81–90 of 114 posts
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A lot of people repeating that line will change their tune when Spotify finally goes out of business in a couple of years time.
And we will call this the golden decade of music access, as our children fetishize the 2010s
Just like we fetishize the Napster era.
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My experience is that iTunes can't handle anything but perfectly neat metadata about album versions of songs. Every time I've fed it live music, or alternate takes, or anything else weird, it's choked so badly that I ended up wishing for no organization.
Agreed, for a lot of people "no organization" is a feature unto itself. iTunes is famous for mangling already cleanly-organized collections of folders on disk, etc.
I dunno. Reading this I can't help but feel like maybe the author is doing it wrong? I'm going to be charitable and admit that Apple has made iTunes incredibly difficult to use effectively, especially since the store is awful and they really, really push the iTunes store on you. That the interface is so slow and inconsistent doesn't help either. My advice to anyone who has any desire to use iTunes is: acquire your mu…
Apple has been selling standard AAC non DRMd music since 2007. No AAC is not a proprietary Apple format. It is supported by everything under the sun and is licensed just like the MP3 format. Apple has nothing to do with the licensing.
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There's still nothing better than iTunes, at least on OS X. It's the best of a bad bunch.
In the "don't delete my music" category - google music is pretty good. You can upload your files without deleting them and then stream from web or mobile app. I haven't tried playing offline from the browser, but caching on my phone is fine.
It makes me sad that's even a category for consideration. wtf
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I don't understand why you say access beats ownership. Do you think this only about music? Or books? Or movies? If so, do you apply it to other things in your life? Do you own a car, or do you only rent? How about your home? Is it better to rent, or buy a place to live? Clothes? Why buy a pair of jeans, when you could pay a monthly fee to have new jeans delivered to your house and return the (month) old ones? For me,…
Why own something if I instead can rent everything when I need it? If I could I would rent everything. Some things I would rent for a long time others for a short. But each to their own of course.
You could download media from the online library and it'd count as part of your local library, and you could create auto playlists that filtered all of your music (streaming and local) into those playlists. Then, you'd just auto-sync those to your devices.
This method isn't possible on any service anymore, and I believe it's because of increasingly more restrictive licensing. The closest I've found, and what I use today is google music. I upload all of my local content to them, and then mark songs that I 'like' as liked. GMusic has an autoplaylist of all my likes that I then sync to all my devices, including my car which has an android stereo.
I encourage everyone to step outside the Apple/Spotify walled gardens every now and then and resurvey the offerings - iTunes is just such an awful bit of software that it makes their service a non-starter for me. GMusic has a great mobile and web client, with download support which is all I need.
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I'm sympathetic to this (well, if I trusted access to continue uninterrupted and offline), but for me we're nowhere near there yet. Anyone with sufficiently unusual music tastes can't possibly get their content via 'access'. And that's not a high bar - even tame interests like EDM, jam, or jazz are completely unsolved via access in my experience.
Actually Spotify's numbers show that people listen to much more off-chart music when they only pay for access instead. So there are many ways to look at this.
Overall access is still a ways out. Access is taken away as easily at it is given. Without ownership you lose the ability to ever share that experience you once had access to.
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I'm sympathetic to this (well, if I trusted access to continue uninterrupted and offline), but for me we're nowhere near there yet. Anyone with sufficiently unusual music tastes can't possibly get their content via 'access'. And that's not a high bar - even tame interests like EDM, jam, or jazz are completely unsolved via access in my experience.
Actually Spotify's numbers show that people listen to much more off-chart music when they only pay for access instead. So there are many ways to look at this.