Tag Archives: streaming

Of Spotify and audiobooks…

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I’ve finally given in and started using Spotify on a regular basis. In a perfect world, I’d still keep up my playlists in iTunes like in the old days, but I’ve grudgingly come to accept that letting the app play a larger role in what I listen to is more convenient… even if it still doesn’t quite grasp the peculiarities of my musical taste. 

In any case, one of the unexpected perks I’ve found with Spotify is having audio books available. More particularly, I should say that audio books are available sometimes, because listening to those is limited to 15 hours a month. That’s fine for some books, but diving into anything in the Game of Thrones family is a bit challenging. 

Like Spotify itself, I was absolutely prepared to hold out against audio books. That said, I’ve honestly come to enjoy them and spend as much time with a book humming along in the background as I do music or podcasts. That’s all well and good, except I keep finding myself running into Spotify’s somewhat inexplicable 15-hour cap… which is just a touch frustrating when you’re in the middle of a book. 

This all leads to an obvious decision point. I could simply wait and finish next month, using the time already included in my plan, I could ante up another or $12 for Spotify to give me an additional ten hours of book time, or I could just subscribe to yet another app to handle my audio book needs. None of those options feels great, so I expect it’s just a decision about what will feel like less of a pain in the ass.

Yes, I know there are free options through the local library. What I’ve found while looking into that is that most of the books I have teed up are waitlisted. So far, I’ve mostly been using audiobooks to revisit some old favorites that I don’t necessarily want to take the time to re-read in paper form. As parts of a series, I need them to be available in the proper order and when I’m ready for them. What I’ve seen so far from the library doesn’t fill me with great confidence their service will fill that bill. Maybe that would be less of an issue if my interests and use case shifts over time.

In any case, it feels increasingly likely that I’ll just throw more money at Spotify for the same reason I keep throwing money at Comcast. I like the idea of having my music, podcasts, and books bundled in one app the same way I appreciate the old-fashioned single point of entry for television that cable provides. I’m sure there’s a cheaper way t get there from here, but unless it’s also more convenient, I’m not sure it’s the real winner. 

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. The limits of better living through chemistry. My doctors and I like to play a fun game. The goal of this game is to wait until I am just about feeling normal and then decide it’s time to add, take away, or otherwise screw around with one or more of the medications I’m taking. The whole thing seems purposely designed to leave me feeling vaguely disoriented, tired, out or sorts, and anxious as often as possible. As we are closing in on a year of this abject medical fuckery, I’d hoped we were a bit closer to reaching some kind of steady state with all this. So far, however, that doesn’t seem to be the case.

2. Eternal cold. I’m approximately 2/3’s the man I used to be. Apparently all of that represents lost insulation and I am, therefore, always uncomfortably cold. I’m forever wandering around the house putting on additional layers. I have extra fuzzy coats at the office. I have four layers of blankets on my bed. Every seat in the living room has at least one blanket… and I generally use multiple while watching TV in the evening. File this as yet another problem that I foolishly assumed would somehow be resolved by now. It’s very strange not having any idea what was the last time that I really felt warm. I didn’t realize it was something I was taking for granted.

3. Streaming television. The number of people who look at me like I have 16 heads when I tell them I still subscribe to old fashioned cable television is pretty astronomical. I get everything from stunned disbelief to pitches for satellite, antenna, and every streaming platform under the sun. The truth is, aside from cost, I’m basically satisfied with cable. There’s one “box” to deal with and every program it supplies is available with the push of one or two buttons. My user experience with streaming services has rarely been so seamless. Whether it’s updating passwords, constantly switching between apps hunting for the generic “something to watch,” or some episodes of a series being available on one service while other episodes are on another, or the sheer cost of building out an array of stream services to match the programming natively available through cable. Most of my television “watching” is in fact, listening to television in the background while I do other things. Cable excels at performing this function. It simply doesn’t require any thought at all as something is always on when you push the power button. Sure, I’ll keep rotating through the myriad of streaming options as I slowly consume their “prestige television” contenders, but I don’t see any world where I’m happy with seven or eight streamers attempting to replace or replicate the proper channel surfing experience. I’m sure streaming is a brave new world for others, but for the foreseeable future, I don’t see it being much more than an add on for me.

