Posts tagged music

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.