2arrs, 2ells

1st November 2011

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Things I learned while breaking my car

My attempts to replace the factory radio in my beloved Subaru Forester have failed, miserably. The beautiful new stereo I purchased lies dead on my dash, no matter how hard I hope when I turn the ignition.

Despite the NPR withdrawal I’m going through, I think I’m okay with the situation, because in the process of destroying my car, I’ve learned a few things:

• How to disconnect/reconnect a car battery
• How to solder two wires together
• How to put my car into neutral, without putting in a key
• How to remove (and reattach) the vent control connectors on my car
• How to remove and inspect a fuse

More than this, I’ve gained enough of an understanding for how my car works, that my Forester is no longer an intimidating black box. When I was 16 and inherited my first car, I vividly remember my dad’s instructions: “Take it to the dealership when you’re supposed to. Don’t try to fix it yourself; you’ll just end up breaking it.”

As it turns out, my dad was right, I “shot my eye out”, if you will. But this weekend I’m going to break out the soldering iron again and get my stereo working. And the next time my Forester breaks and I fix it myself, I think I’ll give him a call. Maybe he needs someone to fix his car.

Tagged: content

10th October 2011

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Thoughts on Spotify

After holding out for an Internet-eternity, Rob and Tyler have convinced me to give Spotify a try.

I’d used a free account occasionally over the past few weeks, but I signed up for Spotify Premium ($10/mo) last night and decided to go 100% Spotify (no iTunes/Pandora) for at least the first month of my subscription.

Things I like

• I made a “stuff to listen to” playlist of all of the bands people have recommended in the past few weeks (and I never got around to listening to) and it was super fast and easy. The catalog had everything I needed, and playlist creation was a snap. The friction that keeps me from trying new music is gone entirely.

• Being able to send songs to people / having an inbox of songs from others. If network effects get going this (and collaborative playlists) could be what make me stay on Spotify despite the complaints below.

Things I loathe

• Syncing music to the iPhone (for offline/bandwidthless play) can only be done from a desktop/laptop - it can’t happen over the Internet. This seems like a silly place for Spotify to cut corners on bandwidth costs (once I sync a song to my phone, I won’t have to stream it), and is a giant pain in the ass - my laptop is asleep 90% of the time. EDIT: The wifi network restriction only applies to local sync - you can cache files using any old wifi connection.
• The iPhone app is rough around the edges. It’s not hooked into the iOS music API properly (i.e. artist name/title of song don’t show on the Lock screen). It’s forgotten where I am in a playlist on multiple occasions. It wants to gobble up a ton of space (6 GB for ~300 songs?) and doesn’t have decent space management options. EDIT: The lock screen issue seems to be a restriction of Apple’s API’s - not a Spotify problem (Pandora has the same issue).
• Licensing issues for tracks are handled poorly (error message that essentially suggests pirating the song and transferring it locally). This is especially embarrassing for the 30+ unavailable tracks on the “Spotify Top 100”.
• The catalog is a mess for something licensed from labels - slightly more organized that a BitTorrent tracker, but significantly less organized than iTunes/Amazon (tons of duplicate albums, “local” music confusing things, shoving multiple artists with the same name into the same artist page).

Things I’m not sure about

• I’ve decided to throw privacy to the wind and embrace the Facebook integration. The sharing has been mostly cool (a FB friend writing on my wall re: the song I was listening to), and a little scary (will I listen to Britney in “public” mode once and suffer massive loss of man points?).
• The social playlist sharing is even more promising, but not there yet. I have a gajillion Facebook friends, but only ~30 have musical taste I’d like to mooch off of. Spotify’s “shove your entire friend list on the app” approach results in a useless jumble for me. Additionally, there’s no easy way (that I could find) to find playlists created by tastemakers. I stumbled onto Bob Boylan’s profile (of NPR fame) - but only because I had a friend who subscribed to one of his playlists. I would kill for the ability to subscribe to a Pitchfork “Best New Music” playlist and have it sync automatically to my phone.
• UI is frustratingly un-mac-like (i.e. window close buttons on the right, instead of the left of the title bar), but it’s not terrible.
• Am I supporting the bands I like with my $10/mo to Spotify (vs. buying 1-2 albums for ~$10/month beforehand)?

Tagged: contenttech