No longer in Beta, Google has announced an update to their Google Music Service. Here is the breakdown.
The service will remain free to host 20,000 of your tracks online, for streaming playback via mobile devices, download and syncing of playlists between devices. I love being able to set a playlist as available for offline playback and forget about it until I want to listen to the music when a connection isn’t there. The service downloads music in the background, and has the ability to limit music streaming and downloads to wifi connections only if you are worried about blowing your data cap.
You can now buy tracks via the Android Market, and they will be available immediately in your online library, and sync to your computer shortly thereafter. There are a pretty good amount of free tracks available right now, some good some bad, some neither here nor there. You can do all of this from your browser, and the music shows up in your library within seconds.
The missing cog so far has been the social element. Google Music now allows your friends to listen to any song you buy once, via invitation. More than enough to share and let them know f they would like to buy it on their own. I like this addition, and I hope that they one day will open the sharing up to the rest of the songs in our library as well, but baby steps here folks.
The service now goes up against the Apple Music store directly, If yo have an Android device 2.2+ and you want the Music app update you can always download it immediately, or wait for the app store to prompt you. I like this player and I hope they come out with a app based client for iOs devices soon.
It has been quite a week, and quite a day around these parts. Lots of things getting done, but not a lot of news on one of our favorite topics. Coffee is like that some days there is a ton of stuff to talk about, others…. not so much. We have a bunch of Halloween themed stories to bring back from the dead, and some fun gadgets and news to discuss join us!
Siri is the new Apple personal assistant, voice recognition app. It can do so many things, and apparently one of them is comedy! Part of the challenge of designing software that reacts to people in real language is dealing with unexpected input. This isn’t a new problem, drop an F bomb in Zork, and you get the response “Such language in a high-class establishment like this!” And Zork came out in 1979, people haven’t changed that much since then.
As soon as you can talk to a piece of software someone is going to curse, another is say dirty suggestive things. And apparently Siri has the response to all of it. Pop Culture references, Philosophical queries, foul requests. All of that can be found on the hilarious blog. Shit Siri Says. People submit conversations, and we all get to laugh.
But Siri, as a concept has never been far from Apple’s mind. For a bit of a jaw dropping experience take a look at one of the original concepts for a digital assistant, the Knowledge Navigator.
Steve Jobs died on October 5th 2011, at the age of 56. The news of which broke not an hour before we started to record our podcast.
PodCast… As much as disagree with the association between iPods and podcasts, it’s there. And no amount of Portable on Demand broadcasting can change it. People listen on their ipods, or whatever. And the term is forever linked. Without him that word wouldn’t be here.
There are things being written by people smarter than I am, and by people who actually knew the man. This won’t be 7 fun things he created, or 13 things your didn’t know about the man. A father has left his family, and three young children don’t have a dad tonight. A loving wife doesn’t have a husband. There is a very real loss to the community as a whole, but my thoughts go out to the people who didn’t just lose a leader and a visionary but a human being as well.
Steve Job’s passing saddens me because people are focused on the things he created, and that his vision helped shape. iPads, and pods, Macs and Apples. That seems shortsighted. If you look at this legacy he didn’t love these things. They were designed to be replaced in a year or two. They were products of a much larger vision for the world and a devoting to making beautiful design functional and easy to use. Focus on the abstract.
I wouldn’t have half my friends if Steve Jobs hadn’t been the man he was. Friends in Podcasting, Friends in Graphic Design. My son wouldn’t have his favorite movies, all Pixar. And I wouldn’t have the experience of playing my first video game with my son, not only because it was Cars2 the video game. A Pixar Joint. And not only because the Xbox 360 runs on a PowerPC chip, which for years powered the Mac. And not only because in the 1970′s Steve Jobs and Woz worked with Atari to help cut the code down for Pong, to make room for other innovations. That right there is several layers of genius missing from the world tonight.
I’ll do you one hyperbole better. Steve Jobs, was not the Walt Disney of our time, no he goes beyond that. Everything you touch today is influenced by Jobs, and Thomas Edison. That’s it. I can’t think of another analogue to the mans body of work. He quite simple thought differently, and changed the world. We are living in the world as it is because of what he wrought.
