I’ve already talked about them repeatedly, but there’s an article about eMusic I read the other day that I thought was pretty interesting. It confirmed some things that I already knew, like the fact that I’m pretty much the exact definition of their target market (the over 25 music fan that likes to check out new stuff on a whim and wouldn’t even consider buying music with DRM). However, there were some things I was suprised to learn, like that they’re the number 2 retailer of downloadable music behind, obviously, iTunes. That’s good news for me that they’re doing well, because honestly I don’t know what I’d do without my monthly downloads. I’ve got almost 300 albums left to get!
One thing I’ve been hoping for quite some time that eMusic would add is RSS feeds of their most recently added music. I’ve just learned from their forums though that they’ve already had that feature for a little while now, they’ve just done a good job of hiding it for some reason. However, it’s pretty cool because you can get an RSS feed for pretty much any category you want, no matter how broad or specific. Basically all you have to do is navigate to a page that contains the set of results you want to get updated on, for example New This Month->Alternative/Punk->Indie Pop->Freshly Ripped and then just replace the word “browse” in the URL with “rss”. So
http://www.emusic.com/browse/n/b/n/a/0-0/65+1200000301+68/0.html
would become
http://www.emusic.com/rss/n/b/n/a/0-0/65+1200000301+68/0.html
Plug that URL into your preferred feed reader and that’s all it takes to get updates via RSS about the newest music available in your genre(s) of choice. It’s pretty handy, so hopefully they’ll make it a little more accessible in the future.
Ever since Amazon announced their S3 online storage service for developers I’d been hoping that someone would come out with an app to take advantage of that service in a way that was aimed at end users rather than developers and it looks like that’s just happened. The recently released beta for JungleDisk is just such a program, providing an easy to use wrapper around Amazon’s storage service that adds no additional cost. The S3 service provides cheap, reliable, encrypted online storage space where you only pay for what you use each month, as opposed to most storage providers where you have to pay a flat fee for a certain amount of space, regardless how much you actually use. The rates are pretty nice too, just $0.15 per GB stored per month and $0.20 per GB of bandwidth used. However, it’s really intended primarily for developers to make use of in web apps and there’s no front end to it to just allow you to copy files over. That’s where JungleDisk comes in. It runs a WebDAV server on your computer that allows you to drag and drop files just like into a normal Windows folder, but it sends them off to S3 in the background. It works well, and in conjunction with two other programs I think it’s going to become part of my automated backup solution. The first other program is NetDrive, a WebDAV client that allows you to map a drive letter to JungleDisk’s server and access it as if it were a local disk. This means that you can now use folders on that drive to create folder pairs for syncing with Microsoft’s SyncToy. And since SyncToy can be set to run automatically, well there’s your automated backup.
As far as backups go, it’s probably about as reliable as you can get (at least for the cost anyway) because data sent to S3 is duplicated at several different physical locations. It’s for that reason that even though hard drives are dirt cheap these days (I’ve recently just crossed the 1 terabyte of total space line myself) it still makes sense to use this for backups of things that you want to be absolutely sure about. For example, my 5 gigs or so of photos. Using JungleDisk and S3 I can transfer those out for $1.00 of bandwidth and then store them for just $0.75/month. On the other hand for 60+ gigs of music it would be $9.00/month so I’ll probably still stick with just backing those up on an external hard drive.
Elsewhere