Musicmatch Customer Service

A Rant: Part II

For me, the most annoying aspect of the MMJB growth was what seemed to me to be complete disregard for the customer in making changes to the software. I'm sure it was all well intentioned, but it is clear that nobody who was involved in the design and decision making was more than a casual user of the jukebox. For a while the changes were harmless enough, and although I was not particularly interested in them the upgrades were free and I thought I should keep up with them. And then, and then . . . .

One of the capabilities of the mp3 format and the MMJB is that you can add "notes" to a song, not musical notes but informational notes, and they become part of the mp3 file itself. And you can set MMJB to display these notes when the songs are playing. For example, the notes that I added to the song "The Jolly Green Giant" by The Kingsmen originally looked like this:

(Text version 1)

Cultural differences surfaced within the company that
marketed Green Giant frozen vegetables: the west coast
headquarters made giant posters for the group to use at
its gigs, and the east coast headquarters sued them.

I downloaded an "upgrade" only to learn that MMJB had reduced the width of the MMJB area which contained text notes. Now my notes looked like this:

(Text version 2)

Cultural differences surfaced within the
 company that
marketed Green Giant frozen vegetables:
  the west coast
headquarters made giant posters for the
 group to use at
its gigs, and the east coast headquarters
 sued them.

Ugly, no?

I emailed customer service with my complaint. At that time I had about 500 songs on my jukebox, and I said so, pointing out what a PITA it was going to be to edit them all to clean them up. I was asked to send them a screenshot of an example of the problem, and did so.

While I waited for a response, I began cleaning up the notes. Within the reduced space, a cleaned up version looked like this:

(Text version 3)

Cultural differences surfaced within the
company that marketed Green Giant frozen
vegetables: the west coast headquarters
made giant posters for the group to use at
its gigs, and the east coast headquarters
sued them.

Ahhh, much better.

I got about halfway through my 500 songs and received a response to my email. MMJB regretted causing the problem, but the good news was that the next upgrade would re-expand the text notes area.

Cool. I took my backup CDs (you didn't think I was keeping all this work on a PC with no backup, did you?) and restored the songs I had "fixed." Soon the new "upgrade" came out. I installed it and learned that sure enough, they had expanded the text notes area, but not quite enough to return to the original size. Now my notes looked like this:

(Text version 4)

Cultural differences surfaced within the company
 that
marketed Green Giant frozen vegetables: the west
 coast
headquarters made giant posters for the group to
 use at
its gigs, and the east coast headquarters sued
 them.

What the Hell were they thinking?

I wrote, complaining about everything from their lack of forethought to the temperature, and again received an apology, this time accompanied by a promise that the text area would never change size again. It was stabilized. (It wasn't.)

Well, I am made of stern stuff, and I made two resolutions:

1. I would clean up the whole song collection, and
2. I would never upgrade MMJB again.

I kept resolution 1, a task that took days to complete. I continued to add songs, secure in the knowledge that they could never ambush me again. Ah, but the best laid plans . . . .

I suppose I should have foreseen this, but even if I had there was nothing I could have done about it. At about the time I reached 1,700 songs, I had to replace a dying and outmoded PC with a new one. I backed everything up and bit the bullet.

After getting the new PC up and running, I learned that my backup of the MMJB software install was useless. I couldn't just copy it to my PC and install the jukebox software. I visited the MMJB site, entered my key, and got my free replacement jukebox. I took my music backup CDs and put them on my hard drive, then imported them into the jukebox. Yup. You know what's coming, right?

They had changed the size of the text window yet again. Now the 500 I had cleaned up and the 1,200 more that I had added were all screwed up. Thanks, guys.

I've thought and thought about this, but I can't find a way around this problem. There will always be times when I have to put the jukebox on a new PC and I will always be vulnerable to the MMJB insensitivity to the user. I speculate that the only thing I could do would be to go back to plan number one, which is to learn enough so that I can write my own jukebox. But man, that's gonna be a lot of work.

It will delight you, I am sure, to learn that I have all but nineteen of the songs that made up my original objective. I also have several hundred songs on the jukebox that are outside the original parameters, just because I like them. Sooo . . . I have 2,707 songs on the JB at the moment. I am not about to go through them one by one, cleaning up the text, just so MMJB can tunnel me again.

OK, wait. The above was written long before this posting. This is an update. MMJB has been acquired by Yahoo. Whether this is good or bad for the users cannot be predicted, or at least it cannot be predicted by me. We all know what Yahoo's prediction would be. But I would dip my arm in boiling oil before betting that the text area will ever be stabilized permanently.