Archive for review

Spotify Premium: Review starts here

Dec 30 | by Sam Deeks | Endless spotify praise, review
5 Comments

I’ve just given myself the gift of Spotify Premium.  This is my ‘as-it-happens’ review

I’ve been using Spotify off and on for most of this year.  In all of that time, it’s been a fun service to use firstly because it has been free (ad supported) and secondly because it gives me access to a million tons of music I would never have otherwise heard in the days of CDs and ‘physical music’.

Can’t fault the ad-supported version.  Yes, the frequency of ads increased over the year but even then it was a relatively small price to pay for all that free background music.  In the course of Spotify’s first year, it’s been my pleasure to help out rather a lot of people get free accounts (via this link here) many of whom, lets hope, go on to be fully paid-up Premium subscribers in turn.

So what’s the Premium experience like then?

Let me point a picture of me-as-Spotify-user first.  I’m 46, male, white.  Professional.  Critical technophile (meaning I love & hate technology in equal measures).  I don’t have a lot of music CDs.  I don’t follow any particular bands.  Live gigs bore me after 45 minutes.  These days, I’d rather hear lots of random stuff I don’t know than stuff I do know.  I’m as likely to listen to spoken word these days as music.  I don’t go to festivals :-)

There you have it: grumpy old bloke sets out to try out Spotify Premium.

Signing up for Spotify Premium

First thing is that I hate being signed up to a rolling subscription when I only want to try.  If you try to upgrade to Premium, it will assume you’re signing up month on month (leaving the onus on you to cancel).  My way around this was to ‘gift’ myself a 1-month Premium Code via a Spotify Premium e-card. £9.99 one-off card payment.

It worked – now I’m Premiumed up for one month. Thank you Sam. You’re welcome Sam. (BTW don’t bother seaching Google for an obvious phrase like ’spotify premium gift card’.  It’s as if they don’t want you to find their e-card. Doh!)

Spotify iPhone app

Downloading the iPhone app is quick and easy.  Ignore the 1 star reviews from the muppets who have downloaded the app expecting to be able to use it with a free Spotify account.  Don’t blame the app because you couldn’t read the small print, folks.

Now, there are two things you’re going to want to test with your Spotify app: the offline playlist capability and the streaming on-the-go 3G connectivity.

Spotify offline playlist downloads

On the face of it, this feature is supposed to make Spotify available to you when you don’t have enough 3G bandwidth to stream it.  In theory, it sounds good but in reality how long a playlist takes to download will depend on the WiFi bandwidth you have available..

At home on my 450kbs broadband connection, downloading a 100 song offline playlist took several hours.  I can’t see myself having enough time to download playlists on a regular basis.

Another consideration here is that there doesn’t seem to be any indication of the size of the files that are being downloaded.  How much will my 8Gb phone take?

And finally: on the iPhone, it appears that playlists don’t download unless you open the app and start them (or let them re-start).  If I exit to do something else, the downloading stops.  I think it carries on when the phone auto-locks but, without any detailed progress indicator, I can’t be sure.

Spotify 3G streaming

At home in Devon even on a lousy 450kbs broadband, Spotify Premium streams pretty well on the laptop – with only the occasional drop-out.

At home, where the 3G coverage is also patchy or non-existent, the iPhone app gives up trying to stream altogether and reverts to any saved playlist.

Sitting in London with a chunky 3G signal the Spotify app works perfectly on the iPhone.  Right now, I’m listening to Elvis – the 68 comeback special. :-) I have no idea if / whether streaming Spotify tracks ends up costing on my O2 iPhone contract.

Spotify Premium verdict?

The downside

The usability of the Spotify app is only as good as the mobile 3G coverage and the WiFi access you have (see above).  If both are lousy you’re not going to get the most out of Premium because the fallback (downloading playlists for offline listening) can be a long-winded and impractical business.