My great leap forward…

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As is so often the case when technology makes a great leap forward, I’m late to the party.

Until a few weeks ago, there I was, happily curating various playlists in iTunes the same way I’d been doing since the second generation iPod came out. I know. I might as well be here confessing I was still using Winamp to whip the llama’s ass.

Anyway. I’d been doing it that way for so long it was dead easy simple and reliable. It probably helped that I was mostly listening to the same music that’s been on my playlists for 20 years with only the occasional infusions of currently popular stuff. It wasn’t as if these playlists demanded a lot of time.

Lately, though, I’ve been a bit enchanted with a couple of artists – several with extensive catalogs – and I wasn’t particularly eager to buy up a few hundred dollars’ worth of digital albums to round out my collection on iTunes. Here enters Spotify with its three months for free introductory offer. Almost as if the great marketers in the machine knew the issue I was having and were prepared instantly to offer a $10 a month solution to get me out of that particular jam.

I still think owning the media is the preferable mode of doing things. Going to just owning the digital copy from owning the physical disks was a big step for me. Signing with Spotify and suddenly not owning any of it at all was something of a quantum leap. I still don’t love the idea that content can disappear or be edited instantly, but for sheer convenience, the streaming world really is hard to beat.

I am, somewhat begrudgingly, a fan.

The broken promise of streaming entertainment…

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I read an article this morning that cited a survey reporting that American adults are now getting more of their screen time through streaming services and apps like TikTok than through traditional television. The comments section was filled by people talking about the glory of cord cutting. 

That’s fine. Good on them. My cable TV subscription is still the one stop shop for 85-90% of anything I want to watch. For all my hostility to Xfinity and Comcast before them, the presence of their “set top box” means I don’t have to constantly go hunting for something. The older I get the more willing I am to pay for that kind of convenience.

I get it. I’m a contrarian… but needing to jump between from Netflix, to Hulu, to Amazon, to Disney+, to Peacock, to HBO Go, in order to watch one show on each of them, in my opinion, tends to be a marvelous pain in the ass that inevitably means stopping to log in to one app or another when all I want to do is push a power button and go to the right channel. Layer on the joy of finding that half the seasons of a particular show are on App A while the rest are on Streaming Service B and forget about it. Whatever percentage of a dollar I’m saving for making my life more complicated just isn’t worth it.

Frankly, we’ve reached a point in this evolution where I’m more apt to cut streaming services rather than cable television. The promise of streaming was that I’d be able to select just the channels and content I wanted instead of buying the whole universe of programs that included bundles of things I couldn’t care less about. That future never materialized and instead streaming became ordering up bundles of bundles instead of one big one with everything included.

Increasingly, if there’s a series I want to watch and I can’t find it free through my cable service, I’ll just wait until I can buy the damned thing on iTunes or Amazon – one and done, commercial free, for a fixed price. I imagine my days of being subscribed to multiple streaming services is just about over. They’re quickly approaching the point of being more bother than they’re worth.

On not messing around with what works…

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For a long time now I’ve been a holdout in the world that seems determined that all music should stream through services like Spotify or Pandora. It’s something I really got thinking about this weekend while sitting through an excruciatingly slow series of traffic light changes – and I think I know why I’m so resistant to a change that should theoretically be more or less painless. 

There are a couple of things at play here, in my estimation. First, I’ve lived through the change from cassette tapes to compact disks to MP3s. In some cases that means there’s music I’ve now purchased in three different formats… and now the streamers want me to pay rent for them on top of it. There’s a bit of adding insult to injury there and is definitely part of why I hold on grimly to the way we use to do things. 

But there’s another, probably more important factor.

