Firehed’s Blog

256k MP3, no DRM, and all the typical Amazon love. It doesn’t have *quite* the same ease-of-use of iTunes, only because you’re going through a website instead of a web app, but the purchase and download process is quick and easy (damn you, One-click!), and the music is added in to iTunes automatically (presumably you choose between iTunes and WMP on Windows, as it mentions both).

I wanted to see if some of the artists I like are on the MP3 store yet (they aren’t), but their String Quartet Tribute counterparts are. For those who haven’t yet listened to a SQ Tribute - it’s a sort of classical twist on your favorite music. Instrumental, of course. I suppose it’s something you either love or hate - and I happen to love them. Anyways, I managed to snap up two albums for $9 each, namely
The String Quartet Tribute to Breaking Benjamin and Strung Out on Three Days Grace: The String Quartet Tribute. I don’t dare go down the path of musical tastes, but there’s a couple examples anyways. Unfortunately I can’t seem to link properly to the MP3 store pages, so those’ll take you to the CD. For half the price, I can’t complain about not having the physical disc, and of course can’t complain about the DRM either as there isn’t any.

Oddly enough, this has worked out much more smoothly than my last iTunes purchase. I’d gone for We Can Create by Maps, primarily because it was $6 in iTunes as an iTunes Plus download (256k AAC, no DRM) and wanted to support the move of cheap music without copy protection in the only way you can do so in a capitalist society. Unfortunately, something went haywire in the downloads, only half the songs came through, and some had DRM anyways. To their credit, Apple was good about sorting it out, but by experience of a whole fifteen minutes with Amazon’s MP3 store has been infinitely more positive.

And just to show how damn well smart playlists work, the two albums above that I purchased automatically found their way into my String Quartet list. As expected, but this is one of the times where something actually went as expected. Heck, even all of the metadata (with both track, total tracks, and discs - which never seems to happen) and album art came in just as it should have.

So, in three words: Well done, Amazon! Apple, you now have some serious competition up against the iTunes Store. Video next, please!

Oh yeah, I should note that I’m typically one to avoid purchasing my music whenever I can avoid it. So if it can make me cough up, they did something right.

(Disclosure: those are affiliate links to the music, but I would have said the exact same thing even if Amazon didn’t have an affiliate program)

Figured it was about time to decide what software I was actually going to use this time around, since I had about seven different tools for everything previously.

Macromates’ TextMate, of course, for my text editor. I bought this as part of the MacHeist bundle, and it’s fantastic. Yeah, a fantastic text editor? For a programmer, there’s such a thing, and I’ve never used anything better.

David Watanabe’s Xtorrent for my Bit-torrent app. Recently released version 1.1, and it’s one of those beautiful apps that just does the Aqua interface right. I’m still waiting for proper traffic encryption - the only reason I had Azureus installed previously, but it’ll come in time, and I can do little tricks if I’m being thottled. His NewsFire RSS client is also fantastic, though I’ve been using Google Reader as of late simply because it’s hard to keep multiple local clients in sync.

Ecto as my blogging app. Simple, clean, and easy. I use Wordpress’ own system if I’m not at my own machine, but the desktop app is definitely preferable.

I’m giving Adobe’s Lightroom a try right now and liking the day’s worth of it I’ve seen, but the new iPhoto is nice too. And Aperture is nice as well. Yeah, they’re all good solutions. But I’ve gotta say that Adobe’s seems MUCH faster, and has a lot more post-processing features that both iPhoto 08 and Aperture 1.5 lack. I’ll come up with a decision eventually.

For everything else, it’s mostly Apple’s own apps, excepting Safari which I’ve dumped in favor of Firefox (I need my extensions, thanks) - iTunes, Mail, Terminal, Finder, etc. I’ve tried both Terminal and Finder replacements in the past, but they just never did it for me. I’d really like to use Thunderbird instead of Mail, but it just doesn’t have the proper iTunes/iPhone and Address Book integration that it needs to win me over.

Well, hacking the iPhone was easy enough. It’s down to a one-click GUI app now, though when I did it, it took a whole bash command in the shell. The next step is to just dive in and create my own apps then, right? Who needs what the community can give me when I can just do it myself! Free stuff with no effort is great and all, but I’ve got spare time, so why not go for it?

Well, yeah. I’m now finishing a reinstallation of OS X. I’m not sure what happened along the way, but while trying to set up the community-developed iPhone SDK, I somehow managed to break things to the point of ls not working anymore. No, not on the shell of the iPhone, but of my laptop. I don’t know how… I thought I was just copying files over. Guess not.

So, whatever, screw it. I’ve got a recent backup, but it’s a mess anyways. I don’t need to think about how many useless apps I’ve managed to acquire over the last 18 months or so, seeing that I only use about five of them now.

And all of this useless pain in order to be able to make an app that I haven’t even thought about, that in all likelihood will be made better by someone else. Don’t I feel silly?