10 ms·

Until just recently I was an iTunes power user. I have a 15 year old 80gb collection of pirated music - all full albums, all with pristine metadata and personal

Until just recently I was an iTunes power user. I have a 15 year old 80gb collection of pirated music - all full albums, all with pristine metadata and personalized genres. I do not have cover art tho, but I don't really care - until now. iTunes 11 makes a big deal about cover art - their UI is nearly exclusively dependent on it. I don't like thumbnails. When I look at my music, I want a big sortable list. I don't want a bunch of random (alphabetized) tiles that don't tell me much. Also - electronic music of today is largely post-album. It doesn't make sense to organize a bunch of remixes by different DJ by album cover. The previous version of iTunes had a hybrid view that had a sorted list with a small thumbnail to the left. It was useful because the thumbnails would scroll nicely with the text. But no longer as far as I can tell. The whole idea of curating my own collection, through either piracy or purchasing, seems outmoded to me. It's expensive even when it's free. Pirating music, at least at scale, is time consuming. iTunes is ridiculously expensive. My music collection would cost me $20k if I bought it and it feels woefully inadequate when I try find something to listen to. I just recently backed up my music collection and deleted it from my HD. I've signed up for Spotify Premium and am so far pleased. $10 is very fair (a bit high, but fair). The quality is consistent, I can save songs and playlists to my devices (feels like buying) and create radio stations that are functionally superior to Pandora (skipping, etc) but algorithmically inferior (try getting it to play Louis Armstrong style music and see how long it takes to play modern music, for me it's two tracks regardless of downvotes). Music discovery is just as important as curation, and Spotify scratches both itches. The iOS apps are buggy but so far it's working. I'm happy to leave iTunes behind. That said, I really loved SmartPlaylists. SmartPlaylists + Accurate Genres + Ratings = Powerful, Granular Track Syncing. It's just too time consuming, and now hard to manage with new emphasis on cover art.

