More bps and no DRM equals more iPod sales?

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Apple announced today that they’ll start selling tracks on the iTunes Music Store without DRM.  As an added bonus, those tracks will be 256kbps, rather than the 128kbps currently offered.  This should make a big difference in quality.  128kbps AAC isn’t quite good enough, in my opinion, 256kbps is just about right.

Doing so also establishes 256kbps is the new quality standard.  It’ll be interesting to see if the make 256kbps the default for ripping CDs with iTunes.  If they do, it’ll speed up the growth in storage required by people’s music collections, which will mean it’ll be time for an iPod upgrade sooner.

EMI & iTunes go DRM free, for a price

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Everyone in the world is already talking about it, but EMI and Apple have just announced that higher quality (256kbps AAC) DRM-free tracks of EMI’s catalog will be available for sale on the iTunes music store for a 30% premium.

This is huge news. As a consumer, I’m pretty happy about it. The existing iTMS offering has been sub-par (marginal bitrate, DRM encumbered) at a price that wasn’t quite attractive enough. As a result most of my music money has still been going for CDs. The improved product is much more attractive to me, at least when I’m only interested in one or two tracks.

I’ll be interested to see if the other labels follow suit on this. I imagine they’ll be happy at the chance to boost their average sales price for dowloadable music.

Update: The premium price only applies to single track purchases.  Full album prices remain the same even without DRM and with a higher bit-rate.  Sweet!

Gypsy Jazz Bewitches, the Eye Wanders

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My webhosting company and I have always been a committed pair, but now gypsy jazz has me all hot and bothered, and wondering what I’m missing.

Pair.com has been there for me for for almost a decade. They host all of our personal websites & e-mail. There have been a few rough patches, but overall, they’ve been very solid. I’ve considered looking elsewhere save some money, but as Anthony pointed out, it seems foolish to turn away from a good thing.

The thing about Pair is that they are very conservative. They are still running Apache 1.3.x, PHP4.1 & MySQL4.1. They don’t offer one touch installs of anything, and no dice on running anything that requires a long running process, like Django, or Ruby on Rails. This was fine with me for a long time, but now I’m getting itchy.

I want to set up a “planet” (a site that aggregates and republishes selected RSS feeds), and I haven’t been thrilled with the PHP options I’ve found. I played with using Drupal tonight, but I don’t like the behavior of either the built in aggregator, or the third-party module I tried. The built in aggregator doesn’t preserve authors or categories on imported RSS items. Leech, the third party module I tried, doesn’t preserve authors, and while it is supposed to preserve categories, I couldn’t figure out how to get it to work. I’ve also considered WordPress (which I use to publish this blog) + a 3rd party feed aggregator plug-in that to preserve both categories and authors, but I would have to hack to get it to display just an excerprt of full-text feeds .

That led me to Feedjack, which is built using Django. Feedjack already appears to do everything I want and if it doesn’t I already know enough about both Django and the Universal Feed Parser to customize things to my liking. Plus, having someplace I can deploy Django apps also eliminates a hurdle to finishing (and starting) another little project I’ve been toying with.

Right now I’m considering A Small Orange and Web Faction. A Small Orange (ASO) seems to have a decent reputation and they represent the cheapest cost of entry. They have a plan that can apparently run Django for as little as $25 a year. Web Faction starts at $9.50 a month (with discounts for paying for one or two years at a time), but they offer 2x the storage and almost 10x the bandwidth of the $10 plan at ASO. Plus they offer Postgres in addition to MySQL, and will let you run memcached in addition to Django on their base plan.

All this has me wondering about my commitment to Pair. I could run my wordpress blogs just fine on ASO or Webfaction. I could even migrate my e-mail over. We’ll see, but what I might do is leave my e-mail on Pair, because reliable e-mail is really important to me, and downgrade to their cheapest plan.

Hitwise’s online store both sucks and blows

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Hitwise, which offers rather detailed and expensive competitive intelligence on website traffic, has the worst online store I’ve encountered in recent memory. Purchasing an off-the-shelf report is a multi-step process, and each step takes over a minute (for no obvious reason).

First you enter the url of a website you want information on, then you wait a minute or more, then you decide what geographic market you want stats for, then you wait another minute or more. I’m not sure what is next, because I’ve never made it that far. I end up doing something else, and by the time I come back to the Hitwise store and try to complete the next step, it has timed out my session and I have to start all over again.

Appearantly it’s been this way for at least a couple of days. What bullshit.

Update: 12 hours later, and it’s still a delightful experience. Appearantly the server is half way around the world from me, in Australia, but this goes way beyond communications latency. Regular page views on their store are slow, but not managed-hosting-on-venus slow.

Update 2: A month later, and I decided to check back because I saw that someone from hitwise seems to have checked this post. It still sucks. It’s taking forever. I have no idea why.