The Modern:  I’ve blogged in the past about my love of the Sonos digital music system, which I’ve installed throughout my home.  As an avid music collector, over the years I’ve amassed a collection several thousand CDs strong.  However, there are still gaps in my collection, and sometimes you just need to hear The Bangles’ version of Hazy Shade of Winter.  Happily, Sonos released an upgrade a couple months ago which offered native Rhapsody support using the new Rhapsody APIs.  There had previously been Rhapsody support via a kludge whereby the Sonos system talked to a Windows PC with Rhapsody installed on it to allow Rhapsody support.  My house is an all Mac household, so I wasn’t going to go there.  Other folks have praised the new Sonos / Rhapsody integration, and I couldn’t agree more.  I always though about subscribing to Rhapsody to have access to the infinite jukebox in the sky, but it wasn’t until I test drove it on my Sonos that I decided to take the plunge and become a paying customer.

However, I have one UI big complaint that I just have to mention, and I hope the folks at Sonos and Rhapsody are listening.  I don’t know if the shortcoming is a result of Sonos’ design choices or a shortcoming in the Rhapsody API, but hopefully they’ll work together to iron this out.  The glaring omission in the Rhapsody interface on Sonos is the ability to do any kind of keyword search for an artist or album.  The Rhapsody browsing paradigm appears to be totally locked in to a hierarchical model which somewhat surprisingly has the musical genre as one of the top level branches, forcing me to guess what genre a particular artist has been categorized in, which often leads to a frustrating dead-end if you’ve chosen the wrong genre.  Is Alison Kraus country or bluegrass?  Is Jack Johnson rock or pop?  What genre is Steely Dan?  How about Ani DiFranco?  Anyway, Sonos / Rhapsody would go from good to great if I could just do a search for a specific artist or album and not have worry about which genre a particular artist has been categorized in.

The Retro:  My friend Jason called me over the weekend, and asked me to come over to see the "engineering marvel" he had just purchased.  I walked down the block (he lives all of 300 feet away) and was surprised to discover a vintage turn-of-the-century Brunswick Victrola that he had just purchased from a local antique shop.  The device is an amazing artifact because it manages to produce sound without any electricity.  A hand crank on the side winds a spring-driven motor that spins the turntable.  As it rides the vinyl record’s groove, the needle vibrates a membrane it is mechanically coupled to, creating (very quiet) sound in a chamber on the machined metal arm, which is hollow and pipes the sound produced by the membrane through an expanding horn-shaped tube, providing natural bullhorn-style amplification.  The horn terminates just behind the "speaker" grille shown in the picture.  The sound is a bit scratchy and tinny and lacks low-end frequencies, but it sounded surprisingly good to me given the decidedly low-tech means of producing the sound.  Never mind tubes, solid state circuitry, capacitors or resistors, there are no electronics of any kind in this system.  Cool.

The Convergence:  So here’s how the past and present converge.  After sitting around and listening to several very scratchy vintage  78s (including Bing Crosby’s White Christmas), Jason and I decided that what we really wanted to do was hear our own music on the Victrola.  After some research, Jason found a site called Custom Records Vinyl Mastering which allows you to have a custom one-off 78, 45 or 33 rpm LP vinyl phonograph record made from a digital audio file that you upload to the site.  So Jason uploaded a couple of tracks (Make Me Feel and Arabic Ska) from our band’s album, Summers in Rangoon, and we are anxiously awaiting the arrival of the vinyl 78s later this week.  I can’t wait for the anachronistic thrill I know I’ll get from hearing the low-fi sounds of Soul Patch emanating from the Brunswick phonograph.

Technorati Tags: Analog, Audio, Brunswick, Convergence, Digital, Music, Sonos, Victrola

When I moved to Boulder, I found out that our house (and several blocks of our street) in Boulder, CO didn’t exist, at least according to Yahoo, Google and MapQuest.

I filed a bug report with NAVTEQ, the provider of the underlying geodata and was told to not expect a fix for six to eighteen months. My colleague Jason (who lives on the same block) discovered that this problem has now been remedied on Google Maps, though Yahoo and MapQuest still provide erroneous data.

Thanks Google! Yahoo and MapQuest, please get your act together. I’m tired of furniture deliveries, electricians and plumbers winding up at the wrong place after relying on online mapping services to find my house.

Technorati Tags: Geocoding, Geocoding, Mapping, Maps

Jobs’ open letter, Thoughts on Music, published this morning, has brought the DRM-free music meme to the forefront in a way and scale that only Jobs can achieve. As Fred Wilson points out, perhaps Steve Jobs has had a change of heart when it comes to DRM. Or perhaps not.

We should remember that Jobs is first and foremost a great marketer and PR guy, and the beauty of publishing this letter is that it gets Apple fantastic PR and doesn’t cost the company anything, regardless of the outcome. And he does a great job of passing the blame (deservedly so) for the evils of DRM on to the record labels, where the blame belongs.

Apple already has de facto monopoly share with or without DRM. And historically, they haven’t been willing to open up FairPlay – the fact that I can’t stream my iTMS-purchased content in my home via Sonos or Squeezebox frustrates me on a daily basis. Between heat from the EU and the bad press Apple gets already from “activist” users and journalists who harpoon Apple for being closed and consumer unfriendly, their dominance and their DRM has become a liability.

I’m sure Apple would happily jettison DRM and it would solve some problems for them, though I think it would have minimal impact on the status quo WRT their market dominance, which means that some of Apple’s detractors will linger simply because they are the big gorilla when it comes to digital music.

Jobs wrote this letter for Apple’s benefit, and any positive side effects for consumers are just happy coincidences. This is a clear case of enlightened self-interest. He gets awesome PR and can position himself as the anti-DRM standards bearer, while solving a growing PR problem for Apple, whether or not it actually leads to a world of DRM-free music. Altruism does not necessarily play a part here and Apple wins regardless of the outcome.

Regardless of Job’s motives, which in the end don’t matter as this is a case of “greed is good”, I am encouraged and excited to see this issue in the limelight.

So kudos to Steve Jobs if he’s had a change of heart and now believes in the anti-DRM religion.

And kudos to him if this is all just savvy marketing and self-interest on his part. Either way, he’s brought the issue to forefront, and users benefit.

Technorati Tags: Apple, DRM, iPod, Jobs

Today as I arrived in Columbus, Ohio, I unwittingly found myself face to face with a bit of Americana:  the original Wendy’s location.  While I have been known from time to time to enjoy a nice Frosty, today all I took from Wendy’s was this picture, saving myself from the 430 calories in a medium-sized serving.