Content has been in short supply here at the Big Bad Blog over the last couple of weeks. There are many reasons — Karen has returned to work after maternity leave, which seems to be producing exhaustion in both of us. I’ve returned to fencing (again). I’ve been playing D&D.

But, mostly, I’ve been fiddling with my phone.

One of the reasons I enjoy my Android phone so much more than I enjoyed its Apple predecessor is the freedom the Operating System gives to customize the device. While both the stock Apple and Android experiences are excellent, only Android embraces users who wish to go outside the stock experience to create one of their own.

This fiddling brought me full circle back to my current music problems, and also made me think that I was approaching music in a wrong way.

The Cloud

What’s that wrong way?, you might ask.

“Tethering” would be the reply.

Rebuilding my phone made me note how well almost everything I use on my phone is kept in synchronization with great ease. From contact information to calendars, backups to books to bookmarks and beyond, everything on my phone just synchronizes with any and every other connected device I might use.

I set it up and forget it — if I enter your phone number into my address book on my computer, I can dial it from my phone the next time I need it. If my phone dies tomorrow, yesterday’s backup files are sitting on my computer. If I take a photo, I can find it on my computer without needing any direct connection.

But music? It wants my phone to be tethered to my laptop, via WiFi if not an actual wire.

And it occurred to me that this is wrong. This is how Apple set things up when they came out with the iPod a decade ago, and nobody ever bothered to make it better.

Until now, of course — now the cloud is all the rage. Nevermind that we all signed up for Yahoo! mail back in the late ’90s, technically a cloud service.

So I took the plunge.

Out with Apple

And a plunge it was — I didn’t figure out what was going to do, and then get rid of my old system. Instead, it was out with the old, despite “the new” being yet unidentified — without knowing what I was going to do, or how I was going to make it work, I deleted the evil that is iTunes from my computer.

It wasn’t needed.

It wasn’t wanted.

It isn’t missed.

In its place has come MediaMonkey. It is fantastic by comparison to iTunes, and I’ve been enjoying playing around with my music collection for the first time in years — organizing it, modifying scripts, and generally playing around.

Ten years ago — before I joined the iTunes collective — I really enjoyed compiling and organizing my music collection. Playing in MediaMonkey generates a similar feeling.

Is it that it’s a new toy? A better toy? That I’ve just reminded myself of how I enjoy this sort of thing?

I couldn’t say. But MediaMonkey already gets my hearty endorsement, in any case.

Getting cloudy

While getting rid of iTunes was easy, it seems that moving to the cloud is a bit more challenging, however.

Over the next few days — or perhaps weeks, given the speed at which I seem to be writing of late — I’ll go through my attempts to synchronize music through the cloud. We will see what works, and (mostly) what doesn’t.

Suffice it to say that the piece that I thought would be the easiest part of the journey has, as it turns out, been the rockiest.

Not too long ago, I wanted to be an Apple fanboy quite badly. I had this little device known as the iPhone, which connected me to the Internet when I wasn’t at home, played music, and reputedly could even make and receive telephone calls.

I loved that iPhone.

And it connected to my computer with a little special cable, where an Apple program called iTunes would synchronize it. iTunes held — and still holds — my entire music collection.

Then things started getting sour.

It began even while I was still in love. Apple wouldn’t let me just turn on my own fucking phone that I had just bought. No. I had to wait until I was home, install iTunes and perform an initial synchronization.

And they wouldn’t let me just install iTunes. They had to try to add their MobileMe service (and later their Safari browser). And not just the first time – they would ask me with every iTunes upgrade that would ever come out.

And they wouldn’t let me put whatever I wanted on my phone. Only specially-approved-by-Apple software could go on a device that I paid hundreds of pounds for.

But I didn’t care. My iPhone was so shiny.

