“This One Goes to 11” — 5 WMP Improvements

Scoble opened up the floor and asked for suggestions for improvements to Windows Media Player, and a lot of responses I’ve seen dealt with bug-fix-type suggestions. I’m a big fan of music and the album as an art form, so I thought I’d chime in with some more fundamental changes.

 

1. http://www.nowplaying.com — A site that lets me create a custom layout for the "Now Playing" visualization in WMP. Like I said I love whole albums, and while everyone likes swirley colored lines, I’d appreciate a clean, cool overview of the track I’m listening to. Song and album title, year released, album art, two sentences from All Music Guide about the band and album… How about a timeline module that graphically lays out the month/year the album was released, along with a cluster of other albums in its genre that were released around the same time. I’d love to see that info when I’m listening to "Street Fightin’ Man" off The Stones’ Beggar’s Banquet. The stock InfoCenterView or WMP 10 Energy are only hints at what this can be.

 

The http://www.nowplaying.com site would be a template where anyone can drag, drop and customize the appearance of a "Now Playing" template, and then export it to their copy of WMP. Choose the location, size, font, background, rich modules like timelines and album art.

 

2. Songtag and Vidtag — Before I have to shut down WMP in the middle of an album or movie, I should be able to tag the progress bar where I want to resume next time I start up WMP or anytime thereafter. The added bonus is that I can permanently tag sections of music or concerts that I want to remember. (Music trivia: there’s a random 10-second segment of Phish’s 4/3/98 Roses jam that duplicates a Fall ’97 Albany jam, not noted on any setlist. Similar deal, Miles quotes the main Sketches of Spain theme for three seconds on another album, believe it was Porgy and Bess. I’d want to tag these segments permanently.)

 

3. In the "Library" tab in the left pane, let me create my own trees. I don’t just want to choose columns. I want to define a tree that starts with only the Classical genre, second branch is Composer, third branch is Album. It would look like this:

 

– Classical Tree

      – Ludwig van Beethoven

            O  Symphony No. 5

            O  Symphony No. 9

 

As WMP is now if I start with the Composer branch, it includes a bunch of Rock and Hip-Hop composers, and I don’t choose my Rock and Hip-Hop based on the composer. But I do choose Classical based on it.

 

Another example scenario is first branch Year, second branch Genre, third branch Album. This gives a good snapshot of music history, a la:

 

– 1969

      + Hip-Hop

      + Jazz   

      –  Rock

            O  Abbey Road (Beatles)

            O  Let it Bleed (The Rolling Stones)

            O  The Velvet Underground (The Velvet Underground)

 

3b. In the existing WMP "Library" tree set-up, sort the Album Artist > Album list chronologically, not alphabetically. I want to see a band’s albums listed in the order the were released. Of course my #3 suggestion would let me define this if I’m an anomoly.

 

4. WAV to WMA — Maybe I’m dull but I haven’t found a quick way to convert batches of WAV files to WMA format. I know WMA automatically converts CDs, but when I download concert tracks from bands that permit trading, I have to convert these to WMA files one-at-a-time. Painstaking.

 

5. Let me choose the tabs I want displayed at the top of WMP. Do I ever burn CDs? Do I ever use the Guide? No! They’re wasting space on an otherwise reasonably clean interface.

 

Again, some of these stem from my love of the album as a musical idea and pop music history. But I bet a whole lotta music lovers would find these kinds of improvements useful.

Images: Blogger vs. Spaces

I switched to MSN Spaces from Google’s Blogger two weeks ago in part because at the time Spaces appeared to handle images better than Blogger. Spaces lets you paste images to the bottom of the post, Blogger didn’t allow me to paste images into my blog entries at all.

 

Bad timing on my part — Blogger now lets users post images, but also offers more options for laying out images within text. When will Spaces play get up to speed and let me embed photos at the top, bottom, middle, left or right of my post? (Without messing around with HTML, if that’s possible.)

RSS and HTML: Sent and Sought

Last week Microsoft announced a strategy for the new-ish RSS content distribution technology that harkens back to a strategy it employed for the underlying content publishing technology for the Web, namely HTML.

I’ll leave all market analysis to Jupter Research’s Joe Wilcox, who always blows me away with the smart content he offers all of us non-paying readers — in addition to his proprietary reports. (How he does it must be worthy of study by similar paid-content producers.)

Microsoft’s RSS Platform: "I: The What" — "II: The How" — "III: The Why"

Here’s one thing that interests me about the news. We’ve obviously gotten to the point where RSS is valued — and merchandized — just about as much as any other Web content. We’ve also added graphics, advertisements; soon we’ll add ordered lists, calendar sharing, and other enhancements to RSS feeds. Hey, I have an idea — why not let us customize backgrounds and little javascripts…

I’m begging the question: with each new function embedded in RSS, what separates it from any other Web content? From my perspective it’s the way RSS is sent, and not sought, like typical Web pages.

This is obvious, this is basic, I’m probably the last to get it — but it teaches me a lot about technology adoption. The way people interact with things — news stories, Web pages, iPods, operating systems — is as important as what they are interacting with. Moreso. RSS is not unlocking some new source of data. It’s just making those sources easier to interact with. Sometimes that eludes those of us staring at the backside of technology.

