My Digital Music Innovation Wish List

As a digital music consumer, these are the top 5 things I wish for:
 

1.  Rhapsody/Rhapsody-to-go for Macintosh. 

2.  A relatively cheap aftermarket car stereo into which I could dock my iPod, either on the stereo face plate or near the gearbox.  It should be able to toggle modes between iPod & radio.  I wouldn't care if it didn't come with a CD player (especially if it made the price lower).

3. Inter-frickin-operability.  I understand the business reasons behind why it's not here but, as a consumer, it stinks!  Short of that, it'd be great to have a (legal!) service whereby I could trade songs that are in a certain format for the same songs in a different format.  This would be good for my bro who, poor guy, has tons of WMA files sitting around his computer.  He finally wised up and has been ripping his CDs into MP3 of late but it is this problem that has kept him from buying an iPod or another MP3 player.  I'd be willing to pay a small fee, like $0.05 or $0.10 per file for this service.

4. A poor man's Sonos.  Basically a way to easily access music (and media) files from different places in the house without being out a couple of G's.  Maybe Airport Express is one way to do this but it requires me to play music through my computer.  It'd be better if I could beam the iPod output wirelessly to my stereo in a high-fidelity format (not via RF).  I think bluetooth adapters could be one way at this, no?

5. More music from my favorite bands in 1 place.  Most of the music stores and services have the 'regular' studio albums and maybe a performance or two from the larger acts.  But they lack a ton of other stuff that may not have been commercially released, but for which there is commercial value:  Take one of my favorites, Luna.  Besides their studio albums, they did performances on Morning Becomes Eclectic, KEXP and a bunch of others...not to mention their various performances where they may have mixed things up, done a cover they've never done before, etc.  The stuff that is available is scattered across various sites while there is no doubt a lot of recorded stuff sitting on the shelf gathering dust.   I know some of it may have been deemed to be not up to snuff from a production-value standpoint but, guess what, the KEXP recording isn't that great and I still ate it up as a fan.  The bar is much lower for fans!

What digital music problems have I missed?

Comments

[David Brewster]

Good post. 1. As long as Apple won't play fair with Fairplay the labels will be stuck with Janus DRM and the Windows platform, hence not likely we'll see Rhapsody To Go for the Mac. 2. Try an iTrip device, it's not perfect sound but it's cheap and easy. 3. It's almost as laborious as ripping into MP3, but iTunes will convert unportected WMAs into MP3s when it's pointed to new folders and files. 4. Agree about beaming from your iPod, but Airport is a great solution that works well from my laptop on my home wireless network. 5. I'd suppose a lot of Luna (and everyone else) can be found on Kazaa et al, but the point is really about great stuff people will be proud to own and experience over and over, maybe via podcast?

[Rags]

Yeah, I'm going to give iTrip a shot but I'm not optimistic. I've also been looking at Airport Express but I have to have my computer on and accessible which is a pain. Finally, I don't expect this kind of stuff to (legally) show up on podcasts anytime soon.

[Peter Forret]

Actually WMA is not that bad a format. The only major MP3 player that does NOT support it is the iPod, but Creative, iRiver, MPIO, Archos, ... all play it. It's amazing that Microsoft has not been pushing it more.

[Raghav Gupta]

I agree Peter but there's the rub -- it's not supported by Apple. But believe me, Microsoft have been pushing WMA like crazy. That's what Real's antitrust is about!

On another note, I tried out iTrip in my car and it's not bad. The fidelity isn't great but it suffices when I can't find anything on the radio, which is often.