Massive Mileage

Getting music on an Android phone with Slacker.com

If I miss the iPhone for something, it's the iPod functionality, which allows me to carry around a large subset of my music library. Android allows this as well, but there's nothing like iTunes, which effortlessly syncs music over. You rather have to copy the music files manually. Also, this requires tethering the phone to the computer, which feels somewhat out of character for Android as a mobile terminal for the cloud.

My first solution are podcasts and there are some excellent ones out there. KRCW, KEXP and NPR have several great ones. I also love Resident Advisor's weekly DJ sets. But sometimes I'd like to have some more control over what I want to listen to, but all the solutions I found so far, were streaming music, which is not very appealing for me as AT&T's network is not the greatest and, of course, it does not work at all in the subway.

Fortunately slacker.com introduced yesterday an Android app with offline caching. It's $5 a month and it allows listening to several pre-defined "radio stations" as well as define your own one based on specific artists or other criteria. On the phone these stations can be marked as cached and can be refreshed automatically, for example overnight when the phone is on WiFi and connected to power.

So far, my impression is mixed. The website itself doesn't work on Chrome, but it works on Safari. Not a big deal, but it always turns me a little bit off if I have to launch a second browser. The overnight refresh didn't work either: in the morning Android greeted me with the offer to kill the Slacker app, which wasn't necessary in the end. The app itself complained that no WiFi was available, which is a flat lie. Anyway, I refreshed manually, which took almost two hours for four stations, but I hope this gets faster for subsequent updates. There are some other bugs too (which interestingly seem to be typical for Android applications and the way they are stacked together).

The music is so far so good, but I actually like to listen to albums in their entirety, which is by definition not possible on an online radio site. For that I hope we see either Rhapsody (Android app currently in beta) or Spotify (not in the U.S) available soon.

How to get the music on an Android phone?

Of course, Android can play music in all thinkable formats, but how does it get onto the device? Well, you need to connect it to a computer via USB and then copy the music files into the memory card. That easy. Same way you had to do it my MP3 player around 2002.

I'm using an iPod since 2004 and have a well maintained library and every time I connect an iPhone or iPod, music is synced over by certain criteria, without me thinking about it. Unfortunately, this is a closed system and Apple does everything to keep it that way.

So what are the alternatives on Android? There are radio-like sites like Pandora and last.fm, which stream music to the phone, but I don't even want to try it. Given the quality of AT&T's network in New York City, I would probably be watching the spinning wheel most of the time while waiting for the first sound come out of the headphones. Also, I can't believe that this works well for the battery life.

Then there's Rhapsody, a service Elke likes a lot. However on Android, it's currently also only streaming, with offline support expected for later this year. And there's Spotify, the elusive service whose U.S. start is imminent for like six month or more. They do have an Android player with offline support.

In any case there's a big hole in the Android ecosystem and I hope Google is working on this too.

Leaving eMusic

I've been an eMusic member for a long time and it's a great site for discovering music and, as far as I know, the cheapest way to legally download it. eMusic works with some sort of subscription model: you pay a certain amount per month (or per year) and in turn you can download a certain number of songs. As an early adopter I enjoyed an extremely sweet deal: around 20 cents per song.

That's going to change: eMusic imposes a more than 100% rate hike on me, which is still less than half the price of an iTunes song, but that doesn't help.

The problem with eMusic is that its catalog is pretty much a random subset of all available music. It's basically restricted by the labels that work together with eMusic. That means that many artists are not available at all and some only partially. Most annoying: some releases appear on eMusic with some delay, maybe after you've already paid the full price on iTunes. Bottom line: there's no way to know if a certain piece of music will be available on eMusic (maybe if you closely follow who's signing up with which label).

This works well if you decide you enjoy music exclusively within eMusic and ignore the world outside (means that U2, Fever Ray or Kings of Leon just don't exist for you). Only then you can appreciate their biggest hits of the year list, which is obviously different from all others as it's restricted by the eMusic catalog. For Elke and me, though, who both discover new music in many ways, this doesn't work very well: we end up buying many of the songs we love on iTunes and then do monthly download binges on eMusic, which often yields music Elke and I rarely listen to.

