Adventures in iPodlessness

I love the iPod, but iTunes? Not so much. It's slow, increasingly bloated, and for some inexplicable reason, my iTunes library started fragging itself every 3-4 months this year. After my last mass extinction event, I said "ya basta" and made the switch to Songbird. It's been interesting.

Unfortunately Songbird hasn't had iPod support since version 1.2 (I'm running 1.10), so that meant using another device. I've always been opposed to having music on my phone because I could never carry a significant amount of it (and people who listen to music on phones are douches), but after deciding that maybe 16GB wouldn't be so bad, I decided to go for it and load my music onto my Droid RAZR.

The Gear: Songbird 1.10.2, Songbird for Android, Motorola Droid RAZR Maxx, SanDisk 16GB SD card

The Good:

Songbird's extensions and integration features are flippin' awesome. After adding my music to Songbird, I was able to sync my play counts with Last.fm directly (crucial for managing music on limited space), making migration a cool summer breeze. Hooray for data! I also added the Songkick add-on, which notifies you if an artist is playing near you soon. Another major like is that Songbird automatically looks for new music in your library folder. As far as managing your library on your computer it's very hassle-free.

You don't need the android Songbird to sync with Songbird on PC, but I recommend it. On the device end, the Android Songbird interface is much better than the standard android music player; its menus are more intuitive, and it features a lock screen widget that has play/pause and seek controls, which is a hell of a lot faster than unlocking your phone every time you want to skip a song. It also scrobbles to Last.fm in real-time(!) and lets you pull up a flickr stream for whatever artist you're currently listening to, which is kinda gimmicky but fun.

The Bad:

Songbird's sync capability, at least with Android devices, suuuuuuucksss. I plugged in my RAZR expecting to be able to sync selected playlists like in iTunes, but only the stock smart playlists were available for that. But oh! I discovered, you can click and drag playlists to your device! That'll do it. That'll get your songs onto the SD card, but it doesn't properly sync; it only adds missing files on top of what's there, without deleting anything. Eventually I had to download a folder sync add-on to sync my custom management playlists, which is pretty pathetic, and even that has sync errors.

As for the phone/app, I have some minor gripes that are fixable. The scrolling motion in Songbird is hypersensitive and makes choosing artists harder than it should be. And I miss hardware buttons, but this is a problem with any touch-screen phone. As with all Motorola droid phones, the volume intervals are stupidly wide, letting me choose between "a little too quiet" and "significantly too loud." A continuous volume slider in Songbird would be a nice touch; strangely that's missing.

The Verdict:

Overall, the experience of switching from iTunes/Pod to Songbird and Android has been better than I expected; I thought I'd be running back to my iPod and trying to put Linux on it, but I'm actually kind of liking this. 16GB of space for a 65GB library isn't much, but it's surprisingly livable, and can easily be remedied by just buying a 32GB SD card from Newegg. Songbird has some major shortcomings, but it also has some really nice features, and because it's open-source there will hopefully be more. I'm even contemplating writing my own "smarter playlists" add-on that'll let you do playlists for most-listened albums and artists so you can keep albums intact.

In the Flesh Vol. II: Good Night and Good Morning

Good Night and Good Morning are some of the most talented musicians I am honored to say I know. Their new album Narrowing Type was just released and will be available on Own Records as a limited-edition 12" (you betcherass I'm buying that), and in case you're wondering, yes, they sound like this live. They have tremendous restraint, incredible tone and are super-nice guys to boot. "Philadelphia" also features violin from my former bandmate Gautam Srikishan.

Streaming Part II: The Day After Streaming

On a note related to my post "Don't Cross the Streams," how is the iTouch the only 64-GB mp3 player out there? I want 90 GB and hardware buttons, dammit. /rant

On Repeat: EMA - "Marked"

When Past Life Martyred Saints got Pitchfork'd into hypeland, I kind of slept on it; for a while I was just generally not interested, then I downloaded the album and wasn't super into it. So EMA kind of hibernated in my music collection for a long time until one day shuffle brought me to "Coda" from the same album, which is a brilliant, a capella interlude. "Marked" reprises and builds on a lot of the themes and lyrics in "Coda", building from a quiet intro to a mezzo-forte chorus. It's a quiet song, but it's mixed loudly, giving it a fitting air of proximity and vulnerability; the guitar fret scratches are terrifyingly loud, and Erika M. Anderson's groans sound like howls when she cries, "I wish that every time he touched me left a mark." It's a song about hurt, shame and regret, and Erika sounds so hurt that I have to believe her.

Don't Cross the Streams

(Video unrelated, but really good.) There's a cold, precise, strategic logic behind the shift towards streaming services and devices. The reduced onboard memory of streaming devices enables portable form factors and makes them cheaper to produce, and having instant access to a plethora of content without sifting through shady sources or waiting for downloads ain't bad either. While the music industry's been busy dropping ball for the past ten years, the founders of Spotify made an important realization: if you want to compete with piracy, you need to be more convenient than piracy. And for better or worse, they're doing just that.

But there's a slight contradiction at play here: if Moore's law keeps up and memory keeps getting smaller and cheaper, what's to keep people from wanting - and consequently buying - devices with more memory? iPods aren't exactly prohibitively expensive (they couldn't move millions if they were [although they are a low-margin-high-volume product]). And services like Google Music allow you to upload your own library and stream from any device. So there might be a chance yet for us music aficionados to avoid being herded into the pay-per-play system. But we need something new.

If memory costs and personal streaming are non-issues, the real weak point emerges: convenience. Spotify lets you listen to whatever the hell you want (if you have an internet connection), and requires zero ripping, management, etc. I personally am not interested in streaming because I want to have high-quality (320 kbps) audio available with or without internet, and possibly because I'm old-fashioned. I enjoy managing my music library (I chronoalphabetize my vinyl records). But most people don't. So why not create pirate streaming services? Data connections are fast enough; anonymity seems like the biggest problem. Streaming services are great, but to me they smell like a closing door on free information. Once someone has exclusive control of data they can charge (or advertise over) whatever they want. Let's hope someone in the underground cooks up something better.