My Morning Jacket in DC

Mike and I went and saw My Morning Jacket last night at the 9:30 Club in DC.

They are my favorite band these days. They have a really unique sound (first use of “echo chamber” tag) and a sound that really does it for me.

My ears, however, are still ringing. Those dudes have got to turn down the volume a little bit. They are brilliant musicians but for much of the show it was too loud to really hear them.

Jim James is a freak musical genius. It is very clear at the show that he is the heart & soul of the band. It’s also clear that he’s the nut who insists that every amp is cranked to 111 or something.

The Slip opened. They were very good too.

I think that my dream concert would be to see My Morning Jacket outside somewhere in the South in the summertime . . . and unplugged.

Songbird Extension Update

We released an update to our Songbird extension today. While we are working hard on an update with better graphics and more features, this one only fixes some bugs. Specifically, if you had trouble logging in with the old version, this one should let you in with no problems.

Of course, if you can’t log-in the extension won’t check for the update, so if you aren’t able to get in, your best bet is to grab the new version from this URL: http://www.qloud.com/download_songbird.html

Here’s a link to instructions on how best to install the extension. Stay tuned for more updates in the upcoming weeks.

iTunes & Playlists

Today we released a new version of our iTunes plug-in for Windows. The biggest new features revolve around playlists:

• Smart Playlists
• This is an often-requested features. Now in the Qloud view of iTunes, you can click the create playlist “+” button and create smart playlists based on criteria that includes tags (see image above). These are smart playlists that will update automatically. The best part of this feature is now you can benefit from your tagging on your iPod: you can create smart playlists based on tags and then synch those playlists on to your iPod.
• Playlist Submission to the Service
• Now every playlist you create in iTunes will live also on the Qloud service as a Channel. Automatically. This allows everyone to discover more music through one-another’s playlists. And pretty soon it will allow you to do some more cool stuff with playlists on our service . . .

Really more important than this new stuff, however, are the fixes we’ve made to existing functionality to make things more reliable, more stable and easier to use. Too many fixes in this version (yikes!) to bore you with all of them, but here are some:

• We cleaned up oodles of UI issues, from inaccurate information to random graphics to font sizes
• We eliminated certain conditions when tagging tracks crashed iTunes
• Thanks to some particularly great user feedback, we fixed issues with inaccurate submissions of data to the service
• Lots of other stuff . . .

As always, we’re just at the beginning with Qloud and what we plan on doing. We appreciate your feedback and always welcome more! Our next push with iTunes for Windows is on continued improved usability and stability.
Importantly, the iTunes Window’s plug-in’s little sister, the Mac plug-in, is about to be born. We’ll be releasing an alpha to a closed-group in about a week. Please put yourself on the list if you’re courageous enough to be in the alpha group.

Portable Player Plug-ins

Nobody seems that psyched about the Zune. I don’t have one, but all of the reviews are super negative.

It is too bad, because it seems that the Zune is not going to be able to break Apple’s stranglehold on the portable player industry, which I don’t think is good for anybody: consumers, services, etc.

Here’s a thought for Microsoft or Samsung or whomever: how about opening up your portable player platform to support plug-ins for independent developers? Yes, there are stability concerns, but there could be a whole certification process that ensures that everything is OK.

It just seems that nobody can keep up with Apple’s innovation. So why not go the time-tested route to accelerated innovation: allow independent developers to do it for you. There are so many consumer digital media services out there, and many would love the chance to extend their service on to a device in an open way (not through some exclusive agreement). Lord knows we would. And consumers would really benefit from devices that allow for independent plug-ins. It would provide some really compelling reasons why a user would want a non-Apple device.
And if your are stuck battling for the 20% or whatever of market share that Apple has not yet conquered, what do you have to lose? Take some risks.