It turned out, however, that these were not glitches in the Apple paradigm; these were instead indicative of Apple’s approach to doing business. And as Apple continued down this road, I decided to stop supporting them with my money. I would cut them out of my life, hardware and software alike. For Steve Jobs & Co., there was no more time, money, or space (real or virtual) in my life.

The iPhone was dutifully ditched for an Android, and this blogger has not looked back. (Well, he has, but he’s had a big grin on his face about the decision.) My other piece of Apple hardware — an external hard drive — was given away.

But there remains one problem: iTunes.

Unbelievably, it remains on my computer — I use a wonderful program called iSyncr to synchronize my iTunes playlists with my Android phone. It works wonderfully, this system of mine. Except that it keeps Apple software on my computer.

And I desperately want to be free of Apple software.

At first I went to DoubleTwist, which is billed in every corner of the Internet as a “must have” Android app, and the Android version of iTunes. It was awful.

Cory Doctorow wrote on BoingBoing about Miro, so I gave that a try. Not only did it lack the functionality I hoped for, but Miro is additionally so full of advertising (and so pushy about its advertising/requests for donation) that AntiVirus software flags it as a virus. It makes Apple’s proprietary formats and DRM look pleasant by comparison.

Frustration was setting in — the both consensus iTunes replacement and Internet Freedom Fighter recommended options did not pull their own weight. So I turned to a dear old friend: WinAMP.

And while we were creeping closer to a proper solution, it still lay just beyond our grasp. WinAMP was by far the best music player used thus far — it worked wonderfully. Yet it still did not synchronize song metadata in the manner that I was hoping for.

Could nothing match iTunes? How is it that a piece of software first designed in 2000 is still the best option for synchronizing music more than ten years later? Surely this shouldn’t happen.

If you are looking for somebody to copy Apple, I thought, look to Microsoft. Windows Media Player was dutifully booted up. It was as bad as I remembered it being, and even refused to recognize my phone as a device to which music could be synchronized.

My last, best hope was MediaMonkey. My research told me that it was the refuge of insane music hoarders, the best tool out there for managing a music collection on your PC. And surely the best music manager in the game must include easy synchronization with the most popular mobile Operating System out there.

Right?

Wrong.

MediaMonkey was breathtakingly efficient at adding all my music, pulling in every rating and playcount from iTunes. It had an answer to everything.

Except a friendly solution to Android synchronization.

It’s strange, because I am not even using iTunes to synchronize anything — I use a third-party tool in order to synchronize over my WiFi connection easily and painlessly. If iSyncr can be built for iTunes, surely it can be built for MediaMonkey.

But in our world full of crowdsourcing, filled with super-intelligent app-writing geeks, the application doesn’t seem to exist.

And I’m still stuck here holding one last rotten, stinking Apple.

Welcome to day two of Android week — with only three days between bank holidays here in the UK and an unusual amount of excitement that accompanies a new gadget, it is looking like we might do an all-Android week here at the Big Bad Blog.

Yesterday, we took a look at our general impressions, and gave a comparison between our new Nexus S and the iPhone. In it, we mentioned that our big surprise was the quality of our music experience. However, getting there was not a smooth ride — today, we give you the full story.

Our goal

Our goal is simple — to replace the iTunes/iPhone functionality with our Google Nexus S.

In particular, we note that our music collection is in excess of 36 gigabytes in size. This is more than twice the storage space available on our phone — and we only want to fill half that storage space with music. This means that we need some method of rotating music in and out.

The method we have used in the past is that of the smart playlist. We have the 4GB of music that has been played least recently, and 4GB of music that we have given high ratings to and has been played least recently.

For this to work, we need to be able to set up similar playlists for synchronization. Ideally, we would also import our existing ratings and playcounts, so we are not starting these playlists from scratch, but we are willing to put up with starting these over from the beginning for the sake of an improved experience.

Stage I: doubleTwist

If you have spent years as an Apple iPod/iPhone customer, you have your music collection on iTunes. And if you are switching to an Android device after all this time, ditching iTunes sounds like a wonderful idea — the only problem is how to do so without losing everything you put into the program. Playlists, ratings, playcounts. If you love music, this is important to you.

