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It's out, and available for free download from iTunes. Rock. You should probably be warned, supposedly there's an "extended nude scene" so you might not want to watch this at work.
Hotel Chevalier (iTunes)
Technorati Tags: art, movies, Wes Anderson, comedy
Amazon announced a "public beta" of their new MP3 download service "Amazon MP3." It's actually a decent looking service, with EMI (who offers DRM-free downloads through iTunes), and Universal (who seems to despise Apple with a fiery passion) both on-board. Prices seem to be $.89 or $.99 per song, and very from $4.99 to $9.99 for most albums, occasionally going higher in some instances.
I decided to give it a shot, and started looking for a particular album: Stars - Set Yourself on Fire. I typed "Stars" into the search field, and came up with these results. Stars, the band, is nowhere to be found in the list of results, so at least for the moment, search is useless. There's no point in having a search function if it's not properly polling.
I got a little frustrated, and started reading my usual music blogs, trying to find something to download. In the end, I wound up sifting through the new release section, and that's when I stumbled across Stars' newest album, In Our Bedroom After the War. I was a little surprised, and followed the Artist link back to, finally, find the album I wanted to buy in the first place. The interface is obviously clunky, search is broken, but with enough poking you might be able to find what you're looking for.
After a few minutes of poking around on the albums page, I figured what I pretty much already knew, and decided to buy the album. I didn't find any small-print about their definition of "DRM-free" being different form the actual definition of "DRM-free" so I was willing to plunk down my eight bucks and buy the album.
Now, when you're buying a whole album, you're required to use the Amazon MP3 Downloader software. It's essentially a download manager that works specifically with Amazon. You can bypass it if you're buying individual songs, but if you're getting a whole album, they require you to use it. I thought that was a little frustrating, as I don't really want to have to have software on my computer so I can simply buy music from one particular store. I've already chosen iTunes to be my music library manager, and I don't really want to use anything other than Safari or Firefox to manage my downloads. And, if I did, I'd want it to manage downloads from more locations than just Amazon.com. But, I gave it a shot, anyhow.
The fact of the matter is that the software isn't incredibly heavy, and you can quit it cleanly after your download finishes, plus you can pause your download if something incredibly important comes up. So, it does safeguard your download, which is pretty nice. I'm sure that Amazon developed it so that they could better guarantee that the songs I purchased were downloaded, therefore I don't get a refund or another download on their bill, but I do see it having an amount of customer-protection included, so I won't hate on it. It's just one more application I don't really need sitting on my hard drive.
Upon finishing the installation, Safari relaunched, and picked up where it left off. It asked me which of my two Amazon-registered credit cards I'd like to use, or I could add a new one. Thank guys. The actual purchase was uneventful and easy. Definitely the most pleasant part of the whole thing.
So the songs are downloading, and that's pretty great. Poking about in the Amazon MP3 Downloader preferences shows that the files are downloading to ~/Music/Amazon MP3/Stars/Set Yourself on Fire/ , and they're being automatically added to iTunes. This will be an unseen annoyance to a lot people in that they'll wind up with 2 copies of the album on their computer (as I did): 1 in the Amazon MP3 folder, and 1 in the iTunes Music folder, since by default iTunes copies added music to the the iTunes Music Folder. Personally, I like this setup, since it lets me easily take music I bought on my Laptop and move it to my Desktop at home, which is my media server. It saves me a step, and I can delete the folders from the Amazon MP3 folder, later.
The music is all Variable Bit Rate, but that's no big deal, because it seems to all be encoded with LAME3.97 which has a "VBR -0" option that produces a very high quality product - not lossless, but just about the quality of 320 kbs non-variable bitrate files.. 600 x 600 px album art is embedded into each file, so Coverflow looks sharp, and each file is fully-tagged. Ok, I'm pretty impressed.
My take-aways form the experience: Amazon followed the trend by offering a "Beta" product to the public. It's close to ready-for-prime-time, but it's not quite there. I will use it again, and I'll definitely be comparing iTunes to Amazon prices when I'm purchasing music. But when I'm using Amazon, I know that I'll have to double-check search results, and I'll have to take my time looking if I can't find what I want right away. I'll also have to remember to delete the contents of the Amazon MP3 folder every once in a while. All in all, Amazon has put together a good product, and I'm sure I'll use it in the future. It'll give iTunes some healthy competition, which Apple has so desperately needed recently. Well played, Amazon, and just in time. I'd been thinking, recently, that I use you significantly less than I used to, and it's nice to see you looking out for the consumer.
Technorati Tags: apple, first impression, internet, music, review, software
And gives over to bicyclists. This is pretty awesome, and I really wish places in the states would do stuff like this. The more I read, the more appealing England is.
BBC NEWS | England | London | Cyclists enjoy car ban in London:
Wes Anderson knows how to market a movie.
