Embracing Chaos

Everybody’s reporting this morning stories about how Yahoo has launched the first legal lyrics website. This is an impressive feat considering how complex rights to song lyrics are. Two companies, Gracenote (formerly CDDB) and a Canadian startup, LyricFind, have been working for years to aggregate the rights to popular song lyrics to create such an offering. At CES this year, both were actively trying to drum up business. LyricFind has partnered with AMG to distribute their lyrics. Yahoo chose the better-established Gracenote as their data provider. I’ve spent some time looking around this morning, and I can’t find any lyrics…

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This morning when my alarm went off it wasn’t the numbing pleasantries of NPR reporters telling me everything wrong with the world. It was a maddening multi-tonal chirp as if a band of crazed robots were about to bulldoze my house to make way for a new interstellar bypass. It certainly woke me up, and fortunately I had a nice yoga practice to restore my nerves. But I spent a few minutes futzing with my Sonos to figure out why it had played its internal “Chime” noise instead of KUOW like I wanted it to. I determined that the problem…

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I am both proud and awed by the productivity of the rhapsody.com development team. Just two months after Rhapsody.com added playlists, a huge new feature has been added: a personal music library for bookmarking your favorite content. Along with it is a fabulous new AJAX library manager which gives users quick visual access to a large collection of music in their web browser. What makes this even more impressive is that one of those two intervening months included the end of year holidays. When I’m doing long-term project scheduling, I generally write off 3 weeks out of December because of…

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If you’re a frequent visitor to www.rhapsody.com you’ve probably noticed that a bunch of “plus” buttons recently appeared all over the site. Right next to basically every play button on the site, there’s a new button that brings up a context window with lots of new options: So you can build a playlist as you’re browsing the music catalog. You can also (finally) queue up music without interrupting the current song. There’s also a drag-and-drop playlist editor for modifying existing playlists. All these playlists are accessible from everywhere Rhapsody works — in the Rhapsody PC Software, on your Sonos system,…

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A couple of recent product announcements out of Redmond have me thinking about the current big struggle in the software industry: GOOG vs MSFT. Frankly, GOOG is eating MSFT’s lunch on the consumer software front. But MSFT still dominates in the enterprise, and will for a long time. GOOG’s model is hosted solutions, which enterprises are really hesitant to deploy. And with good reason — if you were a CIO would you trust all of your company’s IP to somebody else? Regardless of what promises they make, I wouldn’t. So Microsoft continues to turn into IBM. The two announcements I’m…

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I recently noticed that Red Elvises got added to the Rhapsody catalog. Yay! Last time I checked, which was a while ago, they weren’t there, which effectively means I’ll never listen to them. (Like I’m gonna dig up a plastic disc to listen to music! Okay, I might dig through my fileserver for some mp3s, but it’s such a mess, I rarely bother.) If you don’t know them, take a listen to their first album: http://play.rhapsody.com/redelvises/groovingtothemoscowbeat (how about that URL, eh?) It brings up fond memories of repeatedly running into them playing on the 3rd Street Promenade in Santa Monica….

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The volume control system on Windows XP is somewhat broken. The main volume control is pretty easily accessible — you can adjust it with a single click on the volume icon in the tasbar icon tray. This master volume adjusts everything going out to the speakers (or headphones or line-out or whatever). But model for adjusting the relative levels of different sound sources is awkward and not well implemented. Feeding into the main volume is the “mixer.” You can get to it by double-clicking the main volume control. It lets you adjust the relative volume of various sound sources like…

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Small note of personal pride and pride in my team at work: www.rhapsody.com has stripped off its “Beta” branding with a fresh new design and cool new AJAXy features including an improved web player and better personalization. We launched last night, which was unusually stressful. Our load test numbers weren’t glowingly positive. And if the servers couldn’t handle the load, things could get really bad. Normally, we’d just roll back to a previous version of the code, but because of marketing requirements around a new product launch, we couldn’t do that. So last night after we launched and the servers…

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My house pretty much always has music playing in it. Generally the same music is playing throughout the entire house. I do this through a fairly complex involving a pirate radio station, a PC dedicated to playing music, and a set of custom perl scripts and remote-control applications to be able to select music from any of the house’s internet appliances. When it’s working (most of the time, actually) it’s a fantastic system. I wander around, and hear the same thing, and it’s pretty much always something I want to be listening to. For everybody else out there who didn’t…

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I was thinking about getting all serious-like and talking about how cultural relativism makes it hard for me to judge the immorality of gangsta rap that glorifies crime. And I’ll still rant just a bit. But really my main motivation is to shout out props to Weird Al for his new song “White & Nerdy”. (For extra entertainment, watch the questionably-legal video at youtube, at least until they take it down.) It’s parodying a song by Chamillionaire that glorifies smuggling drugs. Nice work dude — way to be a positive influence on other people’s lives. This is one of the…

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