I haven’t made the leap to the Spotify or Rdio train yet. I’ve watched as a lot of people have made that transition but I’m not ready to get onboard. I still buy at least one album a week from Amazon or iTunes.[1]
Someone might think that I’m an old man scared by new technologies, but I love my Pandora subscription too. So what’s my deal? Here’s my deal:
<li>Curation</li> <li>Persistence</li> <li>Recommendations</li> Curated Content My iTunes music has been curated and rated over many years.
iTunes Match is nice but it has not altered my enjoyment of iTunes. However, one thing has been a bit of a surprise. All music really means all music on my iPhone.
Because I use my iPhone as a music device, I'm a smart list maniac. I have far more music than space (even on a 64GB iPhone 4S). I keep these lists on my phone:
Best Songs smartlist (four or more stars) New 2 months smartlist (added within the last 2 months) Push to iPhone (manually curated list of songs/albums I want to always have available) Coding (manually curated list of music without lyrics.
I purchased the Sony DRC-BT30 Bluetooth Headphone Adapter about a month ago from Amazon. After a month of heavy use I thought I’d share my experience with it. Be warned, it's an unsatisfactory ending.
Why? I listen to podcasts and music all day. My sole music player is my iPhone 4. I generally switch between a couple different headphones based on the working conditions. If I am stationary for awhile and need to concentrate, I will wear my Beyerdynamic DT 770 headphones.
I tried out the new Amazon music service. I have to say watch out Apple! It is just about as easy to use as iTunes, although finding music isn’t as straight forward. The albums are a couple of bucks cheaper (for select titles) and the download process couldn’t be any easier. Once you are logged in on their website and have installed the Amazon Downloader, you just purchase the album and away it goes.
When Apple bought Coverflow to include in iTunes 7, I was both happy and sad. At first I was happy that iTunes finally had a nice interface for my album art. Sadly, Coverflow was no longer available (or so I thought). Coverflow downloaded album art from Amazon while iTunes uses the iTunes store (makes sense). I have some unusual CD's which iTunes just ignores the cover art for while Coverflow happily found.
Now that iTunes 7 has incorporated the snazzy Coverflow album visualizer, your probablly wishing all those P2P files came with art work. Well, look no further than Art Collector by Specere software. Specere is the same company that put out Menuet which can also download artwork. However, Art Collector allows you more direct approach and is not a system control panel (I hate mucking up my mac with more control panels).