As I flicked from song to song in my heavily curated iTunes playlist, waiting for the light to change so I could pull a few car lengths closer to being able to turn, each song that came up spurred a very specific memory of time and place. Some of them from high school, some from college. Some late nights with good friends. Some bitter, heartbroken mornings. Every single one of the thousands of possible songs I have teed up evokes thoughts and feelings otherwise lost to memory.

Creedence, Queen, Tom Petty, Aerosmith, Genesis, Waylon Jennings, Good Charlotte, Lou Reed, Louis Armstrong, Mayday Parade, Steve Miller, and an absolute shit ton of others are all jammed into my phone. They sing the songs I want to hear… and I didn’t need any artificial intelligence to pick them out for me. Maybe that’s old fashioned of me, but I’m ok with that.

I’m not one of these people who thinks all new music is awful. New stuff finds its way onto my lists when it speaks to me. Having the internet serve up what it thinks I might like after running me through an algorithm just doesn’t hit the same way as organically finding the songs “in the wild.” It’s been my experience so far that music by algorithm is about as useful as Facebook trying to decide what random articles and information I want to see on its platform. Sometimes it gets close, but it never quite gets it right.

Right, wrong, or indifferent, I’ll keep on with my own way of doing things until I’m absolutely forced into making a change. It feels a lot like messing with something that’s working for me to achieve very little gain in function. I’ll take a pass. 

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. Coffee, black. I had blood work done this week and received instructions not to eat or drink anything prior to the appointment. Black coffee was excepted. I appreciate that I was allowed to get caffeinated and avoid the inevitable withdrawal headache, but honestly, even good black coffee is bad. I’m sorry, it just is. I mean I don’t want 10 times more cream in my go juice than coffee or anything, but I like it to come to a nice deep tan before pouring it down my gullet. I know there will be a chorus of “real coffee lovers drink it black,” well, you’re welcome to your bitter bean water, but I’m going to insist on something more civilized.

2. Hand wringing about corporate profits. “But companies are posting record profits,” they whine. Yes, they are…. and those companies are going to do things like invest in their infrastructure, identify growth opportunities, and return a big slice of that profit to their shareholders through increased value or directly by issuing dividends. If you follow the average news report you could be forgiven for thinking “shareholder” is just another word for the evil 1%. In reality, of course, shareholders reflect every single American who has a 401k, or an IRA, or a Health Savings Account, a 529 plan, or yes, even one of those old school union-backed pension plans. Big corporate profits are a good news story for the 55%+ of the population who have invested for their future. Sorry, but in a free market I’ll just never see businesses making a profit as anything but a good news story.

3. Anti-streaming. Look, if you’re going to have people schlep to the office and spend eight hours there doing work that they could be doing from the comfort and convenience of their own homes, the least you can do is unblock some music streaming options so we can make an honest effort at ignoring those inane conversations going on around us. Unless, of course, sitting around listening in on six conversations at once is the “organizational culture” it’s so important to preserve. I mean I know there are people who really dig being in the office, but I can’t for a moment imagine why. There’s not a single thing there that works better than its counterpart in my home office… myself included.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. Shipping. I know it’s the busiest shipping time of the year – and now it’s overlaid by the number of people who have increasingly turned to online shopping during this plague year. The big carriers – UPS, FedEx, USPS – are likely running near capacity and will be doing so for the next few weeks at least. I’m enough of a logistician to know that when you flood the pipeline, the amount of time to get things from Point A to Point B increases. Even in a low-defect environment (and I’m not conceding that delivery services are that even on their good days), an increased number of items means a correspondingly increased number of errors.  I’m a reasonably rational human being who understands these things… but that in no way means I’m not getting thoroughly annoyed by the number of packages in the last few weeks that seem to have been lost in transit or simply “disappeared” from tracking apps. 

2. Dog life. A certain short haired dog of mine decided earlier this week that he didn’t like going outside when temperatures were hovering at or below freezing. That led to an issue Tuesday night where he’d been “holding it” so long that he’d periodically dribble when he walked. Not cool. As a guy who once sequestered himself to the kitchen for six months to crack the code on housebreaking, I’m fairly certain a fit of willpower and determination will also see me through this phase too… even if that means carrying the fuzzy little bastard out the door over my shoulder like a 70-pound sack of squirming, unhappy potatoes.