Enter doubleTwist.

Every single website that reviews such things has nothing but positive things to say about doubleTwist. It imports your iTunes library, stats, playlists and all. It synchronizes between the PC and Android versions of the software. The most wonderful thing in the world.

I should have known better — there is no way that every single website would agree on such things. Is it lazy reporting, repeating a press release? Is it payola? We have no way of knowing here at the Big Bad Blog.

What we do know is that when we installed it on our PC, it immediately located and imported our entire iTunes library. It nabbed the songs, the stats, the playlists … but left out the “smart” part of the smart playlists. They were no longer auto-updating.

That’s OK, we thought. Let’s sync, and figure out the smart part later.

So we set the phone to synchronize, and walked away.

We never expected an 8GB data transfer to be fast, but it shouldn’t take three hours. Three hours later, and a half dozen photos (and no songs) had moved to the phone.

We cancelled the sync, and uninstalled.

Stage II: Winamp

Having experienced failure from the laziest available approach, we decided to look a bit deeper, and found that Winamp was still around.

Our favourite music player of the late 90s, Winamp still exists, is still updated, and now comes with an Android version. What’s more, the PC and Android versions will synchronize! What could be more perfect?

Unfortunately, a couple of things.

First, the synchronization only happens one way. Playcounts – which are integral to our rotation system – do not synchronize back to the computer from the phone, to update the playlist.

Second, while a “smart playlist” is available in Winamp, it is not called a playlist, and so will not synchronize as part of an “automatic sync”. This means that the sync must be done manually.

Third, the manual sync process is a pain in the butt, having to detect the device, select the songs to be synchronized onto the device, and then synching … which (as mentioned above) does not even cause a proper music rotation.

By this time next year, we fully expect the folks at Winamp will have figured things up, and that our search might have ended here. But in 2011, we needed to perform our second uninstall.

Stage III: iSyncr

At this point, we were despairing. All along, we had really wanted to give MediaMonkey a shot as an iTunes replacement for playlist management and PC-based playback, but the lack of a paired music player gave us pause.

Now, we decided to look at synchronization as its own puzzle. And we found iSyncr.

iSyncr is the first application that we have found in our hunt that works like a dream. The music just copies across, without a hitch. The stats on played music copies back to the PC, without any problem. The only issue is that iSyncr synchronizes iTunes playlists.

iTunes is dead. Long live iTunes.

We can live with this, though — iTunes is now the place our music collection is stored, rather than the one and only door to our phone. We became comfortable with this idea surprisingly quickly. And we have music synchronization.

Stage IV: PowerAMP

Everything was synchronized. We are now listening to music on our new Android phone, … but … there’s still a problem.

It seems that the native application that Google provides to play music is a bit … shitty. The sound quality was notably worse than what I was used to having with my iPhone. This was disappointing. We set to research alternate players.

Most players appear to be alternate front-ends to the same native music player. Some of them were very cool, in fact. And then there’s PowerAMP.

PowerAMP lists the formats it supports on its website, suggesting it uses its own codecs to decode the files, and it has a graphics equalizer. And the sound that comes through my headphones from the Nexus S is superior to that which has come from any MP3 player before it.

And that’s how I found myself leaving Apple, but sticking with iTunes.

There is something distracting from the morning coffee this morning. A general feeling of anticipation.

On the “news including gross pictures” front, we present a man who had a fir tree removed from his lungs. Well, one of them. One lung (not fir tree).

(Photo by t-klick)

On why you cannot find AC/DC songs on iTunes. Or anywhere else in digital form. Which I agree is a pain in the ass.

We also feel the need to mention the great Amazon debacle this morning, in which they removed most of their GBLT content from their subject-based search. Making Light has the best summary of what happened (and potential causes) that I have seen.

Today’s webcomic is from Simulated Comic Product: