The first half of this week was tough. Things broke. As they are purported to, they broke in threes.

last.fm

As many denizens of the Internet might know, last.fm broke early in the week.

Once upon a time, this would be something I might not have even noticed, but since last year’s Android Music Adventure experiment, I have become quite the last.fm enthusiast. I now use the service to track all the music I listen to, to discover new music (which is mostly music that has somehow gone missing from my library in the move from tape to CD to MP3), to listen to music at work, and to keep track of statistics on what I listen to.

Yes, I like statistics.

At the end of the day, I can listen to music using my phone or the library on my home computer (which is what I mostly do anyways). But it broke. Which sucked.

giffgaff

Of course, having last.fm broken doesn’t necessarily matter if you can’t connect to it. And when I was mobile, I couldn’t connect to it.

Why? Giffgaff went down.

That isn’t exactly fair, of course — giffgaff is a “virtual” mobile network, meaning it runs on another company’s hardware. And that company, O2, had a major network crash, which lasted for approximately 25 hours.

The phone

Of course, having your mobile network broken doesn’t mean much if your phone is not working. And mine has developed a fault.

The down volume button doesn’t work.

If this sounds like a small problem, it’s because it should be. But for some reason, this triggers my phone to go into Safe Mode in Android Ice Cream Sandwich. There seems to be no way around it. I’ve tried a stock ROM, and all sorts of other ROMs. None of them work.

What does work is going back to Gingerbread. But after half a year of using Ice Cream Sandwich, it feels like being back in the stone age — I have grown accustomed to many of the Ice Cream Sandwich features.

The plan today is to stick with Gingerbread until Jelly Bean is available for my phone — hopefully later this month. Then hope that Jelly Bean will play nice with slightly broken hardware.

If it doesn’t, then I will have a dilemma: I want my next phone to be compatible with a 4G network in the UK, but those don’t exist yet. Do I limp along with Gingerbread until then? Or upgrade my phone early?

And if I upgrade, to what?

My first thought was the Motorola Atrix HD. I’ve like Motorola phones in the past.

But for some reason, Motorola — who are owned by Google — lock down their Android phones and don’t ship with the latest version of the Operating System. On the other hand, Google branded phones by Samsung (who I no longer trust to build robust hardware) are easy to root.

Colour me confused.

In any case, I apologize for missing your call this week.

Late last year, we wrote a three part series on our attempts to de-tether music synchronization between computer and phone.

The experiments were unsuccessful – all we found is that 3G data speeds are insufficient for the constant playlist churn that we like to experience on our phone. But it wasn’t entirely a loss.

In the process, iTunes – arguably the worst software for a Windows machine on the planet – was ditched from my computer in favour of the incredible (and highly recommended) Media Monkey. And last.fm entered our life.

But you’ve been on last.fm since 2009.

This is true. In 2009, I wondered what this whole “internet radio” malarky was about. I got myself a last.fm account, and wondered how many plays it would take (with me loving or banning as many tracks as possible) to go from a blank slate to an accurate representation of my musical tastes.

I did no scrobbling. I answered no – or, at least, minimal – questions about my musical likes and dislikes.

That experiment, by the way, was another failure. I did not possess the patience.

But my Android Music Adventure experiments got me scrobbling. And I loved it — I cannot resist a good set of data about myself, with which to analyze what I actually like and dislike, rather than what I think I like and dislike.

I’m wise enough to know that I probably don’t actually understand what I enjoy.

Having stats on every song I’ve listened to (pretty much) over the last half year, we would now like to report on the following surprises:

#50: Segovia

There’s a four-way tie for the 50th most played artist since my last.fm revolution. And alongside Creedence Clearwater Revival and Bjork, is Andres Segovia.

I’ve always been a sucker for great guitarists, and Segovia is certainly that. But it is, nevertheless, surprising to see classical guitar land itself in the top 50.

#31: Frank Zappa

While Segovia gets credit for landing so high, Zappa is occupying a surprisingly low spot.

Your blogger listens to a lot of Zappa, or so he thought. And Zappa’s seemingly endless catalogue of music is the sort of thing that prompts increased listening, as there is more to listen to without listening to the same things over and over again.

And yet, he’s down in 31.

First thoughts were that “Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention” would push him up … but not really. Barely at all. And he’s hardly the only artist to appear as two (or more) in the chart.

#17: Lily Allen

I know I like Lily Allen. I know it’s a bit weird – she doesn’t seem, on the surface, to fit with other music I enjoy. But enjoy her music I do.

It’s just a little bit of a surprise to see how much. Lily Allen sits between Radiohead and David Bowie on my “top artists” chart.

#7: Raffi

Not the only sign of fatherhood in the list, but the one closest the top.