ry0ohki 14y ago
I love that $10 for monthly access to basically every album ever on demand is "a bit high". I remember dropping $16 a pop on CDs/Tapes at Tower Records back in the day, probably bought at least two a month... In terms of your issue with iTunes cover art, didn't they announce some thing where you pay a flat fee and is basically matches all of your illegal music with legal one when iCloud was introduced (I never tried it just remember the keynote vaguely)
- nextstep 14y ago
  You're recalling iTunes Match, the service which allows you to upload/match your iTunes library and access it across multiple devices. This service is $25/year. However, you can have iTunes download album art (even for albums you've imported and haven't bought through iTunes) for free. You can just select every song in your library and the right-click and choose "Get Album Artwork" or something like that. It works decently for music you have somewhat accurately tagged (at least a correct artist and album name). Again, this fails for a lot of electronic music though.
  - andrewmunsell 14y ago
    ...no...he's probably referring to any other streaming music service, where you do get access to almost every album/song, like Spotify. EDIT: Yeah, see the guy he replied to. He's referring to Spotify Premium.
  - wiredfool 14y ago
    In my collection, The album art matcher is quite bad. Stuff that's tagged correctly and well known (e.g. Led Zeppelin) comes up with the wrong (but related) image. Where it really falls down are compilations, I think it's running about a 20% hit rate on those.
  - crag 14y ago
    "Again, this fails for a lot of electronic music though." It also fails for classical music. But since I ripped CD's I just scanned in the cover and added the art. Trust me, it was time consuming. But there is hope, iTunes has added much more classical/opera recently. So changes are, if I had to do this all over - a lot of the art would be available from iTunes.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- joeguilmette 14y ago
  I have iTunes Match a shot - it was ok but it didn't get all of my music fixed and it didn't change any of the fundamental issues I have with the whole workflow. Find artist Download/buy albums Listen to songs, rate, put in playlists Sync to devices (this it solved)
arrrg 14y ago
That had nothing at all to do with the submission. Why the hell did you feel inspired to write this? I don’t get it. It seems like a fairly detailed description of your fairly niche needs that are hard to generalize in any real way. Neither useful nor really interesting.
- mwexler 14y ago
  Other than admitting to piracy, his needs sound like the same as anyone with a music collection of any realistic size. I struggle with many of the same issues around the emphasis on the "album cover" as the unit of organization in 11, so I don't think it's as niche as you make it sound. Agreed that it's a step away from the top level submission however.
  - adsr 14y ago
    It's a personal preference, and it's still possible to pick a list view with no album art in iTunes 11. I often have a visual recollection of album covers, be it singles or whole albums as well as physical location (if it's real singles). It's not really only albums that gains from album art, singles with remixes would still have a cover which I vastly prefer myself as compared to a blank square. Still it's a critique of iTunes as such, while the submission is related to generating color themes from an image algorithmically.
  - arrrg 14y ago
    Most people buy/pirate music that has album covers or can easily be organized around album covers. iTunes is pretty good about giving even a library with pretty horrible metadata decent covers. Plus: There is the artist view. I don’t see the emphasis on album covers. The artist view is just as (if not more) competent and it’s not at all based around the album cover.
  - veridies 14y ago
    Depends on how you do things. I make sure to always grab album art for my music, and I remember the art. Despite having thousands of albums, I can identify most by the artwork. I also tend to listen to one album at a time. For my needs, iTunes 11 is almost perfect The biggest flaw for me is that they got rid of the composer view, which makes quickly finding classical music vastly more difficult. Stupid, annoying omission.
7402 14y ago
When someone casually states that he has an "80gb collection of pirated music," I assume he feels that the act of copying contrary to the wishes of the copyright holder is either a good thing or, at worst, ethically neutral. For those of us who disagree with this idea, it is important call out instances that seem to minimize the significance of this. By remaining silent, we help encourage behavior we disagree with. Opinions differ. Strategies for reforming copyright differ. But I think the issue is important enough that people who think it's OK to ignore copyrights en masse should be explicit about their beliefs. Is your opinion that: 1. Copyrights are bogus. I should be able to copy anything I get my hands on. 2. Copyrights are good if they benefit licenses such as the GPL. Copyrights are bad if they benefit big record companies. 3. Copyrights should apply to books. Copyrights should not apply to music or software. My opinion is that there are many aspects of current copyright laws that I would like to see changed, but that generally current laws should be followed unless they rise to a level of evilness that calls for civil disobedience, a principled and public decision to disobey the law in an attempt to get the law changed. I also think that the benefit of the doubt should be given to the author of a creative work as to their wishes for the copying of the product of their work. Personal convenience or being a cheapskate are not, I believe, sufficient reasons to fail to pay for the copyrighted materials that you have obtained.
- joeguilmette 14y ago
  I think that our pricing models for media are vestigial remnants of an era that suffered from a distribution problem. When I buy a $15 kindle ebook that is from a publishing house vs a $2 kindle ebook that is self published, I have a sense that the artist in both instances gets a similar amount of money - that is to say, the publishing house is what is making that book expensive. Same with music. The cost of production and distribution is close to zero, with a hobbyist grade audio set up and a laptop one could produce an album the same as anyone else and with decades old P2P software distribute it for free to the globe. So when artists sell their art for a fair price - $2/3 for an ebook, $4/5 for an album, I'll buy it. When prices go beyond that its usually because a big distributor is involved and I don't mind just pirating the content. Same with TV. I pay for Netflix and Hulu and I go to theaters. If you withhold your content from those services, or it doesn't warrant a $40 theatre experience, I just pirate it. Also, sometimes I want to watch some TV shows on the go, so I'll pirate something available via Hulu and store it on a device for later consumption. So really it has nothing to do with copyright, just that I feel that their pricing is out of control and piracy has been made mainstream and easy enough that I don't mind piracy to fill in the gaps to the services I subscribe to.
ghshephard 14y ago
I don't what's worse about your comment - that you seem to think that there is nothing wrong with having pirated music, that you admit to having done so in a public forum, or that you are so blasé about it that you did so with your (presumably) real name. I wonder where people like you draw the line at such behavior. Why is music any different than TV Shows? Or Movies? Or eBooks? Would you feel comfortable "pirating" all those as well? Hell, why not go all the way and pirate software as well - presumably that has no protection from your urges to accumulate. I often wonder, under what moral authority, other than "It was really easy and I wasn't caught and/or punished for doing it" people feel comfortable "pirating" other people's intellectual property.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- untog 14y ago
  I wonder where people like you draw the line at such behavior. Why is music any different than TV Shows? Or Movies? Or eBooks? Would you feel comfortable "pirating" all those as well? Hell, why not go all the way and pirate software as well A lot of people do all these things- I thought that was relatively well known. Not that I am condoning it, but if we're talking about drawing the line... it's very far away from where you're discussing it. I suspect it lies somewhere near "is a real physical item".
  - tarabukka 14y ago
    >I thought that was relatively well known I find that most HN contributors are well-off, don't make too many movies/songs and contribute under their real name. Put those facts together and you can easily get a hivemind reaction of "piracy is extremely evil with zero justification ever for anyone".
    - jbigelow76 14y ago
      Weird, I have the exact opposite impression, I always thought the common HN hivemind mentality was EXTREMELY pro piracy, usually rationalized with one of the following justifications: 1. "I wasn't going to buy it anyway so the author isn't losing a sale" 2. Zero incremental cost! 3. "If I like it I'll eventually maybe buy it" (if only I could use that defense after stealing a Porsche) 4. Paul Graham's oddball (in my opinion at least) "stealing the smells" re-imagining of property. [http://www.paulgraham.com/property.html http://www.paulgraham.com/property.html]
forrestthewoods 14y ago
I hope you don't really think that $10 is "bit high, but fair". Spotify is horrible for artists and pays them next to nothing. Assuming you fully own the rights to your music it takes 232,000 plays per month just to make minimum wage for a single artist [1]. Now consider that Spotify, and similar streaming services, are losing money hand over fist and it's obvious this model can not last [2]. Personally I put Spotify at the same tier as piracy. I mean that not in terms of morals or ethics but in regards to the viability of the industry. If you want to copy all music ever recorded that's fine, go for it. We're almost all guilty to some extent. If however you'd like to see new music created in the future then you owe it to yourself to compensate the artists you enjoy. The most dangerous thing about Spotify is that people genuinely believe listening to a few ads an hour or paying a mere $10/month is enough to support the industry they love. [1] http://www.digitalmusicnews.com/permalink/2012/120730infamous http://www.digitalmusicnews.com/permalink/2012/120730infamou... [2] http://www.businessinsider.com/spotify-revenue-2012-10 http://www.businessinsider.com/spotify-revenue-2012-10
- robryan 14y ago
  What I don't get though is why doesn't spotify pick a more sustainable subscription price. I guess there is the issue of less sustainable competitors. I would be happy to pay at least double, that would be a vast collection of music vs 2 albums a month.
  - forrestthewoods 14y ago
    I would assume because their goal is not to create a sustainable business model but to grow a massive user base and sell/IPO for >$1 billion.
- shpiel 14y ago
  I don't think anyone (with the possible exception of the Spotify marketing department) thinks that Spotify will be the savior of the music industry. Most popular artists know this. Popular artists like Radiohead, Taylor Swift, or Arcade Fire either distribute only a portion of their work on Spotify, or distribute it with a delay. And Spotify is better than piracy for record labels. (i) Spotify provides useful data for labels (at least those that have an ownership stake in Spotify), (ii) the revenue, in aggregate, is not insignificant and certainly better than revenue from piracy (again this benefits the labels with ownership stakes), and (iii) gives them a measure of messaging control. Essentially, Spotify is marketing channel for major labels.
ojbyrne 14y ago
Spotify is great, but my main concern with it is it is not profitable yet - far from it actually. So they could either go away at some point, or do draconian things that will make the experience too unpleasant to continue. So I'm not quite willing to rely on it yet.
afterburner 14y ago
I am fearing a possible transition from iOS to Android because I'd be dropping SmartPlaylists... from what I gather though there are options. I just hope they're as good.
- joeguilmette 14y ago
  I lived by SmartPlaylists. I basically ended up just dragging and dropping them into Spotify, thus making them static DumbPlaylists. With a Spotify-like service I doubt you'll miss them, tho.
signalsignal 14y ago
This is a really good copy. You appealed to the develop base of this site and made it sound like something other than a press release.
jsz0 14y ago
The whole idea of curating my own collection, through either piracy or purchasing, seems outmoded to me. Interesting perspective but personally that doesn't work for me. I am not hung up on owning a physical item like a record or CD but I am hung up on having a space where these records I love all live together. There are no un-inivted outsiders. Every record in the collection has a story. Collecting them together and presenting them in a beautiful way is exactly what I want. I do use other services for music discovery but anything new I find doesn't touch my library until it has proven itself to be worthy to sit next to my favorites. I'm very weary of digital overload these days. For the first time in many years I've actually gone through my library and started to remove records I don't actually love. I'm making the choice to segment my musical world into what I consider to be the essentials and to everything else that I may like but don't really care much about. If they could be nicely combined into one platform that would work for me too but the first time I couldn't find one of my favorite records on Spotify I realized it would never be an iTunes replacement for me. (also going forward it's not clear all existing music available on any of these services will always be there. That's very troubling to me)
lectrick 14y ago
The funny thing is that the very first thing I did when I first fired up this iTunes version was return it to the track listing view. I did not even discover this color-matching feature until I saw it in Hacker News today!

ry0ohki 14y ago

I love that $10 for monthly access to basically every album ever on demand is "a bit high". I remember dropping $16 a pop on CDs/Tapes at Tower Records back in the day, probably bought at least two a month... In terms of your issue with iTunes cover art, didn't they announce some thing where you pay a flat fee and is basically matches all of your illegal music with legal one when iCloud was introduced (I never tried it just remember the keynote vaguely)

nextstep 14y ago
You're recalling iTunes Match, the service which allows you to upload/match your iTunes library and access it across multiple devices. This service is $25/year. However, you can have iTunes download album art (even for albums you've imported and haven't bought through iTunes) for free. You can just select every song in your library and the right-click and choose "Get Album Artwork" or something like that. It works decently for music you have somewhat accurately tagged (at least a correct artist and album name). Again, this fails for a lot of electronic music though.
- andrewmunsell 14y ago
  ...no...he's probably referring to any other streaming music service, where you do get access to almost every album/song, like Spotify. EDIT: Yeah, see the guy he replied to. He's referring to Spotify Premium.
- wiredfool 14y ago
  In my collection, The album art matcher is quite bad. Stuff that's tagged correctly and well known (e.g. Led Zeppelin) comes up with the wrong (but related) image. Where it really falls down are compilations, I think it's running about a 20% hit rate on those.
- crag 14y ago
  "Again, this fails for a lot of electronic music though." It also fails for classical music. But since I ripped CD's I just scanned in the cover and added the art. Trust me, it was time consuming. But there is hope, iTunes has added much more classical/opera recently. So changes are, if I had to do this all over - a lot of the art would be available from iTunes.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
joeguilmette 14y ago
I have iTunes Match a shot - it was ok but it didn't get all of my music fixed and it didn't change any of the fundamental issues I have with the whole workflow. Find artist Download/buy albums Listen to songs, rate, put in playlists Sync to devices (this it solved)

arrrg 14y ago

That had nothing at all to do with the submission. Why the hell did you feel inspired to write this? I don’t get it. It seems like a fairly detailed description of your fairly niche needs that are hard to generalize in any real way. Neither useful nor really interesting.

mwexler 14y ago
Other than admitting to piracy, his needs sound like the same as anyone with a music collection of any realistic size. I struggle with many of the same issues around the emphasis on the "album cover" as the unit of organization in 11, so I don't think it's as niche as you make it sound. Agreed that it's a step away from the top level submission however.
- adsr 14y ago
  It's a personal preference, and it's still possible to pick a list view with no album art in iTunes 11. I often have a visual recollection of album covers, be it singles or whole albums as well as physical location (if it's real singles). It's not really only albums that gains from album art, singles with remixes would still have a cover which I vastly prefer myself as compared to a blank square. Still it's a critique of iTunes as such, while the submission is related to generating color themes from an image algorithmically.
- arrrg 14y ago
  Most people buy/pirate music that has album covers or can easily be organized around album covers. iTunes is pretty good about giving even a library with pretty horrible metadata decent covers. Plus: There is the artist view. I don’t see the emphasis on album covers. The artist view is just as (if not more) competent and it’s not at all based around the album cover.
- veridies 14y ago
  Depends on how you do things. I make sure to always grab album art for my music, and I remember the art. Despite having thousands of albums, I can identify most by the artwork. I also tend to listen to one album at a time. For my needs, iTunes 11 is almost perfect The biggest flaw for me is that they got rid of the composer view, which makes quickly finding classical music vastly more difficult. Stupid, annoying omission.

