A short rant by Dean Robinson resulted in me going off on one of my own about Microsoft’s new search venture, Bing. I couldn’t resist but comment with some of my own thoughts, and by the time I’d finished commenting I figured I may as well adapt the original comment and throw it out there as a blog post in it’s own right.

My Thoughts on Bing

It really hasn’t impressed at all. What’s worse is that it’s a branding nightmare. Microsoft have completely cocked up their web activity branding over the past few years. They can’t make up their mind who they are. Are they MSN? Are they Live? Are they Bing?

If you go to bing.com and want to do a map lookup you get taken to the immensely shit multimap.com. Go to maps.live.com and you get forwarded to bing.com/maps – what’s this all about. Which system am I meant to use?

Microsoft Live Windows Bing Hotmail

What about Live Mail, which became Windows Live Hotmail, which integrated with Windows Live Mail on the desktop which confused the hell out of everyone. Am I a nick@live.ie user, or should I be logging in with an @hotmail.com account. Going to www.hotmail.com forwards to mail.live.com (after redirecting you to login.live.com). It’s all so completely retarded.

Microsoft Bing Ciao

Go shopping on ciao.co.uk, not shopping.bing.com, where it says Ciao! (from bing) and if you want to use it you have to create a Ciao account. Go to your Live profile and do a search, the default is the Live “people” search, but use that same search box from your Live Hotmail account and you get dropped into bing.com, oh, and I’m no longer signed in. Click sign in to get redirected around various MSN or Live passport type things before coming back to Bing.

Microsoft Bing Community (Live)

Heard of Bing Community? Nope, that’s hidden away in extras if you do a search. What is it? I’ve no idea:

“Welcome to the Microsoft Bing Community – Remember, don’t post your personal information”

Don’t post my personal information about what? What is Microsoft Bing Community? Where does it all fit on? Should I link to my Windows Live Spaces (bing)?

The worst branding nightmare imaginable

This is a PR company/marketing person’s nightmare.

Also, if you change your country location (my default was United Kingdom) to Ireland and suddenly you can no longer search for videos, shopping or maps, they’re just gone. Clearly Irish people don’t have fast enough net connections to watch videos online.

It’s a total disaster. Microsoft need to work out their identity issues and damn quick. No one has a clue what they’re meant to go to any more. Of course, both Live and Bing are poor names to begin with, but I think Live is probably a little better than Bing (which has an absolutely awful logo by the way). However, it doesn’t matter, cause they’ve allocated $100,000,000 to pound this name into people’s heads until a few years down the line they’re going to change it all to be something like Microsoft Live Mesh Windows Search (now with extra Bing).

What about the search?

Ok, I should mention as well that I’m not overly impressed with the search results as well. I’ve done a few comparitive searches and they’re just not hitting the mark right at all. Whilst there are a few nice touches – such as the infinite scrolling on image search, and the preview playing of video thumbnails, it’s definitely not enough to make me consider changing to use them on a daily basis.

I can’t resist mentioning the screen shot below. What’s up with this set of suggested searches – type “Linux” and get suggested “Linux Windows”, “Linux Microsoft”, “Linux Vista”. Are you trying to tell me that your suggestion engine is completely broken, or are you having a bit of a joke?

Bing Linux Suggestions

Why do I care?

Well I don’t really care – this is just a commentry. I don’t really use any of the Microsoft/Windows/Live/Bing web services, I’m not a MSN messenger user, I’ve no contacts with them etc, but I do keep an eye on web developments as a whole and boy has this one struck me as a momentous cock up.

This morning, for no particular reason, I decided to install the first release candidate of Windows 7. I had a spare old hard drive lying around and just unplugged all my old drives and did a fresh install.

The installation process went pretty smoothly altogether and whilst it worked away I took the opportunity to tidy up the office a wee bit. About 20-30 minutes after initialising the install was complete.

First Impressions

I must say overall I’m fairly impressed with the solidity and smoothness of the new OS. Networking was painless, driver installation equally so, and it feels remarkably snappy on my AMD Athlon X2 3800+ which has 4Gb of RAM (all of which is now fully addressable thanks to 64-bit operation).

I think one of the major contributing factors to this sense of smoothness is the fact that I have two decent graphics cards powering my four screen set-up, and now that Windows (since Vista) is actually making use of the substantial processing power hidden in modern graphics cards it leaves me feeling that Windows XP display is sluggish and poorly executed. However, I guess that’s hardly surprising for an OS which has been around for nearly eight years.

