Multiple Formats, Watched Once

I have a new feature to add to my wish list for iTunes Pro. Podcasts have overtaken TV for me. I watch them at home on my Mac and my Apple TV, and on the go on my iPhone. For those podcasts that support it, I like to watch the HD versions on my Apple TV. The iPhone doesn't care for that high of resolution, so I need to either not watch certain shows on it, or catch a duplicate feed, in a lower resolution.

Catching dual feeds burns more disk than necessary, but that's not why I hate it. I hate it because iTunes isn't smart enough to know that when I've watched the HD version, it should mark the other version as watched as well. iPhones aren't that big and it really hurts to have it sync'd full of stuff I've already watched.

Apple could hide all of this mess. I could just have a single entry for Diggnation and it could figure out the best version to show for the platform I'm using.

One day the iPhone will support HD, but unless flash capacity jumps dramatically in the near term, it will still be more cost efficient to sync a lower res version.

iTunes Housekeeper

I think I read somewhere that once you have a house over 3500 sq ft, you require a professional to keep it clean. This got me wondering. How big of an iTunes library can you handle before you need professional help? Mine is getting quite large.

I tell you what, I sure could use someone that comes in once a month to correct album art, rename incorrect CDDB tags, and fix the playlists that I screw up when dragging stuff around.

But would an iTunes housekeeper be more hassle than they are worth? Would they drop your favorite playlist, shattering it into the dozen original pieces? Would they dust that new punk album you bought, ruining the sound that you paid good money to sound bad? Would they steal the 50 Cent you left sitting on the counter?

Maybe they'd make your music sound better than you ever thought possible. Perhaps they'd rearrange some tracks and make your library feel spacious and airy. But maybe, just maybe, they'd invite over their boyfriend, Zune, and make a mockery of your whole existence.

Nits List - iTunes Edition

I love iTunes, usually. It's a great app and one that is always open in my dock. It does have its issues. Most of them are minor. Here's my nit list:

• iPod syncing isn't as good as it could be. It needs the same interface you get when building smart playlists. For example, I might want to sync the 3 newest unwatched episodes of some shows, but the 3 oldest unwatched shows of others if I'm catching up on a season. I could do this by generating the playlists first and then syncing those, but why should I clutter my library with playlists only meant for the mobile device? Update: Ehh, maybe I just talked myself out of this one. I could just make an iPod sync lists folder to hide all of the playlist mucking.


• You should be able to drag a TV Show directly into the TV Shows library source. As it is, you have to add it to movies and then go set the type to TV Show. Yuck.


• Music videos are a video type, but they aren't a type in the library. Movies and TV Shows are, why not Music Videos?


• The iTunes store needs a wishlist in the store so it can follow me across the computers I log into.


• iTunes needs a "look again goofball" function for when it forgets where half of you library lives, even though the place it thinks the files live is the very place that they are. If anyone has a script to auto-fix (not auto-delete) the !'d tracks, let me know.


• The albums list on iPods needs to have a threshold applied. 1 track off of an album is not an album! I have a couple hundred actual albums loaded in my library. Unfortunately, I'll have many times that amount in the Albums list when browsing the iPod. This forces me to flood my playlists with playlists that are the real albums in my library.


• Building on the last one, they finally added folders to the library list. This makes it nicer to organize the albums in my playlists, but my iPod doesn't respect the folders, so it is of little use to me as most of my listening is on the iPod.


• I want to remove an item from my library within a playlist. At the least, give me a "Show in Library" right next to the "Show in Finder".


• Don't stop background syncs because a dialog has been popped up. I don't know if this is still an issue, but many times I've cursed at the not-updating podcasts on the Apple TV only to go find some message box in iTunes that had halted all downloads and syncing. I shouldn't have to check-in with iTunes every day to keep the related systems running.

Edit: Jason reminded me of the one that irks me the most (message boxes stop syncing). I have added it.

Sync or Stream

The Apple TV has a problem. You can hardly blame the little guy. I'm sure the decision was made in his best interest. He had to be introduced to the world and given a chance to grow.