The Search Command-Line — Part III

I have this strange recurring thought that computing is moving from text-based DOS/BASH prompt to Windows/KDE graphics interfaces back to text-based input methods.

 

Of course we’ll never leave graphical interfaces behind; I exaggerate only to highlight the increasing reliance on text-based search to find my own stuff and the Internet’s boundless goodies (thanks Russell!) In that vein, today Erik Selberg at MSN Search posted info on new text commands you can use to narrow down searches and find very specific content on the Web. For example

"One of our new, experimental operators is called Contains:. Contains:<foo> searches for pages where there’s a hyperlink to a file with the extension <foo>. For example, contains:wmv will find results that contain WMV files. You can augment this with other search terms to narrow your search… for example, the infamous news clip of the exploding whale is easily found via exploding whale contains:wmv. This will fine any filetype that our spider sees a link to on the Web, so it’s a great asset to find binary files that our Crawler doesn’t download and process — audio and video files, images, binaries, and so forth. We’re really just starting to explore the utility of this feature, so we can’t wait to see what you come up with as well!"

Cool stuff. I’ve already started to build a list of customized, functional text-based shortcuts in my desktop search toolbar. This list of search presets is a welcome addition.

Giant Steps

Scoble pointed me to this great animated video set to John Coltrane’s "Giant Steps." Coltrane is top-five for sure.

Speaking of, I just finished reading Miles Davis’ autobiography — loved hearing Miles tell stories and talk music. Highly recommended for any music fan.

Microsoft at Lex & 59th?

Don’t know how much truth there is in rumors that Microsoft is looking at Bloomberg as an acquisition target, but add to that a new rumor yesterday that the friendly Redmond giant might shed its stake in MSNBC, and you have the makings of "rampant speculation." Regardless, I think the sale of Slate.com was just a bit of unrelated Spring cleaning.

I don’t buy into the notion that MS needs a strong media content arm — their platform/distribution businesses seems to work fine channeling the wealth of third-party content out there.

More Innovations in Today’s Command-Line

People have been talking — well, I have anyway — about how the major search engines are beginning to resemble the command-line of years past. With every new function built into that single-line Google or MSN search field, we seem to be regressing to text-based input instead of rich graphical interaction. (Then again, Linux junkies thrive on this as a way to tap tons of resources from one simple place.)

Today Google adds movie listings to its search, so if you want to find a showtime for the excellent movie Sideways you use the prefix "movie:sideways" or if you want a rated list of movies that Will Smith has been in, type "movie:will smith." Simple, but cool.

I don’t know what to make of this text-based command-line regression. I wish we had a more advanced input mechanism altogether, but I’d also like to see more text-based commands built into search, like "dict:" to look up definitions, "thes:" to look up synonyms, "area:" to look up area codes, "stock:" to look up a company’s share price, etc. You get the picture. Maybe these already exist beyond a more manual hack for Firefox, but I haven’t seen them.

Here

You know how search results are priorized (in part) by the text labels that link to them? For example if a bunch of people link to my blog by calling it "hogwash," I might eventually show up in a Google search for "hogwash."

So, knowing how many times things like this appear online:

"You can read it here" or "Click here" or "Get such and such here"

I Googled "here" and found that it’s actually a pretty good indication of the Web’s most valuable utilities. Here’s the list (eliminating redundant results):

10. Paypal
9. Netscape
8. XE.com
7. WinZip
6. MapQuest
5. Internet Explorer
4. Realplayer
3. Apple Quicktime
2. Macromedia Flash

[and, drumroll please…]

1. Acrobat Reader

I’m surprised that xe.com made the cut, and wondering why Netscape beat out Firefox. I’m also a little bummed that one of my favorite Pavement songs didn’t place Top 10.

Mapping Out Software and Services

Not an entirely new concept, but fascinating when applied to a company like Google:

As cable and telecom companies bulk up broadband connections to the home, the line between client software and online services will become increasingly blurred. After all, sites like Google are just building and running software that sits on a Web server, right? The fact that you use Google’s map service through a browser really doesn’t change the fact that it is a great piece of software – arguably better than most other consumer mapping software. No fundamental difference between software and services.

There’s a lot more I could say on the topic, but I could imagine a world where Google becomes the complete computing environment – essentially replacing today’s concept of a client-side operating system. I’m sure not the only one with this vision. Software could be served over high-bandwidth links from home to Web site. Consumers boot into a hybrid BIOS-Linux OS with one core function: browser. From the browser they organize their photos, send e-mail, read the news, search for TV shows, listen to the radio, access file storage, and who knows what else. Word processing can’t be far off.

And I bet that OS-less computing environment will have a big “G” logo. As a brand and software engineering force, Google has shown incredible potential. I’m curious to see what’s the next _____.google.com.

Today’s Command-Line

Quick point to something Joe Wilcox just wrote, I think his analogy is a great one and raises a fascinating question:

"My question: Will the search wars take us backward to go forward? Remember that the original user interface was the command line–typed text telling the computer what to do. Right now, search’s utility is a lot closer to the command line than it is to the graphical user interface. Google’s extremely streamlined interface makes the point, I think; GMail, perhaps more so, since the idea is to use search to find e-mail rather than organize it in folders."

If Google is today’s CLI (i.e. DOS prompt), what will the graphical search of the future look like? I hope I won’t be clicking through 5 billion icons. (And while cool, A9.com isn’t it either.)