7402 14y ago

When someone casually states that he has an "80gb collection of pirated music," I assume he feels that the act of copying contrary to the wishes of the copyright holder is either a good thing or, at worst, ethically neutral. For those of us who disagree with this idea, it is important call out instances that seem to minimize the significance of this. By remaining silent, we help encourage behavior we disagree with. Opinions differ. Strategies for reforming copyright differ. But I think the issue is important enough that people who think it's OK to ignore copyrights en masse should be explicit about their beliefs. Is your opinion that: 1. Copyrights are bogus. I should be able to copy anything I get my hands on. 2. Copyrights are good if they benefit licenses such as the GPL. Copyrights are bad if they benefit big record companies. 3. Copyrights should apply to books. Copyrights should not apply to music or software. My opinion is that there are many aspects of current copyright laws that I would like to see changed, but that generally current laws should be followed unless they rise to a level of evilness that calls for civil disobedience, a principled and public decision to disobey the law in an attempt to get the law changed. I also think that the benefit of the doubt should be given to the author of a creative work as to their wishes for the copying of the product of their work. Personal convenience or being a cheapskate are not, I believe, sufficient reasons to fail to pay for the copyrighted materials that you have obtained.

joeguilmette 14y ago
I think that our pricing models for media are vestigial remnants of an era that suffered from a distribution problem. When I buy a $15 kindle ebook that is from a publishing house vs a $2 kindle ebook that is self published, I have a sense that the artist in both instances gets a similar amount of money - that is to say, the publishing house is what is making that book expensive. Same with music. The cost of production and distribution is close to zero, with a hobbyist grade audio set up and a laptop one could produce an album the same as anyone else and with decades old P2P software distribute it for free to the globe. So when artists sell their art for a fair price - $2/3 for an ebook, $4/5 for an album, I'll buy it. When prices go beyond that its usually because a big distributor is involved and I don't mind just pirating the content. Same with TV. I pay for Netflix and Hulu and I go to theaters. If you withhold your content from those services, or it doesn't warrant a $40 theatre experience, I just pirate it. Also, sometimes I want to watch some TV shows on the go, so I'll pirate something available via Hulu and store it on a device for later consumption. So really it has nothing to do with copyright, just that I feel that their pricing is out of control and piracy has been made mainstream and easy enough that I don't mind piracy to fill in the gaps to the services I subscribe to.

ghshephard 14y ago

I don't what's worse about your comment - that you seem to think that there is nothing wrong with having pirated music, that you admit to having done so in a public forum, or that you are so blasé about it that you did so with your (presumably) real name. I wonder where people like you draw the line at such behavior. Why is music any different than TV Shows? Or Movies? Or eBooks? Would you feel comfortable "pirating" all those as well? Hell, why not go all the way and pirate software as well - presumably that has no protection from your urges to accumulate. I often wonder, under what moral authority, other than "It was really easy and I wasn't caught and/or punished for doing it" people feel comfortable "pirating" other people's intellectual property.

deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
untog 14y ago
I wonder where people like you draw the line at such behavior. Why is music any different than TV Shows? Or Movies? Or eBooks? Would you feel comfortable "pirating" all those as well? Hell, why not go all the way and pirate software as well A lot of people do all these things- I thought that was relatively well known. Not that I am condoning it, but if we're talking about drawing the line... it's very far away from where you're discussing it. I suspect it lies somewhere near "is a real physical item".
- tarabukka 14y ago
  >I thought that was relatively well known I find that most HN contributors are well-off, don't make too many movies/songs and contribute under their real name. Put those facts together and you can easily get a hivemind reaction of "piracy is extremely evil with zero justification ever for anyone".
  - jbigelow76 14y ago
    Weird, I have the exact opposite impression, I always thought the common HN hivemind mentality was EXTREMELY pro piracy, usually rationalized with one of the following justifications: 1. "I wasn't going to buy it anyway so the author isn't losing a sale" 2. Zero incremental cost! 3. "If I like it I'll eventually maybe buy it" (if only I could use that defense after stealing a Porsche) 4. Paul Graham's oddball (in my opinion at least) "stealing the smells" re-imagining of property. [http://www.paulgraham.com/property.html http://www.paulgraham.com/property.html]

