bye bye emusic.com

iTunes younger, cheaper, cooler cousin is no longer very young, very cheap nor very cool.

What with the creeping prices the leaking of indies and embracing of mainstream, eTunes… i mean emusic  has just become a smaller, cheaper, crapper version of iTunes.

I’ve bailed after finding less and less of your catalogue appealing each month I was struggling to actually fill my (much diminished for the money) download quota.

 

What started out as a really cheap, risk free way of finding new bands became a much less cheap way of wading through mounds of crap, old music to discover the occasional gem.

Neither am I a diamond miner, nor am I a long-tail cool-aid drinker so I’m afraid I’ve had to say good bye after a fun (at first) five years…. I kept holding out on the hope that one day you would come to your senses. But you never did, so I guess it’s…

 

…Good Bye Emusic…

 

emusic download manager blues and repurchasing

emusic is really starting to take the piss. Price hikes and monthly song quota cuts has already dented its once proud image as “iTunes’s younger, cooler brother.”

Now we have a site with buggy, sub standard download software and a policy which aims to make you repurchase tracks that have failed to download fully.

OK, so what happened?

I clicked on the download button, and the album started to download. (Much slower than it used to, I might add.) I then paused the download momentarily by accident (clicking the pause button).

When I clicked resume, it resumed from the next song! I now had two 30 second snippets. Nonplussed, I cancelled the download in the hope that I could restart it… Nope

Going back to the website, I found that there was no longer an option to complete your album… I’d have to pay the whole $6 to download the whole album again!

It’s a download site, for fuck’s sake and they’re charging me PER DOWNLOAD, when it’s THEIR SOFTWARE THAT’S BROKEN.

I really think that this time, I’m done with emusic.

For reference, here’s the mail I sent to their customer support… Not my most eloquent prose, I must admit.

"To whom it may concern"
I paused the download.... when I resumed, 
it tried to download the next track... 
I now have four half downloaded tracks....
I thought if I cancelled the downloads,
and reselected them manually I'd be ok...
but IT SAYS I ALREADY DOWNLOADED THE TRACKS.
With the OPTION OF REPURCHASING (WHAT THE F***?!)
ARE YOU KIDDING!
This is not good enough... You are not iTunes,
the only thing you have going for you is that
your prices are cheap... If you can't make a
system as painless as iTunes you will
go out of business.
Please let me redownload the songs which I paid
for but now don't have.
The album is
http://www.emusic.com/album/modwheelmood-Pearls-to-Pigs-MP3-Download/11475231.html

It says I have 7 tracks but I don't.
I'm getting sick of music's draconian "REPURCHASE"
policies requiring me to justify my existence
every time you have a bug in your software.
Yours, Disgruntled,

Craig Lloyd.

iCal and Power PC / 10.5 leopard, 5 days to the end to push notifications!

So long and thanks for all the fish! In Apple’s eternal quest for your money, they are continuing their disrespect for Mac OS 10.5 Leopard users less than two years after 10.6 came on to the market.  forcing you to upgrade your OS at an increasing pressure rate that would make Microsoft blush.

In seven days, Mobile Me will no longer support iCal push to Leopard clients. F*** the What?

I run a shed load of Power PC macs which refuse to die…. And their OS was only superseded only in June 2009, less than two years ago… At which point all updates ceased abruptly, with only security patches from that point on.

I always remembered the adage…. “You don’t need a new PC because the old one will always continue to do what it always has done…”

Bah humbug. Not any more… With the cloud centred life that we are all starting to live, they can rescind anything they want at any time…. And with MobileMe, they’re doing just that… already…

Looks like I’m not the only one whose Intel iMac 27″ beautiful screen is discoloured and dirty, with dark patches, stripes and bands.

I think Steve’s video is worth transcribing because what he said certainly casts a shadow over Apple’s legendary customer service.

