Thinking Out Loud

Category: Tech

Technology

The new Apple Music Classical app solves the wrong problem. Is Apple Music Disco next?

Apple launched its new classical music streaming app this week, as anticipated since the company acquired Primephonic in 2021. Michael Tsai provides a good overview of the reaction, ranging from the expectations of classical music listeners to practical matters of interface design and software development.

I have some opinions of my own.

But first, let’s get our terminology straight: “Apple Music” is Apple’s subscription streaming service, “Music” (née iTunes, sometimes called “Music.app” for clarity) is the primary app (available on iOS, iPadOS, macOS, and even Windows), and “Apple Music Classical” is the newly released separate app. You may see the latter app described as “free”, but only paid Apple Music subscribers have access to its curated library of streaming content. Dan Moren notes another astonishing fact in Six Colors: Apple Music Classical is currently available for iPhone only, and not (yet?) fully integrated into the Mac/iPhone/iPad/TV/Watch/HomePod ecosystem.

Kirk McElhearn‘s 2015 MacWorld piece Listening to Classical Music on Apple Music was unsurprisingly been making the rounds again in the run-up to this week’s release of the new app. To drastically summarize McElhearn, existing streaming services are fine for genres with simple metadata (like most pop music), but stumble over anything with complex details. You can ask Siri or Alexa to play the latest Lizzo single, and maybe even a remix or live recording if you want to get fancy, but if you’re looking for the Overture from the 1959 recording of Mozart’s Don Giovanni, released on Warner Classics, performed by the Philharmonia Orchestra and conducted by Carlo Maria Giulini, then you’re going to find yourself in a difficult situation that rivals the title character’s predicament.

Music lovers who maintain local libraries of audio files have always been able to organize them well enough in Apple’s ~~iTunes~~ (sorry, force of habit) Music app, given a little patient work. So-called jukebox apps are essentially databases for audio files, and have long supported extended ID3 metadata more common in classical, than say, rock or country: including Work Name, Movement, Title, Composer, Grouping, and so on. Today, you can already listen to Jack Antonoff songs performed by Beyoncé and Bach pieces performed by Glenn Gould. This is a solved problem.

I know this is going to sound hyperbolic, but as a lover of music in general, and a very amateur musician, I find the concept of separate apps for various genres almost offensive. I’ve been listening to digital music since Panic’s pioneering software Audion was released for the Mac in 1999. Over the years, I transitioned my library to Apple’s iTunes & iPod, and now to Music.app and iPhone. All this time, I’ve listened to classical alongside rock, pop, jazz, and so on. I’ve never had any problem organizing it all in one place, or finding anything, even with multiple recordings of one composer’s piece performed by different ensembles.

Listening to classical music on a Mac is completely fine, if a little clinical, as long as you don’t mind your collection resembling a spreadsheet:

“Electric Counterpoint” composed by Steve Reich and performed by Johnny Greenwood, playing in Music.app for macOS.

Again, for those interested and willing to manage a music library themselves, it’s long been possible to tag classical music:

The macOS Music.app Get Info window.

Things are less ideal, but passable on iOS. To begin with a positive example, below is how the Steve Reich album Radio Rewrite looks in Music.app on iOS. In the album view on the left, the Work name is displayed as a heading, the composer and performer are listed below that, and individual movements are playable tracks below that. In the now playing sheet on the right, the Work and Movement are combined into one line, with only the performer below. This is perhaps the bare minimum of support for extended metadata, but I think it’s fine.

“Electric Counterpoint” composed by Steve Reich and performed by Johnny Greenwood, playing on an iPhone.

The mobile Music.app interface does fail to do justice to an album like Yamanashi Blues by California Guitar Trio, which features contemporary arrangements of music that span multiple centuries and composers. When I thought of music ill-served by digital interfaces, this excellent album is the first that came to mind, due to its remarkable diversity. Even though all of these tracks are tagged in my library with their respective composers, the iPhone only displays the performer. I wish the interface exposed the composer metadata, but it doesn’t strike me as reason enough to design an entirely separate app.

“Chromatic Fugue in D Minor”, composed by Bach and performed by California Guitar Trio, playing on an iPhone.

But this is not how most people listen to music these days; streaming (usually on mobile devices) is the method of choice, and managing local libraries of audio files on hard drives has become a niche hobby for audiophiles — or if you will, obsessives (I raise both my hands from my Mac keyboard; it’s a fair cop). The UI/UX for nascent streaming services, including not only Apple Music but also Spotify and Tidal, are in a relatively young category of apps, and were were designed from the get-go for quick access to popular music in the literal sense: what appeals to the largest audiences. There’s also the matter of voice interfaces like Siri and Alexa, which are even less suited to searching within complex genres — and if used on home networking devices like the Echo or HomePod, have no screen to display any text or artwork at all.

Cellist, composer, and former Apple employee Jessie Char posted her thoughts on the matter in a Twitter thread. An important point she makes right away is that even if complex tracks are tagged with the correct metadata, the typical mobile interface doesn’t even have the physical screen real estate to display long text fields. But again, I contend that this is a solvable design deficiency, not cause for creating a walled garden, solely to accommodate one genre of music that typically has longer names than most others.

On the occasion of the Apple Music Classical app launch, McElhern has revisited the subject for Tidbits. One interesting note he makes is that there is as yet no one source of truth for classical music metadata, akin to how The Movie Database powers services like Letterboxd. Even the venerable Gracenote isn’t reliable when it comes to classical music. So what Primephonic and Apple have done here goes beyond designing a new interface to better search & display complexly tagged audio files, and had a twofold challenge: build an updated database and curate a searchable and browsable experience. McElhern notes that while Apple overhauled of its own library of music on the backend, this updated database apparently only powers the new Classical app, and apparently does not apply to music for sale in the Apple iTunes Music Store or streaming via the flagship Music app.

So, given all of these factors, and after going to all those lengths, why did Apple opt to create an entirely separate app to showcase its revised music catalogue and curated classical selection, as opposed to correcting the deficiencies of their existing product? I fail to understand what is unique about the broad category of classical music that would require an entirely different app/service than all the existing ones for, you know, music. The cynic in me wonders if pop music composers, producers, and performers don’t want to draw attention to the composer metadata. Not to pick on Beyoncé, but I can imagine she might object to every appearance of “Single Ladies” on her fans’ phones to be accompanied by the text “Christopher Stewart, Terius Nash, Thaddis Harrell, and B. Knowles”.

Imagine if Apple’s iCloud Photos service was split into two apps: Apple Photos Pets, specifically tailored for all your fur baby pics and nothing else, and Apple Photos for pictures of everything including pets. If the hypothetical of an app just for cat photos sounds like a solution in search of a problem, is it not it also absurd to posit an app just for classical music? If Apple’s existing music service (comprised of its backend database and accompanying apps) is deficient, then the responsible product design team needs to go back to the drawing board, not fork it into separate products.

Further, who are the editorial gatekeepers that decide what is “classical” and what isn’t, and what goes inside or outside of the quarantine bubble? Would Philip Glass’ opera Einstein on the Beach be available in the Classical app, but you’d have to launch the boring old Music app whenever you’re in the mood for his pop album Songs From Liquid Days? What about the California Guitar Trio album Yamanashi Blues, shown in screenshots above, that includes an arrangement of Bach’s “Chromatic Fugue in D Minor” from the 18th Century, alongside a cover of Santo & Johnny’s “Sleep Walk” from 1959, as well as their own original contemporary pieces like “Blockhead”?

If Apple were to improve metadata support for the existing Apple Music streaming service, the benefits would extend well beyond classical music. For example, Beatles obsessives would surely appreciate quick access to the 2009 remaster of the 1970 mix of “Get Back” from Let it Be, not to be confused with the 2021 Giles Martin remix, the 1969 rooftop performance from Anthology 3 (released in 1996), the 2003 Naked version, or the 2009 remaster of the 1969 Single Version from Past Masters (released in 1988).

If you are sitting in your favorite chair, reading The New Yorker, and turn the page from an essay on politics to a poem, cartoon, or short story, would you stand up, walk across the room, and sit down in a different chair? Of course not. So why would you launch different apps to listen to different genres of music?

There is no one genre of music that I like so much that I would exclude all others. What next, Apple Music Disco? Apple Music Slow Jams For the Ladies?

March 29, 2023
Businessman, artiste, or madman? We Live in Public

If you dig the deeply cynical TV series Black Mirror, you’ll love this documentary profile of businessman/artiste/madman Josh Harris. Love, hate, or pity him, Harris is undoubtedly a fascinating individual who succumbed to information-age and surveillance state delusion back during a time when we still used terms like “cyber-surfing the information superhighway” to describe the arriving networked world. Ondi Timoner’s documentary We Live in Public argues the point that however mad and irresponsible Harris may have been, he was definitely a visionary who saw what was coming over the horizon.

Of particular interest to me was the story of his venture Pseudo, where I worked for a few months in 1999-2000. This was after Harris left the company and launched his underground hotel project, so the doc necessarily omits this interesting phase in the company’s history. Going by this film alone, you’d get the impression Pseudo continued operating as a non-stop orgy right up to the end. But in actual fact, it did receive a large investment, followed by a major effort to mainstream itself as a serious company. When Pseudo finally burned through this cash infusion and went out of business, it was considerably a more sober and normalized operation than the wild bacchanalia it may have been in its early period.

As a footnote, I found it amusing that a documentary about the destructive effects of technology on society and the individual psyche would ship on a DVD encoded with a form of DRM (Pixeltools) that prevented it from playing on my totally run-of-the-mill DVD player.

September 26, 2016
Based On a True Story: Mike Daisey
I agree 99% with the popular consensus regarding Mike Daisey: he lied. But the tiny 1% nobody seems to be talking about is bothering the hell out of me: if his now infamous monologue “The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs” is a work of fiction, why can’t we talk about it as a work of fiction?

Until recently, Daisey was forging a reputation as a popular monologist in the tradition of the late Spalding Gray: fusing the mechanics of autobiography, journalism, and theater to tell stories with the power to move individuals and sway popular opinion. That is, he was, before his enormously popular show “The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs” was dramatically revealed to be largely comprised of half-truths and fabrications. Daisey initially required theaters to advertise it as “a work of non-fiction”. When he began to feel the heat, he initially claimed he had merely taken dramatic license, but finally issued an actual apology.

