Daily Archives: Thursday, 20th March 2008
TuneBar
A lot of the time when I’m working on the Mac, I have iTunes playing. This works well, and doesn’t appear to put any real load on the computer. As I use the Spaces feature of OS X, iTunes happily sits on its own virtual desktop, leaving my screen free for either Lightroom (if I’m working on photos) or Firefox Safari if I’m typing nonsense for Losing it[1]. I can adjust the volume, pause and go back or forwards a track by using the multimedia keys on the Apple keyboard, which also works fine.
But what I didn’t have was a way to see the current artist and track without switching back to iTunes. Not a big deal, but a minor inconvenience. And like a lot of minor inconveniences, there’s a simple solution. All I needed was an add-on piece of software: and iTunes controller. I saw some reviews, and one that I’d heard Good Things about was TuneBar. It’s a nicely unobtrusive thing which sits in the menu bar. At its most basic, it gives you controls for the music. You can configure what information you’d like to have on show in the menu bar. I’ve settled on artist and title, after an experiment of adding the album title as well made it get confused. What seemed to happen was that if the total amount of text was too long, it would bump into the menus of some applications, and would temporarily disappear. This seemed a bit random, and I thought it might be broken at first, but I think it’s just a sign that I need a bigger monitor.
The app has lots of options – it can display more information, drop down a bar with more controls, and can be skinned to suit most people’s wants. I played with the trial for a couple of days before deciding that I liked it and wanted to keep it. Registration costs $12, which came out as £6.16 via PayPal, which I’d call good value. If you’re using iTunes on a Mac, TuneBar is worth a try.
eMusic
After my recent mention of the mutterings about Apple’s possible future music services, I was reminded to have a look at eMusic, another online music store, with a somewhat different business model.
With eMusic, you pay a monthly fee which allows you to download a fixed number of tracks each month. The difference is that the tracks are DRM-free, high quality MP3 files, which you are free to burn to CD, transfer to any music player and indeed keep forever. Yes, your music doesn’t go away if you stop paying for it. There is a catch, of sorts: eMusic deals exclusively with independent record labels. This means that there’s an awful lot of music that eMusic don’t have. Most major acts are conspicuous by their absence. But what they do have is a quite large archive of independent music, some of which is familiar, and much more that may well be worth exploring.
You can download short samples of any track – not the usual scratchy streaming thingies, but full-quality samples that might just help you decide if the track is something you actually want. You have the choice of taking single tracks, or whole albums. No fancy software is actually needed – you can download straight from the webpage, but this does restrict you to taking one track at a time. If you want the convenience of grabbing albums in one go, you will need to install their downloader. On the Mac, at least, this seems to be a well-behaved little thing, and download speeds are acceptably fast.
Packages start at £8.99[1], which allows you to take 30 tracks per month, going all the way up to £59.99 for 300 tracks per month. And there are lots of options in between those. Payment is by credit or debit card only, and you can cancel at any time. I got 50 free tracks for my first month, which made it well worth a try.
So far, I’ve got the best of the Go-Betweens, an album by Propaganda that I had on tape many years ago, and haven’t heard in years, and something by Dashboard Confessional, who are one of those bands I’ve never managed to get into, but who make a pleasant sound.
I’ve no idea if I’ll keep using it for long, but I’ll be getting my money’s worth for one month at least. If you’re in the least bit interested in exploring new music, it’s worth a try. And for roughly the price of one CD, you’re not going to lose much if you decide it’s not for you.
[1] In the traditional manner, the US price is apparently around $9. Mutter, exchange rate, mutter
Related posts
A Better Sign
After that bad sign, here’s a better one. There are numerous variations of this around, but I liked the “towed away” detail on this one.
Not a great picture – it was quickly grabbed with my phone while leaving a West Wales pub after lunch back in December.
“Massiv”
I do love a good bad sign, and this is as bad as I’ve seen in a long time. Spotted in a Newcastle shop window today. The identity of the shop will be kept confidential. Far be it from me to mention that it’s in Monument Mall.
Weight Report – 20 March 2008
Now there’s a relief[1]. Today’s weight is back down to where it was a week ago, which is a significant improvement on the severe bloatage[3] of the last few days.
[1] Which might have something to do with it, but it would be TMI[2] to go into details
[2] Too Much Information
[3] Note: any word can be improved by adding -age 