—-
Hello everyone… Well, my name is Steven and I used to be a proud owner of an iMac 27″
A state of the art…. their flagship computer.
And basically after 90 days they invalidated my warranty and said that they’re not gonna fix it because it’s been used in a TOXIC ENVIRONMENT.
First of all, let me just take you on a journey… I’ll bring you over here…. to the environment that my iMac is used in.
Erm… let’s see, it’s almost like any normal person’s home office. maybe much smaller of course you know… but… well…

[Here he takes us on an impromptu tour of his humble, yet well kept, and might I say, well kitted… abode.
highlights include
microwave, plasma TV… iPhone and docking station…. and…. heaven forbid, he even has a Cup Noodle in to cupoard!!!!

It is during this tour that he shows us his iMac.

“
My iMac… My iMac… let me show you my iMac. I think you can see fairly well on the right hand side of the screen: Marks running from top to bottom. That’s actually… those seem to be getting worse. But even on a greyish background you can still see it fairly clearly. Bring it in….
Argh!… look at a that man! It’s disgusting!
But, erm… Apple have turned around an’ said I’ve been using the Mac in a TOXIC ENVIRONMENT.
YEAH. MY HOME OFFICE. YEAH. MY BLOODY HOME OFFICE!
Yeah, it might be attached to my kitchen…

”

[He continues the tour]

”
Look, my computer’s running absolutely bloody fine but…
The screen is a complete mess!
And Apple have said, “Go get stuffed, you’ve got a dirty house you’ve got a toxic bloody environment.”
And I will not accept that.
They want me to pay four hundred and seventeen frigging pounds for a new screen!
What? Because of this toxic environment? This toxic environment?
Jeezus! There’s millions upon millions of people around the world who have an office just like this…
Probably guys…. probably guys who have even small offices than this… Jeezus!

”

[Back on the tour]

”
Well. I’m afraid it’s over… You know like Apple… You know like…
Your firm… Steve Jobs….Your representative called my home a toxic environment!
And you need to get that sorted!
If you’re treating customers like this after 90 days… after 90 days… not even a year…
You are BREAKING THE LAW, sir… You are BREAKING THE LAW…
And you are breaking the covenant with he customer.
And I’ll not take…. I’ll not take it!

—-

I sincerely hope they see their stupidity and you get your problem sorted out as rapidly as I did.

I think I’m going to send this to The Register. They always seem to know what to do with material like this!

Intel iMac 27″ developing dirty, dark spots and patches on the screen : The zombie problem that just won’t die!

Like one of those nightmare zombies that never stays dead, the dreaded screen dirty dark patch screen problem has recurred….

Started with this:

My Intel ‘Aluminium’ iMac 24″ roasting with dark spots on screen

Admittedly, it did come  back from repairs in record time.

But that was only the beginning, Since this battle for a replacment continued for over a year!!

Then, my new iMac 27″ started to develop dark patches on the screen too.

FFS Apple, fix it.. I just had a new screen for my replacement iMac  in November!

I’m running it in a cool, clean dry environment.

As usual, the discolouration appears to be behind the glass. Or even behind the pixels themselves, in the underlying lighting panel. So there’s no way it could be dirt from regular use.

This time, the discolouration looks somewhat like hand prints…

Or, forget trying to describe it. Let me show you some pics…

Photos taken with an old D70, so vignetting and sensor dirt is a little bit of a problem.

Please note, that these marks only appeared last week so I’ve upped the contrast of the pictures. But I can assure you that within a month they will be quite visible without tweakage.

Ignore the yellow piss-like tinge at the bottom of the screen, although it’s there, it’s hardly noticeable at honest contrasts.

Here is a closeup of the left hand side. Note that I had to intentionally blur the picture when taking it since the moire effect of the pixels made the final image unviewable. What a mess of dots and a fine patina of blobs! Yuck!

Now for the right hand side:

This looks a little bit like the heel of someone’s hand, perhaps…?!?

What more can I add?… This is my second iMac 27″ screen and my 7th (or 8th) iMac screen in total. Grrrr Arrgh! As the phrase goes.

Apple’s quality control has not improved over the last three years.

I’ll keep you posted.

Aluminium iMac 24″ screen displays patches, uneven brightness and dark spots saga recap

My Aluminium iMac 24″ started to develop dark patches and black spots during the summer of 2008. It was well into it’s second year of Apple Care, so I was glad I’d purchased the extended cover.

—> For 27″ iMac story, click here.

Here is a picture of my disfigured screen, which I posted in the original blog entry.

