Marc Canter seems pretty excited that Songbird is going to support XSPF. While Marc has written about it many times, I had no idea what it was. It’s the XML Shareable Playlist Format (pronounced “spiff”). It’s designed to be simple and open and built on XML. Typically, that’s coolness but while reading the spec, I had a strong sense of deja-vu. XSPF defines a list of songs for a playlist, much the same way that RSS defines a list of blog entries.

So that begs the question, why didn’t XSPF just use RSS instead of starting from scratch? RSS is simple, open, built on XML and is massively popular? Remember when Adam Bosworth that pointed out that RSS and Atom are “both support a base schema that provides a model for sets”. I’m all for a simple, open and extensible playlist format, but I’m not excited that XSPF has gone of an reinvented the concept of “list” in order to do it.

As I have written several times on this blog, I am using Napster 2 Go with my Creative Nomad Zen Micro. Unfortunately, the N2G compatible firmware from Creative is still in beta. Everyone in a while…not sure what the repro steps are…the Zen Micro would lose all the N2G music licenses. They’ve released new firmware (2.11.02) that is supposed to solve this problem.

However, while the new firmware will eliminate this from happening in the future, it doesn’t help you with songs that have lost their license. So you have to delete them off the device and reload them. Simple enough to do w/ WMP10. However, the music you download from N2G has a set of license restrictions, including a limit for the number of times you can transfer it to a portable device per month. I think the limit is three. I’ve reset my device a few times experimenting with it, so about half my N2G songs had reached their limit. Major bummer.

However, I dropped a quick email to the folks at Napster and the next time I synced my device, suddenly all the songs had their transfer count reset. So I was able to resync even the songs that didn’t work before. I had figured I wouldn’t get those songs back until next month, so I decided to download some other stuff to tide me over. Having the older songs transfer was a very pleasant surprise.

Bravo Napster Support!

Last weekend, I tried in vain to install a PIE GM9-AUX in my Chevy Blazer. The GM9-AUX converts the CD changer port on the stock CD player that came in the car to a standard RCA jack, which I can plug any one of my four Nomad media players into (though I imaging 99.9% of the time, it will be the Zen Micro) via a standard miniplug to RCA adapter cable. This weekend, my neighbor Dino helped out and we got it installed. He did most of the dashboard removal work and I did the cable installtion and threading it thru the dashboard to somewhere accessable from the driver seat. Thanks Dino!

I’ve discovered one thing about my Nomad/Napster To Go/WMP combo that I don’t like. Napster is wholy inconsistent when it comes to tagging their music. For example, I downloaded Denis Leary’s Merry F’n Christmas album, but half the songs are tagged that they come from the Merry F#%$in’ Christmas album. This specific example only appears to be an issue in WMP, but I also had issues with the tagging of Chris Rock’s Never Scared album. One song shows up as part of the “Never Scared” album, but the rest show up as “Never Scared [Bonus DVD]“.

I think WMP adds to the difficulty here because of the sheer amount of metadata it tracks. Artist and Album Artist for example. Good idea, but it’s really easy for those to get out of sync (check out this website for more info on that). And because these files are all DRM protected, you can’t edit the metadata in the file itself, only in WMP’s library. But I can’t figure out how the metadata & file structure on my computer corrisponds to metadata structure on the Nomad with 100% certanty.

However, even with that, I still recommend Napster to Go highly. This is a very minor issue that I think highlights a few of the remaining rough edges in a consumer scenario that involved Microsoft, Napster and the media player manufacturer. Plus, I’m anal about things like album names.

(One other side note – deleteing and rebuilding your WMP library causes all the songs on the device to be retransfered. Woops. Had to reformat the device, but since there’s nothing on it but my Napster music, it was no big deal.)

“I just tried out Napster to Go with my iMate and while I still am not sure that I like the idea of music rental, but I would pay a monthly fee to Apple if I could get access to any piece of music anytime even if just for a while after using Napster for even a few days.  The software experience needs work, but it is a lot better than I ever expected it to be.  Napster has something here actually, but most people don’t realize it yet because Microsoft and the industry is doing a piss poor job at showing just how interesting life can be in this model.” [Lenn Pryor]

While Lenn admits that “Napster has something here actually”, I guess I have never understood the issue some people have with “music rental”. You don’t own the music and you never did. You’ve always owned a copy of the music. You “rented” the music in perpetuity (that’s legalese for “a long ass time”) for a flat fee. You can argue that the record labels have kept more than their fair share of said flat fee, but it doesn’t change the fact that you never owned anything but a copy.

Personally, I like the Napster model much better. I am paying $15 a month in perpetuity but I get access to pretty much everything that comes out. Actually, I’m not even paying yet – I’m still in my 14 day trial period. But I’ve downloaded nearly 3GB so far including a variety of stuff that I was going to buy on CD anyway when I got around to it. Life is certainly more interesting under this model.