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.
Showing posts with label musicmatch jukebox. Show all posts
Showing posts with label musicmatch jukebox. Show all posts
Sunday, August 31, 2008
Wednesday, August 27, 2008
MusicMatch Customer Service
A Rant: Part I
Sometime in the 1980s I decided that when the technology was available I would take up (as a hobby) the task of acquiring every song that hit the top twenty during the years 1955 to 1969. This was the music of my youth (roughly, anyway, as I was 14 to 28 years old during that period). I would get all the music and somehow - depending on what the technology looked like - string it all together so that any of it could be found by artist or by song title and then played.
Well, the mp3 format came along and I learned about it in 1998. My first step was to list what I needed, and for this I used the then current issue of The Billboard Book of Top 40 Hits by Joel Whitburn. Over the years I have worn out several copies and acquired new ones. I believe the book is updated annually to include all top 40 songs from 1955 to the year before the edition in question. It is a marvelous source and I recommend it to anyone interested in the subject.
The list creation resulted in something over 2,400 songs which I had to acquire either already in the mp3 format or on CD, from which I could convert them to mp3. At that time, vinyl and cassette were not good sources because the PC line in capability usually resulted in line feed hissing. Or at least the capability that *eye* had did.
So, list creation accomplished, I pondered the problem of organizing them in such a fashion that I could access them as described above, that is by artist or by song title. I speculated that I would have to learn enough about the PC to write my own software, and was ecstatic when I discovered a software product called "MusicMatch Jukebox." It was only $19.99 or $19.95 or something like that, and I would be able to access them by those two characteristics, and by slightly misusing the software's capabilites I could access them by the years they reached their peak positions, the highest chart positions they reached, and other characteristics. I'll take one, please.
MMJB was still a small company and its customer service was the best I have ever experienced, on or off the internet, even though it was all by email. I had need of it several times and never waited more than a few hours for a response. The responses were prompt, coherent, and helpful. On a couple of occasions a woman in Tennessee emailed me after midnight and I happened to be still awake and using my PC. We exchanged both technical information and social pleasantries. I recall fondly that on the first such occasion I asked her what she was doing answering my email at that hour and that she told me she was home and unwinding with a glass of wine. We asked each other about wine preferences. She was drinking "Spanish Red." I liked Merlot. She informed me that "Merlot is for wimps." Ah ha ha ha ha ha ha. Perhaps she was right.
In any case she solved my problems and how could it get any better?
On another occasion I emailed customer service during the day. I think there was a glitch in the MMJB software. I received a response almost immediately, from a male this time, outlining the steps I would have to take to fix it. As I began those steps my phone rang. It was the customer service rep, calling to walk me through the steps to make sure I had no problem. Can you believe that?
Alas, things deteriorated, slowly at first and then more rapidly, as MMJB grew in size. I suppose this is inevitable as companies grow, but it is in any case lamentable.
NEXT: MusicMatch Customer Service: The Decline
Sometime in the 1980s I decided that when the technology was available I would take up (as a hobby) the task of acquiring every song that hit the top twenty during the years 1955 to 1969. This was the music of my youth (roughly, anyway, as I was 14 to 28 years old during that period). I would get all the music and somehow - depending on what the technology looked like - string it all together so that any of it could be found by artist or by song title and then played.
Well, the mp3 format came along and I learned about it in 1998. My first step was to list what I needed, and for this I used the then current issue of The Billboard Book of Top 40 Hits by Joel Whitburn. Over the years I have worn out several copies and acquired new ones. I believe the book is updated annually to include all top 40 songs from 1955 to the year before the edition in question. It is a marvelous source and I recommend it to anyone interested in the subject.
The list creation resulted in something over 2,400 songs which I had to acquire either already in the mp3 format or on CD, from which I could convert them to mp3. At that time, vinyl and cassette were not good sources because the PC line in capability usually resulted in line feed hissing. Or at least the capability that *eye* had did.
So, list creation accomplished, I pondered the problem of organizing them in such a fashion that I could access them as described above, that is by artist or by song title. I speculated that I would have to learn enough about the PC to write my own software, and was ecstatic when I discovered a software product called "MusicMatch Jukebox." It was only $19.99 or $19.95 or something like that, and I would be able to access them by those two characteristics, and by slightly misusing the software's capabilites I could access them by the years they reached their peak positions, the highest chart positions they reached, and other characteristics. I'll take one, please.
MMJB was still a small company and its customer service was the best I have ever experienced, on or off the internet, even though it was all by email. I had need of it several times and never waited more than a few hours for a response. The responses were prompt, coherent, and helpful. On a couple of occasions a woman in Tennessee emailed me after midnight and I happened to be still awake and using my PC. We exchanged both technical information and social pleasantries. I recall fondly that on the first such occasion I asked her what she was doing answering my email at that hour and that she told me she was home and unwinding with a glass of wine. We asked each other about wine preferences. She was drinking "Spanish Red." I liked Merlot. She informed me that "Merlot is for wimps." Ah ha ha ha ha ha ha. Perhaps she was right.
In any case she solved my problems and how could it get any better?
On another occasion I emailed customer service during the day. I think there was a glitch in the MMJB software. I received a response almost immediately, from a male this time, outlining the steps I would have to take to fix it. As I began those steps my phone rang. It was the customer service rep, calling to walk me through the steps to make sure I had no problem. Can you believe that?
Alas, things deteriorated, slowly at first and then more rapidly, as MMJB grew in size. I suppose this is inevitable as companies grow, but it is in any case lamentable.
NEXT: MusicMatch Customer Service: The Decline
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