Musical evaporation

In 1999, I moved to Finland to study at the University of Art and Design Helsinki. I had decided to bring my trusty, how-on-earth-did-I-get-them-so-cheap BeoSystem 5400 and Beovox speakers and just about every CD I owned. The CD part was easy. I threw away all the jewel boxes and put the CDs in the biggest Case Logic folder I could find. The stereo part was pure luck: an extremely hung-over cargo handler mistyped the per-kilo freight cost and charged me about NOK 1000 to fly the three stereo-filled suitcases to Finland.

As an interface, the Case Logic folder works quite well. After investing a little librarian-time in sorting and grouping your music, you’re good to go, and like a skilled fourth-grader handling a dictionary, you know pretty much where to find what.

Now here was an excellent resource. In contrast to my stereoless co-students, I always had a good listen close at hand. It also made our apartment an obvious venue for dinners and parties. The physical nature of the Case Logic folder “interfaces” makes it ideal at parties. Several people can browse simultaneously and it’s quite efficient cognitively, too. I’ve always preferred browsing through music by album cover rather than by title or artist; my internal taste-o-meter handles queries at least ten times faster.

Physical interfaces for digital music

Around this time, plenty of people were thinking of how physical interfaces could make the listening experience better. They weren’t thinking about screens. Creating value by design, a book by Stefano Marzano (PDF, agh) and Philips Design includes a music controller design that is a book of CD covers, each with it’s own “play” button. Others too abstracted the link between the controlling container and the actual music, using RFID tags, UPC or QR codes and so on. However, I never came across a thingamajig I could buy, so I stuck with my Case Logic folder for quite a long time. FYI, mp3′s weren’t interesting to me at this point: I didn’t like the audio quality of files from napster, hadn’t seen a good mp3 player and liked having LPs and CDs.

In early 2002 I got my first iPod (NOK 5000 at the time – insane!) and immediately began ripping my way through the hundreds of CDs in my Case Logic bag, eventually stowing it. Bringing 1000 songs to a party was great, but it lacked social skills. There were no covers to browse through and only one person could browse at a time. Aside from oft and mighty risks to the device itself, my music was suddenly safe from the inebriated escapades of old, new and non friends.

A bucket for your music

At school I created a rather naive-looking CD-ripper-cum-digital-music-player that put a (hard to manufacture) round screen inside a huge dial that you could use to spin through your music collection. A complete iPod rip-off if there ever was one. At the time flat panel monitors were seldom larger than 19″, but soon after handing in the assignment I saw a Wacom Cintiq monitor and realized what a fool I had been. A large touch-sensitive screen would have been far better than my musical bucket, especially if combined with a physical controller for volume. Where I had used a 7″ monitor that could barely show one CD cover plus controls, a larger screen could have shown multiple covers in a matrix, with axes for listings by genre, band, album, similar, different and so on.

I merely had an idea of what I was looking for, but others were more industrious. Andew Coulter Enright blogged about his idea of visual browsing and posted it to his blog (Archive.org mirror; the real version has had its content removed), an idea that Jonathan del Strother of Steel Skies came across and developed as an application stumbled upon, and began to develop a piece of software that could do the trick.

Andrew Enright Coulter’s early visual browsing concept

I was an early and eager user of the app, which was eventually called CoverFlow. I found the fake 3D stack-unstack and carousel scroll modes far more clever than my album cover grid viewer, which never got past the studio stage. CoverFlow, on the other hand, got better with each upgrade. Upgrades were required, by the way, as each version had an expiration date, a feature that hinted at a possible sale of the software to Apple, which eventually came to pass.

An early version of the CoverFlow app, via Eifion on Flickr

It’s hard to beat a digital music player when it comes to speed. You click the button and the song starts. When it comes to browsing however, a list – flowing, filterable or searchable – is still just a list. Yes, I really do miss the physicality and non-computerness of flicking through a stack of CDs or LPs.

What do I need all these files for?

Digital music is compact, but it’s not entirely weightless. I have about 40 days worth of music in iTunes and it takes up a lot of space. So much, in fact, that if I had it all on my laptop’s hard drive, there would be space for little else. iTunes handles this rather badly. Sure, there are applications for handling multiple libraries and some native support for this in the app itself. I’ve tried putting all my music on a portable drive, putting some music on the machine, having music on my iPod only and have put the files on a server online and at home so I always had them available. No dice.

Then there’s the matter of the covers which, you by now understand, are pretty interesting to me. Many of my CDs were ripped years ago and lack covers, and iTunes doesn’t automagically add them. CoverScout, now in version 3 (below), is a full-featured browser tweaked to search for the missing covers in your music library. It works pretty well.

The problem is, it’s too much like work. I don’t like sorting through all those files, removing duplicates, looking for covers. I just want to listen to what I like and occasionally discover new music. Scrobbling to Last.fm offered a new way to discover music but they didn’t and still don’t let you play the song you want to, nor did Pandora, which is now available in the US only.

Sadly, I’ve never been able to try Rhapsody as they, too, are stunted by 1900s contracts that carve the world up into regions. The natural option for most is to download via networks or swap hard drives with friends.

Use, not own

Listening stations, by roboppy

Last October I decided to give Spotify a try. As a lot of people were (and still are) looking for invites, I decided to just cough up the NOK 99 and get a premium account. Let me tell you why this is an excellent deal. First, I don’t like downloading music because it’s a lot of work. Whether you do it in the iTunes music store, via eMusic (where I had a 75 tunes per month subscription for years) or via eMule, it’s work. Figure out what you want, look for it, get it now or save it for later, download it, import it, fix the cover … does this sound like fun?

Spotify, on the other hand, is just music. While it’s too bad that they’ve been forced to cull songs from their archive, they are still adding music to their catalog. Rumor has it that Rhapsody has more music, but that’s a moot point as long as I can’t use it. On a sidenote, I really can’t figure out why friends and colleagues opt for the free, ad-laden version of Spotify.

I think music is worth paying for and I think Spotify is the best deal ever. Think of it: if they had come out in the 1990s, when I began buying CDs, I wouldn’t have bought ca 500 CDs at an average cost of NOK 150 per CD. For those NOK 75 000, I could have subscribed to Spotify for 63 years, or from 1993 to 2056, and I wouldn’t have had to buggle around with files, physical media or dead hard drives. Nor would I have had to drag that huge Case Logic folder til Finland and I could have shared links to songs without any manual bungling.

So yeah, I think paying NOK 99 per month for “all” the music you want (from a very large selection) is a fair deal.

Where is my physical-ish musical interface?

There are a lot of interesting conversations taking place at Spotify’s GetSatisfaction forum about how the player and the service could be improved. Spotify already scrobbles your listening habits to Last.fm, but I’d like to see the reverse happen, too, and get Last.fm’s recommendations into the Spotify player. I (and 62 others at the time of writing) want an API so I can pipe my music wherever I want, not just through my computer. There’s been a great suggestion for a party mode that lets your guests add new tracks to a playlist but locks down the player controls, for more pleasant, less staccato evening.

Alias|Wavefront's Portfolio Wall from 2001, via Car Design News

I love many of the ideas at the Spotify forum, but I’m still looking for a better cover browser (Microsoft Surface could be interesting) and a physical, token-based interaction that my kids can use. Retrofitting my BeoCenter 7007 with a multitouch screem for browsing through covers wouldn’t be bad either. I might just have to make one.

Thanks for reading! If you have an idea for a new and improved way of discovering and listening to music, or a link to share, please do add your comment below.