Confessions of a Fanboy

I’m pretty well indoctrinated and brainwashed by the Cult of Apple. I replaced my PowerBook with a 17″ Mac Book Pro (I got 17″ of a lot of things, but we’ll leave that for another day). I have owned five iPods, upgrading when storage capacity is upped. I now have an iPhone. I drank the Kool-Aid. I’m a believer. Last night, I wanted someone at Apple flogged.

I bought a copy of Jeff Tweedy’s Sunken Treasure DVD after spending the afternoon listening to Wilco. Among the many reasons for making the purchase is that Tweedy offers MP3 downloads of the full show for fans who buy the DVD. That’s really cool, right? It allows me to listen to the show on my iPod without having to go to the trouble of extracting the songs myself. Fantastic! Thank you, Jeff.

So I got home last night and set out to download the songs prior to BSCA. I put the DVD in and that’s where I ran into trouble.

QuickTime 7, the current version, doesn’t support Flash. For reasons beyond my understanding, Flash is required to download the MP3s. I couldn’t get a version of QT6 on my Mac last night so this morning I came in to work and uninstalled QT7 and installed QT6. After that, I downloaded all 24 songs. Each song was in its own zip file so I had to unzip 24 files. Then, to listen to them, I had to update QT because iTunes requires the current version. Now I have all 24 MP3s and I’ll be able to put them on my iPod tonight. All that work for something free. Unreal.

Here’s a suggestion to all artists out there: take Jeff’s lead and offer audio files of your concert DVDs but improve the distribution method. Instead of making people download them through the DVD, put the audio files on the disc and allow people to pull them from the DVD to the portable music player of their choice. It requires less bandwidth for the provider and makes it easier for the end user.

Filed under: Tags: Musical Musings and Random Ramblings, Wilco