I was pleasantly surprised to see it pick up my four screens at the correct resolution on first run, as well as easily detecting my USB headset and my M-Audio Keystation Pro 88. My Focusrite Saffire LE was something which I wasn’t sure whether I’d get working or not, but I downloaded the 64-bit driver Focusrite have made for Vista and installed it with my fingers crossed – to my delight it worked straight out and I’m happily listening to Capleton using Foobar whilst I write this.

Improvements

I’ve steered well clear of Vista for quite a long time now having been quite unimpressed by its behaviour on my HP6715b laptop. With Vista I found myself frustrated by poor performance, badly implemented networking, and a lot of minor annoyances with default behaviours.

UAC and Explorer

Windows 7 seems to have conquered an awful lot of these issues. The streamlined UAC behaviour is a vast improvement on Vista and I haven’t, during the process of setting things up, felt inclined to switch it off (something which I believe I did on Vista). Windows Explorer is behaving much more smoothly than it did on Vista as well and whilst I haven’t looked at file copying speed etc, it definitely feels a lot more usable. The new “libraries” look as though they could be extremely useful for grouping a number of different physical locations into one “virtual” folder.

Networking

As I mentioned, networking seems hugely improved. I found networking on Vista to be ungainly, overly complicated, and found myself consistently amazed at the fact that actions which I, as an experienced computer user, was being baffled as to how I could get the results I wanted for things which I would consider to be simple and basic. Connecting into our local network didn’t require any Workgroup name changes and system restarts, it just picked up a Windows Vista machine and an Ubuntu server (where we store all our media).

Connecting to the Linux server just required an input of user name and password and has worked smoothly since then. This is in stark contrast to Donn’s experience with his recent Vista install where, bafflingly, he has difficulty connecting every time he restarts the computer (not helped by the bizarre concept that “Home” editions of Vista and XP apparently don’t remember network credentials).

General Improvements

I have only been using this system for an afternoon, but a few things stand out. The new Windows Taskbar functionality instantly makes a huge amount of sense. With progress indicators on taskbar icons, a sleeker more intuitive look, and “Jump Lists”. The Jump Lists look like something that will gradually become more and more useful as developers integrate common actions into their programmes. In addition the notification area has been greatly improved and is easy to customise and feels responsive.

Of course, as I say, I’ve only been playing with this for an afternoon, so I’m sure that more things will jump out at me if I continue to play around with it.

Niggles

Remarkably there have been very few niggles, and again, it is possible that I’d have more to report here on a more extended use of the OS, but a few things I’ve noticed are reported below.

System Resources

I was surprised to see how much of my 4Gb of RAM is consumed on a fresh start and the Resource Monitor is reporting that I have 1025Mb of RAM in a “Hardware Reserved” state. However, it looks as though this could be a BIOS issue, as reported on this Overclockers Forum post. Of course my plan will be to coincide a computer upgrade with the installation of the final release of Windows 7, including at least 12Gb of RAM.

Audio Playback

On a few ocassions, such as when unzipping or running an installer, I’ve noticed that my CPU usage has gone surprisingly high considering the simplicity of the task at hand. When this has happened I’ve noticed audio playback has been a little glitchy. Whether this is entirely dependent on the CPU usage or it’s a result of me running my Focusrite sound-card with a Vista64 driver, I’m not sure, but figured I’d mention it here anyway.

Some Hardware Incompatible

Of course, this isn’t really an OS issue, but unfortunately my Frontier Design AlphaTrack midi controller won’t install. I had hoped that, as with the Focusrite Saffire LE, I could get away with installing the Vista64 driver they have made available, but no joy on that front.

I haven’t as of yet tested the crucial software on which I’m dependent (such as Cubase, Reason, Sound Forge, Traktor, Adobe CS, etc), however, as with hardware it’s not an OS fault if this software isn’t compatible.

Conclusion

All in all I instantly have felt much more impressed with this new OS from Microsoft. It feels solid from the off, and seems to have solved a lot of the issues that plagued Vista from day one.

I would really need to intensively test this out by running a full install with all hardware and software installed and try it out on a day to day basis to get a proper idea of its capabilities, but I have a feeling that I’m probably going to run back to my WindowsXP install soon enough for fear of wasting work time on configuring, installing, and tweaking, all the while not knowing whether I’d actually end up with a completely usable system (especially from the audio tools point of view – and given that I have a live gig fast approaching and still have to wrap up a short film, I think I should revert sooner rather than later).

