So I finally tried out iTunes to see what it was like… There was some good news, but overall I’m disappointed albeit with one proviso. Let’s start with that.

I am clearly against the ‘subscription’ model for renting music [the All New Napster Model^TM. I don’t want to pay 9.99 euros for months on end and then have my music disappear. I had reserves about Apple’s model, but no more. I went online, bought a disk that I had been seeking Glassworks by Philip Glass, all 6 tracks for 5.94. Reasonable.
I have just looked at amazon.fr and it is currently available as a CD for 10.50. Once I downloaded the tracks I immediately burnt them to CD as an audio disk and tested this on the home audio system. No problem. Whatever copy protection there is, is not carried onto the audio disks. This was my worry: you can use the iTunes-purchased tracks on only 3 computers I believe, and I change about every two years. I read that one can remove authorisations from a computer, but I have no idea how this works [This is, in itself, worrying, if I a computer geektype like myself cannot understand this stuff what will Jane Public make of it..?] But by burning the material to CD I am assured that I will continue to have the files that I have bought as music available to me as music, even if it is not a carbon copy of the original file that that music was delivered as [hope you’re following].

That was the good point.

Now the bad ones. I had read that the interface was supposed to be exemplary. It is not. I found it wasted space imposing thousands of choices that were in no way interesting [Top Ten, Other people bought, Playlists…]. And worse than that, there is no way to personnalise it. I want, for example, to say that even though I am in France I am not at all interested in French Pop music [about 50% of the content of any given page], and would prefer it to open on the ‘Alternative’ page with music and info about these ‘x’ artists and groups that I have selected. Then I can get directly to the music that interests me. [Were navigation quick and simple that might not be so annoying…].

On a minor point, I would also like to see Wishlists: where friends can go on line and buy me music and that it would be waiting for me with a short note the next time I go online. I would like to see an affiliate program so that I can add links to these pages, for example, and earn some mullah on buy-throughs.

Another minor irritation: even though the interface mimics a web page, it is not posisble to spawn a new window through cmd-clicking a link. This means that you spend all your time clicking backwards and forwards. And not only is the downloading and rastering of the pages slow [I have a boradband connection—what can it be like for a dial-up line?], but there appears to be no page caching, and so each page is painfully downloaded again and again. A most excrutiating experience.

If iTunes is supposed to be the best interface, then what are the others like?

But the worse point is in the selection of music available. If you want anything with any personality that exists out of the mainstream [I accept that some mainstream music does have personality, but it is not its primary characteristic] it is simply not here. I have been looking to buy Yann Tiersen’s Rue des Cascades for some time. Unknown. Even his very nice soundtrack for Good bye Lenin is unheard of. And the world famous Amélie soundtrack: nada. Even Amazon.com scores better on this. I have been wanting the track Your Ghost by Kristen Hersh for years, but don’t want to buy the album. This is the sort of thing that iTunes is made for, surely. Except it doesn’t know her. Oh well, Gary Jules singing Mad World from the Donnie Darko soundtrack. You guessed it: unknown. I can go on: Michael Nyman’s film music..? Hector Zazou? Paddy McAloon? Disturbed by Ilya, No Peter Gabriel at all… [I’m looking for The Tower that Ate People]. No R.E.M., no XTC later than about 1998. I’m pretty sure that I will end up finding albums and tracks I want, as I think that other material will eventually come on line, but it is balefully lacking on that front at that moment.

One final point that I did not like at all. I opted for a shopping basket rather than a one-click purchase [I don’t like one-clicks OK? It is my right not to like it: bear with me]. On any other site you browse and put your material in the basket. Then you get your card out at the checkout. Not on iTunes. You have to create an account giving all your details in order to create a basket. I do not like this. This and the fact that the service doesn’t have enough of the music I enjoy will be the reasons that I will not stick with this beyond a trial period.

Next week I’m going to give eMusic a try out. It offers a simple download of up to ‘x’ mp3s a week according to a subscription scheme, but once you have downloaded, it is yours. They also have an offer of about a dozen free mp3s when you sign up.

Can’t be bad…

There is a cat conspiracy out there… and no-one is writing about it. I was peacefully reading Daring Fireball, basking in the thrill of being able to get in again, and not being sent off to some bit bucket in space by a hell hound proxy server somewhere, when I read this:
In short, a hobby-level Daring Fireball will resemble much more a typical weblog — blurb-length posts, often only to link to articles elsewhere. No cat pictures, but still.

Nothing to write home about you say.

Then I thought about the number of sites and blogs that I visit that have cat pictures and talk about cats. And—let this be clear—I am not a cat-enthousiast, and am not browsing the web actively seeking cat-news, cat-pix or cat-whatever.

Is the web in fact just some huge cat cabal to get their pictures everywhere? Does Tim Berners-Lee have a cat I ask myself?