Dark patches are clearly visible on the left with the right hand obviously darker

My Intel ‘Aluminium’ iMac 24″ roasting with dark spots on screen

I first sent it in for repairs a couple of days after that, as detailed here.

My iMac 24″ comes back from repairs in record time.

My initial feeling of satisfaction remained for almost a year, and the screen performed flawlessly for most of it. But as time progressed, I couldn’t help noticing that the bottom left hand corner was

was subdued by the quality of the second screen which was much lower than the original it replaced. I contacted Apple again and sent the screenshot below.

The lower left region was less than half as bright as the centre of the screen.

A call back from a more senior engineer suggested a further replacement screen.

So, I zeroed my drive, reinstalled tiger and sent it back with screenshots and explanations saved to the desktop.

The machine came back a couple of days later and no sooner had I powered it up than a horrible feeling came over me.

Second New Screen

The second replacement was just ghastly. After leaving it to “warm up” for an hour, I took the above screenshot. I didn’t even reinstall. I just put it straight back in the box, contacted Apple again and had the bloody thing replaced forthwith.

This screen clearly shows striping down the left hand side and a dark central region

This time, a more senior member of staff contacted me, since this was now the third time to “fix” the problem.

She explained that the next screen would be the final screen I would be able to receive, since a screen could be replaced a maximum of three times.

So I explained to her that in actual fact, the screen would be replaced as many times as was necessary to ensure that I could do my work on it again, as I had done when I first purchased it. She seemed a little surprised by the concept.

I explained that the new screens were clearly inferior in clarity, regularity and colour balance and were clearly a different make from the originals. She would neither confirm nor deny this.

Once more she asked me to realise that this would be the last free replacement they would give, and I was once more forced to explain that this was not a favour to a mate, this was in order to fulfill the legal requirement of “fit for purpose” and obey advertising standards as on their original advert: A built-in professional grade screen perfect for editing photos and videos, and serious graphical applications, the screen was far from professional or perfect.

I asked for the screen to be fully tested and have an engineer report the fact to me before returning the machine, a demand to which she acceded graciously.

The engineer called and said that the screen had been calibrated for both colour and brightness and was found to be well within specifications.

Great! Finally, we were getting somewhere… Surely this time, the machine would have a lovely, clear screen, like the one it first came with.

The computer came back the next day.

I fired it up.

Bong. Came the chime.  It was immediately and, by this point, unsurprisingly apparent that this screen was also substandard.

This screen shows a terrible, dark band on the left hand side

I contacted Apple again and this time, they put me straight back though to the lady in charge. I showed her the picture above and asked her if this was typical Apple quality.

No she admitted…

I asked her who had tested the screen and who had assured me that it was within spec. She couldn’t release the information, she said, but she would speak with him before contacting me back.

An hour later the phone rang and with an apologetic tone, the lady asked me to send the machine back in and confirmed that “some irregularities in the testing procedures had been found.”

Off it went.

The next day, a call from the chief engineer confirmed that the screen was below standard. But since there were no more screens of the original standard, the next screen might well be of the same quality or even worse. But, if I was not satisfied with the next screen, I could have the whole machine replaced.

The machine was back in my hands the next day, with another substandard screen, with almost the same patterns of distortion as the second replacement I’d received.

This photo clearly shows the nasty banding on the left, a dark central region and a severely pink-tinted right hand edge.

‘Since there are no more 24″ iMacs in stock, I’m afraid we are going to have to replace it with a different model. But we guarantee that it will be of at least the same spec or higher than your last model.”

“Whatever,” I said resignedly, as long as the screen is clear.

Two days later, the machine below arrived on my doorstep.

The new iMac 27" with LCD backlit screen.

Now we’re talking…

Thank you Apple. It was a long and winding road, but well worth it. A machine nearly 3 years newer than the one it replaced. Although they had some quality control issues, they were constantly polite, attentive and very forthcoming with “fixes”.

Here’s another satisfied Apple customer (albeit with caveats).

Firewire vs. USB

The battle between Firewire (A.K.A. IEEE 1394, iLink) and USB rages on.