In reality, though, fewer and fewer of us are stuck with both crap 3G and crap broadband all the time – and it’s a situation that will only improve.

A major downside to Spotify has got to be the inability to run the app in background mode while I do other things with my iPhone.  After all, iTunes can do it – so why not Spotify?  Is it a deal-breaker? I’ll let you know when my trial month is up.

The upside

On the upside, Spotify does something that’s so different from any previous mode of music ownership: it encourages me to listen to lots of new things.  With Spotify, the musical world expands.  With my real-world CD collection (or paid-for mp3s), it seems to contract, encouraging us to listen more and more to the same things.

And Spotify’s search facility is everything you’d expect of a software that learned from iTunes, YouTube, Google and everything that paved the way before it.

All in all, I keep thinking “I don’t want to own music!  I just want to listen to it” – and Spotify lets me do that for £10 a month on my handheld device of choice.  I think that’s probably worth it.

The Long Walk by Slavomir Rawicz. Amazon and Audible should reclassify it as fiction

Nov 2 | by Sam Deeks | GRRRR!!!, critical approach to online media, review
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Slavomir Rawicz’s ‘The Long Walk: The true story of a trek to freedom’ was anything but, it seems.

So why do Audible and Amazon still sell it as non-fiction?

I just finished listening to this book, via my ‘2 titles a month’ account with www.audible.co.uk.  I have to say, I quite enjoyed it (heroic second world war Russian gulag escape romp) up to a point.  The point being the party’s encounter with a pair of 8 foot tall Yetis.  Hmm, I thought.  I bought this thinking (not unreasonably, given the title and the marketing puff) it was a ‘true’ story.
Picture 1
Wrong.  The tiniest bit of online research demonstrates quite clearly that it’s credentials are, to put it midly, shaky.  No corroborating evidence; no trace of the others in the party, no historical records except those which contradict the story entirely.  Ah.

Ok, so I wasted £10.  But at least I got a chance to review it on Audible (let’s see if they publish my comment!).

The process of research was interesting.  Why? Because it took only a couple of minutes to surface the controversy over this book – a debate that’s nearly 60 years old.  The first clear indication was, of course, good old Wikipedia.   The second was the huge number of reviews on Amazon.com.  Note the number of reviewers who found it inspiring (and want to believe in it).  Note also the clarity of the critics’ arguments.  You can see that some of the critical reviews come from as early (in internet terms) as 2002.

All of which makes the Guardian’s 2004 obituary for Slavomir Rawicz seem mildy amusing – and makes the journalist involved look faintly ridiculous.  Alright, so in 2004 Wikipedia wasn’t up to much (started in 2001) but c’mon? You’re a journalist for God’s sake.

If you’ve arrived here after reading the book (which is more likely) all I can say is ‘Yep, you’re right.  It was too good to be true’ and ‘Come on, Audible and Amazon, you need to put a virtual sticker on the front of this one’ or else people will be asking for their money back.

“Truth” said someone a little while back “is information about which there is no serious dispute”.

TubeRadio.fm music video player – awesome and free

Sep 30 | by Sam Deeks | media, news, online video, review
3 Comments

I’m 10 minutes into TubeRadio.fm and having a great time.  Now where’s the catch?

Picture 3A couple of weeks ago some friends came by and we found ourselves creating a soundtrack to the evening via YouTube.  You know how it goes; guitar out, dancing in the front room to a whole load of old tunes you could never admit to liking in everyday life.

For many people, YouTube is more a place to go for music than it is for moving image.  You can be sure – legal issues aside – that someone somewhere has uploaded your favourite music.  The only downside is the interface; a masterpiece of MySpace style chaos.

Then along comes TubeRadio.fm.  Think YouTube meets iTunes meets Spotify and you’re close.

Unless I’m sorely mistaken (and I rarely am) the TubeRadio.fm web interface is so entirely intuitive that you don’t even need to read the f****n manual.  How refreshing. You just start using it – and, providing there’s no unforeseen catch – you keep on using it.

