New Music Tuesday: 3 Albums, 3 Services

You may have heard that Amazon has thrown their hat into the ring of selling music online. iTunes has been the big player for legal downloading of music for years, but eMusic and now Amazon continue to make competition more interesting. I tested Amazon as well as the new eMusic remote and have to say they are both strong products. So I bought the new Athlete album on iTunes, the new Joni Mitchell album on eMusic and the new Thrills album on Amazon. Both Amazon and eMusic's new app download the file and load it automatically into your iTunes library, which is handy and skips an extra step. eMusic continues to specialize in indie music whereas Amazon seems to have a very similar catalog as iTunes. There are definitely differences between the services. Apple continues to copy protect their music. Both eMusic and Amazon sell unprotected mp3's which means you can listen to them on any device without having to enter a password. Another major difference is that eMusic is a monthly charge for a set number of songs. Both iTunes and Amazon charge per song. Another difference is that Amazon charges less per track for popular music. I recommend giving them a look if you're into legally downloading music. I may just continue to use all three to their strengths. On a separate note, eMusic recently launched an audiobooks section, which is one more step in making the competition heightened.

Amazon
eMusic

iTunes: Again With The Driving Me Crazy

The latest oddity with iTunes (and I've been getting a lot of traffic looking for info on the alphabetizing issue I pointed out) is that I can't burn a CD if any of the songs have question marks in the title. I had to re-tag the song as well as rename the file in order for a question titled song to burn. I should clarify, the disk would burn, but it would skip the question songs. Strange things those Apple people probably overlooked while they were salivating over launching iPhone.

Little Things...

Matthew Ryan contends that "The little things mean everything..." and Bush (the band not the President) said "It's the little things that kill." When it comes to iTunes 7.3, it's the little things that have me annoyed. First off, everything works, so it's not a matter of losing functionality. One of the little things that changed was the way it handles the alphabetization of bands that have a number to begin their name (i.e. 10,000 Maniacs, .38 Special) which isn't a big deal, just took some getting used to seeing A-ha at the top of my music.
I use eMusic. When I download music from eMusic, I have to add it to my iTunes library by clicking File>Add Folder to Library. In the past it would remember what folder I'd previously added and take me straight there. Now it "forgets" and starts me in the 'My Music' folder which I don't use for storing music, it's rather tedious to drill around to my external hard drive to the eMusic folder.
I've been listening to my iPod while it's plugged into my computer at work since moving into a new office. Everytime I plug in my iPod I'm taken to what I can only assume is a default for the iPod in respect to the columns it displays. The default includes Play Count, My Rating, and Last Played which are all features I don't use. Not included are track number, year. Each time I "customize" it the way I want it to be, but the next time I start it's all back to the default.
My understanding was that the upgrade was due to the iPhone, but I not only find the changes impacting me to be unrelated to anything specific about the iPhone, but as Matthew Ryan and Bush say, it's the little things.