I’m pleased to see that the gradual redevelopment of the Emusic website is nearly complete and it’s definitely come a long way from the last version.

The newly designed home page features a well laid-out suggestion box which features the ability to remove suggestions either because a) you own it already, or b) you just aren’t interested.

This is extremely important and is something that Amazon have been doing for a long time. There’s no point you being continually being shown music that you already own, and Emusic can leverage all of this data to build up a much more effective idea of the music they should suggest to you.

Learning what you like

This is good for Emusic and good for the end user as well. They get more potential for sales, the end user has a better chance of finding stuff he likes and being introduced to new music that they didn’t know.

I think they should go further and partner up with the likes of Last.fm. The listening profile I’ve built up on Last.fm covers over 30,000 songs and should give a very accurate impression of the sort of music I like. As a frequent buyer of music it makes a lot of sense to have the option to make this sort of data available to an online music store.

They need to push these things further. If I come across an album on Emusic I should be able to, from the album page (or the artist overview page), indicate that I own this album which should be added to their database records to help with recommendations.

‘Different’ Roll-out

It was interesting to see that rather than roll-out the new version of Emusic in one go they appear to have been redesigning each page and quietly letting it loose. I can’t remember what order things came in, but for example you would have had the artist overview page in the old style but the album page would be in the new style. It’s quite odd to see something done in this way, and whilst it’s actually worked out fine as far as I’m concerned ¹, it seems like a very odd thing to do.

At the moment the Browse, Search, Label, “New on Emusic” and a few other sections are still languishing in the old design. It’s been a very gradual redesign, but they are getting there slowly but surely.

Quality not Quantity

I’ve got to mention it whilst I’m here (and this is starting to feel more and more like an open letter to Emusic), obviously when Emusic first launched, selling Mp3’s at 192kbps bit-rate must have seemed quite acceptable, and I can imagine that there’s quite a vast amount of complication going back over old stock and upgrading the quality. However, I’m sure there are plenty of audiophiles who are turned off by not having an option to purchase in higher compression or even FLAC or WAV files.

I think I’d be quite happy to pay two credits per track to download a FLAC version. It does seem that newer rips are coming in at 224kbps, which is a definite improvement, but 192kbps really isn’t good enough and sometimes you’ll even come across stuff compressed at 128Kbps, which is nothing more than a waste of money. I find I can hear the difference and it’ll be disappointing to look back in a few years time when you have all the storage space in the world and realise that you have essentially bought a cheap version of a product. You haven’t actually bought the full article.

It’s not dissimilar to buying a print instead of the original painting.

Whilst I can’t fault Emusic on being good value for money, and I love the complete lack of DRM and the ability to re-download tracks, I think they need to be wary of losing custom to people being attracted to higher quality download options on other services.

I think it would also be a lot better if Emusic actually showed what quality the tracks are encoded at so that you know before you buy. Going back to my painting comparison, it would be similar to an online gallery selling a “painting” but at the end of the day you receive a rolled-up print in the post. You wouldn’t be particularly happy with that now would you?

Discoverability!

Signup and Home Page

Finally, I’d like to mention something my housemate Donn pointed out ². When a non-logged in user visits www.emusic.com they are presented with a sign-up page and no easily discoverable way to browse the site.

I think his point is a good one, it wouldn’t take much to present a user with simple link offering them the ability to browse the website to see what sort of catalogue was available.

Obviously there is a “free trial” giving you 50 free downloads, and you can back out before the first month is up, but users are always wary creatures, especially when it comes to entering your credit card details ³. Offering them an option to browse or search the catalogue would be very wise in my opinion.

Don’t get me wrong, it is possible to browse the store without being logged in, but it’s not discoverable. It feels like a gated community.

Conclusion

All in all, and despite some of my above gripes, I think Emusic is an excellent subscription service, and I’ve found a lot of new music that I like through it. It’s very handy for quickly checking out new artists that you hear about around the web, and their prices are really excellent. With their optimum plan coming in at €20.99 per month for 75 tracks it works out at €0.28 per track. At least a third of the price you’d pay per track on iTunes or Amazon.

As with most subscription services though, your downloads don’t rollover, which always feels like a bit of a rip to me (my phone company do the same thing for bill pay). This means that you have to make sure to use up all your downloads every month or you’re paying for nothing. That being said – I’m not sure I’ve ever had a problem finding stuff to download and I think only once did I forget to utilise my full download amount (lost about 12 downloads as a result – not the end of the world).