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February 17, 2009
Resistance is Futile...
Dawnise had another in a long line of run-in's last night with Rhapsody, and I think it's finally going to push us over the edge and convince me to buy her an iPod.
It seems simple enough - Rhapsody offers her exactly the model she wants - "unlimited" music on loan, a community of people who build themed playlists, and portable device support (in her case a Creative Vision:M, on semi-permanent loan).
The trouble is that every time she touches Rhapsody she gets frustrated, and every time I touch Rhapsody (which happens every time she gets frustrated and asks for help) I get very close to homicidal.
I spent a good half hour yesterday recovering her library, and then trying to get Rhapsody to find more than 285 of the 1100 tracks she had on the device so she could add a couple more.
The library problem is just a bug in Rhapsody - library sync has never worked reliably, especially for large libraries - and sometimes you need to nuke Rhapsody's local state directory and let it re-sync from the server. It's easy enough, once you've figured out where said local state directory is, but it's damned annoying, and shouldn't be necessary.
The portable device sync isn't completely Rhapsody's fault - MTP is a gawd-aweful protocol (I've ranted about it before) - and one of it's most awesome aspects is that the more media you have on a device, the longer it takes to manage said media.
Even with "only" 1100 tracks, once I got it working, Rhapsody took a good 10 minutes to finish inquiring the device (part of that was probably updating DRM licenses, but that distinction doesn't matter - from the users perspective it just takes forever). I basically gave up using my Zen Touch for the same reason - it just takes too damn long to manage the device, and I'm not "doing the DRM thing," just syncing my own library.
So I fired up iTunes on Dawnise's mac, pointed it at our mp3 collection, and left it alone for an hour or so while it scanned the collection and built it's "genius" data. As an aside - every time I've tried to point Rhapsody at our collection (roughly 50G of mp3s, around 10k songs) it's crashed part way though the import.
When it was done, I gave Dawnise the quick tour - showing her how she could find music in the list, podcasts at the itunes store, internet radio, and how Genius would build playlists of "similar" music based on the song she selected.
Like many Apple products - it doesn't do what she really wants, but it's sorta close, and it mostly just works.
So I think we're going to take a look at ipod prices. And you can't go down that road without at least considering an iphone. But as far as I can tell the iphone still has a bunch of problems, several of which (like the tie to AT&T, or the cost of unlocked phones on the grey market) are deal-breakers.
Posted by dberger at February 17, 2009 8:31 AM
Comments
There are indeed drawbacks to the iPhone, and the AT&T lock is a big one. But at the same time, as widely available as wi-fi is these days, it's still not quite the same as being able to access the net (almost) anytime, from anywhere. More than I ever did with any previous device, I've grown reliant on that access - took Ari to see "Coraline" last night, and the very last thing to flash up on the screen at the end of the credits was the cryptic statement "For those in the know: jerk wad". The lights hadn't come up before Google via my iPhone had produced the explanation.
And sure, you can (continue to) carry multiple devices - Ari loves her Touch as a media player, and when there's wi-fi around it's 90% of an iPhone. But that 10% makes a difference sitting on the bus, or standing in the checkout line, or...
Posted by: Hendel at February 17, 2009 9:56 AM
I've been contemplating the same thing lately. Rhapsody sucks, but I'm worried itunes won't be any better. My Zen still works (after three and half years that seems fairly impressive), but it's been a little iffy lately.
Posted by: Laurie at February 18, 2009 5:09 PM