The problem is that the Apple TV thinks its an iPod...at least as far as the iTunes management goes. Apple TVs sync like iPods. You pick what things you want to sync and iTunes will make that happen. This is a problem because the Apple TV is a far more capable product than the iPod. It spits out HD content, and lets you stream from a number of sources. But HD burns disk, and streaming presents a different use model than iPods. It wouldn't be so bad if the Apple TV support sync and stay. In other words, you could drop content on it and remove it from your local drive so you wouldn't be burning 2x the space. Unfortunately, you can't. You can go through some sync'ing gymnastics to let stuff live a little while, but that's mucking, and mucking is not allowed.

The 40GB drive in my Apple TV is hardly big enough once you start tackling movies and TV shows. If you just want to sync music, that's alot of songs, but I don't want to just sync songs. This is not an iPod. This is a remote enabled interface to my entire iTunes library. The 160GB drive option really wouldn't be much help. I'd still have more content than would fit on it, so I might as well have no hard drive and just stream everything.

The streaming functionality is technically great. I rarely see skips or glitches. Content is quick to play, and browsing remote libraries is just as fast as the sync'd library, once you get connected to it :) What sucks is that the computer that I have designated to by my sync source is also considered to be a remote library. If I want to look at a podcast that isn't synced or I want to watch a feature length movie that was too big to fit on the Apple TV, I have to menu back out to the top and pick a whole new source to browse. That's unacceptable and needs to change. Apple should build a way to view the synced content and at least the other content of my sync source within a single set of content. If the sync source is unavailable (asleep, off, network down), they can gray those selections in the content and it won't be a problem. They could provide an option to disable this feature for those that use the Apple TV in a mostly offline mode.

I have to believe the Apple TV engineers have thought of this and want to do it. I think they haven't because they wanted to reuse the iPod sync model as a first step to get the product out the door. Here's hoping for this in the next release.

So, if they made it easier to access multiple stream sources, how about we ditch the hard drive altogether? Could they knock another $50 off the price if they had no disk in there? If that 40GB drive and hard drive controller cost them $25 in parts (which might be high), then it isn't unreasonable for that to translate to a retail price of $50 less. They could skip a price drop and switch to flash. Maybe just a few gigs of flash to hold the OS. It would be nice if the device ran a bit cooler.

One last stream wish. Let me stream DVD playback from my Macs to the Apple TV. I don't want a DVD drive in there. I have a perfectly fine one already available on my network in a Mac. This would allow me to watch Netflix on TVs that have nothing hooked to them but an Apple TV. You're probably thinking "damn, how many TVs does this guy have?". You'll be surprised at the answer. I have 1 TV, and it is only a 26" :) I do like to keep my options open though.

The Other iPod Dock

It's not the thing that goes on your desk. It's the thing that now looks more like your desk, with icons on it.

The new iPod touch dock doesn't match the iPhone. Instead, it matches the new dock coming in Leopard.



Isn't it funny how Apple can make basically identical products look different? The do the same thing with apps. Aqua, brushed metal, dark gray. Ugg, it annoys me.

iPod Wireless Sync - Still Hoping

The rumors of a wireless iPod are starting up again. It's been over 2 years since I first called for a wireless iPod on this blog. So if it hasn't happened by now, why would it?

• Apple TV trickle down - The work of figuring out wireless syncing is already done. Apple did that work for the Apple TV and it works well. They've already dealt with the errors and the intervals. Now, this is over 802.11 flavors, not Bluetooth, but at this point, wireless is wireless. I'll live with Wi-Fi, but I still want Bluetooth.


• Cost - It's years later. The Bluetooth radios are dirt cheap now, especially in iPod quantities.


• Market has been prepped - The Zune has plowed that road. The wireless hasn't proved to be a killer app, but people are aware that it is in there. Apple loves to come late to the party and do it right. Here's an opportunity.


• iPhone trickle down - We still don't have any good info on whether the iPhone can sync wirelessly, but Apple engineers certainly learned plenty of mechanical and electrical lessons with the radios they put in the iPhone.


• Draw Upgrades - If you have a 5G iPod, what would make you upgrade? A bigger hard drive? Doubtful. They're getting pretty big. Until they get a bigger screen, people aren't rushing to toss gigs and gigs of movies on them. Size isn't an issue. If you wanted something smaller, you'd get a nano. Battery life might be nice, but would you buy a new one for that? Wireless done right could be a feature to upgrade for.

Now, why wouldn't it happen?

• Cost - Adding even $5 on for a Bluetooth radio is quite a bit, not only in parts, but development time and support costs.


