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I want to believe.

Happiness CCVI

Why is all the music from my high school years "oldies" when my dad’s are now called "classic"!? There is something fundamentally wrong with that. ;-D

Online music choices – where’s the choice?

I talked about this a little over a year ago.  I was pretty gung-ho about URGE, the music service offered by MTV and Microsoft.  It seamlessly integrated into Windows Media Player 11, could be used on up to 3 computers, and sync tunes to both my Windows Mobile smartphone, and my wife’s Nokia 5300 XpressMusic as well as other "Plays for Sure" WMA media devices.

At the time, things transpired that I didn’t "pull the trigger" on the service.  Now I’m glad I didn’t.  Real’s Rhapsody has absorbed URGE and all the reasons I was looking at the service have evaporated.  The devices I would like to use are "possibly" supported, I have to install *another* media player, and I have to manually copy the music to the devices.

Too much bullshit.

I’ll stick with buying the actual, physical CD-ROM of the artist in question and ripping the audio tracks to lossless WMA.  Disk space is cheap – 1TB for $100 – and I have been using Orb for some time to spread my digital media where I want it.  I’ll continue to do so.

This is the kind of crap that online services are going to do to their customer base.  I can’t use the service based on their offerings, I need a service that caters to my wants and needs.  I’ll keep my cash and spend it directly on the artist in question.

Maybe you’ve already figured this out, maybe you’re content with the offerings and wonder why I can’t see the value in it.  I can see the potential value in online music services, but it has to be on my terms – not theirs.

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New Headset – Logitech® Premium USB Headset 350

image I finally pulled the trigger on getting a decent headset for online vid-conf work.  The Logitech® Premium USB Headset 350.

With better sound quality than I can probably detect (I’ve not the best hearing), it sounds better than any of my previous headsets.  I usually buy cheap ones and end up being disappointed in them, not that this unit is really expensive, I made sure it was of good quality and read lots of gaming headset reviews, it was $40 at my local Wal-Mart and I’m glad I got it.

Just a few points on it.  It’s very comfortable, has a USB connection (drivers ship with Windows/OS X), and automatically sets itself as the default playback/record device when plugged into the computer.  Reverts back to previous defaults when not installed.

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