Technology As A Journey, Not a Destination

I was surprised to a new little button in iTunes a few days ago called iTunes Match.  I have not heard much of this other than it being an add-on to the iCloud offering. I have not been one to jump on the bandwagon of storing music in the cloud, so that is probably why I have not paid much attention to it.  However, I have been sufficiently impressed with iCloud except that I did not read a warning message and deleted a bunch of my contacts by accident.  Luckily, I know most numbers and addresses so I was able to rebuild it.  That aside, the idea of syncing my music with iTunes quality, DRM-free tracks is appealing.

Back Story

The bulk of my music collection represents CDs we have ripped, most of which were not ripped all in the same month or year, let alone in the same format or bit rate.  In fact, we would do a song here or there, a whole album here, another song there and so on.  It’s also possible that it was done on multiple computers at different encodings and with different formats.  For instance, one song on an album may be AAC, while another is MP3, and yet another may be (shudder) WMA.  For quite some time we were a mixed OS household – a couple of Windows XP machines and Ubuntu.  It didn’t start out being on portable players, it was more of having a song available as we sat at the computer and didn’t want to hunt for a CD.

The same goes for purchased music.  Through the years I have purchased music from a variety of sources online.  Some has been shackled with DRM and some in mp3 format, again, all in different bit rates and volumes.

Through the past few years, we have been through a variety of mobile devices and eventually became a strictly iPod and Apple household.

The Apple Household

We are completely Apple, right down to an Apple TV and a pair of iPhones.  I know that some do not like the complete integration of everything media-related into iTunes, but I actually find it very useful.  In my past computing experience with other devices, it was a multi step process to get media onto the device. One of the aspects of iTunes that I love is that I can plug any of my devices into it and it will sync what I tell it to do.  Everything is in one place and I find that simple and wonderful.

The Conversion

I took some time to prep my library and made sure that everything was what I wanted to match and available in the cloud.  There were some tracks that I had downloaded from free samples, artist mailing lists and various other (legal) sources.  Some of those tracks are very good and I would like to have them available in iCloud, but not all.  If nothing else, this prompted me to clean out the junk in my iTunes library.

The experience of scanning my library was pretty simple and took only a few minutes.  It went through about 3100 songs and matched all but about 250.  Some of those were just not available in iTunes, but some of them did have corresponding tracks in the iTunes store.  I hit Google and found a variety of solutions, but this one in the Apple community forums offered the solution that worked for me for the majority of my match problems.  On the second page is a suggestion to convert to AAC for those that are simply not fixed by deleting and re-adding.

One thing that I noticed is that the meta tags seemed to make a difference in the matching.  From what I read on various sources before I started this, it seemed as though they didn’t make a difference so I didn’t pay a lot of attention.  However,  I had one album that just would not match and I realized that there was a typo in the album name.  Once I fixed that and added to iCloud again, it worked like a charm.

Getting back to my hodgepodge of track bit rate and format, I was particularly excited about the ability to re-download music in the higher bit rate in the AAC format.  It brings me back to the first time I was burned by DRM.  I can’t even remember which service it was – it’s long gone now – but it was in some Windows Media DRM format.  Long story short, I got an e-mail that my music was going to stop working unless I burned it to a CD.  So I did, and then re-ripped it to mp3.  As you can imagine, the tracks sounded like crap.  As luck would have it, this particular album was one that I could match and download in the original quality in DRM free AAC format.

I have a couple of CDs that were in 128 bit encoding, but I cannot re-rip them because the original disks have been damaged in one of our moves.  It’s not music I listen to frequently, so really not worth re-purchasing.  Again, this is going to be great to make the format of my music library more consistent and high quality.  That alone is worth the annual price and the time.  I am sure I will also appreciate it at work or when we are traveling to have access to our entire iTunes collection from our mobile devices.

All in all, I think this is a great service and will be sharing my thoughts as I use it more.

We have a lot of desktop computers that are past their prime.  At this moment, they are sitting unused, just waiting to be dealt with in some manner.  Some of them still have some life left in them in some capacity, but some of them are ready to move on to their next phase of life.  Whether that phase of life is an a new home, or into the great recycling center in the sky, the time is here.

So I was thinking about what a shame it was to have all of this aggregate computing power, but scattered on machines that are, by today’s standards, slow.  I started to seriously contemplate putting them together in some sort of cluster, but lack the free time or the technical expertise to get them going on my own.  Unfortunately, I don’t have a whole lot of time to just play, either.  It occurred to me that perhaps this would be a good project for some of our students.

I mentioned it on Friday, and over the weekend much research was done and yesterday they started finding the controller computer.  Yesterday, they managed to locate a good performing machine, get an extra hard drive, and find some memory too.  They are ready to go and are excited. As such, I am excited too.  Now there are drawings, plans and some buzz around.  The thought of La Junta, Colorado having a “supercomputer” is appealing on a variety of levels.  To me, having a supercomputer created and maintained by our students purely for discovery purposes is even better.

One of the important features of my job is making technology accessible to all of our students.  Most of our students use the computers for their work and creative projects.  We have so many resources that go unused, I am so pleased that some of it can possibly be put to some educational use.

Stay tuned for updates, it’s going to be an interesting few weeks.

There’s a lot of lip service paid to “the cloud” in the computer world nowadays.  It seems everyone is trying to get in on the action.  I admit, I personally like the cloud as a concept.  That does not mean that I love every salesperson’s product that sells their solution to my real or imagined problem.

I am one of those IT people that embraces the freedom that cloud based solutions give me – less servers to maintain.  Google Apps has been one of the greatest things that happened at my work.  The power of collaboration and its ease are unmatched by other off-the-shelf products that could be purchased and installed on our own servers.  Plus, there’s no way that most organizations could come close to the computing power of Google.  It’s just a phenomenal product.

Google’s flirting with evil aside, they do offer a fantastic product.  I also regularly use  Dropbox, SkyDrive, and Evernote.   These free applications have changed the way I store and access my information.  When I got my Mac, I paid for MobileMe because of what I wanted it to give me in terms of a central place where I could put files or resources that I wanted available wherever I may happen to be.  It has served that need well, but I see that it’s more targeted to those individuals who may want to share their photos, web site, e-mail, and those sorts of things.  Being in the IT world, I have no trouble publishing the things I want to publish, so a solution like Dropbox is more along the lines of what I had in mind.  Don’t get me wrong, MobileMe is a great product, but I probably won’t renew my membership when it’s up next year.

At a recent technology education event I attended, a comment was made that when the iPad becomes part of the cloud, it will be a gamechanger.  I have to agree with that completely.  What the Dropbox and Evernote app does for the iPad are amazing.  When there is read AND write access to Google Apps, watch out!  I find myself using my iPad almost as much as, or more than, my notebook when I am at home.  Once it’s untethered from its storage limitations, I think it will change the way we interact with the cloud.