Last week, I was watching Stephen Colbert interview Elvis Costello, Don Fleming and Emmylou Harris about the historical work of live music performance archivist Alan Lomax. I immediately leapt onto iTunes and found over 110 Lomax albums available for purchase. I was happy to have those Lomax gems in my iTunes Match library in the iCloud at 256 kbps.
Continue reading → The Alan Loax Collection: Is iTunes Censoring Musical History?
Last week, I was intrigued to read about the new “Mastered for iTunes” albums that are now appearing in the online store:
Enhanced Audio on iTunes: This week, Apple quietly introduced a new section of its iTunes store called Mastered for iTunes, with albums whose sound has been adjusted by engineers “for higher fidelity sound on your computer, stereo and all Apple devices.” Mastering, the fine tuning at the end of the recording process, has long been tailored to specific audio formats, and Apple’s changes come after years of complaints by musicians, including Neil Young, that sound quality suffers from the compression used by digital services to reduce a file’s size.
I have, generally, had a pretty good experience with Apple’s new iTunes Match music service since its debut last week, but there is one particular album that is giving me fits on iTunes Match.
As you can see in the screenshot below, Sergei Rachmaninoff’s “Complete” album — consisting of over 300 songs in total — is having trouble “matching” 63 of those songs on iTunes Match so I can download them to my computer via iTunes. The error I’m getting is 5002 — so, preternaturally — Apple blames my local network connection, even though I can buy and download new music and pull other matched songs from the iCloud without incident.
I’ve been a Google Music Beta user since the product first arrived six months or so ago. Yesterday, Google Music lost its “Beta” tag and went live and that’s why this morning — after trying the new service for less than a day — I am un-pinning my Google Music Chrome browser tab and forgetting all about the service. Google Music is now useless to me. Google Music is dead to me.
Continue reading → Why Google Music was Dead to Me the Day it Debuted Yesterday
Yesterday, I decided to test the new “In-Store Personal Pickup” option Apple is now offering customers when you order from the online Apple Store. I had to take the iPad 2 plunge — times two! — and I placed a nine-item order online at 10:30am in the morning and planned to pick up everything from the 14th Street Apple Store in New York City when I finished teaching later that night.
Continue reading → 14th Street Apple Store In-Store Personal Pickup Problems
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