The music problem

▼ After reading stuff like this and even like this, I'm so glad I didn't sign up for Apple's new music service.

I regularly hear about people with more than 25000 songs in their iTunes library. Compared to them, my music library is tiny at only 3500 songs. Still, that's more than 9 days worth of music, or about 200 CDs or 300 LPs. (It's insane that these days this will fit on an SD card the size of a postage stamp.) So there's an entire universe of music out there for me to discover. But it turns out that, not unexpectedly, my prime music discovery days seem to be behind me. These are the numbers of songs per decade in my music library:

• 1900 - 1909: 1
• 1920 - 1929: 1
• 1940 - 1949: 4
• 1950 - 1959: 102
• 1960 - 1969: 421
• 1970 - 1979: 766
• 1980 - 1989: 897
• 1990 - 1999: 526
• 2000 - 2009: 379
• 2010 - 2015: 8

(And the 2000 - 2009 number is inflated quite a bit because a lot of purchased music has the year field set to the year of (re-) issue rather than the year of original recording.)

Still, after the whole Taylor Swift thing, I considered doing the three month trial for Apple Music. Until I realized that if I did that, my local music library would become intermingled with music from the cloud, with too many corner cases to have any hope that Apple will handle all of them correctly.

I'm not even particularly happy with buying songs from the iTunes Store. Despite the 30 second preview (it's often longer now), I managed to buy the wrong version of a number of songs. I also somehow managed to buy songs that I end up never listening to. Then remember all the issues people have had with iTunes Match. And Apple Music is much more complex than what came before. So I'm not at all surprised that people are having problems combing existing music libraries with Apple Music.

For a while, I've been hoping that Apple's opening up of various aspects of iOS would lead to a more liberal approach to music on iOS devices, rather than the current system where there is only one way to get your (local) music on a device in a workable way: through iTunes. But now that Apple has redoubled its music efforts, that probably isn't going to happen any time soon. Too bad.

Many people have called for breaking up iTunes (on the Mac) into smaller applications that handle more limited tasks better. I can see the appeal: an Apple Music app would be much simpler than bolting on yet another function to iTunes. However, previous experience has shown that any change to iTunes only serves to make it worse. (I'm still on iTunes 12.1, and I'm not sure I'm going to upgrade to 12.2.) Some kind of super ambitious, super radical rethinking of the whole system is certainly going to make some parts of it a lot worse. Remember Final Cut X and iWork '13?

A better approach would be to freeze iTunes as it is today (well, as it was a few years ago, really) and then create new apps for new stuff such as Apple Music. This way, both the people who like the old stuff and people who like the new stuff get something that works well for them. That still doesn't solve the use case of having both the old and the new stuff side-by-side, but then, the current approach doesn't really solve that either.

Permalink - posted 2015-07-30

My podcast listening workflow: iTunes/Podcasts, Pocket Casts and (not) Overcast

▼ In 2013, I wrote a pretty long story with advice to podcast app developers. Today, someone on Twitter asked me if I ever found a good solution to the "catching up" use case. I guess the short answer would be "no", but did settle on a podcast listening workflow that works fairly well. So let me explain how I listen to podcasts these days.

After switching from an iPod to the iPhone, I continued to use Apple's built-in podcast functionality for many years. Of course Apple couldn't resist messing with a good thing, so they released the Podcasts app. For a while, you could still use the Music app to listen to podcasts, but that hasn't been possible for a few years now. A few years earlier, Apple had rejected the first third party podcast podcast app, and later changed their minds about that. A few years later, there was a healthy niche of podcasting apps in the store. And then last year Marco Arment released Overcast.

After I reviewed a bunch of podcast apps for Ars Technica three years ago, I settled on Pocket Casts as my main podcast player. However, I never abandoned Apple's Podcasts app, for two reasons.

First, sometimes I can't use my iPhone, and then it's nice to be able to listen to podcasts using my iPod. So for that reason alone I keep a few podcasts around in iTunes on my computer and sync those to my old iPod as well as my iPhone. Second, going through feeds and selecting which episodes to download and which to skip is easier on a computer with a big screen and a keyboard. Also, long lists of back episodes that I accumulate for a rainy day don't get in the way on iTunes and the Podcasts app. However, iTunes keeps getting harder to use, and Podcasts is far from perfect, especially now that it keeps around old episodes for 24 hours. And not being able to use the headphone clicker to skip ahead can be very frustrating.

When Overcast came out, I obviously wanted to try it out. I found the $5 price for the full version a bit steep, and I don't like the whole in-app purchase thing. The Overcast unlock is my one and only in-app purchase. But I decided that I'd be writing about Overcast here on my blog so the $5 would be worth it. And then I didn't write about Overcast and stopped using it, so it wasn't...