• Product differentiation - If you can sync wirelessly with the iPhone, Apple might want to keep that feature high end to drive sales of the iPhone.


• Battery life - If you believe that the iPhone only gets 40 minutes of battery life then you probably think the iPod would only get 30 :) In any case, radios do burn juice. You don't get to use them for free.

Hybrid iPods

I'm by no means the first to think of this idea, but the more and more I read about the hybrid hard drives, the more I think, hmm, could those work in an iPod? The idea is, you put the songs you think will be played in the flash and then you don't have to spin the hard drive. More on that in a sec.


For starters, this wouldn't work because the drives are physically too big. Right now, the drives I've read about only come in the 2.5 inch size, not the 1.8 size that the full size iPods use. It's only a matter of time before they get made in that size though, right?

Next, I wondered if the flash cache was big enough. Currently, they come with 512, or at most a gig. Is a gig enough? Ideally, you'd avoid the drive as much as you could and only play from the flash. If we assume a meg a minute, which is about right for 128 AACs or 192 MP3s, you'd get 1000 minutes or 16 and half hours of playback. That's more than a full run of the iPod's battery. This is starting to sound pretty good. If you could predictively populate the flash at sync time, when you have plenty of time and plenty of power, you skip the spinning drive and extend the battery life.

You'd get all of the benefits of a full iPod with the battery life of a nano. That would be cool.

So how would you fill the cache flash with the stuff you'd want, rather than the other 59 gigs of stuff you are carrying?
Well, iTunes could attempt some predictive algorithms to fill the flash, or perhaps they go the low tech route and just ask us. Just like the checkbox to "Play higher rated songs more often" in Party Shuffle, you could tick a box for flash-syncing the higher rated songs if you listen to those more often. Or, maybe you can designate a few playlists as flash-syncable because you know you listen to those the most. Combine that with smart playlists and you'd smart sync the right stuff a good portion of the time. I know I spend most of my time listening to a Not heard recently smart playlist that picks up any newly added content (including podcasts) along with the stuff I haven't listened to in months. This lets me get a nice mix of my new stuff while still keeping my whole library in rotation.

I wanted to see if you could do some predictive syncing and I also wanted to see how much music I listened to between syncs to see if this would work. I looked at my last 16 days of listening, which translates into 4-6 sessions. I'm defining a session as 3-4 days of playback. That's about how long a charge will last me and I need to do this because the last played times aren't the last synced times...unless you're using a shuffle which does set the last played at the time of sync.

I average about 3.5 hours of listening a day. Roll that up into a session and you have 10.5-14 hours which is less than the 16 hour figure from earlier. Still, that assumes a lot of positive hits coming out of the cache. Perhaps a 2 gig flash cache would work out better.

One last idea for those that like to shuffle. The set of tracks for the shuffle could be determined at sync time and populated in the flash. It would still be random, it just wouldn't be chosen at random at the time you were listening.

Throw Hardware At It

When I saw the product announcement of the Popalive Remote & and Dock, I had to groan. This product is the wrong answer. The question is, How can I get songs from my iPod to play on my stereo and control the iPod simply from across the room.

I have to give Alive Style credit for trying to replicate the iPod's ease of use on the remote side. Unfortunately, it looks like they borrowed more of the style than of the substance. It looks like it has a scroll wheel, but it doesn't. It looks like the familiar iPod screen interface, but it isn't. It even adds buttons. I know most remotes have more buttons than the thing they control, but why? We're at a point where the interface can be on screen. We don't need more buttons on the remote, we need less.

I think the most depressing thing about this product category is using a thing like-an-iPod to control an iPod sitting near a stereo with even more wires. They've just tossed a bunch of hardware at the problem rather than solving it. To me, solving it is using the darn iPod as the controller. No need to learn a new interface. No need to charge an additional item. No need to drop another dock on the table with yet another wire. Have the iPod send the audio wirelessly to the stereo. I've posted at least half a dozen times about A2DP in an iPod. Here's hoping we see that tomorrow at Macworld. I'm not holding my breath. A2DP is showing up in players. Apple is getting their butt kicked on that one.

2 Way iPod

By accident, I found that you can listen to your iPod using both the headphone jack and the dock connector. Many (most?) functionality that uses the dock port takes over the iPod. A Bluetooth dongle is one accessory that doesn't. I found I can listen to my Bluetooth headphones and it doesn't stop the output to the headphone jack.