2010 is for sure is a year with many changes happening in the music industry. Maybe eMusic strikes more deals like this one and becomes more mainstream. Or everybody streams their catalog in a subscription model anyway. Until then I will have bite the bullet and buy my music on iTunes.

Can I take a 130% subscription price hike in eMusic?

eMusic was obviously in the unpleasant situation where they have to present their customers an unpopular change in the best possible light. So yes, eMusic will carry a larger catalog that includes older work from mainstream artists and there will be a unified album pricing. But they also let me know, carefully worded, that I get less downloads for twice the money as soon as my current subscription runs out next January.

Ironically, I anyway wanted to rethink my eMusic subscription and this new development makes it a lot easier. 

There's one main argument speaking for eMusic: It's cheap. Even with 45 cents (up from 20 cents) it's less than half of the iTunes average price (even lesser than the top price of $1.29. Supposedly there are 69 cents songs in iTunes as well, but I haven't seen a single one).

On the other side, there are several things that annoyed me in the two and a half years I'm using the service:

• The catalog looks pretty random. There's certainly a system to this madness, but on the bottom line for each album I may be interested in I have to check if it's available in eMusic or not. In many cases - indie or mainstream - it's not.
• Worse, some albums are released with a delay on eMusic. Nothing better than buying an album on iTunes and then find it a few days later on eMusic for half the price.
• Even worse, some labels and bands are silently removed from the catalog. This happened with Bloc Party or the White Stripes.
• Downloads expire at the end of the month, which leads to get music, that I wouldn't have bought if I had more time to select.
• eMusic doesn't work as a social networking site as their catalog is limited, which makes my musical profile very much incomplete. last.fm is much better here.

On top of it, I don't think that a download subscription works very well for me. 40 songs (or 35 in the future) per month is a lot more than I actually pay attention to during a month. Additionally, all my old music (6,973 song as of this writing) hasn't expired and is still worth be listened to (at least most of it).

So come next January I probably let my eMusic subscription expire and invest the money in individual downloads from iTunes. Yes, this is more expensive per song, but I can select exactly what I want and this is fur sure much less than 40 or 35 songs per month.

How I rate songs and albums in iTunes

ITunes allows an up to 5-star rating for every song and album. I know many iTunes users wouldn't go through the hassle of rating all their songs, but for me this is an important tool on selecting the music I want to hear. As of this moment I have 7,492 songs in my library and I need to select those that get a place on my iPhone. Also, I want random playlists, where I like every single song. And the best way of accomplishing this is by rating each and every song.

Obviously my library is biased towards songs I like, so a rating has mostly a positive meaning as there's no point of separating bad and very bad songs. So here we go:

• 1 star goes to songs I don't want to hear. These would be candidates to be deleted from the library if it was worth the effort. An example is No. 1 Song in Heaven by the Sparks, which makes me feel like drowning in melted candy. Interludes that only make sense in the context of an album also go into this category.
• 2 star goes to songs I don't dislike, but which fail to hook into my mind, so that I forget them 30 seconds after they have finished. That doesn't mean it's a bad song, but I would only play it in the context of an album or a genius playlist.
• 3 star goes to songs I like and which I would put in my playlists.
• 4 star are my favorites, outstanding songs that I would just search and play by themselves.
• 5 star are the rare songs that have a special effect on me, such as this one.

Since some time iTunes also allows ratings on an entire album. By default it calculates it from the average ratings of the songs, but I need it for with slightly different meaning:

• 1 star goes to albums I plainly dislike. There may be an outstanding song on there, but I most of it I don't like.
• 2 star goes to albums I wouldn't listen to on my iPod or iPhone, but maybe as a background soundtrack at home.
• 3 star is for a good album I like sometimes to listen from begin to end.
• 4 star is for an outstanding album. These are the ones that are synced to my iPhone. Since space is limited, I try to keep all 4-star albums below 10 GB.
• 5 star is for all-time favorites.

I do regularly review my ratings as my musical preference changes. Since this can be done on the fly on the iPhone or iPod it doesn't take too much effort. Also I have the ongoing project where I try to listen to each song at least once a year, also for adjusting the rating when necessary.