Radiohead: In Rainbows

For their latest album, In Rainbows, Radiohead have gone direct to their fans with a bold new experiment in music distribution. They are selling their album directly over the Internet, in MP3 format with no DRM. What's more, they offer an interesting choice: set your own price for the download (even free!).

I almost never buy music on iTunes - I'd rather have the CD, thanks. But in this case, I went for the download and paid £4 (around $8). Radiohead have sidestepped all the problems that the big labels have created around digital music distribution, and their pricing model is a good answer to Allofmp3 and The Pirate Bay.

Here's what I thought of the buying experience.

Radiohead's website for the album, inrainbows.com, is designed for looks rather than usability. The terse wording on each page gives you barely enough guidance to get through the purchasing process. You have the choice of ordering the digital download or, for collectors and completists (market segmentation!) a box set with bonus CD and vinyl LP. Sadly, choose your own price only applies to the digital download, not the box set.

As for the choose your own price option - You can choose any price you like as long as it's in pounds sterling. Fair enough, they're a British band. But with a worldwide following, it would have been nice to offer dollar and euro denominated options.

The site does not describe in detail what you get with the digital download. You see a track listing and that's about it.

When you order is filled, you get a link to download a file - as it turns out, it's a Zip file containing 10 tracks in 160Kbps MP3 format. No album art and no lyrics are included. I found some D.I.Y. cover art; it's not official but it's good enough for now.

So - how's the music? I've listened to it once so far as background music while writing. It's a Radiohead album, but it's no OK Computer. I'll have to listen to it a few more times before I make up my mind about it.

How to cancel AIM Phoneline Unlimited Service

This information is a bit hard to find on the web so I'm posting it here. How to cancel AIM Phoneline:

Call 800-279-3192 and follow the voicemail prompts to cancel AIM Phoneline Unlimited service.
Service rep will go through his script and ask you for your AIM Screen Name, security code, and a few other bits of info. You'll get a confirmation code. Done.

This process was surprisingly quick and easy compared to the hassles I used to encounter when canceling AOL accounts. This may be because I am a New York resident. In 2005 AOL was investigated by the NY State Attorney General, paid $1.25 million, and agreed to improve customer service. They may have instituted special procedures for New York residents. Don't know if the experience will be the same for those who live elsewhere.

Mio 310x map updates are on the way

At last the long-promised map updates have been announced. (warning: link will not display if you are using Firefox.) Pricing is very reasonable ($14 + $9.95 S&H). Order on July 16 at www.mio-tech.com or avoid the S&H by buying at Circuit City.

Bad OOBE

Out Of Box Experience (OOBE) describes a customer's first contact with a product. Unbox, assemble, plug in and power up. Apple is renowned for lavishing attention on their OOBE to the point where there are fan blogs and videos sharing each step of the process.

How does the competition measure up? I recently purchased a Dell Inspiron E1505 laptop. Nice machine, great price. I'm very happy with the purchase. But the OOBE was a little disturbing...

Open the box, pull off the top layer of cardboard, and you find your new laptop wrapped in a plastic bag with a picture of a man suffocating to death.

lala.com

I just signed up for lala.com, the online music exchange that launched last year. Lala works like this: You list the CDs you have and the CDs you want. Others do the same. When another member wants a CD from your collection, a "Ship it" button appears in your "Have list". You can choose to ship out the CD or ignore the request. When you ship, Lala.com provides mailers, facilitates the trade and collects a small fee: $1 per CD plus postage.

This is brilliant on several different levels:

Unlike NetFlix, lala holds no inventory and does not serve as a central shipping hub. All inventory is owned by members, and all trades are directly shipped between members. The business scales beautifully with relatively little additional investment, and the service gains value as it scales up. See also: eBay, Craigslist.

CD rentals are illegal in the USA (libraries excepted). Under the lala model, members own the CDs they receive in the swaps, so it's all perfectly legal under the doctrine of first sale. There's nothing the RIAA can do unless they get Congress to outlaw the practice.

Lala's website is slick and AJAXy but it could really benefit from some additional tools:

• Automatic upload. I had to key in my 400+ CD titles by hand. I would have preferred to upload a .CSV file.
  
• Auto-ship. Every CD on lala is worth the same as any other, so your goal is to send your least favorite CDs out first. Lala's scale means that there is probably someone out there who likes the music you hate, but there are some CDs that no one wants, and in the rare event that it does get requested, the first member to hit the "Ship it" button wins. For those of us who can't watch the site 24/7, auto-ship with some kind of fair queueing strategy would allow you to (eventually) get rid of that unwanted disc.
• All-or-nothing shipment of Sets. I just requested a 3-cd set, which (per lala rules) is sent out as three separate mailings. After discs 1 and 2 were shipped, my transit quota kicked in and I was blocked from receiving disc 3. This should resolve itself over time but it is unnerving to have that third disc in limbo. There should be some way to guarantee that sets are shipped together.
• RSS feeds of your "have" and "want" lists with auto update. Or, even better release a Web Services API and let the community write its own tools.
• Lala.com knows how many people are requesting a given CD, and they also have statistics on the velocity of trades for any given CD title. This would be very interesting information for traders to have.
  

My new favorite store

My iPod Mini was lasting only 45 minutes between charges so it was time to replace the battery. Apple will replace the battery for $65.95 (and you won't get your original iPod back!) Rather than go that route, I thought I'd try a DIY battery replacement.

FifthUnit.com is my new favorite store - a Hong Kong based online store that sells iPod accessories incredibly cheap ($6.25 for a battery including tools, plus about $7.00 shipping). I bought a battery and an AC charger. The battery arrived in under 2 weeks, and I spent 20 nerve-wracking minutes disassembling my iPod, installing the new battery and reassembling. The CNet video here helped me understand the disassembly process.

So far I've been using the new battery for 2 weeks, no surprises, works great and battery life is back to normal! Charger works well, too.

First update to CDParanoia in 5 years

I'm glad to see that CDParanoia, the popular CD ripping software for Linux, has delivered its first official code update in about 5 years. Version 10.0 is still prerelease, but this is great news for everyone who needs good quality ripping software on Linux!