Beam Me Up! Music in the Cloud....

If you maintain your music collection within iTunes, then you must be excited with its new music Match feature. 

Demoed at Apple's WWDC in June 2011, this looked at one of the most interesting features. For $25 per year, its not too expensive, and provides a seamless way to keep all your devices in sync with a common music collection.

So, how is different from Amazon's or Google's music in the cloud services? I have been using this service for over a month now, and here's what I think.

First, instead of taking weeks (if your music collection has thousands of songs, that is), the process of uploading the songs to Apple's data servers is fast - by fast, I mean in a matter of a few hours, I was able to upload 6000+ songs. iTunes Match services scans your library and tries to match your local songs with what is available already with iTunes music store (based on meta tags, song duration etc). It then uploads whatever songs it couldn't match. I was surprised by the number of songs it was able to match - that included Hindi and Bengali songs as well!

Second, once the music is in the cloud, you can delete your local songs from your PC, and redownload the songs from the cloud. If it was "matched" instead of uploaded, what you get is a 256 kbps AAC song file. This means, even those low quality MP3s you ripped from your friend's CD collection can now be replaced with a high quality AAC versions.

On your portable Apple devices, you have an option to "download" the song, listen to it, and delete it later to save space. I like this better than streaming, as you are not dependent on your data connection speed, data limit and availability to access your entire music collection.

Songs you directly purchase directly from iTunes music store do not count to the 25,000 song limit. And I consider 25,000 songs is an overkill for me.

Currently, this is US only, and is available only within the music app for Apple devices (iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch).

There were a few things which Apple does need to iron out:

1. Not all songs are uploaded / matched. I get an "error" status for some files. This may be due to the fact that the files were encoded at a bitrate lower than 128kbps.

2. Album art display is not consistent. Its been a month now, and I still don't see all my album arts on my iPad (esp. when I group songs based on artists). When I play a song, it sometimes downloads the album art, but this is not a consistent behavior.

Overall, I am quite impressed with the way all my songs are now available on all my devices. Physical storage capacity is not an issue anymore. If I want to listen to a song, I can just search my entire music library within my iPhone / iPad, download the entire album, listen to it, and delete it by swiping it.

So, is it worth $25/year? Well, if you are tied to the Apple ecosystem, and have a huge music collection, I think this is a good service I am willing to pay for. iTunes Match is not a music subscription service (like Spotify), which many had hoped for, but this is an elegant way to have access all songs you own.

About This and That..

As the title says, I am in that "random" mood again, it seems. Another uneventful day in office has made me really tired, and so after an one hour nap in the evening, I decided to just update my blog. Yes, today's Friday, and I don't seem have much plans tonight.

I have been reading and smiling at the articles about the latest AIG bonus fiasco, and the hum-drum its causing across America - my take? Those idiots deserve to be treated like that (90% tax?? Ha ha :) )

For the last few days, I have been absorbed with the new Facebook home page - which, after giving an initial scornful look, I seem to like it. I mean, seriously, what's with this "what's in your mind" stuff? I liked "Abhishek is ..." better. But as they say, you get used to the change. But now, I am addicted to the new layout. The best part? I can comment on anything!!! And I just love people replying to those comments, and some of them are really witty replies :). Wonder, how come I didn't miss this feature before?

Listening to trance again - my current favorite being "Metaphorique" by Cape Town - truly mesmerizing :)

Decided to learn German, so, without thinking twice (after hearing about a good institute), enrolled for the weekend session. They are supposed to start tomorrow, so excited about it too :)

Tagging The Digital Music

I am obsessive about my music collection - you can say that I actually suffer from obsessive compulsive disorder when it comes to digital music - I like everything to be properly tagged, with cover arts. I remember, last year, when I bought my iPod, I spent an entire week sorting my entire collection. Initially I was manually updating some 4000+ songs, but then, I came across some good tools. So this post is mainly about those tools.

First is the TagRunner - this software automatically searches for missing tags in your music files. So the major part of your tagging problems are taken care by it. Next, if you use iTunes to listen to music, Tunesleeve can be used to search for album arts for each of the albums. It looks into your iTunes library and updates the cover arts of most of the albums (assuming all your songs are properly tagged with the correct albums).

In search for a song.....

Recently, I was listening to only 1 song in a continuous loop (lets say, for 1 whole day)...

I had mentioned somewhere in my earlier post about how enthu I was for watching "Frank Miller's 300". This was mainly because of the breathtaking trailer I happened to watch last year. Apart from the great cinematography, the other great thing was the soundtrack. Didn't know the name of the song that time, but I kept watching the trailer, as the combination of the video and the soundtrack was intoxicating!!! 300 turned out to be "bloody" great movie (apart from some of the "bloody" violent scenes when I kept my eyes shut)... Then, some days back, I got hold of the soundtrack from the movie. I started playing all the songs to search for the particular song I wanted. Unfortunately, I didn't find any thing even faintly resembling the one I wanted. Disappointed (the soundtrack distributor had tricked me into getting an album I wasn't going to listen - the songs were not that great when you just listen to them, it sounds better as a movie background)... Whatever, I was disappointed... But, then I searched for "300 soundtrack" in wikipedia (the great!!!), and this time, I wasn't disappointed. Turns out, the music in the trailer was never included in the OST, as it was composed by a group called "Nine Inch Nails" about 10 years back. But nevertheless, I got the name of the song, did a bit of googling, and was able to download it (god bless the person who had uploaded it to some file sharing site :) ).

BTW, the name of the song is "Just Like You Imagined", and it felt great to listen to it in a loop... Its hard rock, with some great piano in the background.... And this time, even without the video/trailer, it was good....

Some Random Thoughts

It has been more than a year since I started blogging. If you look at the earlier posts, you can see that this blog was created as I was getting bored after my college had finished, and I had nothing much to do for some time. Then, once I started working, gradually I got busy (this was in Nov 06). New place, new friends, new responsibilities.... Now, as I am almost about to complete a year as a working professional, I am trying to recollect how the past year has been for me. In a word - "GREAT"!!!! :)

The biggest problem I have in life is that I just cannot sit idle. I need something to do, something to keep myself busy all the time, maybe work, or maybe some time-consuming pass-time... Things were fine initially, with training and all for the first few months. I was excited.... Then, we got out of our training, and a few months of no work. Fortunately, I was one of the lucky few to be allocated in a project in March, and thats when I really got busy (but, I still manage to post some random article on my blog at that time, something related to the excitement of watching 300 the movie etc etc).

In April, we had a short trip to Goa. It was fun, but it turned out to be a too short visit. I remembered some of the places from my previous visit to Goa (that was way back in 1990, i think). And, I managed to click loads of photos.

I got shifted to a new project in June, and had the opportunity to work with a new team. The work was great, and I had a chance to learn about so many new things, was given new responsibilities.

I got a 30GB iPod video 5th generation (late 2006 model) from the U.S. As, I had mentioned somewhere in my previous post, I always wished to own an iPod. Now, I have one. I bought it in July. I was aware that Apple is going to release the new versions of iPods in Sept, but I didn't mind buying the 5th generation model. Even now, after I have read the reviews of the new classic and the touch , I don't regret buying that. :). I have my whole music collection (worth 16GB of songs) with me in my pocket... What else do I want??? It has now become a faithful companion....

So, here I am, as always, sitting idle on a Saturday morning, wondering what to do next.... BTW, here are some pics I had taken some time back, and I thought of posting them on my blog......

This photo was taken from my hostel room way back in college. I loved the way the photo captures the approaching rains.....

This one was taken on our trip to Sinhgarh fort in Jan 2006. I love taking photos of the setting sun
This one was taken on the Surya Kiran airshow in Suratgarh AirForce Station in Sept 06. I loved the red-planes-on-the-blue-background contrast.
This one was taken on my trip to Goa (I told you, I love taking photos of the setting sun)

Fireworks on display at Corenthian Club, Pune (you can check the video in my previous post)
This photo was taken at dusk. I had disabled flash, and had kept the shutter speed to around 8 sec to get the effect of daylight (just check out the yellow street-lamp visible in the photo)