the real Nate Clark

An ad on the inside of my Netflix envelope caught my attention yesterday … it was an offer from MP3 music download site eMusic for 35 free song downloads. I have been casually searching for years for a music download site that meets my tough criteria in order to earn my money:

• Has a selection of music that I like. I’m not a typical mainstream music consumer. My taste leans mostly in the indie pop/rock and electronica genres.
• No DRM! I refuse to pay for anything that is specifically engineered to not work.
• Platform and browser independent. I use Linux (the Ubuntu variety) ... not Mac and not Windows. Don’t force me to reboot into an inferior operating system just to shop your site. This rules out iTunes.

eMusic had an interesting offering: after your free trial downloads. The basic plan is $9.99 per month for 30 DRM-free song downloads. That comes out to $0.33 per song, two-thirds cheaper than iTunes and most other sites. They also have a $14.99/50 and $19.99/75 plan, which works out to even less per song.

The deciding factor here is going to be selection. I was disappointed that I couldn’t browse the download library without signing up and providing my credit card number for when my “trial period” expired. The whole sign-up processed reminded me too much of those “Get 12 CD’s for 1 cent” ripoffs of 90’s. But, curiosity got the best of me so I coughed up the cc digits.

I was pleased to find a decent selection of music from artists that I really like. And I also found eMusic’s ratings, similar artists, and editorial content very useful. I had no problem using my 35 free downloads in a few hours. Here’s what I picked up:

	Live at Radio Aligre FM in Paris by Broken Social Scene
	The Dream of Evan and Chan by Dntel
	Picaresque by The Decemberists
	Dreams by The Whitest Boy Alive

The MP3 files sound great and were happily DRM-free as promised. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to use the multiple file download manager on Linux … but at least they provide a way to download tracks manually clicking on each track individually. I can live with that for now.

One thing that is pretty annoying is that the filenames of the downloaded files are named in such a way that they don’t sort correctly. For example, The_Decemberists_Picaresque_10_The_Mariner_s_Revenge_Song.mp3 sorts before The_Decemberists_Picaresque_1_The_Infanta.mp3, and therefore plays in the wrong order in my MP3 player unless I manually re-sort them. To fix this, eMusic should use 2-digits in the track filename for each file, so The_Decemberists_Picaresque_1_The_Infanta.mp3 should become The_Decemberists_Picaresque_01_The_Infanta.mp3.

Again, the selection was pretty good, but not nearly as comprehensive as iTunes. I found enough interesting stuff to keep me busy for a while, but also a few searches for bands I know and like came up empty. I think the more eMusic can improve here, the more compelling their service will be to more people.

I’ll be upgrading to the $9.99 plan for a month or two at least.

If you want to try out eMusic and hook us both up with 50 free downloads under their Tell-A-Friend program, email me or post your email address in the comments and I’ll send you an invite.

I recently returned from a great ski trip over New Year’s to Heavenly with my best college friend Hyaat and his finance Sheila. We had a great time, despite a shortage of snow on the mountain.

Anyway, Sheila had bought Hyaat a new Casio digital camera for Christmas. I was impressed with the small size of it and the nice LCD screen. We took it out on the slopes with us and ended up taking a lot more video clips than actual still photos. This lead to a perfect opportunity for me to try out Jumpcut, a new online video editing and video sharing site that I heard about from TechCrunch not too long ago. Jumpcut is now owned by Yahoo!

So I got started by uploading about 20 video clips ranging from a few seconds to a few minutes. Most of Jumpcut’s interface uses Flash, and their Flash uploader tool is pretty cool—but it kept crashing my browser (Firefox 2.0.1 on Ubuntu Linux 6.10)! I only got about two clips uploaded with the flash browser before I gave up on it. I did notice in Jumpcut’s FAQ or Help page they mentioned Flash crashing on OS X, but no mention of Ubuntu or Linux. In any case, I think the have some stability work to do.

Luckily, Jumpucut also offers a standard HTTP upload which works fine, but it was slow even on my high-speed cable connection. The worst part was that I had to upload the video clips one at a time. It took me about two days (not continuously) to get ‘em all uploaded. This painful upload process was my biggest complaint. Jumpcut: either fix your flash uploader or offer a FTP/SFTP batch upload option!

Once all my video clips were in there, I really had fun arranging the clips and creating transitions between clips. I should say that I have very little video editing experience – I took one TV production class in high school years ago, but then we used two VCRs and a little jog wheel – nothing like this! I had also used Windows Movie Maker once or twice. And before trying Jumpcut, I played with Kino for Linux for a few minutes, but quickly abandoned that because it was too complicated.

The Jumpcut movie editor is very easy to use. I like how you can easily switch between editing a single clip and then back to the whole movie in one click. I did have a few problems again with Flash/Mozilla crashing on me, but Jumpcut lets you save your progress which saved my video from destruction a few times.

I has some problems with the ‘Undo’ functionality – it didn’t seem to undo change-by-change like I would have expected. Also, I think the audio overlay features could use some more work. I couldn’t figure out how to fade out an audio track into another track—so I ended up using one song for the entire movie.

Overall, I think Jumpcut is a lot of fun, easy enough for most people, and a great Web 2.0 business. I know I found myself glued to Jumpcut’s site for hours at a time, which could have presented them with ample opportunity to show me ads (but there were none!).

I knew you would ask. Here’s the video: