2008-06-23 – A Scott Odyssey

Since the iTunes store opened, I have been a customer. I have bought a bunch of music from the store over the years. I have still bought regular CD’s but recently that has been happening less and less. Out of all the online buying options I liked that Apple’s AAC format’s DRM would allow me to burn regular CD’s. But recently I have ran into issues with that option. I have wanted to play music bought from iTunes on my Nokia phone. In order for me to that I have to burn the music to a CD and then rip it back to iTunes as an MP3. By doing this I would lose quality. I knew this when I bought the music in the first place, but I didn’t think I would need to do the conversion ever so I figured what the heck. Well fast forward a few years and if I bought all my music as CD’s and just ripped them as MP3’s I wouldn’t be in this situation.

I know that the iTunes store does offer some MP3’s without any DRM, but the issue is the store only offers SOME MP3’s. I haven’t found a song I want to buy from iTunes that was in MP3 format. About a week ago I checked out the Amazon MP3 store. I have heard about the store since it came out, but the ease of use of the iTunes store kept me lazy and I never checked it out. Last week I picked up 1 single to try out. Amazon made it really easy to buy and import my completely DRM free MP3 into iTunes. I was very impressed, but how about the stores selection?

Yesterday I did some browsing for music. I searched the iTunes store and then searched the same music on the Amazon MP3 store. What I found was that most of the music I wanted was in both stores. I ended up buying the latest Stoke 9 album on the Amazon MP3 site. I actually was going to buy that album about a month ago but I held off because I wanted a DRM free version. Now I have it. I will say I am not a huge fan of the DRM in Amazon’s ebooks, but I buy them. That being said I am impressed with the DRM free music they offer. For now I am switching to the amazon store vs the itunes store for my music. I will wait for more music to be DRM free on the itunes store, but I am not holding my breath.

For the future, I don’t see myself buying any DRM enabled music. I will get it from amazon or another store that offer’s DRM free music, or I will buy the CD’s like I used to and just rip the music. This is a time where I will not let laziness win out anymore. Now I wait for a more open ebook reader like the Kindle, but until then I will be still buying DRM’d books.

Amazon MP3 Store, ebook, iTunes, iTunes Store, Kindle, Shopping

I think I am going to get back to basics on some of these posts. I want to write down simply what I did for the day. This is how I originally started writing a journal many years ago before blogs got big. I will still have regular posts like I normally do, but i want ot have at least a blirb about what I did for the day. I will keep the titles simple like the one I have on this post. I am doing that just because it is hard to come up with snappy titles all the time.

Today I worked on some status reports for my boss. I worked on getting the status of several projects that are in progress right now. I also had to rebuild my desktop in the office in between working on stuff. The linux install I put on last week wasn’t working out, and the backup image I took of the machine didn’t work so all I could do was do a restore from the factory defaults. Thankfully that doesn’t require allot of effort from me.

I went to the post office to ship my Treo 750 that I sold on ebay. Thankfully it didn’t rain as I walked the 10 blocks to the nearest post office. I don’t understand how in mid town manhattan you have to go 10 blocks in any direction to find a post office. Oh well.

It was unusually hot in my office today. I don’t get it since it was only like 75 degrees outside today. Maybe it was the humidity. It got worse in the afternoon when I had a meeting in my office and there were 4 of us with the door closed. Man it can cook when you do that. Thankfully the meeting was very productive and I think we have a game plan for solving some design questions on an old hardware platform we need to support for a while linger. Now I have to write up a proposal to our vendor and see what they think.

I got out of the office at a reasonable time. I cooked up some stuff I had fresh from my Fresh Direct on Sunday. That was tasty. I got to talk to both my parents, and I emailed my brother in law back an answer to a question he sent me. I got to relax at home after that. I also even had a chance to write this post.