I’ve got high hopes for Songbird, btw.

Matt, are you sure it doesn’t have an option to determine the names?

I’m sure of nothing. I just want it to work and not have to think about it. I’m one of those people.

For playing I usually use Media Player Classic, or VLC, but that’s because they’re light, configurable, and in the case of VLC doesn’t rely on external codecs for playing. I never used them for encoding.

I’d suggest, for ripping from CDs, that you’d get the latest compiled non-beta LAME, and a program that can use it. I use EAC (Exact Audio Copy), which does a very good job even with scratched CDs, but there are plenty of others.

All of the above have the additional advantage of being free (Unless you feel like donating, as with most freeware), while providing comparable, and better, quality than the commercial programs. The interfaces are usually less refined and a bit clunky, but, well, the programs you described as “suck” are the ones with the elegant looks.

Matt, are you sure it doesn’t have an option to determine the names? I’m not familiar with eMusic (lucky for me, the way you describe it) but most of these programs allow you to define what parts of the ID3 tag you want in the directory names and file names.

It also doesn’t help that eMusic creates a subfolder for every song or that many of the tracks are helpfully titled “Various Artists.” Don’t you ever just want to tell the guys who invent these things to stop adding new features and just get the features you’ve got to work?

Encode your mp3s as high quality VBR, not 320kbps CBR. You’d get your 320kbps when necessary, but less when it’s not.

Well, I used to code VBR… and then I went ahead and bought an Intervideo plug-in for Windows Media Player to get better sound quality. The thing claimed to be encoding VBR, but everything came out as 320kbps. Now I’ve uninstalled it and Windows Media Player doesn’t even give me an MP3 VBR option anymore.

Yes, I’m perfectly open to switching to another media player, but as far as I can tell, they all suck. That includes you, iTunes, and you, RealPlayer, and you, WinAmp.

Plus, for some people (I’m not sure if it would be a majority or not, but a sizeable chunk anyway) it can also cost a heck of a lot more, since they may have to pay over and over just to listen to basically the same music.

Now for the obligatory technical comment. Encode your mp3s as high quality VBR, not 320kbps CBR. You’d get your 320kbps when necessary, but less when it’s not. The new encoders do it very very well, and basically even the crazy audiophiles agree there is no relative quality loss.

Though of course I still insist that I feel the original CDs sound better. But it’s hard to say whether it’s physics or psychology. And the mp3 files are far more… flexible and easy to carry.

A side point: one of the things I hate about cell phones in this country is that virtually all useful plans are done on the subscription basis (which perhaps is the writer’s reason for misunderstanding the appeal of Rhapsody), when my vague understanding is that there are – or used to be, anyway – better pay as you go services in other (foreign) cell phone markets. These subscription services are, it seems to me, predicated on the consumer overpaying for what they might use, whereas iTunes or at a music store I pay for what I want.

Re how you pay for it all… Just because you can hold an entire Library of Congress in your pocket doesn’t mean you would buy the whole thing in one fell swoop. I assume we’ll continue buying things in small chunks of one song/album/film/book/story at a time, which makes sense because that’s how we consume them. We’ll just download them rather than stream them.

That’s my theory, at least.

I can be excused for segueing into shameless self promotion territory for two reasons: 1) my novel RADIO FREEFALL deals with this issue at some length; and 2) my novel RADIO FREEFALL isn’t on sale yet (August 7, Tor).

I called the jukebox in the sky the worm drive (write once, read mostly, not my acronym) and proposed that information would be metered as it entered your space like electricity is metered. You can send it to someone else but they have to pay for the information when it comes into their space. Such a setup would require a centralized authority that controls the flow of information and such an authority would be ripe for exploitation by evil control freaks and thus you have the setup for the novel.

But aside from dramatic license, whether you’ve got a jukebox in the sky or one in your pocket, you have to ask not only about the technology but the flow of money as well. I’ve got the library of congress in my pocket, but did I have to pay for the whole thing up front or do I only have to pay when I access something? You’ve got a jukebox in the sky but do you have to pay to access or can you just agree to take in some commercials and skip the fee? (Or do they just hit you with the commercials and still make you pay, like they do at the damned movie theater?)

I’d hate to guess where the electronic file thing is going to put us. When I wrote the book ten years ago I hadn’t even heard of any of this so I had to make it up as I went. I recently updated some of the sections about the technology of listening to music, but I wonder how up to date that will all be in August when the book comes out. (Did I mention that already?)