I’ve no idea whether TubeRadio.fm is the future of music video listening but right here, right now, it’s most definitely the present.

Get over there yourself and try it out.  You won’t be disappointed.

Spotify Premium: review time (coming soon)

Sep 28 | by Sam Deeks | feedback, review
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Ok, it’s time to review Spotify Premium and the iPhone App

Since I’ve benefitted from loads of traffic to my site since first blogging about Spotify back in January and giving out 600 free invites, I think it’s only fair that I finally give the paid version a go and report back here.

So long as it’s ‘easy in, easy out’ I’ll sign up when I get back from holiday, give it a full go and update this post.

Watch this space for the full ‘can-it-really-work-on-an-old-iPhone’ warts and all review from someone with truly rubbish broadband access.

;-)

Apple iPhone hands-free just works

Apr 2 | by Sam Deeks | review
5 Comments

The iPhone hands-free beats the tangled Sony Ericsson nastiness hands-down

Hands-free kits and me have never really got on very well.  I kept buying Jabras but just couldn’t get on with them.  All I can say is that I found them more trouble than they were worth.

And when something you paid £80 for gets tossed aside just a couple of months after you bought it, something’s not right.

And if bluetooths don’t work for you, all you’re left with is a wired hands-free.  The one that came with my Sony Ericsson was rubbish from the start.

The earbuds are the wrong shape and too big.  It’s like trying to push a plate in your ear.  The whole hands-free tangles itself into a bird’s nest as soon as you put it into your pocket. But at least the quality’s good.

For some reason, I bought another Sony Ericsson hands-free the other day – this time the version with a jack plug half way down its length so it comes apart into two pieces – and it’s even longer!  More wire to get impossibly tangled – which of course it did the moment I bought it and seconds before my phone rang.

I’d started to think that – like a toilet seat that an ordinary human being can change successfully – a usable hands-free was pretty much an impossibility.

Until I got an iPhone a few days ago complete with a a hands-free that doesn’t tangle, sounds great and just works.

Wall-E movie review. Proof I’m mad.

Jan 6 | by Sam Deeks | review
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Wall-E scored 96% in the Rotten Tomatoes site – with 208 good to 8 bad reviews.

Imagine what its like to feel almost totally alone in a world where everyone else has gone off in a different direction. I know how Wall-E must have felt, bless him.

These days, it has become fashionable to love everything new, shiny and CGI – particularly if it purports to have some important, timely message for us. Anybody who doesn’t love it (the mass hysteria goes) hasn’t got a heart.

Ah well. That’s me branded then.

I watched Wall-E with a desperate hope that – given no dialogue for 30 minutes, and given our ‘prowess’ in computer animation – I’d at least be treated to a visual spectacle worth sitting still for.

What I got – from the clumsily out of place opening music to the grating anthropocentricity of Wall-E and his attachment to cute objects – was another piece of Hollywood trapped in the cycle of media obsession and self-referencing that turned me off King Kong in as short a time.

I know everyone else in the human race loves Wall-E. I don’t. Given that CGI not only gives you the chance to create breathtaking worlds of the imagination but breathtaking ways of people and things interacting, did we get either? No. We got a world that was more of the same in every sense. And we got emotional gestures and interactions that were depressingly – maddeningly – familiar and tired.

Hollywood is trapped in its own limited range of ideas and gestures. Draw a gun, Eve! They do it in every movie! Blow things up, Eve! You just gotta.

CGI seems to have fooled everyone into thinking that you just change the skin of a movie and Presto! A new story.

I summed up my review for Wall-E in a text to a friend:

“Don’t worry, kids, we’re all going to get incredibly fat but then good technology is going to come along and save us from bad”

End. Ah, well. I suppose I’ll just roll back into my container with my bits and bobs, then.

Spotify – internet radio for the terminally lazy and nostalgic. I like it.