The tone of tonights show was different right up until the time we had to record it. Am I going to spend the whole episode rehashing and talking about it? No, but things deserve their due. And a man as great as Steve Jobs deserves no less than our admiration, respect and condolences to his family. He created a great many beautiful things, some will stand the test of time and others will not. his spirit will live on in the company he helped found and the choices he made. Let us all hope there is another crazy cocky genius in their garage tonight planning to take over the world one shiny gadget at a time.
We have an odd episode tonight. My brain wasn’t fully plugged in, not for lack of coffee mind you but I guess there is a short somewhere. If you watch the video you can actually see sparks I swear. there is also a bonus story, bumbled horribly in the video edition. I cut it out of the Standard CaffiNation offering to save your ears.
The week is a tuneup for Podcamp Philly lots of stuff going on and a few wires are coming loose. We hit up a bunch of fun stories about coffee, tea and snacks. We also look towards the new offerings from Amazon and Apple.
Geek Cruft:
Geeky This Week
Podcamp Philly! This Weekend, Stay tuned for on location stuff!
We’re all here because we’re not all there tonight!
I sponsored this one myself
Tonight’s show is a dress rehearsal for next week. There is some serious bidness that need to be taken care of and tonight we make the coffee vodka for next week! I unviel the new official caffination coffee vodka infusion method. We also have a ton of great content that quite simply needs to be discussed just because it is all awesome.
We lost a sponsor, but we still have room for more people who want to comment on show 500, send us audio or written commentary for the episode and I’ll play it on the next show. Tonight we hit all the high notes, retro fun, coffee, alcohol, what is there not to love?
Tonight and life took an unexpected turn, but as luck would have it we found a stand in for steve, this one doesn’t add much to the equation but it sure does make focusing the camera for two people a bit easier. The show is a hodgepodge of all of the different awesome things from the net this past week.
I love design, especially good design. And Apple has been a part of some great design in the past 30 years, other times not so much, I’m looking at you one button mice, and puck mice. But their logo has always been beautiful (although I am partial to the older multicolored one) But i was surprised just how well designed their logo is. It is a study in the golden rule, nay a graduate study in its use in design. This makes me want to layer the grid on the left onto some of my work to see just how close my eyeballed versions of design match to true perfection.
So as a form of homage to the beautiful bits of design Steve Jobs helped bring into the world, either by his singular vision, or the culture he created I’ll just leave this here.
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This week we are going all CaffiNation Klassic on you. Its just me as Steve the wonder-cohost is on vacation. So Its all me all the time. I’m here and I’m a bit angry about some things. Lets see if it turns into a fun little rant, because hey that’s just what I do best. In fact i have a rare treat for you. Because of a wonderful recording error yesterday I have 3 rants all lined up for you at the front of the show. So you get 3 times as much bluster for the low low price of one download. I’ll be here all week try the veal
We have a preponderance of Zombie related information to pass along, a sign of the times or are zombies just that cool? We I have a wonderful little look into the world of conspiracy theories, because without black helicopters and mind controlling public water supplies how else would we live in this mixed up world.
Thanks for Listening & Stay Caffeinated!From the Chief Bean @ The CaffiNation Podcast“High Octane Caffeine Culture & Technology News” Phone 215-240-1319 | Twitter@caffination | Facebook Fan PageSubscribe via | RSS | iTunes | ZuneThe CaffiNation is a Puzzle Piece Production
This week we have a a goodly bit of content to send your direction. The Numbers are in and we have Duke Nukem Liftoff The Winner is announced. But Fret not if you didn’t win you can still stick around for some of the other giveaways we will have in the coming months! We are looking into a couple different
What is on tap tonight? We have a decent serving of Steampunk, Zelda and a dash of humor. Not too much mind you. Wouldn’t want to ruin the drapes. We also hit up some fantastic comic news, a bit of lego fauxery and a wonderful Google Music Review
Show News!
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Thanks for Listening & Stay Caffeinated! From the Chief Bean @ The CaffiNation Podcast “High Octane Caffeine Culture & Technology News” Phone 215-240-1319 | Twitter@caffination | Facebook Fan Page Subscribe via | RSS | iTunes | Zune The CaffiNation is a Puzzle Piece Production
Can you hear the music? Well now it lives in the cloud. This isn’t just talking to angels, a stairway to heaven or any other bad pun you can think of this is real, good old-fashioned music, that you own already, streaming to you anywhere, anytime. The beta is available for sign ups at Music.google.com. And here is how it works. You upload your music to the service, your own songs, and then they become available to your android phone, via a spiffy new app. Or are playable in any browser out there, from anywhere.