The imbroglio has been Tweeted, blogged, podcasted, and analyzed to death over the past two weeks, but here are the key incidents: Daisey’s original stage monologue (with a free transcript on his website), an episode of the venerable radio program This American Life featuring a version of it, followed by their astonishingly gripping retraction. My favorite analyses of the ensuing fallout came from Daring Fireball (Separating the Baby From the Bath Water) and Derek Powazek (How to Spot a Liar).

The general consensus among the cognoscenti, digerati and NPR set alike, is that Daisey made a fatal error in presenting his piece as journalistic report. I agree. But most of these analysts go on to express horror and outrage that Daisey’s show goes on. The monologue inspired a popular petition on Change.org (now there’s a petition against the petition). Theaters are not canceling Daisey’s future shows and are refusing refunds for past showings. Gruber, in an episode of his podcast The Talk Show, attributes this to the theater business running on a tight margin, as if it were simply a matter of economics. Interestingly, The Understatement reports that many theaters are also daring to defend the “essential truth” of Daisey’s work.

Mike Daisey went to great lengths to preserve the fiction that “The Agony and Ecstacy of Steve Jobs” was nonfiction
The Understatement

Which brings me to the tiny sliver of this whole story that I believe needs to be addressed: there is a massive disconnect between journalists and, for lack of a single term, artists / writers / performers / monologists / etc. Or simply, “creatives”. So Mike Daisey largely lied about what he saw in China; so what? Should his admittedly powerful monologue be wiped from the record? Can we not talk about it as a work of literature? Here is the point where, perhaps, the English majors of the world ought to take over from the journalists.

Ira Glass states in the This American Life retraction that Daisey’s use of the literary device of speaking in the first person triggered his brain to register it as truth. Other outraged journalists seem to not want to even entertain the idea that Daisey’s work might be an effective work of fiction on its own terms. Daisey was free to present his first-person account as truth (or as Stephen Colbert might term it, “truthy”) within the context of his play itself, but he erred by also doing so on This American Life, Real Time With Bill Maher, CBS News, and other venues. He deceived accredited journalists with hard-earned reputations in order to preserve the fiction that his piece was nonfiction.

But what if he hadn’t? What if he had, from the beginning, pitched “The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs” as what it actually is: a fictionalized dramatic account, told in the first person but, to use a familiar phrase, based on a true story. Most of what Daisey claims he personally witnessed are actual ongoing events at Foxconn and other factories in China. Workers’ conditions are harsh and unjust, not only to western sensibilities, but also in violation of Chinese regulations.

Many commenters have mused on how Apple Inc. may have been harmed by Daisey, both financially and in terms of reputation. It most likely has to some measurable degree, but no matter how much I may personally use and like many of their products, I don’t believe Apple is any more possessed of sensitive feelings than any other multinational corporation. Apple is no more deserving of protection from a work of fiction than — to fabricate a hypothetical example — Exxon might be if a writer were to publish a novel telling the story of an environmental activist visiting the 1989 Valdez spill.

The current refusal to consider that Daisey’s discredited work might still have merit as a piece of literature smacks to me of two things:
1. Excessive apologia to Apple. Apple is justly beloved for designing great products and seems to be making a great effort to improve its environmental impact and supplier responsibility. But no one needs to worry about their feelings being hurt.
2. A general distrust and fear of fiction and literature. On a grand scale, you often see this when video games are blamed for school violence, rock lyrics for drug use, or comic books for juvenile delinquency. When a problem is too big to deal with, often the easiest thing to do is ban or burn a book. Now, of course those are extreme cases, and all that’s happening here is a few journalists discrediting one man’s dramatic monologue. Perhaps journalists spend too much of their careers dealing with verifiable facts, and are ill-equipped to deal with the sometimes messy business of analyzing literature.
Daisey is not a journalist, and his situation right now is not the same as that of Jayson Blair, who was rightly run out of town for his numerous fabrications published by the New York Times up until being discovered as a fraud in 2003. He’s more akin to James Frey, whose supposed memoir A Million Little Pieces was revealed in 2006 to have been better classified as a novel. Had it not been marketed as his true life’s story, it probably would have been lost in the fray of bookstores’ crowded fiction aisles. Daisey’s medium is the theater, worlds away from the media journalists work in. No theatergoer or novel reader expects absolute verifiable truth from literature. The tools of literature have the power to entertain, instill a sense of catharsis in the audience, to illuminate, and perhaps even to move people to action. All of these goals seem to have motivated Daisey to do what he did.

It’s now near-impossible to appraise the merit of Daisey’s work on its own terms. Interviewed by Ira Glass in the This American Life episode Retraction, he stated that “The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs” is the “best thing I’ve done.” Clearly, he knew he had really hit on something that touched a nerve in his audiences, and it brought him a great deal of acclaim that later curdled into notoriety. He wrongly felt that the notion his work was factually true was essential to its continuing popularity, which provided him many benefits: larger audiences, fame, and likely a greater income than the vast majority of struggling theater artists are ever likely to glean from their work. I think it’s clear now that had he presented his work as fiction, it may have reached far fewer people, but still have had its undeniable impact on those that did experience it. The shame is that now we’ll never know.