forrestthewoods 14y ago

I hope you don't really think that $10 is "bit high, but fair". Spotify is horrible for artists and pays them next to nothing. Assuming you fully own the rights to your music it takes 232,000 plays per month just to make minimum wage for a single artist [1]. Now consider that Spotify, and similar streaming services, are losing money hand over fist and it's obvious this model can not last [2]. Personally I put Spotify at the same tier as piracy. I mean that not in terms of morals or ethics but in regards to the viability of the industry. If you want to copy all music ever recorded that's fine, go for it. We're almost all guilty to some extent. If however you'd like to see new music created in the future then you owe it to yourself to compensate the artists you enjoy. The most dangerous thing about Spotify is that people genuinely believe listening to a few ads an hour or paying a mere $10/month is enough to support the industry they love. [1] http://www.digitalmusicnews.com/permalink/2012/120730infamous http://www.digitalmusicnews.com/permalink/2012/120730infamou... [2] http://www.businessinsider.com/spotify-revenue-2012-10 http://www.businessinsider.com/spotify-revenue-2012-10

robryan 14y ago
What I don't get though is why doesn't spotify pick a more sustainable subscription price. I guess there is the issue of less sustainable competitors. I would be happy to pay at least double, that would be a vast collection of music vs 2 albums a month.
- forrestthewoods 14y ago
  I would assume because their goal is not to create a sustainable business model but to grow a massive user base and sell/IPO for >$1 billion.
shpiel 14y ago
I don't think anyone (with the possible exception of the Spotify marketing department) thinks that Spotify will be the savior of the music industry. Most popular artists know this. Popular artists like Radiohead, Taylor Swift, or Arcade Fire either distribute only a portion of their work on Spotify, or distribute it with a delay. And Spotify is better than piracy for record labels. (i) Spotify provides useful data for labels (at least those that have an ownership stake in Spotify), (ii) the revenue, in aggregate, is not insignificant and certainly better than revenue from piracy (again this benefits the labels with ownership stakes), and (iii) gives them a measure of messaging control. Essentially, Spotify is marketing channel for major labels.

ojbyrne 14y ago

Spotify is great, but my main concern with it is it is not profitable yet - far from it actually. So they could either go away at some point, or do draconian things that will make the experience too unpleasant to continue. So I'm not quite willing to rely on it yet.

afterburner 14y ago

I am fearing a possible transition from iOS to Android because I'd be dropping SmartPlaylists... from what I gather though there are options. I just hope they're as good.

joeguilmette 14y ago
I lived by SmartPlaylists. I basically ended up just dragging and dropping them into Spotify, thus making them static DumbPlaylists. With a Spotify-like service I doubt you'll miss them, tho.

signalsignal 14y ago

This is a really good copy. You appealed to the develop base of this site and made it sound like something other than a press release.

jsz0 14y ago

The whole idea of curating my own collection, through either piracy or purchasing, seems outmoded to me. Interesting perspective but personally that doesn't work for me. I am not hung up on owning a physical item like a record or CD but I am hung up on having a space where these records I love all live together. There are no un-inivted outsiders. Every record in the collection has a story. Collecting them together and presenting them in a beautiful way is exactly what I want. I do use other services for music discovery but anything new I find doesn't touch my library until it has proven itself to be worthy to sit next to my favorites. I'm very weary of digital overload these days. For the first time in many years I've actually gone through my library and started to remove records I don't actually love. I'm making the choice to segment my musical world into what I consider to be the essentials and to everything else that I may like but don't really care much about. If they could be nicely combined into one platform that would work for me too but the first time I couldn't find one of my favorite records on Spotify I realized it would never be an iTunes replacement for me. (also going forward it's not clear all existing music available on any of these services will always be there. That's very troubling to me)

lectrick 14y ago

The funny thing is that the very first thing I did when I first fired up this iTunes version was return it to the track listing view. I did not even discover this color-matching feature until I saw it in Hacker News today!