Microsoft has recently made Virtual PC 2007 available to download for free. This version supports Vista, so if you have a Vista license, you can run it on Virtual PC without installing over your current OS. However, it looks like it will only run on XP Pro, XP Tablet PC, and Vista OSes.
Pandora has been around a while, but I recently tried it out. Pandora is basically a free internet radio service which allows you to create your own custom channels. You specify artists and albums that you like and Pandora will play those and similar music. As the songs are playing, you can give each a thumbs up or thumbs down for whether or not you like the song, and Pandora uses your choices to modify the type of songs played. It does this using data from the Music Genome Project, which classifies different aspects of each song and artist, such as melody, harmony, arrangement, etc.
Pandora sounds cool in theory, and it actually works very well. It is a great way to find music similar to music you like, and it allows you to bookmark songs or albums to review later. There are also handy links to iTunes and Amazon if you find something you want to buy. The are only a few limitations of the service. First, there are ads (unless you pay for a subscription). However, the ads are visual only and there aren’t any popups, so they are pretty unobtrusive. Second, you can only skip 6 songs per hour. This limit is because unlimited skips would let you find specific songs you want to hear on demand, which is not allowed for such radio stations. Finally, you can’t rewind a song, but you can pause, which is very handy.
I tried putting in some of my favorite type of music, movie scores and composers, and it couldn’t find them. There is an email you can use to suggest music for them to add, so I emailed a list of my favorite movie composers, and the next day I actually got a reply:
Thanks for all the great suggestions of orchestral film composers.But unfortunately, we don’t have orchestral film scores in our system at the moment; we’re focused right now on rock, jazz, pop, country, hip-hop, and electronica. We’ve just added Latin and world music will come next. Classical music–including film scores–and opera will come after that.
So, Pandora is great for mainstream music, and hopefully it won’t be too long before they add the classical stuff. They do already have some less mainstream stuff that I like in there, such as celtic music and Cirque du Soleil, and the overall selection is very diverse. I definitely recommend trying Pandora out.
After posting about the Hymn project yesterday, I found an article about Apple and a monopoly lawsuit filed against the company. The complaint is about the dependency between iTunes and iPods. Music and videos purchased on iTunes do not work with portable players other than iPods, and iPods cannot play music purchased online from competitors. An interesting point is that the lawsuit argues that the iPod hardware by default supports the WMA (Windows Media Audio) format, but that it is disabled purposely in iPods.
It is interesting that Apple is now dominant enough in the music industry to provoke antitrust lawsuits. They have certainly dominated digital media players. Microsoft’s mp3 player, the Zune, did not do well in sales over the holidays just after it was released. I don’t think the fact that you can’t play iTunes music on other players affected this. The Zune just doesn’t offer enough of a significant advantage over iPods to entice people to switch. The only interesting feature they added was the ability to share songs between Zunes, but there is a huge limitation on this type of sharing — you can only listen to the song three times or for three days, whichever comes first. Is that really such an advantage over borrowing your friend’s player for a few minutes? I have not seen the software that comes with the Zune, but it is hard to beat iTunes, despite the DRM limitations on purchased music. The iTunes has a clean, easy to use interface with interesting capabilities like dynamic playlists. So does the antitrust lawsuit have merit? It will be very interesting to see the results.
I stumbled across the Hymn Project today. Its purpose is to remove the DRM associated with music purchased on iTunes. There is a GUI version of the program that works on both Macs and PCs. Now, I’m not advocating illegally obtaining music here, only the ability to play the music you have already purchased on many platforms. For example, iTunes music does not play on unsupported mp3 players or in other music software. A workaround that I know of is to burn your purchased iTunes music to CD and then rip the CD to mp3 (or whatever format you want). However, this results in a loss of quality. Since the iTunes songs are already fairly low quality (128 kbit/s), I don’t want to lose any more. The Hymn program looks like a nice alternative for me to be able to use music I have purchased in software and on hardware not supported by Apple, and to be able to continue to play the music on PCs that I own beyond the 5 computer limit imposed by Apple.
Here are the benefits of Hymn according to the web site:
The last point is a big one. Fair use under copyright law implies that if you purchase music (purchase the license to use material under copyright), you should be able to listen to it without limitations. DRM (Digital Rights Management) is one option used to prevent people from sharing music illegally. However, I personally don’t think it really works in practice. The honest people are going to pay for the music they like, and if they do so through iTunes, there are limits imposed on playing the music. With some hassle, there are ways to overcome the DRM limitations. The dishonest people are probably just going to obtain the music illegally anyway as they continue to do today. DRM may actually encourage the use of file sharing to obtain music if people who might otherwise purchase music legally want to have DRM free files. Of course, they can usually purchase a CD almost as easily, but this option breaks down if someone wants only one or two songs on an album.
I’ve been waiting for the release of the Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1, hoping it will fix a few bugs I’ve encountered. The improvements listed include:
Download VS 2005 SP1.