iTunes Match First Impressions

Folks that have a lot of music (20 thousand or more tracks) would love to be able to access that library anywhere.  Amazon, Google and Apple all realize this and have recently introduced competing offerings to get our music in the cloud.  Now, with the amount of music I have personally, Google Music (still beta) and Amazon Cloud Drive do not offer an accommodating solution.  Up until now, if I wanted to pull some rare track from my library, I'd have to get it from my Moxy backup, which is a cumbersome solution at best.

It appears to me, and Apple, that the best way to do this was to just "verify ownership" and then allow access to the songs you own.  I'm sure Amazon is doing this, but Google i'm not sure.  But it would be ridiculous to hold millions of copies of an identical track for each individual.  Rewind about 2 years and you may recall a little website called LaLa.  Well, this is exactly what LaLa did.  It scanned my library and allowed me to stream tracks it assumed I owned.  The site worked well and I enjoyed it for about 6 months until Apple bought it and shut it down.  Thus iTunes Match was born.

The initial setup took quite a while and only ended up matching about 70% of my music.  The remaining six thousand or so track were theoretically uploaded to Apples servers.  Once this process completed, I took a look at my library.  Some albums, tracks and artists have clouds next to them, some don't, and some have clouds with a slash and some have clouds with an exclamation.  I have no idea what any of this means.

From my phone, the story was interesting.  I tuend match on and within an hour i had access to all the tracks in my library.  But the performance of the Music player on the iPhone was dog slow.  And since it seems to be downloading every song i want to play, it takes a while to get a song going.  Also, most of my album art didn't make it to the phone.  So, this is not looking good.

The next day I tried to enjoy my iTunes Matched music by shuffling all my music. This failed completely.  It seems to only play whats local on the phone at the time, and I don't know what logistics using to do this.  Furthermore, my beloved genius button was gone, as were some of my playlists.

So, as a result I am back to syncing only the music I want to hear on my phone and i disabled match on iphone.  I still believe the value is there as I can now access my library from any other ipad or computer, plus its safely backed up in the cloud which is nice.  I just wish there were a separate interface on the iphone for "Match Music" and I can go in, dig around for a track and play it.  But the fact that it essentially changes the whole music listening experience on the iphone was a deal-breaker.

Now, take my comments with a grain of salt, I do have a large music collection and the fact that my commute takes my underground for 20 or so minutes each day, I just dont see this working out.  Maybe your findings will be different?

Note:  As I was writing this i did "Update iTunes Match" which will resync your cloud database to your local itunes.  It's now picking up some of the songs it had missed earlier.  I hope this process is somewhat automatic in future as I add music from other sources, but we'll have to wait and see.

My Drobo is flashing

Maybe it's trying to tell me something?  What's it saying?  It's saying "Don't worry, your data is protected!"

I've had my Drobo installed for 10 months now and I couldn't be happier.  The model I purchased may be their entry level offering, but it has the same data robotics algorithms of its more expensive counterparts.  I initially purchased it with 4 1TB 5400RPM drives and have enjoyed plenty of space.  But this week I had 1 hard drive blink orange to get my attention.  Apparently, even though I have space, I'm running low on protected storage.

OK, no problem, in theory...  Tonight I picked up a 2TB Seagate from MicroCenter for $79.  I read the online drobo documentation to see what the "procedure" is for replacing a full drive.  Surely, I'd need to power down, or "let it know" in advance or something.  But no, you're just supposed to yank the drive.  So, yank I did.  The light on the drive bay blinked red to alert me that my data was unprotected (temporarily).  I slid the new drive in and within 5 minutes it started populating the new drive with protected data.

The kicker in all of this?  I was running iTunes (which lives on the drive!) and was watching videos!  The videos never stopped playing and my data NEVER stopped being available.

If this was an old fashioned RAID 5 array and I filled it up, I would have had to MOVE my data elsewhere, destroy the array, and rebuild it with FOUR new larger drives.  Tonight, I was able to add capacity, without a loss of protection, downtime and I didn't have to get my hands dirty.

Once the protected data is up to date, i'll probably pick up another 2TB drive while they are on sale.  I can't recommend a Drobo enough if you want to never worry about your online store again.

Nintendo's Ridiculous DRM

Now that the 3DS eShop is open, the much-awaited System Transfer Tool is available.  But, as with anything Nintendo, things aren't always as easy as they seem.  Upon launching the transfer tool, I was pleased with the option for custom transfer.  I can (theoretically) select which games I want to transfer to my 3DS and it moves the game and license to the new system.  Game saves are not moved.

Much to my surprise however, is that certain games are not-transferrable.  No explanation is given by Nintendo.  I paid for and enjoy Pinball Pulse, yet i'm not allowed to bring it with me.  Why?  Online forums speculate this is because the game and/or company is no longer available.  So what?  This wouldn't happen with a physical game, and in fact would probably increase its value.  Now I'm stuck.  Will Nintendo offer me a refund on the game?  I will call and find out.

The "games are tied to systems not people" issue is still as annoying as ever on the Wii platform.  I own even more WiiWare and Virtual Console titles and as of now, they can NEVER leave my Wii.  I bought the Wii at launch and the drive is starting to go.  What will I do?  I also had considered purchasing a black Wii but had to reconsider since I'd have to leave my games behind.

Now that the new Wii has been announced, I really hope Nintendo reconsiders their policy on digital rights.  You know who I am, I log in and tell you.  Let me register my devices and play the games me and my kids love.  Until this is sorted out, I just can't take Nintendo seriously.

A new start...

Techmoments as you know it is gone.  A few months back I received a notice from Google that my site was infected with malware and Google would be blocking visits to it.  Wonderful.  I attempted to update my 1and1 hosted WordPress installation, thinking that would have some improved spam detection capabilities.  Well, that didn't work out well at all.  Automatic site updates wouldn't work and I was unable to update the back-end to MySQL 5.0 (which is now required).  The icing on the cake is that I can't even export any data out of the broken wordpress installation.

So, as terrible as I feel about losing the past few years of articles, I'd rather start fresh.  Most of the advice and commentary is dated anyway.  Seriously, my most popular blog post was in reference to LightScribe templates.  Does anyone even know what that is anymore?  Does anyone care?  No.

The new way of hosting and managing a personal website is SquareSpace.  I can let them manage and update the engine, and I can just worry about content.  Plus, there's an iPhone app too :)

Unfortunately, I can no longer afford multiple editors, so it's just me again.  I hope to have more info soon...