You may not care in the slightest, but I do see some applications for this 2 way action. You can jack in to your friends iPod without disturbing them too much. This would be good for side by side machines at the gym, or road trips (think back of the van and front), or even listening to your cubicle neighbor's iPod, just for something different. The wireless aspect allows much more freedom than a traditional headphone splitter.

You can also use this method to hear the latency of the A2DP connection. It isn't much, and perfectly acceptable for most listening applications, but you can clearly hear why you won't be using Bluetooth headphones for DJing any time soon.

USB in the Dash Please

A positive trend in cars as of late is to include an aux input on the stereo. Many sell this as an iPod input, but it will work for a Zune, Dell Ditty, whatever. Here you see the dash of a Chevy SSR.

Now that the ball is rolling, how about we ditch the cigarette lighter power jacks and just go with USB? Tons of phones, music players, and other gadgets are capable of being charged over USB. I know it would put a hurt on the folks selling lighter adapter cables, but this is about the consumer :)


If you're a smoker, you can buy an adapter that plugs in to USB to light your cigs!

I really don't care if the USB is hooked to any data network. I'd imagine it wouldn't be for quite some time. I'm just looking for convenient charging solutions that don't require cable double-ups.

Add some bungees to the top of the dash and your gadget could charge without flying around the car.

I like gadgets. I hate chargers.

Following along with my recent posts about my A2DP audio solution, you can't help but notice I went from charging my iPod to charging my iPod, my headphones, and the iPod dongle. That's out of control and a terrible solution. If you buy a package deal, like from Plantronics or Logitech, you can get a single charger with two connection points, but you still have two chargers and a bunch of wires to manage.

If your house is anything like mine, you have a bunch of wall warts that are semi-permanently installed because the gadgets they charge need frequent charges and it doesn't do any good to put the wall warts away daily. Anthro tried to address the problem with their eNook system. I think it is a good idea, but I'm not too sure about the $400 pricetag for what it is.

What I'd like to see is a combination valet + splashpad system. Splashpower hasn't caught on, but I wish it, or something like it, would. You could build a splashpad in to the bottom of a drawer, or a valet. I already have something like a valet that holds my watches, wallet, and iPod when I come home. I would be delighted if my iPod just charged while it sat in the box overnight. I don't carry a cellphone, but plenty of people do. Combine that with the number of people carrying Bluetooth headsets. Tell me those people wouldn't love to not plug-in their phones and headsets every night. I'd have the problem of my iPod not getting to sync, but that's one of the reasons I want wireless in it :)

People complain that putting wireless in portable media players, like the Zune has done, is a bad idea because of battery life. If the battery lasts longer than you use in a day, and you get automatic, hassle free, charging at night, do you care how long the battery lasts? Yeah, you still probably do for multi-day trips, but still.

If Apple ever does release a phone, there would be more than a few people carrying multiple, portable, Apple products. Perhaps not Splashpower, but Apple could create their own similar standard, perhaps along the lines of the MagSafe connector. I'd buy it....if it didn't cost $400 :)

Headphones From Harald - Part 2

Source and sink. I covered the sink, now let's talk about the source.

The source end of Bluetooth A2DP solutions is even worse than the state of the sinks. Headphones are finally coming out. The problem is, we're stuck with half-crap dongles for most of the A2DP sources. Bluetooth technology has been slow to catch on in portable media players. There are a few players on the market that support it, but if it isn't in the iPod, people really aren't noticing.

To A2DPize your iPod, you must use a dreaded dongle. Dongles suck. They add bulk. They ruin the visual design. They usually require their own charger. They lack features that could be achieved with tight integration. They can break off. These all apply to A2DP adapters.



The adapter I chose for my solution is the Jabra A125s. It connected to the dock connector, which allows for track skipping and volume control (AVRCP). It wasn't too huge. The colors matched. The price was right.

Well, it works, sort of. All of the player controls work just fine. You can play/pause, control the volume, and skip tracks. One delight feature was the fact that you can wake a sleeping iPod with a press of the play button on the headphones. One other nice thing is that when the dongle runs out of battery, it will pause the iPod as its last action before shutting down. Nice. Range is so-so. Line of sight can barely get 10m in a clean environment. This isn't a problem when you have your player in your pocket or backpack, but it doesn't allow you to sit your player on the front steps and mow the lawn listening to wireless music.



