Ogg Vorbis, but not the design and clunkiness of all the tools. Basically, I want Apple to design and implement open formats and standards. None of the choices available to us are both enjoyable to use and functional enough for our uses. And don’t get me started about not being able to rip a Dual-Disc format CD I recently purchased.
My basic message: Make it simple to let me do things I want to with things I own. I pay for good design. I pay for good music (and other content). In return, these companies make me tear my hair out to simply use them. And copyright, patent, and other rights management legislation makes it okay for companies to keep doing this, and to distrust my motives and interests as an individual citizen.
Disclaimer: I’ve been in the software industry for nearly 20 years. I’ve mostly worked with Microsoft technologies at work. I love Apple design. I appreciate Linux variants for geeks but never see it working out for non-techie users. And you won’t convince me that I should give up my comfy Windows XP machine and my Apple gadgets to move to a free or open source environment… unless it does everything I need it to much more easily. The software/products I want don’t exist today, and I don’t see them emerging soon. So no need to leave me messages about why a specific individual tool is better than another, unless you can point me to a complete system that is so much better it is worth scrapping everything I already own (or better yet, can suck in and use everything I already have).