The silver lining is he contributed to an ever increasing spotlight on the complex issue of China’s labor practices, and a growing awareness that the consumer electronics industry could not exist as we know it today without it.
March 30, 2012
Get a Real Job! or, Thoughts on Pseudo.com

Bringing new meaning to the phrase “get a real job,” I now learn that my last full-time gig was for a “fake company.” Years after the fact of its demise, Pseudo.com founder Josh Harris has pronounced to Boing Boing that Pseudo Programs Inc. was in fact a massive performance art piece, aided and abetted by the since discredited New York Times journalist Jayson Blair.

What is Harris up to? Is he, as my former colleague Jacki Schechner puts it, “Batsh*t Crazy”? [update: link no longer online] Has he been retroactively inspired by the literal definition of the word with which he chose to christen his venture, and now remembers things the way he wants to? To give him the benefit of the doubt, this pronouncement itself may be the performance piece. Or, he may indeed just be batshit crazy.

Regardless, wow! All of this comes as some surprise to me, as I drew a regular paycheck at the time. I was there, so I can attest that Pseudo was “real” insofar that it had actual employees, sitting behind desks, computers, cameras, and studio mixing consoles. We reported every day for real work, for pay, with benefits. We produced countless hours of audio, video, and animated programming for exclusive broadcast over the internet, years before technology and bandwidth made such things commonplace and trivial. If I was a small pawn in someone’s conceptual art piece, well, it’s still a bullet point on my resume, man. But it may explain why I’m having trouble locating most of my past colleagues on LinkedIn.

Some of the comments on the Boing Boing piece are more amusing and insightful than anything I could attempt here, but I thought it might do the public record some good for a former employee to contribute a few thoughts and memories about the tiny corner of Pseudo I was briefly involved with.

I joined the company in November 1999, right at the precarious peak of the infamous dot com bubble. Countless startups were all trying to figure out how to make money on the internet (wake me when somebody figures that one out). Pseudo was one of the first and most notorious, with a rough-and-tumble reputation of hard partying and drugs. Worse than all that (at least in the eyes of Wall Street) was how it excelled at its true forte: burning money in spectacular fashion (and speed). Media executive David Bohrman had been recently brought on as CEO in an effort to steer the chaotic company into profitability. To illustrate how much old-world thinking was driving Pseudo at the time, Pseudo’s disparate programs were fractured and reorganized into “channels,” an amusingly quaint metaphor ill-suited for the internet.

The Q.B. Club logo. I don’t know who designed it, but that’s the font Triplex, and it’s got a whole lotta Illustrator action goin’ on

One of these new ventures was the Politics Channel, still remembered now for its groundbreaking online coverage of the 2000 Democratic National Convention. But I was to be part of another channel no one, not even Wikipedia, now remembers: The Quarterback Club Channel. The Quarterback Club was a collaborative venture by several NFL players (including Warren Moon, Kordell Stewart, and Boomer Esiason) to consolidate their various moneymaking and charity ventures. Yes, that’s correct. This I, who couldn’t possibly care less about professional sports, and in fact often disdains them, took a job working for football celebrities. To my family at the time, I was working for the NFL, but to me, I was right where I wanted to be. To a former film student also interested in web design, making short animated films for the internet looked like the perfect job.

It was easy to get hired with the dot com bubble was at its apogee. As is my policy, I was utterly frank in my interview. I had used the then-new and trendy web animation tool Flash for a few projects by then, but was hardly an expert. What they had in mind for me was to execute Flash animated cartoons, then a radically new thing, from the writing, directing, and art by Kevin Ross (with whom I still have beers). Here’s a rough transcript of my interview:

MY FUTURE BOSS: “Do you know Flash?”

ME: “Well, yes…”

MY FUTURE BOSS: “You’re hired!”

That was easy! But the humiliations started early. One of my first tasks was to tote Warren Moon’s briefcase around after him on a visit to the Pseudo offices. Although I had never heard of him, but I was informed he was far too famous to carry his own shit. I have clear memories of it being made of orange basketball rubber, which makes no sense but that’s what I recall.

The Q.B. Club, Politics, and Comedy teams were housed catty-corner to the main Psuedo building, on the north side of Houston & Broadway. If Pseudo’s legendary partying was still going on under the reign of new grownup-in-charge David Bohrman, we saw none of it over at our depressing digs. The confusion over the two locations was always a problem. Once, Boomer Esiason mistakenly showed up at our place, and was clearly unimpressed as we tried to give him directions to find the main office (I didn’t know who he was, but my having met him really impressed my sports-fan cousin). There was everything to be read into our placement; the Pseudo veterans hated how Bohrman was mainstreaming the company.

