iTunes Plus Gets an A+ in My Book

While not the perfect interface, iTunes and and iPod have been a convenient and powerful way to manage my music library and DAP usage over the years. The one glaring problem with this situation has been iTMS. I refuse to own music that is locked into one player so my use of the iTMS has been limited to one album and maybe a half dozen tracks out of hundreds of albums and thousands of tracks.

Well not anymore!



Enter iTunes Plus - Stage Right

The idea had been kicked around for a while that Apple was working deals to make a DRM free music store, but those theories were quickly dismissed by the technology community since no big label had yet to greenlight such a use. Steve Jobs himself even sent out an "Open Letter" to the music publishers and still people doubted it would ever happen.

Then it was announced ushered in a new chapter in digital music downloads.

iTunes 7.2

So I downloaded iTunes 7.2 in a recent software update and figured "What the Hell?" I would give this new store a whirl. Amazingly enough I was no sooner in the iTunes Plus store I was upgrading the one album I bought for a paltry $3. In total I still spent less on this album then I would have in a local store.

Browsing the store it's apparent that the sock is limited in many regards, but there is still quite a bit of good music there. Within the first two hours I had bought another 2 albums ( Coldplay - A Rush of Blood to the Head $7, Royksopp - Melody Am $10 ) both for less than I would find them in the stores or at Amazon. While I'm sure that there are some genres that will benefit from the doubling of the bitrate, so far I can't hear any perceptible difference between the two sets of tracks.

The Good

Higher bitrate tracks with no DRM. I copied the tracks over to another library in my household and they played as expected with no questions from iTunes. As I said before I can't tell any difference between the 128 kbps tracks and the 126 kbps tracks, but maybe it's because I have not turned up the stereo enough. Now as a point of reference I can easily pick out a poorly encoded mp3 track even with earbuds. The higher bitrate will allow for transcoding to other formats like mp3 without too great a loss vs converting the CD yourself.

The Bad

Your name, email, and purchase date are encoded in the file... big whoop. I really can't see the problem with this as it does not prevent any legitimate fair use rights or even bending fair use rights. The larger files will affect the storage capacity of the iPod if you patronize the iTMS a lot. AAC format rather than Apple Lossless. The change to the single track pricing "feels" like a back door price increase. The store is still going through "growing pains" and there have been a few occasions where things on the site have not worked as expected.

Conclusion

If you have avoided the iTunes Music Store because of DRM now is the time to reexamine what they offer. With DRM gone you can now use the music without worry that someday you might want a non-iPod DAP and have to repurchase all of your music. I will be happy to spend money at the iTMS on plus albums rather than hoofing it out to a B&M store to try and find a CD.

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Linux and Photography Don't Mix So Well

Don't get me wrong... I still love the Penguin ( for now, Solaris 10 / ZFS review coming up ) but the penguin just doesn't like my photography work.

My requirements were not very high. I shoot with a dSLR and capture RAW images. I want to download, sort, re-develop, and post process my images with a small amount of effort. Under windows I had been using Picasa with much success. I don't think these requirements are too much to ask for.

UPDATED: 6/7/2007: Added a link to some more commentary and some more editorializing below.



Picasa for Linux

My first attempt was to use Picasa since it, in theory, would be a seamless transition. I could take my existing folder and move them over to the laptop and fire up Picasa and be off to the races.

Not so fast!

Under windows Picasa has been a welcome change from managing images via folders manual. It also supported RAWs ( in a limited fashion ). The interface was limited, but fast and functional. It allowed me to sort, touch up, and upload quickly and easily.... I loved it.

Under Linux Picasa was prone to crashing the application or the system. There were fewer touch-up options than under windows, there was no uploading, and it's integration was NILL. Exporting pictures was an exercise in frustration as it was a 50/50 chance that I would get what I want or 2 out of 20 pictures actually converted.

GPhoto

No RAW support! I would have to take a step backwards and start using .jpg's again as well as reconverting a year or more of pictures back to .jpg in order to use this application. It won't upload to picasaweb and while it's integration is nice, it lacked any good features that made Picasa a real win on the desktop.

UFRaw

This application might be great if you want to kill yourself slowly, but for those that have better things to do with their time there has to be a better solution. Don't get me wrong UFRaw + GIMP would have worked, but would have required 10-15 minutes per photo just to do basic touchups after workflow/sorting that I would have to do manually.

After weeks of playing, tweaking, fixing, rebooting, re-installing, searching, and failure I abandon all hope that a RAW workflow was even realistically possible under linux at this time. Short of using VMware to run Picasa or Adobe products under windows I was out of luck. I was backed up months in processing my personal photos and I just could not stand it anymore.

Apple MacBook Pro To The Rescue

I did the math and ended up running down to my local Apple store and buying a stock MBP off the shelf. Within a day I was up and running processing RAW images with little more than a few clicks. While I ended up leaving iPhoto in the dust for LightRoom both were painless and FAST. I can now do basic touchups in less than 30 seconds and advanced touchups in less than 5 minutes and quickly move through whole batches of pictures faster than any previous workflow.

As the old adage goes, "Linux is free only if your time costs nothing". In my case that was true. Maybe in a few years when photographers have tread this path a few more times and have beaten a few workflow applications into the OS realm it might be possible or at least less painful a possibility.

Update 1:

Here is a link to the google groups alt.photography discussion. I like linux, but boy their users are assholes sometimes.

I did neglect to test Bibble Labs Pro, but as one user has noted it's workable but not the most stable application out there for linux. LightRoom was also cheaper than Bibble Labs Pro costing me only $99 during the introductory period and I didn't need to go out and buy a noise reduction package on top of it.

I still stand by my conclusion that RAW photo management / workflow under linux is immature and needs a few more years to develop. It is possible, sure, but it's not nearly up to the usability standards that I have come to love from other platforms.

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