The first week, my main problem with Overcast was that many functions were extremely non-obvious to me. I've forgotten which functions were so problematic, but there was definitely a learning curve involved. However, eventually I figured things out and the app became much more usable. I like the smart speed, which speeds up playback by removing pauses. In theory, I also like the idea of normalizing the volume, but in practice I didn't use it. Another thing that's great in theory but doesn't really do it for me in practice is the smart playlist ordering. Yes, there are some podcasts where I immediately want to cue up a new episode, and others where I'm not in a hurry to listen. But in practice I keep changing the order so often that the feature doesn't really help much. Manually adding/removing episodes from a playlist is way too hard.

However, the one thing that made me stop using Overcast is that it always insists on continuing to play—even after you reach the end of your playlist. I find that insanely annoying. Yes, you can make Overcast stop playing at the end of the current episode, but there is no workable way to play a bunch of episodes and then stop.

So I went back to Pocket Casts. I like the look of Pocket Casts better, and in the current version "up next" works very well: when you add episodes, they're put at the end of the "up next" list. You can easily do this with a long press on an episode and then one additional tap. Unfortunately, removing episodes from the up next list is much harder. You'd think that a swipe to the left would do it, but that marks the episode as played, which is pretty much never what I want in the up next list.

To finally answer the question on Twitter: Pocket Cast doesn't handle catching up exactly the way I'd like, but it works. When you subscribe to a podcast, the latest episode shows as new and all older ones as played. When I decide I want to catch up and listen to all old episodes or some old episodes, I just scroll to the bottom of the episode list, tapping "show older episodes" as needed. I then download a few, and listen to those. I have to take care that I go back and download more before I listen to all the ones I downloaded, because having at least one downloaded but unplayed episode allows me to keep track of how far in the feed I got.

Yes, it would be nice if more episodes would be downloaded automatically as I listened to older episodes, but downloading them manually is no big deal. The only annoying part is that the downloaded episodes move to the "new" section at the top of the episode list, so it's not obvious where in the "played" section the oldest unlistened episode resides. A solution would be to mark the whole feed as new, but then all the unlistened episodes would clutter up my "all" list, which also isn't great.

Update: it turns out that the swipe-to-the-left gesture that normally marks podcasts as "old" also marks old ones as new.

Permalink - posted 2015-02-05

Power use of bluetooth vs Wi-Fi vs wired audio on the iPhone 5

▼ With all this bluetooth audio going on, I wondered: how much power does playing back audio over bluetooth use? So I tested this. The tests then snowballed as I got curious about audio over Wi-Fi, or having bluetooth and/or Wi-Fi on when the phone is idle. All the tests were done on an iPhone 5 with a freshly replaced battery under iOS 7. The results:

• Playing audio through the headphone jack, airplane mode, background app refresh off. In 7:59 the battery went from 50% to 34%, 2% per hour.
• Playing audio through the headphone jack, Wi-Fi off, bluetooth off, background app refresh on. In 8:04 the battery went from 50% to 31%: 2.4% per hour.

So in airplane mode, you should be able to play audio for 50 hours and with 3G enabled but not Wi-Fi or bluetooth and no background app refresh to trigger CPU and network use, it's a bit over 40 hours. I guess this also means that just running the 3G radio uses 0.4% of the battery per hour, so the standby time of an untouched iPhone 5 would be 250 hours. (A week and a half!)

Now let's add some bluetooth and Wi-Fi:

• Playing audio through the headphone jack, Wi-Fi on, bluetooth on, background app refresh off. In 8 the battery went from 44% to 23%: 2.6% per hour.

With these settings, you'd be able to play audio for over 38 hours, three hours less than with Wi-Fi and bluetooth off. But what if we start actually playing audio over buetooth?

• Playing audio over bluetooth, Wi-Fi off, bluetooth on, background app refresh on. In 8 hours the battery went from 72% to 45%: 3.4% per hour.

Now we're down to 29 hours of audio playing. So if you really only use your iPhone to play audio and you need it to last as many hours as possible between charges, using the headphone jack certainly makes a big difference. But you'd have to charge your bluetooth headphones two or three times before the iPhone runs out of juice! In normal use, this is more than good enough to use bluetooth for audio when that's convenient and not worry about the iPhone's battery.

However, there's another way to stream audio from an iPhone: over Wi-Fi.

• Wi-Fi streaming, bluetooth on, background app refresh off. In 9:55 the battery went from 89% to 65%: 2.4% per hour.

So streaming audio over Wi-Fi uses the same amount of power as playing through the headphones. Who knew?

Last but not least, what's the impact of having Wi-Fi on on the standby time when the iPhone is idle?

• Standby, bluetooth on, wifi off, background app refress off. In 8:49 the battery went from 23% to 18%: 0.6% per hour.
• Standby, bluetooth on, wifi on, background app refress off. In 9:44 the battery went from 18% to 11%: 0.7% per hour.

So with just 3G and bluetooth on the standby time would be a week and with 3G, bluetooth and Wi-Fi on six days. In other words: having bluetooth on uses an extra 5% of your battery each day, and bluetooth + Wi-Fi 7% per day.

Please note that I did every test only once and the accuracy and precision of the battery charge indicator are limited, so this is just a rough estimate, don't be fooled by the fact that there are numbers behind a decimal point. But I think the overall conclusion that you can simply leave Wi-Fi and bluetooth on is a pretty safe one.

Permalink - posted 2014-10-21

Bluetooth earbuds: Jaybird Bluebuds X

▼ With the impending arrival of the Apple Watch, it's time to start looking for some new bluetooth headphones/earbuds.

When I checked my RSS feeds this morning, I saw that Marco Arment had reviewed three sets of portable bluetooth headphones. He pretty much came to the same conclusion as I did when I reviewed the Sennheiser MM450 for Ars Technica back in 2011:

The big question is whether it's worth all the trouble. Having to charge another battery pretty much every day, being surprised by "bad wireless" days, the poor audio quality in HSP mode, the video-killing lag, and the extra cost all scream "No!"

Still, getting rid of that wire is really nice. Walking into the kitchen while listening without even bothering to pocket my iPhone is good. And not seeing the iPhone fly through the air because the headphone cable got caught behind a doorknob once again is even better. Apparently, the answer is a qualified "yes" after all.

As per the reasons above, when the MM450 broke I wanted to get another set of bluetooth headphones, but although I liked the MM450, I didn't like the price and durability. So I got the much cheaper FSL Zero instead. The FSL Zero are great for indoors, but the size and sweaty ears issue make it a non-starter for use outside when it's warm or when exercising.

Enter the Jaybird Bluebuds X bluetooth earbuds ($140 at Amazon).

Yes, they're a little bigger than most earbuds, but only a little. They weigh 13 grams. That's half of what a typical AA battery weighs. But the battery life is 8 hours. I don't know how they did it, but the iPhone shows a very tiny battery indicator for the Bluebuds next to the bluetooth icon. Another nice touch is that there's a voice that tells you the battery is running low, as well as telling you when the earbuds are turned on, connected using bluetooth or in pairing mode. Pairing was super simple. There's a red/green LED, but it stays off during normal use. The Bluebuds come with a carrying case and a short USB-to-micro-USB cable, but no charger.

The Bluebuds compared to Apple Earpods and the Sony DREX12IPB

With regular earbuds, I always use the smallest tips because apparently I have small ears. On the Bluebuds these are a bit bigger than normal (and not interchangeable with ones from my wired earbuds) but they still fit—and didn't fall out over the course of several hours' use. Like Apple's Earpods or the Sony DREX12IPB that I normally use, the Bluebuds have three buttons: volume up, volume down and play/pause. With wired headphones/earbuds you skip ahead by double pressing the play/pause button and back with a triple press. On the Bluebuds this is accomplished with a long press on the + and - buttons. A long press on the play/pause wakes up Siri and a really long press turns off the Bluebuds. The volume buttons do the exact same thing as the volume buttons on the iPhone itself, which is good.

Audio quality is very good for podcasts: voices sound natural. As with most earbuds, there is less bass and more high end, but there's still a reasonable amount of bass and the high frequencies aren't harsh. Obviously you wouldn't want to use these to do serious music listening, but the Bluebuds certainly aren't terrible for music. You can even use them when watching video, there isn't any noticeable lag.

You wear them either using the "traditional under-ear fit option" where the wire between the earbuds runs down your cheek and the controls are on the right, or with the wire running up and then behind the back of your head, with the controls on the left. Unfortunately, there's no option to reverse the left and right channels. Jaybird claims the wireless reception is good enough to leave your phone in your gym bag when you work out, or wear it anywhere on your body. Looks like they're not exaggerating: I had barely any dropouts out in the open, where my old MM450s would always struggle. Walking into the kitchen is also entirely doable.

I'm impressed with the Bluebuds. Without any wires or over-ear foam pads but with better than average bluetooth reception, they allow for lots of situations and activities where other types of headphones or earbuds just don't cut it. However, only get them if you can wear in-ear earbuds comfortably, as they are a bit bigger than the wired variety.

Permalink - posted 2014-10-14