It’s well known that although USB 2.0 shows a higher speed on paper (480Mbps vs. 400Mbps) than Firewire, due to inefficiencies in USB protocol and the fact that USB requires the host to manage the transfer of data, Firewire is in actual fact faster on the whole.

The reason is cited as being not just the efficient, real-time, streaming oriented protocol but the Firewire controller itself, which manages much of the dirty work when it comes to data transfer, offloading the stress of controlling real-time, high speed data from the motherboard/CPU onto the device.

This offers two main benefits:

1. The host CPU or controller has less work to do and can focus on other, more important stuff, meaning the attached host will feel more responsive and less stressed under heavy load.
2. Because major data flow control is performed on the device itself, wasteful, detailed control data does not have to flow back and forth between the device and the host, leading to less wastage and latency.

…and two main drawbacks:

1. The controller is relatively complex and thus expensive.
2. The controller’s complexity can lead to difficult to diagnose compatibility issues.

Which leads to my main issue.

My Logitec MA-16FU2/WM external firewire and USB dvd burner regularly fails to mount disks on my Mac, while connected by Firewire but performs flawlessly with USB.

Basically, no disks inserted will mount at all under Snow Leopard.

Indeed “about this mac/more info…” shows no sign of any volume in this drive, whether it’s directly connected to the mini or via the firewire hub of the Princeton PHD-MM160IUH.

Moreover a second firewire / USB device will often fail to remount over firewire if I shut it down or disconnect it. Again, it works flawlessly over USB. Moreover, it even works with Firewire when connected to my Windows PC!

Go figure!

I’ve tried:

sudo kextunload
/System/Library/Extensions/IOFireWireFamily.kext/Contents/PlugIns/AppleFWOHCI.kext/

and:

sudo kextload /System/Library/Extensions/IOFireWireFamily.kext/Contents/PlugIns/AppleFWOHCI.kext/

but the external drives just shut down and restart, still without mounting the volumes.

No joy.

It’s really ironic that the Mac has worse support for firewire than Windows, especially since Apple were one of the founders of the specification.

basically, despite the ‘so-called’ superiority Firewire, I can only get my job done reliably with USB… sigh.

Vibration Isolation Cones and Audiophile Gear

As many of my readers know, I was lucky enough to have been given a then ¥450,000 Denon DVD-5910 <<link to specs here>> by Denon for my part in troubleshooting some serious playback quality issues in the DVD-A1 (5800), their previous top of the range player.

So I guess I can claim to know a bit about this kind of thing and don’t want to suddenly come off sounding ignorant. Well, here goes then…

<takes a deep breath>

Well, considering that the 5910 had been designed like a Sherman Tank, used practically the finest components known to mankind and then tweaked to eek the very last drops of detail from the disks (or so readers of this forum will gladly tell us) could you explain how a few little cones help to the extent that they cause a humanly audible difference? And if they do, why Denon didn’t incorporate a similar feature into its design, considering the 5910 was long the flagship, no holds barred player of choice for the discerning video-AND-audiophile.

I’m extremely curious as to how a little vibration management can “really enhance the already stellar performance” of a $4000 player that is to all intents and purposes, considering its construction, unlikely to suffer unduly from day to day vibrations of any kind besides those caused by a warped or damaged disc or a disc with a label stuck to one edge, or a small earthquake.

Of course, if one lives by a motorway, vibrations might be enough to affect one’s player… in which case the sound of the cars would all but drown out anything below 24 db or so in any case, making such an investment all but pointless.

I’m really sorry to sound sceptical, but I had friends who used to spray antistatic wax on their cables and made similar “really enhances XYZ” or the classic “tightens the bass/focus/pants” line.

One day, fed up with their constant “tweking”, when they were out, I cleaned the wax off the cables with some rubbing alcohol, but of course they continued to boast about the improvements when their mates came round. Not only that, but I had reversed the polarity of one of the back corner surround speakers, just for a laugh. And until the day I left, it stayed wired that way, unnoticed.

Obviously, in the days of valves, when the filaments could be excited by external vibrations, any isolation was bound to help, even more so with a turntable (which I demonstrated once by placing the needle on the receiver of a phone during a conversation and having a muffled version of the conversation relayed through speakers.