Raffi music was bought (amongst other things) so that we had some music we could play for Maggie (this was before we learned that she loved Kanye West). And I have played this music so often that it manages to rank in my top ten.

All the music I play for myself – to and from (and at) work. While sitting and typing blog posts. On airplanes. Except for a small group of six artists, I’ve heard more Raffi in the last six months.

That, for the record, is an awful lot of Raffi. The more we get together …

#1: Pink Floyd

Fitting and ridiculous, Pink Floyd sits at #1 on the list of most listened to music.

If this were high school, I would be saying: No shit, sherlock.
If this were university, I would be saying: Not much of a surprise there.

I was way into Pink Floyd. Given that I was three years old when The Wall was released, I spent a large portion of my youth far more into Pink Floyd than I had any right to be.

I owned every album. I owned every video. I bought books, t-shirts, bootleg albums, anything I could get my hands on. I knew – still know, pretty much – every lyric and every note of music of every song.

My wife doesn’t like Pink Floyd. It’s easy to see why people don’t like it. Above, I’ve linked to an album written and recorded by a white, male, mutli-millionaire who has the good fortune to be able to write and play music for a living. When he feels like it. Because he’s so rich he only needs to work when he feels like it.

And that album? Ninety minutes of self-indulgent whining about how hard it is to play music for millions of dollars, and how he misses his daddy. It’s easy to see why the teenagers who listen to Kanye West are more likely to get laid.

I like it all the same. But now that I’m a wise old man, it seems like I don’t really listen to it that much anymore.

Seems like that means listening to it more than anything else, all the same.

Previously, we have discussed our search for a cloud-based music synchronization system. We looked at the offerings of Google, Amazon, and Apple, and found them all seriously wanting.

So much so, in fact, that we despaired that such a service might not exist. And what do you do if something doesn’t exist?

Build it yourself.

The Criteria

The first thing that we had to do was lay out some pared down success criteria — what are we trying to accomplish, no frills? We can always tinker and add things later.

The first thing we do is throw out “automatic”. Automation can happen later after proof of concept.

What we need is:
1. A way to copy a set of songs to my phone, without having them connected by a cord, or on the same WiFi network.
2. A way to copy metadata back to my computer, to update information on what songs have been played on my phone.

The Ingredients

With two simple steps, we now need to gather our set of ingredients to set it up.

Cloud space

We cannot simply load data directly to the phone, unfortunately — an intermediary is needed. Options here are endless, but for a proof of concept, I chose to use Dropbox.

The Big Bad Blog has had issues with Dropbox in the past, and didn’t feel entirely comfortable about this. But as the most popular service of its type, it means that there’s a plethora of tools out there to use.

If things work, goes the logic, either utility will trump ideology, or alternative cloud storage can be found.

The clients

With storage space figured out, the next question is how to upload from the computer, and download from to the phone.

On the PC side of things, I went with Dropbox’s own client. Easy to use, with the benefit of being pre-installed from a brief past flirtation with the service.

For my phone, I downloaded Syncness from the Android Market.

Metadata sync

Which left us with sending the metadata back to my computer. Here I chose to use last.fm.

Last.fm is not just an internet radio — it will also listen (or “scrobble”) to everything you play on your computer, phone, or iPod, and keep track of it. Information on what is played can then be imported back into MediaMonkey, to update the play counts and dates on my computer.

The Test

So how did it all work?

Initial, small scale tests of all three systems worked like a dream. The upload, download, and metadata sync all went smoothly. And we were ready to roll.

And that’s when the shit hit the fan.

I tried to make a larger scale synchronization — not my entire playlist, or a multiple gigabyte load, or anything of that sort. One hundred songs; something that might be typical of a weekly scheduled sync.

It took three hours to upload the songs to Dropbox. And another hour and a half to download them — over WiFi, no less.

This was simply too long. The entire point of this was to create a process that did not require manual intervention. And while all the individual pieces can be automated, making sure that the individual pieces weren’t interrupted mid-sync would require that the synchronization was always kept in mind.

The Verdict

We can see why nobody seems to be offering the service that I’m after — it would just run too slowly to be viable. Hence the concentration on “cloud players” that don’t bother to try to move music onto your own device.

It goes without saying that having music on your device is better — it can hold better quality files than can be managed by streaming services, it can play that music anywhere. Underground, on an airplane, in a foreign country without internet access. The music is just there.

Our bafflement at the lack of a cloud synchronization service has been morphed into an understanding through this process. The companies in the cloud player market are actually building their problem — an inability to provide proper synchronization — into their services as a central, “positive” aspect.

In a couple of years, after everybody has been convinced to stop synchronizing, the technology will have finally arrived and all the same companies will start to convince you to sync your music again.

And so it goes.

(Previously: Volume I and Volume II)