Despite its justified reputation for profligate spending, Pseudo could be petty, cheap, and wracked by turf wars. Our NoHo Pseudo annex was viewed as intruding on the old skool’s SoHo territory, and they let it be known by delaying our computer and software orders for weeks. We were effectively crippled, but Kevin Ross and I produced the first and part of the second episodes of Q.B. Toons on my own personal PowerBook G3 (it could handle the animation, but didn’t really have the processor oomph for the multi-layered audio tracks we needed). The situation was so dire, and we were so obviously unwanted, that I know many of us considered quitting (not a single one of the Q.B. Club team ever did, choosing instead to ride out the weird situation). Speaking for myself, I was convinced Pseudo was the wave of the future, and the best possible place for a former film student to be.

Many of the “new-skool” employees came with little understanding of the medium in which they were to work: the internet. But to be fair, at the time, who did? Our boss was a former Navy Seal, and some of the rest came from television and video production. Time and time again we came up against a frustrating inability to write and communicate clearly. Kevin and I coined the phrase “purple puppy” to describe the kinds of random requests we would receive, as in, “Can you put in a purple puppy?” I still amuse myself with the in-joke to this day.

Kordell Stewart was not amused by “Activator Man”

All told, I was there for a little more than half a year. The rest of Pseudo had some success promoting the film American Psycho and selling the SpaceWatch Channel to Space.com for a chunk of change. Meanwhile, we only able to produce four episodes of Q.B. Toons. The first was little but a crappy teaser, featuring a holiday greetings from Warren Moon (what Scrooge would not be moved by that?). The second episode told the full, fleshed-out tale of li’l Moon in his first-ever game. The third starred Bernie Kosar and was a disaster, in my opinion, taking ages to produce and looking the worst. But our fourth, and what turned out to be our last, is our masterpiece. Reportedly our supervisors, and Kordell Stewart himself, were not amused and it remained unaired. We were inspired by the cut-out animations of the Monty Python genius Terry Gilliam, but the visual allusions were lost on everybody.

Klik-a-Kandidate: Bush wallows in his daddy’s riches, and Gore rides the information superhighway

We labored under an air of impending doom throughout, and the only ray of light was the daily visit by an enterprising young woman that sold homemade sandwiches door-to-door. I still have copies of some of the internal emails that circulated after each new article predicted Pseudo’s demise. So with the writing on the wall, we tried to diversify with two new projects for the Politics Channel: Klik-a-Kandidate and Campaign Dope. We were finally put out of our misery during the first round of layoffs in June 2000. The day began with an almost comical omen: as we were all called to assemble in the main Pseudo offices, I scraped my arm against the rusty grille of an old truck while crossing the street. There was not a single Band-Aid to be found in all of Pseudo, so I clutched a paper towel to the stubbornly bleeding wound for the rest of the day.

About half of the Quarterback Club staff was called into a brief meeting with Bohrman (like being picked, or as in this case not, for a dodgeball team). Our burden relieved, we dragged our pink-slipped asses back to our offices to hurriedly copy our SWF files onto Zip disks (remember those?) in time to grab a few pints at the local pub (which I recall being a really good, authentic Irish pub, actually… I wonder if it’s still there?). I spent the rest of the night in the emergency room for a tetanus shot. The next day I got a call from ABCNews.com, but I declined to comment, thinking I might hurt my chances at finding a new job (but I was working again within days). A second round of layoffs only a few months later put the rest of the company to its definitive end. The domain Pseudo.com appears to live on as a some kind of patchwork of affiliate music links.

Even if it took some wild pronouncements by Josh Harris for it to happen, it’s nice to see Pseudo back in the news. It was a great talking point for me in job interviews right after it imploded, but these days it’s hard to find someone who’s even heard of it. I now work for Warner Bros., and I certainly hope that the original Warners (Harry, Albert, Sam, and Jack) don’t someday rise from the grave and say “Psyche! Just kidding!”

July 7, 2008
In which I complain at length about Adobe Illustrator & Updater

IconFactory vents their Top 5 Adobe Illustrator pet peeves. A flood of “I know, right?”s from fellow travelers quickly followed, but on the plus side, so did a hopefully productive dialog with Adobe. I couldn’t agree more with the selection weirdness. Frustrated by Illustrator, I frequently find myself using Macromedia Fireworks for vector graphics (hardly its intended forte, but Fireworks’ vector tools are far more intuitive and immediate, perhaps because it’s descended from Freehand).

Along those lines, Subtraction hopes Adobe will sit up and notice Lineform (no longer online: freeverse.com/lineform), an award-winning $79.95 competetor to the $499 Illustrator. Khoi Vinh’s complaints are right on target: massive bloat in Photoshop & Illustrator, and annoyingly arbitrary changes to long-standard features. Two examples in the Photoshop Layers palette alone: linking layers with the shift key (instead of easily with one click as before), and the new needlessly huge size of layer groups. (spotted on Daring Fireball)

I experienced what must have been a bug in Illustrator CS2 the other day. I was working in a file set up to use pixels as its unit of measurement, but noticed that A) the menu command to outline strokes was missing (just plane gone), and B) the positioning palette was reading in points. I triple-checked the document set-up window, and started changing the strokes on the object I wished to outline. Illustrator up and crashed on me. On relaunch, everything was back to normal.

“The Adobe Updater must update itself before it can check for updates. Would you like to update the Adobe Updater now”
Adobe Updater

Just last week I read a series of blog posts about an absurd bit of found poetry in the Adobe Updater interface (“The Adobe Updater must update itself before it can check for updates. Would you like to update the Adobe Updater now?”), but now I am frustratingly unable to retrace my steps and find the original links. But here are a few: Brainfreeze (no longer online: brainfrieze.net/comments.php?id=A578_0_1_0_C), BlueStateBanter (no longer online: irvingavenue.com/BlueStateBanter/blogJonny/view_by_permalink.php?the_id=17). To top it all off, an admission of guilt (no longer online: weblogs.macromedia.com:80/xd/archives/2006/02/improving_exper.cfm) from Adobe itself.

But that’s just the beginning of Adobe Updater hell. Once you’ve updated the updater, get a load of the main interface above. Perplexingy, the left column is a hierarchical list of all available updates for every Adobe application, even if you’ve already installed them, and even if one is has been since superceded by another. For example, “Bridge 1.0.4 update” supercedes “Adobe® Bridge® 1.0.3 Update” as the updater for “Adobe Bridge 1.0” (Adobe aparently can’t settle on a naming convention), plus there’s some other component called “Photoshop Services Update.” Got that? The right-hand column tells me what I have installed so far, and by omission, what I have not. Regardless, everything has a check-box in the left column. Now that I’m used to it, I can see that I have yet to install “Photoshop 9.0.2 Update” and “Adobe Stock Photos 1.0.7,” but I feel sorry for those seeing this window for the first time.

October 1, 2006
More iTunes and iPod minutia

Because I just can’t help myself, a few more comments on iTunes:

The iTunes 7.0.1 maintenance update (no longer online: apple.com/support/downloads/itunes701.html) has finally dropped. I haven’t noticed any real speed improvements, but Apple has fixed the bug of dragging image files to the album art window not working. Partially fixed, rather… you can now only drag one image, not multiple as you used to be able to do, pre-version 7 (you can still do so via the pop-up Song Info window).

I’ve had an “iPod with Video” for months, but just now noticed an oddity. One of Apple’s touted features is the elegantly simple “Shuffle songs” menu item. One click and you’re served up a random steam of the entire contents of your iPod. The problem is, it draws from the entire contents of your iPod, including video!

So if a video comes up on shuffle, it plays the audio only, with a still from the video serving as album art. I obviously rarely look at my iPod screen unless I need to change something, so the only reason I noticed this issue is that it started playing a song for which I know I only have the music video purchased from the iTunes Store. Video soundtracks are typically of a much lower audio quality than a dedicated MP3 or AAC audio file, so it sounded terrible.

To avoid having videos mixed in with your audio, you apparently must forgo the Shuffle menu command altogether, and take the extra step to navigate through the “Music” menus, or to a playlist you’ve manually created yourself.

And finally, an iTunes Smart Playlist question: is there a way to refresh a smart playlist generated at random? If you set up a smart playlist of, for instance, 10 random songs from the 1980’s, iTunes will create exactly that for you, but it appears to be frozen that way unless you change a criterion. What if I just want to refresh it, to get a different random 10 songs from the 80’s?

September 28, 2006
My iTunes 7 Nightmare
As Engadget reports, iTunes 7 may be more than a little flakey, and I have a nightmare story of my own.

First, some background: I use a PowerBook G4 17″, with a very, very large iTunes library of 16,000 plus tracks, stored on an external 250 GB LaCie Firewire hard drive. Perhaps unwisely, I was doing several things at once shortly after downloading the brand new iTunes 7: listening to a smart playlist on shuffle, and batch editing tags in another smart playlist (specifically, editing the Album Artist tags of all my compilations to read “Various Artists” — see The Dork Report for September 13 for more information). To complicate matters, I was running Last.fm in background (itself freshly updated to Version 1.0.6).

After batch editing tags for several minutes, I opening the batch info window for another dozen or so. iTunes suddenly stopped playing a few seconds into Pink Floyd’s “Time” from The Dark Side of the Moon, and then froze. I noticed Last.fm had frozen as well. I waited until it seemed neither would free up on their own, then I force quit both. I relaunched iTunes, but it was noticably sluggish (many spinning psychedelic pizzas of death for me). I selected a song to get info, and nothing happened. I tried another and a tiny exclamation mark appeared next to it (which I know from experience to mean that a track has been manually deleted or moved on your hard drive and iTunes can no longer locate it). I nervously switched to the Finder and clicked on the music folder on my external drive. To my horror, the folder was empty, and the custom icon I had applied long ago had disappeared!

Needless to say, I feared the worst: several gigabytes and years worth of music collecting (not to mention irreplaceable tracks purchased on the iTunes Store) gone. Not knowing what else to do, in fact thinking doing anything else might make matters worse, I quit iTunes and restarted my Powerbook. The external drive took longer to mount than usual (I’ve read that Mac OS X checks disks for errors on startup, so perhaps it sensed a problem and was running a repair). Once everything had started up and settled, I used Disk Utility to verify both my internal and external drives, with no errors reported. Taking the proverbial deep breath, I opened up my external Firewire drive… and the folder was back to normal. I launched iTunes, and again, everything was normal. As if nothing had happened. Thank god, right? But terrifying that several gigabytes of files could disappear and reappear so easily.

Shaken, I ran Backup to bring my Home folder backups up to date, and promptly went to bed to try and calm myself down with a nap.

There are a bevy of other problems being reported on Macintouch, including the very odd case of large chunks of people’s libraries being flagged as “Explicit.” But I think my story wins.

So. Lessons learned:
1. For crying out loud, buy SuperDuper already! I’ve never properly backed up my music collection for the simple reason that I don’t have another drive big enough to duplicate it. Time, I think, to start deleting crap I never listen to nor wish to keep, and bring it down to a size more easily backed up.
2. Resist the temptation to download new software as soon as it comes out. At the very least, don’t stress-test it with precious, irreplaceable computer data.
September 17, 2006
Notes on Apple’s “It’s Showtime” special event

Time for some obligatory mouthing off about Apple’s latest iFiesta, the “It’s Showtime” special event at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Theater in San Francisco.

iPod with Video (such an ungainly name): enhanced with more storage and brighter screen.

iPod Nano: totally redesigned. Or rather, it’s just like the retired iPod mini except more mini. Comes in a very confusing array of models, with certain colors only available with certain storage sizes. No doubt black iPods are popular, for that finish is reserved for the top-priced model.

iPod Shuffle: totally redesigned. Really small. Really, really small. No, I mean, like, accidentally-inhale-small.

iTV: previewed months ahead of planned release, usual for Apple to say the least. I already use Airport Express to wirelessly stream music from my computer to my stereo, a massive improvement oo my computer’s speakers (which don’t suck). So being able to stream video to a real TV will no doubt be really cool. $299 doesn’t seem like so much when an iPod costs about the same.

The iTunes Music Store is now simply (and belatedly) just iTunes Store. Feature films and iPod Games join the existing lineup of music, audiobooks, podcasts, TV shows and music videos. Buying single TV shows and music videos makes sense to me (thanks to iTunes, I didn’t miss a single Lost episode last season), but at this point I can’t imagine ever buying a movie as a digital download. It’s a rare movie I see twice, and those that I wish to, I’ll buy the DVD (or just rent it twice through Netflix) for higher-quality picture and surround sound, not to mention bonus material. And digital download prices of $9.99 to $14.99 are absurd; I recently purchased the new 2-disc special edition of Apocalypse Now! for about $13.

iTunes 7, the first new release in years to include actual new features to enhance listening to and organizing music. Previously releases were almost entirely commerce-related (adding music video and TV content to the iTunes Store), and Apple has apparently been saving up a huge flood of new features, some significant, others troublesome:

Toggle between view options: 1. the familiar standard list, 2. grouped by album (with artwork), and 3. Cover Flow. Purchased outright from Steel Skies, Cover Flow is a visually striking new interface that aims to evoke the real-world browsing of albums by their covers. It apparently caches the album cover image files on your hard drive the first time you use it, so if it seems slow at first it should improve. It’s neat; already I think I will continue to use the boring list view when I know specifically what I’m looking for, but Cover Flow is a way to skim through and rediscover dusty old tracks I may have fogotten about.

Gapless playback. I haven’t tried this feature yet myself, but it always was annoying to hear a split-second pause between tracks on a live album, so this is welcome. To take advantage of it, however, iTunes must rescan your entire library, which can take forever if you have as huge a collection as me. Then you need to manually tag specific tracks as part of “gapless albums.” I’m not sure what happens then when you listen to stuff on shuffle… when happens when a “gapless” track is randomly cued up to a gappy one?

Transfer from iPod, meaning that for the first time, you can legally copy music from your iPod to another computer. However, it is limited to files purchased from the iTunes Store, and the destination computer must also be authorized (the first time you play a purchased file on any computer, you have to log in with your iTunes account info, which registers your computer over the internet to Apple). Apple obviously couldn’t/wouldn’t allow total syncing before because of piracy fears, but since it’s limited to DRM-controlled music, then everything should be kosher with the music rights-holders (99% of the time, not the musicians, but that’s another story).

Automatic album cover downloads. Lots of question shere. How accurate is it? I’d rather have no art than the wrong cover. You can request art for specific albums or have it go through your entire library at once (it also searches for art when you rip a cd). I tried it on my work computer with a relatively small libary of about 600 songs. The results were mixed: it correctly grabbed Talking Heads’ 77 (albeit of horrendously poor JPG quality), but couldn’t find such a popular and distinctively named album as Gorillaz’ Demon Days. I only noticed one error: iTunes mistook Suzanne Vega’s Sessions at West 54th EP for the compilation The Best of Sessions at West 54th.

A troublesome new meta tag: Album Artist. As I understand it, this is for the rare instance in which a single artist’s album features a few tracks by different artists, but is not a compilation. So, Jane Doe’s album may be by “Jane Doe” overall, but have one track by “Jane Doe feat. John Doe.” Now you can use the tag “Artist” for individual tracks and “Album Artist” to group together an entire album under a single name. OK fine, but much much more common (at least in my collection) are compilations of various artists. There’s already a tag to flag certain albums as compilations, but now iTunes 7 groups them by artist if you don’t manually specify something like “Various Artists” in the Album Artist tag. If you have only one track from a compilation, iTunes thinks it’s an album by that artist, even if it’s tagged as a compilation! So the end result is a lot of busy work for me so iTunes can go back to recognizing compilations. For someone as anal retentive as I with a meticulously managed music library, this is annoying to say the least!