But come on, seriously, modern electronics being affected by vibrations to the point where the vibrations affect the device audibly more than the vibrations raise the sound floor of the room itself?

Now don’t get me wrong, I am a man who understands the value of floor to ceiling curtains, a thick carpet and a rather uncool, but audiophile tiled ceiling.

I also understand the importance of solid speaker stands, relative speaker distance and especially, of course, sub woofer placement.

I can also vouch for the efficacy of the auto calibration of a number of highish end amps.

But I don’t ever want to see a monster TOSLINK cable, or for that matter a 25% silver digital interconnect costing $1000 connected to a modern digital buffer with full ECC. I don’t want the smell of cable-antistatic spray in my room… And I do not ever, ever want to see another green rimmed CD in my freezer ever, ever again, Paul, do you hear me 😉 !

sorry… I’ll… erm… I guess I’ll be going then…

<<grabs his coat and shuffles out of the building quietly by the back door>>

Solution to the noisy fans on a Core 2 Duo Intel Mac Mini

As those who’ve been reading my blog may know, I started my conversion to the other side (Mac) on the 28th of Feb, 2005 with the purchase of a 1.42 GHz Mac Mini after gushing over my now wife’s 12″ Power Book.

I was taken by its size, it’s sleek lines, OS X and last but not least, its comparative silence next to my air moving PC.

I kept this machine for 3 years before handing it over to my brother in a vain attempt at getting him to move into the digital world (he is an artist of insane calibre, but with zero digital knowhow).

To replace it, I bought an Intel Mac Mini when the Core 2 Duo models were released.

Since then, I’ve been enjoying trouble free compting, but have had only one issue with my machine.

It’s an issue that started the moment I upgraded the RAM from its inital 1Gb to 2Gb and Continued after a further upgrade to 3 and then 4Gb.

That issue is a fan that revs up as soon as the system comes under even minor stress, drowning out the sound of my beige box Windows 3GHz P4 system with 4 hard disks!

I’m not talking about a fan that revs up and gets loud shortly after booting and stays loud constantly, I’m talking about a fan that revs up as soon as the system shows even a modicum of activity.

With the supplied 1Gb stick of RAM, this issue did not occur, but add a second stick and the fan goes berserk at any opportunity. The fan revs up so much that the CPU, GPU and HDD actually cool down below their respective idling temperatures!

Anyway, there is a Really Simple Solution (TM).

Step 1: Download and install SMC Fan Control.

Step 2: Open a terminal window

Step 3: type the following:

/Applications/smcFanControl.app/Contents/Resources/smc -k F0Mx -w 3e80

And your fan will become a much more sedate affair.

Why? Because this limits your fan to about 4000 RPM rather than the ear numbing 5500 RPM it is usually capable of.

A 20% or so reduction doesn’t sound much, but remember that fan noise often has sometimes a squared or cubed relation to rotational speed, and that ignores a system working at its mechanical limits, so even a minor reduction can give big gains!

Try it and see.

For the curious, the 4 digit number after the -w is:

HEX (Base 16) : Fan Speed x 4

If you set the speed too low, I recommend installing ANOTHER FAVE OF MINE, Temperature Monitor to keep an eye on your newly silenced computer, especially in summer.

Apple Software Bugs Rise to New Heights : OS X iCal Truncating days off the end of month.

I always thought that February was the shortest month of the year.

After all, ever since I could speak I’ve known the poem:

Thirty days has September, April, June and November.
All the rest have thirty one, except February,
which has 28 days clear and 29 days in a leap year.

If only Apple knew it, because apparently they think that January 2009 had only 24 days!

 

This is OS X Leopard iCal, the one which dispensed with the the side drawer in favour of a crappy pop-up box for editing calendar entries.

Here Apple are trying to work their way into the enterprise as a viable Outlook alternative with better Exchange support for Mail.app etc. but I’m sorry, if this is the best they can do, I’m sticking with Outlook/Entourage.

Is there anyone else out there who’s found that their months have been truncated with the last week missing in Leopard’s joke of a calendar application?

Now I’m sorry, but this kind of quality beggars belief! Apple, WTF are you playing at? GET YOUR HOUSE IN ORDER.