Dec 31 | by Sam Deeks | news, review
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Despite the name – ‘Spotify’ – this is internet Radio at its very best, but….

Right now, I’m listening to some old 1980s reggae just as the playlist swerves from Bob Marley into the Sex Pistols ‘C’mon Everybody’. This is what makes Spotify such instant fun.

It’s either a personalised radio station (click the mood you’re in and the decade you’re hankering after and let the software do the rest) or its a ’search for artist / track’ player.

In the ‘oh, I’m feeling dark and punk circa. 1981′ mode, this is great for just creating a mood and putting tracks in front of you that you’ve probably never heard before. This is perfect for those of us who like the sound but can’t be bothered to get all worked up by the band names…

In the ’search’ mode you’ll encounter the limitations soon enough – by failing to find the most well known tracks, tracks that are obviously still making someone else more money elsewhere. But as Spotify is supported by EMI, Universal, Warner, AMG and Orchard (among others) there’s plenty to choose from – particularly if, like me, most of it is still in the realm of ‘undiscovered treasure’.

With a few (relatively) unobtrusive audio and banner ads and options for premium accounts, this is the broadband jukebox for me.

So what’s the ‘…but’?

Well, Spotify is currently in ‘invitation-only Beta’ mode.  This means that you can only get a free (ad-based) account through being invited by someone.  Since (as far as I can see) a free account doesn’t give you any invitation tokens to throw around, I can only assume these come with paid membership.

A good marketing model?  We’ll see.  How much more likely am I to pay £9.99 for a monthly membership because it gives me free invites to give out? Time will tell.

Meantime, you can find out more (and register your interest) here.

Best mp3 recorder – mAudio Microtrack.

Dec 12 | by Sam Deeks | WOW!, review
2 Comments

mAudio’s Microtrack has proved to be the best mp3 recorder for sound, money and longevity

. click to listen

This week, I took our trusty old mAudio Microtrack I to record a Christmas Carol concert at St. Luke’s church in London. There was no fancy set up – just the natural ambient sound and the Microtrack with it’s little plug-in mic.

I recorded this in mp3 format, 44.1Khz at 192 bits. Since then, it’s been edited and recompressed as an mp3 and uploaded.

The machine is over two years old now and still giving great service. Occasionally it locks on saving a file but so far never loses the file it was saving. The battery was never great – so I velcro a 4xAA usb battery pack onto it. That gives me as much battery as I want to match the 33 hours of top quality mp3 recording.

It’s been a seriously good unit. It’s done seminars, conferences, outside broadcasts, podcasts, video soundtracks, panel discussions… you name it. So good, in fact, that I’ve not even been able to find a reason to buy the next generation Microtrack.

Online reputation monitoring software first impressions: BrandsEye

Nov 27 | by Sam Deeks | review
3 Comments

Can BrandsEye help real-world businesses make sense of online reputation monitoring?

I’m not sure yet – because I’ve only just started trying out the basic version of it.

What I can tell you, though, is that there’s a fighting chance it will. What makes me say that? This: when I gave BrandsEye feedback their software wasn’t intuitive to use, they were bothered enough to get in touch to find out more – within hours.

That resulted in a 40 minute call from BrandsEye’s Tim Sheir in South Africa to find out what didn’t work for me and why – and to give me a guided tour.

This year, I’ve tried out 3 online reputation management software packages including BrandsEye. All 3 suffer from being designed by people who can’t quite get their head around the fact that people on the outside of their product don’t know what they know about it. ;-)

This result for me is disorientation. Don’t know what I’m supposed to do. Don’t know what I can do. And I’m heading out the door saying ‘forget it, I’ll just stick with Google Alerts’.

BrandsEye is the first of the three to take that experience seriously.

Watch this space for a fuller report on BrandsEye when I’ve had time to learn more about it.  Meantime, here’s the neat little ‘monitor widget‘ doing it’s thing…. all for $1 US per month.

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