My experiences with the Motorola Xoom + More
Posts tagged Amazon MP3
Xoom updated…hello 32G SD card slot!
09 months ago
by Charles
in Xoom Updates
I woke up to find that the Android 3.2 update was ready to install. That’s a great way to wake up!
I had ripped a copy of my Inception DVD and placed it on my new 32 gigabyte SD card in preparation earlier this week. It played like a champ!
I’ve also removed six 99 Most Essential albums (purchased from Amazon) from the internal Xoom storage and placed them onto the SD card. It took a 2-3 minutes for Android to index the 6.46 gigabytes (700 files) of music, but it soon showed up under albums and New/Recent songs.
I’ll be testing the stability over the next week to see how smoothly it goes, but I am very happy at the moment.
Combining the 32 gigabytes of internal storage + the 32 gigabyte SD card finally gives Xoomers 64 gigabytes of storage, but if you think forward a bit more, technically this gives you unlimited storage after purchasing additional SD cards. In my opinion, this is a major advantage over IOS devices.
All things Amazon: Apps, Clouds, and Music…oh, my!
01 year ago
I’ve been putting this post off for a while, because it’s a little more involved.
I’ve been downloads apps from Amazon’s new App Store since it went live. You can download and install their App Manager from the Amazon website. They offer a new app for free every day. These are apps that normally cost money. I’m not sure if they’re going to continue this promotion. It may possibly be used a way to attract customers to their App store. Meanwhile, Apple is still suing Amazon for the use of their trademark ‘App Store’ name.
I’ve mentioned before that I’ve been purchasing music from Amazon for a long time. It took a little while to notice that downloaded music is automatically stored outside of the primary Music folder. I was very happy to discover this, because it makes backing up purchases a lot easier, since new music files are not meshed together with existing music. Like the App store, Amazon offers a free song every day, along with an album for $3.99. There are some great bargains. I picked up REM’s new album last week! I would also like to point out that Amazon generally has a wide variety of free songs and albums. You sometimes have to dig a little, but that’s part of the fun: The Chase! I’ve discovered a number of great songs and really good bands/groups that I would have otherwise never given a second glance at.
I don’t have a lot to say about the Amazon Cloud Drive just yet. Once you go through the process of creating an account on the service and make a purchase, you are given the option to send the music straight to your Cloud Drive. Honestly, I haven’t been brave enough to do this, yet. When I purchase something, I want it in my hands! I don’t want it floating around in the cloud, because digital music is already somewhat intangible already.
Instead, I’ve uploaded an album from my Dell laptop and the songs played pretty good; however, I see there being a potential downside to this concept. Internet Service Providers are increasingly talking about capping bandwidth usage. I know that AT&T Uverse and AT&T DSL are well on their way to implementing these caps. Between services like the Amazon Cloud Drive, Netflix, Blockbuster, and Amazon Instant Video, I have to wonder at which point the combined streaming media usage of cloud based services will affect our bottom line: our utility bills.
On a very small, side note, I heard this morning that Android’s Gingerbread OS upgrade includes mention of Netflix in certain system level files. It may only be a matter of time before, the Xoom will be able to stream Netflix video. Now that…I really can’t wait to have that ability!
Music Syncing…an almost epic tale
01 year ago
I’ve had one continuing problem since I purchased my Xoom on March 11th. I have a lot of music. Historically, I have purchased that music through Amazon.com – even for my iPhone. I’ve never liked buying songs or albums from Apple and that goes back to the days of DRM. Amazon doesn’t embed DRM, but even after Apple stopped….I stuck it out with Amazon.
A minor side story first…
My favorite music collection…The 99 Most Essential series. These are collections of classical music from a broad spectrum of composers including Schubert (my favorite), Tchaikovsky, Saint-Saëns, Brahms, and Beethoven, and many more. There are also collections around themes like Spring, Summer, Romantic, Opera, Christmas, Violins, Pianos and more. They are generally between $5 – $7, but are frequently on sale for $1.99. In fact, several are on sale right now.
Now, back to the story. I first tried using Doubletwist, which includes a PC program that syncs with the Doubletwist Android App. I started slowly adding chunks of music to my Xoom and everything seemed to be going well. So I figured I might as well buy the wireless sync access. The next day I began to see the problem. Several of the orchestras from the 99 Most Essential series appear across multiple collections. That’s a problem, because it began syncing Christmas music, even though I had never actually selected any Christmas music or the 1 Christmas playlist that I have. I deleted all of my music and resycn’d twice, before I began to understand what was happening.
I had another huge issue with Doubletwist that deserves a separate paragraph. The PC application was really unstable and it appears to have a massive memory leak. I came back to my laptop during a sync to find that Doubletwist was using over 1 gigabyte of RAM multiple times. It caused my laptop to hang on restarts and shutdowns. I had to shut it off with the power button more than once. This was completely unacceptable.
Somewhere along the line I tried WinAmp and was very unhappy with it. The Android app kept crashing, so I got rid of it. I’m not entirely sure at this point, but USB based synch’ing may not even need the WinAmp Android app. I think it’s only needed for the wireless syncing, but I’m loosing interest in that ability.
I then went on to try Salling Media Sync. It immediately struck out, because it didn’t even use the default music location on the Xoom. It put everything in a sub-directory within Music the behavior was very Doubletwist-like. I didn’t like that, so out it went.
Once again, I removed all of my music from the Xoom. I decided to try Winamp, again. I steadily resync’d my music over the last couple of days. Winamp is more stable now. I think an update or two came out. My artists and albums look good. Deleting albums is much easier. Management and search functions seem to be very usable, especially compared to Doubletwist. The most painful process has been the recreation of my playlists. That’s going to take a while and I probably won’t be able to recreate my ‘Walking Music’ or ‘New Music’ lists very easily.
WinAmp does have one good point in its favor. Everything that’s uploaded via WinAmp plays perfectly well with the OS built-in Music player. I like that a lot.
Where does this leave us? It leaves me with a slightly better view of iTunes, even though I really don’t like iTunes. Could this be considered the lesser of two evils? Perhaps.
I’ll keep running with WinAmp as my primary music sync application and see how well things go over the next week.