Sounds too good to be true? Well for right now the service is free, no word yet on the pricing, and no idea how Google plans to make money off of this but it is astounding the amount of features are available at launch.
Good Stuff: Everything is at your fingertips, literally, your phone has the ability to browse, search and organize your library just as easily as your internet browser does. And there does not seem to be any limit to the number of clients who can access the stuff at once.
The layout you can embiggen on the right is beautiful and smooth. The features just seem to work. The only complaint i have is i kinda like the player stuff to be on the top of the page but after a day or so I’m used to it. click the little arrow next to any song to add it to a playlist, create an instant mix based off this song, or a selection of songs. Overall it is a wonderful service. The desktop client has a version for Mac, PC and Linux! As of yet there is no App for iOS.
Bad Stuff: The streaming playback needs a decent internet connection obviously, so if you are on a metered Data plan, or in an area with poor reception this might not be the best time to surf for music, unless you plan… On your phone you can even mark a playlist as Available offline and your phone will download the playlist to your phone so when your network cuts out you will still be set to go. I love this feature! So Google saw that network connectivity isn’t a guaranteed thing and even built a feature into the software to fix it. And other than the initial setup there isn’t a real bad thing about the service unless you have to yell.
Damn you iTunes!
Google Music does integrate with iTunes nicely, even importing all music and playlists directly from your existing library. But if you bought any music from Apple way back when they were the champion of DRM you won’t be able to use that music in anything but iTunes. Yes you can pay Apple 30 cents per song to free your music, for me that would be able $87 dollars to free the 289 songs we have in our library from those dark times when both my wife and I had iPods, gift cards and those wonderful Pepsi giveaways. Yes we could burn each song to a CD and rip the CD back into the library and free them but this is beyond the point. That is just annoying, and would take roughly 41 or 42 CD’s. But all new music you buy from iTunes works quite well in this application.
Time: I have a modest library of over 8,000 songs, not many by some people’s standards but still not a small amount. this took about 4 days of syncing to get all the music up. The good thing is that if you have any music in playlists in iTunes or Windows Media Player they get uploaded first, and as each song is uploaded they are available to play on any device. So yes this is a ton of music and takes a bit to set up, but once its up man alive is it fantastic. And the application on your machine can even keep track of your iTunes and other media libraries to make sure your online library stays in order, and updated.
Family Friendly: My wife is a long suffering WOG, Wife of a Geek. She puts up with a ton of extra steps to do things that should be dead simple, just because I have goofy and geeky gadgets everywhere. Our Main TV in the House has Google TV on it, and as much of a fan of the system as I am she just wants to watch TV and doesn’t understand the need for an extra gadget in her way. The Xbox talks to the PC, there is a file server in the garage, I have Ethernet running in our walls, and constantly fidget with things. If this service touched her music I’d be dead. No bones about it I have a feeling that would be the final straw. She can take the experiments with coffee vodka in the freezer, the goofy gadgets on the TV, she enjoys the home network and being able to print from any room in the house, when it works.
But if I messed with her iTunes Library it would be a bad day for me. The fact that the software works well with iTunes and doesn’t interfere with her ability to buy music and have it on her iPod is a fantastic thing! I can’t wait for the Google Music app for Google TV!
What is on the docket for this evening? We are all hit with Lunch truck evny, learning to chew bubblegum all over again, and of course we hit some fantastic coffee news. but beyond all those things we are getting ready to run an awesome contest for a free copy of Duke Nukem Forever! Make sure you listen in to find out how to enter! You’ll win the game and be in on the early fun!
Tonight’s show is a wrap of of stuff that caught my eye from CES, a run down of stuff you have already heard about, and tons of awesome bits that slipped through the cracks. We have funny comments, witty one liners and other jokes. Non by me, so you’re all safe. Lego, Dino and Roomba Oh My!
So we have a very dense show tonight, a little on the heavy side with privacy concerns and why a program allowing amateur hacking is a good thing in the long run, as well as some utterly and completely silly nonsense. It all depends on what part of geek culture you hail from but i seriously think we have all of our bases covered on today’s show. So sit back and enjoy the ride.
This is my world you’re all just drinking my coffee.
Today we discuss everything from Apples, to Apple, Coffee to Hobbies, and Why the Math defeated the germans. We also return to a security discussion from before as well as a couple of other fun tidbits along the way.
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