The dongle charges via mini-USB cable to a USB port on your computer. This is the best you can get other than not requiring it to be charged at all. I wish it could just suck juice from the iPod. The dongle runs out far before the iPod does. That leaves you switching back to wired mode, which sucks. You can use the dongle while it is charging, but I can't use my headphones while charging, so this has limited use.



The on/off switch is a little hard to use since you can barely see the indicator lights behind it when you are pushing it. The colors of the plastic match the iPod pretty well. They even mirrored the back to match the iPod. The depth is also pretty close to matching my 60GB iPod.

Pairing was simple and effective. I haven't had any problems with that.

Now the worst part. Either my unit is bad, or this thing has poor performance, antenna or error rate. If I'm at home, on the bus, or in open areas at work, things work fine. It will only skip about once an hour, which to me is usable. However, when I'm at my desk, which is awash in a sea of 2.4 GHz transmissions, the solution is unusable. It will work and then enter fits of skipping for up to 20 seconds at a time. I've used dongles from Plantronics and Logitech in the exact same environment and didn't have these problems. At this point, I can't use my Bluetooth audio solution for the reason I bought it (use at work). I'm going to have to try another dongle while I continue to wish for Apple to put it in the iPod.

Stay tuned.

Headphones From Harald

I'd like to start by saying that I love wireless headphones. I need to lay down a little love, because I'm certainly going to lay down a little hate.

Wireless headphones come in many flavors. The flavor I like, for now, tastes like Bluetooth. I choose Bluetooth for the multiuse radio, the interoperability amongst varied vendors, and the reasonable cost.

I've been complaining about the state of Bluetooth audio for quite some time. The headphones on the market sucked, or at least they weren't the style I was after. The support in, or attached to media players was nearly non-existant. Worst of all, the cost was still quite high.

As of late, the situation has gotten a whole lot better. I can't say that it is good, but it is at a usable point. I now have a complete, stereo audio, Bluetooth solution. I'm happy with it in some cases, and disappointed in others. Here we go.


The Headphones
I spend a fair bit of time monitoring what Bluetooth products are available on the market. During one of my routine weekly searches, I found something called the Motorola Bluetooth DJ Headphones. This instantly sparked my attention. Through further searching, I was able to determine that Motorola had released a set of A2DP enabled, on the head, big can, headphones.

They appeared to be more durable than any of the other Bluetooth enabled full headphones on the market. The price was reasonable. They seemed to meet all of my criteria. I had to have them. After a handful of delays, Mobile Planet finally shipped me a set. I was elated. I've been using the headphones for a few months now, so I can really give a honest review of them.


The Good

• Build quality - They aren't bombproof like my Sony MDR-700s, but they are the toughest built Bluetooth headphones I've handled. They have swivel ear cups that allow them to flatten for easier storage. The headband is adjustable and seems like it will hold up. The ear pads seem nice as well. They are soft and I haven't had any problems with wear so far, but it has only been a few months. My only complaint is that they hang a wire out a bit where the cups meet the band.
  If you really used these for DJing, that could snag on things, or just wear to the point where it would fail. I wish that the wire were routed through the interior of the phones like most "DJ" headphones.


• Comfort - Pillows of sound. My ears can start to hurt after a few hours with the MDR-700s. I can wear the Motos all day without the slightest discomfort.
  
  These are very comfortable headphones. I also like the traditional
  over the head design. I can't stand the behind the ear designs. I wore the Logitech A2DP headphones and my ears hurt after 7 minutes, I counted. I know that I probably look goofy with my giant headphones, but I don't really care.


• Battery life - Battery is good. It far outlasts the other end (dongle). I usually go a few days of listening between charging. This matches up well with how often I charge my iPod.


• Sound quality - A working A2DP setup is nice to listen to. A problematic A2DP setup will frustrate you to no end. More on that in a bit. I like the sound quality. I'm no audiophile, but the range is wide and the bass deep enough that I don't complain that it isn't enough.


• Ability to be wired - When you're on the plane or out of battery, you can cable up the headphones and use them traditionally. The headphone jack is hidden under a rubber flap on the ear cup, next to the charge port (mini-usb, type B)


• Interface - Moto keeps it pretty simple. There are two different actions and two instances of each action, left and right. You can push a button, or twist a ring on the ear cups. The left button is for connecting, disconnecting, turning the headphones on and off, and initiating a pairing. That sounds like a lot of options for one button, but it works pretty well. The right button is for play and pause. If you have an A2DP adapter on the other end that supports AVRCP, you can start and stop your music without touching the player. I love this. You can also skip tracks back and forth with a twist of the right ring. You can't fast forward and rewind however. The left ring is for controlling the volume. The volume is not affected by the volume you set on your iPod, at least not for those A2DP dongles that attach to the dock port. Those that connect to the headphone jack are affected by the volume set on the iPod.
  
  To put these controls in perspective, this morning I rode the city bus. I was waiting in the pouring rain for it to arrive. I had these motos on. I could change tracks, play/pause, and control the volume through the hood of my jacket. That's good design.


• Styling - The blue lights aren't too brash. The Moto logos are visible, but not overpowering. They aren't as clean as an iPod, but they also don't look like a label happy PDA (cough, Dell Axim, cough).

The Bad

• Buttons - I like the size and location of the buttons. My problem is the feel of them. Sometimes I'll push them, they'll depress, and nothing happens. I think the button contacts are poorly designed. You have to push the buttons pretty hard, or exactly perpendicular for them to work.


• Charging - I got these via import so they came with a UK power plug. It's massive and only gets worse when I add a US converter to it.
  
  I've found that the Motorola HT820 headphones expect the exact same power supply characteristics, so if I can find a replacement charger that works with them, I can do away with my charge lump. I also hate that the phones have a mini-USB plug, but don't seem to want to get charged from a real USB plug. They want 550mA of power. A USB port can provide 500 according to the spec. I hated my electronics classes and thus didn't learn a whole lot. I'm guessing I could get away with charging at 500mA, but I haven't tried it yet. If you have the knowledge, please smack me down in the comments on why this would or wouldn't work.

As for these headphones being "DJ" headphones, forget it. There is a slight latency between the source audio and what you hear in the headphones. You couldn't care less when you're listening to your iPod. You care a huge deal when you are trainwrecking your beatmix. We'll just assume that Moto is using the "DJ" descriptor to refer to the swiveling ear cups, and not the ability for them to actually be used by a performing DJ.

Overall, I really like these headphones and I would recommend them. Hopefully Motorola will give the US a proper release of them.

In a follow up post, I'll discuss the iPod adapter that I chose to complete my Bluetooth audio solution.

Cover Flow on an iPod

When Apple finally releases a wide screen iPod I really hope that it can run the Cover Flow effect. I wanted to see what it would look like, so I did a quick mock up. I think it would work ok, and I really hope they put the scroll wheel on the backside.

Bit, Meet Brick

Buying content digitally is great...sometimes. As I've said before, I have some rules for buying content digitally vs. physically.

1. If I can't buy it physically


2. If I'm massively impatient and need it NOW


3. If I'm exploring and don't know if it's worth $10 or $20 for the full album or film

I definitely won't buy albums digitially if I can get them physically. This applies even when I have to wait for Amazon to ship it, or burn gas to hit Best Buy across town.

Recent developments make me want to break my rules. Many albums are now available in the iTunes store before they are released. Sometimes they haven't released in the US. Sometimes, they haven't released physically, period. Examples of this include Hybrid's latest album, and DJ Shadow's album, which just came out this week physically, but has been available digitally for a while.

The thing is, why do I have to choose? I like holding a CD in my hands. I like looking at the album art. I like to smell the printing chemicals. No, really, I do.

The bits and bricks need to get together. I should be able to buy an album, at a premium, in the iTunes store. I'd get the immediate downloads and I'd get a physical copy, complete with the art and smells, shipped to my house. The bits guys get a cut, the bricks guys get a cut.



But Apple doesn't make any money with the iTunes store, you cry. Well, maybe they don't make much, but I'm sure they'd like even a tiny cut of a fraction of the physical albums sold. I think they should partner up with someone like Amazon (did he just call Amazon a brick?) and sell digital and physical. Everything will continue to function like it does today. Your iPod still gets loaded instantly, but then the CD will show up a few days later for use in the car, archival, your collection, or even just as an uncompressed version of the content.

Even better, this would allow me to buy the albums I want as soon as they are available digitally, but not feel guilty that I don't have the physical copy as well. It would just ship when it did get released.

If you want another reason why Apple should do this, we'll return to the new DJ Shadow album. Shadow is quite possibly my favorite artist, but I stayed away from buying it early on the iTunes store because I wanted the album experience and I wasn't going to pay for the album twice. I'll save that cash for the import singles :) What's worse is that buying the album at Best Buy gave me two free digital downloads, yay! Too bad the digital downloads are PC only and use Windows Media with DRM. I'm not 100% Mac, so I was able to download them, burn them to CD and then rip them back in to iTunes, but that just sucks, and what about those folks that don't know you can do such a thing. If they are iPod users, they are robbed of those tracks. Even worse, I think those tracks are 2 of the best of the whole album, but that's another post.

Now it goes the other way. If you bought the album from the iTunes store, you are stuck with iTunes or an iPod, but you probably don't care if you are buying the album from the iTunes store. The only format choice I made in Best Buy was CD. The .wma shackles were tossed in with the bonus that Best Buy gives its customers. Way to treat your customers Best Buy. Thanks for buying that CD here. Let me give you a gift you can't use!

Best Buy could do this too. Join up with Napster or Rhapsody. Do your thing. Add value rather than compete with each other. It's all choice. If you don't want the physical disc, you can still buy for $9.99. If you want the CD too, maybe it costs $14.99.

The same concept holds with DVD, TV shows, and books. Paying again for a digital copy is old and tired. The company that gives the consumer value in the formats they want to use will win.

Closing the Gap

I thought the day would never come. Gapless playback on iPods has arrived. Please give me a minute to compose myself. There, I've dried my tears of joy. The world is a better place. No longer will my groove be harshed by a momentary slap of silence. My number one gripe has been erased. Thank you Apple.


BTW, you may have to prod iTunes a bit to get it to update your iPod. I'm running 7 and plugged in/out my 5G a few times, but was never prompted to upgrade from 1.1.2 to 1.2. I then selected Check for Updates... and it immediately popped up telling me that I it could upgrade my iPod. I did not need to reload my music. It just works.

I fully expect the haters to now shift their attention to the iPods lack of Ogg Vorbis support.

Track Flags

Podcasts are continuing to evolve as a marketing tool. Puma is using music to spead the word about their frangrances. Beatport regularly puts out a wicked mix made from new releases. Even Apple releases a podcast once a week with new tracks that they'd love for you to buy.

For the most part, these marketing vehicles are doing their job. I've been moved to buy many tracks that I heard for the first time on a podcast. The problem is, they are too hard to buy.

Podcasts are certainly a step up from the old way. Downloading a DJ mix and then searching for a tracklist is a pain. Some will have a .cue sheet, but even then, you have to have software capable of handling that .cue sheet and doing something reasonable with it. For those keeping score, iPods don't know what a .cue is.

When I'm grooving away to Beatport Burners, I frequently think to myself "I need to buy this." If I'm at my computer, I can make use of the brilliant links that you can build in to podcasts, but I'm never at my computer when I'm listening to podcasts. I'm always listening on my iPod, usually at work. That means I get to play the game of writing notes to myself on scraps of paper, or dropping entries in my Google Notebook. Surely there is a better way.

We need a solution for flagging tracks on our iPods. Microsoft's Zune is already rumored to support bookmarking of shared tracks. If Apple wants to justify the development time, they can mark this in the increased iTMS sales category, but certainly we'd have reason to flag tracks other than as a future purchase reminder. I can see flagging tracks to use in iPhoto slideshows, for use in a DJ set of mix tape you are working on, or even as one you'd like to email Jimmy about because you think he'd like it.


My suggested implementation borrows on UI that most users are already familiar with. First of all, I borrowed the flag icon from Mail.app. Most users are familiar with flagging important emails for further future action. I also needed a UI gesture that could be performed on the iPod. Apple already lets you click and hold on a track to add it to an On-The-Go playlist. All they need to do is support that same gesture while on the track ID screen in a podcast.

1. From the default podcast screen...button click to enter track ID mode.


2. Click and hold. Flag icon is added to verify this track is flagged.

Later, back in iTunes, you can create a smart playlist with flagged tracks. If they had a link associated with them, you'd get the typical cirlcle-arrow icon to go to that link. If a link was not assigned, you'd at least have the information about the track that you'd normally scratch down on paper.

Here's hoping for this in iTunes 7!