3. Xfinity. I like to keep something streaming as background noise while I’m working from my home office. Usually that means one of the big news channels, but could be Futurama or Star Trek reruns when I get tired of hearing whatever stories the major news outlets are pimping on any given day. Increasingly, I’m met with buffering, dropped feeds, basically unwatchable content when signed in to Xfinity’s streaming website. Sure, I could just turn on the TV in the other room and boost the sound a bit, but that’s inconvenient for switching between channels as the mood strikes. Basic diagnostics show all speeds are great and I can’t come up with a reason there should be a problem, but there is one. I’d be considerably less aggrieved if this wasn’t part and parcel of the same Xfinity that wants to slap me with yet another regular charge for busting through their arbitrarily set data cap every month. Look, I don’t mind the cost of the service, but if you’re going to pillage me out of $250+ a month, I’d very much like to get the services for which I’m paying.

The case of the mysterious disappearing playlists…

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One of the many wonderful things I’ve found myself able to do while working from home is to set up my personal computer to do some of the tedious update activities so that I can click “next” and “ok” in the background while hammering out the next great PowerPoint briefing or staff memo on my work laptop. It’s become an awfully convenient method of making sure I’m running the latest version of applications, everything is backed up, and my tired old Mac Mini is in as good an operational condition as possible. Up until today the process had been a happy and productive one.

Today, though, some combination of changes in iTunes and on my phone conspired to delete all of my hard built playlists from both the computer and the phone simultaneously. The music files are still sitting safely in iTunes, thank God, but such playlists as “Angry,” “V. Angry,” “Sleepy,” and “Depress me,” are nowhere to be found. I’m left with just the main list of everything from Music for the Royal Fireworks to songs that are so filled with pop goodness that I’m not even going to mention their names here.

I know I should just get with the program and stream my music like a normal person. You see, although I live among the millennials, I’ll never quite be one of them. My music habits were formed at a time when you went to a store for your music – and you came home with a shiny new jewel case filled with liner notes (and you got the privilege of slicing the hell out of your finger trying to get all of the security packaging off the product). Even though I don’t buy music on physical media much anymore, I do like the idea of knowing that I have all the correct files sitting on my hard drive waiting to be served up to me instead of just expecting them to live forever on someone else’s cloud. Maybe it’s the last vestigial piece of my analog self in the digital age.

So now I need to rebuild my playlists. It’s daunting, but perhaps guided by the spirit of WinAMP it won’t take five years to get things sorted and back in service just the way I like them. I know listening to music doesn’t need to be this hard… it’s just another fine example of liking what I like with all logic and simplicity cast aside. If that doesn’t give you a deep look into who I am as a person, I don’t know what will.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. Brain fog. Perhaps worse than actually being sick is the pharmacologically induced brain fog that comes from trying to stave off the more obnoxious effects of the human condition. It makes everything happen just a little bit slower and makes it well near impossible to craft well formed and coherent sentences. Don’t even ask how badly it tends to mangle spelling and grammar usage, which isn’t a particularly strength of mine to begin with. Despite the annoyance, I’ve got a few more days of self medicating left before letting the stuff work its way out of my system. Until then I’ll continue to be the poster boy for short attention spans.

2. Two months. We’re still two months from the 2016 presidential election. I usually like this stuff, but I think at this point I’d rather take a jackhammer to the side of the head than listen to another day of the back and forth.

3. Afternoon television. It’s something I only notice the once a year or so that I find myself home and otherwise unengaged between the hours of noon and 4:00 pm, but there really is absolutely nothing on television on a typical weekday afternoon. Which makes perfect sense when you consider that most of the people who have jobs to earn disposable income are at their jobs earning disposable income instead of home watching television. Still, I’d like to note how wonderful it is to live in an age of Netflix and Amazon Prime. They saved me from endless hours of crap programming on the networks and cable providers this week.