Out with the Trek, in with the Gate

▼ Nine months ago I got myself the entire series of Star Trek Voyager on DVD. Today, I watched the series finale. Usually those suck, but this one was pretty good! It did provide some closure but not at the cost of being an entertaining episode in its own right with plenty of action.

However, I must say that at several episodes a week the weaknesses in Star Trek in general and Voyager in particular became very apparent: a lot of talk, stories tend to be repetitive and are too self-contained. I would love to have seen Voyager with today's long-arch approach to TV. But the biggest issue is that the technology is magic: it's all way too advanced to be based on any real science. So basically anything goes, which makes for uninteresting stories.

I used to think the first couple of seasons were weak and the middle seasons (when the Borg show up) were much stronger. But this time around, the early seasons seemed stronger and the middle ones not really better. The last few seasons still have some good stuff, but there's nothing big in them to look forward to so at some point I started to look forward to the end.

So out the the old, in with the new: I got all ten seasons of Stargate SG1 on DVD, ripped the DVDs and imported everything into iTunes. SG1 is much more grounded in current-day reality, and the notion of traveling between worlds without ships is ingenious. So I'm looking forward to seeing that show again. I believe the first two and the last two seasons are weaker here, but I'll find out soon enough.

Permalink - posted 2015-09-20

The music problem

▼ After reading stuff like this and even like this, I'm so glad I didn't sign up for Apple's new music service.

I regularly hear about people with more than 25000 songs in their iTunes library. Compared to them, my music library is tiny at only 3500 songs. Still, that's more than 9 days worth of music, or about 200 CDs or 300 LPs. (It's insane that these days this will fit on an SD card the size of a postage stamp.) So there's an entire universe of music out there for me to discover. But it turns out that, not unexpectedly, my prime music discovery days seem to be behind me. These are the numbers of songs per decade in my music library:

• 1900 - 1909: 1
• 1920 - 1929: 1
• 1940 - 1949: 4
• 1950 - 1959: 102
• 1960 - 1969: 421
• 1970 - 1979: 766
• 1980 - 1989: 897
• 1990 - 1999: 526
• 2000 - 2009: 379
• 2010 - 2015: 8

(And the 2000 - 2009 number is inflated quite a bit because a lot of purchased music has the year field set to the year of (re-) issue rather than the year of original recording.)

Still, after the whole Taylor Swift thing, I considered doing the three month trial for Apple Music. Until I realized that if I did that, my local music library would become intermingled with music from the cloud, with too many corner cases to have any hope that Apple will handle all of them correctly.

I'm not even particularly happy with buying songs from the iTunes Store. Despite the 30 second preview (it's often longer now), I managed to buy the wrong version of a number of songs. I also somehow managed to buy songs that I end up never listening to. Then remember all the issues people have had with iTunes Match. And Apple Music is much more complex than what came before. So I'm not at all surprised that people are having problems combing existing music libraries with Apple Music.

For a while, I've been hoping that Apple's opening up of various aspects of iOS would lead to a more liberal approach to music on iOS devices, rather than the current system where there is only one way to get your (local) music on a device in a workable way: through iTunes. But now that Apple has redoubled its music efforts, that probably isn't going to happen any time soon. Too bad.

Many people have called for breaking up iTunes (on the Mac) into smaller applications that handle more limited tasks better. I can see the appeal: an Apple Music app would be much simpler than bolting on yet another function to iTunes. However, previous experience has shown that any change to iTunes only serves to make it worse. (I'm still on iTunes 12.1, and I'm not sure I'm going to upgrade to 12.2.) Some kind of super ambitious, super radical rethinking of the whole system is certainly going to make some parts of it a lot worse. Remember Final Cut X and iWork '13?

A better approach would be to freeze iTunes as it is today (well, as it was a few years ago, really) and then create new apps for new stuff such as Apple Music. This way, both the people who like the old stuff and people who like the new stuff get something that works well for them. That still doesn't solve the use case of having both the old and the new stuff side-by-side, but then, the current approach doesn't really solve that either.

Permalink - posted 2015-07-30