More metadata: skipped count and date. Now you can track how often you choose not to listen to something.

And now for more complaints: when you purchase anything or a podcast updates itself, it appears in a “Downloads” sort-of playlist, instead of at the top. So now you need to manually click over to that playlist to see what’s going on.

Various interface changes, including non-glossy buttons and… heinous scrollbars! WTF? Icky grey-blue blobs that look like nothing else on a Mac anywhere! I’m not sure, but if these same scrollbars appear on the Windows version, then perhaps Apple wanted to make the user experience more uniform, and so they can advertise with images of iTunes that anybody will recognize as theirs. Dsandler.org has a great overview of the graphical user interface design nightmare and links to many others (spotted on Daring Fireball).

iTunes (and iPods) still can’t alphabetize properly. I am totally strident on this point, so thus begins my rant: alphabetizing song, artist, and album names should have been in iTunes 1.0, and it’s insane that six revisions later it still can’t handle it. Artists beginning with “The” are alphebetized correctly, but songs and albums aren’t. So, The Beatles correctly appear under “B”, but “The Long and Winding Road” shows up under “T” and where’s John Lennon? That’s right, filed under “J” of course! Any brick & mortar music store organized like this would go out of business before you can run through your ABCs. If Apple will introduce a whole complex new system to handle relatively rare cases where you need an Album Artist, why won’t they address something as utterly basic as this? I predict that in the future there will be even more musicians who go by one name, if for no reason other than people being able to find their music on their iPod. OK, rant over.

September 13, 2006
I Heart Katamari

Best. Game. Ever.

To give that statement a little context: I’m a novice gamer at best. I didn’t grow up with an Atari, so I’m a latecomer to all this beeping, flashing, vibrating analog joysticking stuff. A few years ago, I was engrossed in The Matrix films to a degree that seems silly now. But at the time, I was a web design working on the official Matrix online shop so I can explain away my obsession as having arisen from spending all day every day Photoshopping distressed metal boxes with glowing green screens. Word was that the Enter the Matrix Playstation game was a veritable revolution in gaming, an unprecedented merging of cinema and interactivity, necessary to understand the upcoming sequels, yadda yadda yadda. Sucker that I am, I actually bought a Playstation 2 on the strength of this hearsay, and… the game sucked. I had never even touched a PS2 before and I could tell that it sucked.

Worse than that, it was unbelievably violent. Before you call me naive for thinking it wouldn’t be: My favorite of the Matrix series is No. 2 (yes I know that’s against popular opinion, but what does Popular know?). If you watch closely, you’ll notice that although our ostensible heroes Neo and Trinity mow down dozens of innocent humans (not, technically, their bodies, but their consciousnesses in the Matrix, resulting in their real-world bodies dying) with machine guns in the first film, not a single living person dies in the second. Unfortunately the game takes after the first film and the player’s very first task is to sneak into a post office and kill as many armed guards as possible.

Where to start? First, is it intentional irony that you’re going postal on poor USPS workers? Second, why are they all packing heat, as opposed to packing tape? I forgot to mention that you start out the game unarmed, and the included instruction/hint book helpfully suggests a complicated combo move (or whatever gamers call it… you have to move the joystick up and to the left, press a dozen buttons in a complex sequence, turn around three times and toss salt over your shoulder) to sneak up on somebody and break their neck.

Now let me say here that I am against censorship in all forms, and all the talk about banning or even creating a rating system for violent videogames sets off all my liberal alarms. But when a game like this actually encourages the player to sneak up on an innocent human being just doing his job (as opposed to a non-sentient but malicious computer program, as the Matrix mythos call a villain) and break his neck instead of confronting them head-on and potentially costing you health points in a fist-fight… well, I nearly had the urge to call my representatives in Congress.

So my Playstation gathered dust for a good long while. I would occasionally take a stab at other games, but wound up selling most of them back. I did enjoy one quite a lot: The Simpsons Hit & Run, a sort of Grand Theft Auto (or so I’m led to believe it’s like) without the hookers and whacking and stuff. Great fun! Seriously, you should try it.

But then I read about Katamari Damacy in Time Magazine, and was intrigued. Partly that the media would focus on a game for any reason other than to decry its poisoning our nation’s children’s precious bodily fluids, but also by it sounding totally unique. And it is, as far as I know. Basically, you roll a big sticky ball around the place and pick things up. The bigger your clump gets, the bigger things you can pick up. Soon it becomes clear that if you play long enough, everything around you is pick-uppable, including people, skyscrapers, and even clouds. It’s insane! Totally weird! Addictive!

I just picked up the sequel We Love Katamari this weekend and have fallen in love all over again. I wouldn’t say it’s a huge conceptual advance over the original, but there are many more worlds to explore, more complex goals, and more general loonyness all around. Yay! I’m a gamer!

September 25, 2005