Friday 14 September 2007

Pic of the day: Samsung YP-Z5F and Koss "Spark Plug" earphones.

Things that work

If you have the same computer equipment as everyone and their grandma, there is a good chance that things work together. Like, you have a mass-produced Hewlett-Packard PC with Windows, and you run Internet Explorer on it, it is highly likely that it will work. This is good. On the other hand, there are a number of reasons to not use standard components always and for all things. For instance, almost all viruses are written for Windows, Internet Explorer and Outlook. Replacing one or two of the above can cut heavily into your virus population. Drop them all and computer viruses are less of a threat than meteorites to your equipment.

If however you have rare pieces of hardware and software, which only a few people use, there is a good chance that nobody has tried them together before. If they work then, it is impressive. I was impressed today.

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The Samsung YP-Z5F (what's up with a name like that when you try to compete against something called iPod? I bet you could not tell me the name even now without looking back.) Anyway, the Samsung iPod Killer is one of those things that work right out of the box. OK, you should probably recharge it first, I certainly did. But the way you recharge it is via the USB cable (a non-standard one on the gizmo side, alas) and this is also how you transfer music to it. So it kind of goes without saying that you do this before you start listening. The interesting part is HOW you transfer the music.

I have a private computer at work. It is more of a privilege than a necessity. It lets me occasionally open strange file formats that the work computers can't handle or check web sites that the (justifiably) paranoid intranet won't connect to. (Justified because as one of the non-popular tentacles of government, anyone who hacked us would have unlimited chicks for life or two years, whichever came first.) It also lets me read my private mail without a copy being forwarded to the central IT department, and order Japanese CDs with my credit card without the central IT department using my credit card for their own shopping. It is unlikely that I will continue to have this in my new job, but that's OK. I still came out with the job I wanted, unlike almost everyone else.

My private PC at work came with Windows, but that's a couple years ago and it was a laptop. At the time, you were supposed to be grateful that a machine was that small and light at all, not demand that it be fast. This has changed a bit lately. But this laptop is still slooow. So I have installed Ubuntu Linux on it in addition to Windows. (I decide when I start it which I will use, although it goes to Linux if I don't do anything within a few seconds.) At first I stayed mostly in Windows, but resorted to Linux if I had much writing to do in Google Docs, which is painfully slow - like a sentence or more behind my typing - in Windows. But over the weeks, I have gradually spent more and more time in Linux. I like the extra speed, and as I have found most of the tools I want, it becomes a bother to move back to Windows just for some small thing. Now, the Linux media players tend to use an open format called .OGG instead of .MP3, as MP3 is actually intellectual property of Fraunhofer and only licensed to Microsoft and various others.

Using Linux was the reason why I got an .OGG player, although it is also an MP3 player and WMA too. I think this freedom of choice, and the support for open, non-commercial formats, is something to encourage with my money (as well as my recommendation here). It was a combination of convenience and principle that caused me to buy it, but I did not know then just how good it was. I would soon discover.

I was running the standard music player in Ubuntu Linux at the time I connected the Samsung YP-Z5F to charge the batteries. Shortly after, the hard disk light blipped on my laptop, and in the left column (music sources) a small icon showed up at the bottom. It was a small picture of the Z5, with the text "Samsung" just in case I didn't get it. Curious, I dragged some songs from my playlist to the icon. Immediately, the files were transferred to the gadget. When I later tried it out, the songs were there with name and artist and album, so I could sort them and search them as I wanted.

Well, you may say, that's how it should be. That is exactly my point. Because this is usually not the case. Usually you have to install some custom software (usually slow and bloated and running only under Windows, or on a Mac, depending on the product). This software then insists on taking control of your music, and storing it in some non-obvious place in a non-obvious way. If you have already ripped the CDs, the proprietary program will make another copy in its proprietary location and quite possibly in a proprietary format. (My previous MP3 player from Sony certainly seemed to have its own format. You could use it as an external hard disk, but it would then not recognize any music you had loaded on it that way.)

For good measure, I also used the file system in Linux - not a music program - and dragged .OGG files to the temporary Samsung icon on the desktop - not in the music program. The effect was the same. The Z5 greedily accepted the music files and seamlessly integrated them in its database when I started it in offline mode.

OK, let me just hammer on this nail until only the head is visible. You find your music by any means, whether with your file explorer or your music program, and you drag it to your music player. (Or the other way around, from the player to the computer.) The gadget recognizes the music and lets you listen to it any way you want. That's it. That's how it should have been all along. That's how things ought to work. Right out of the box, in any obvious way you could come up with. And regardless of what operating system you happen to run.

If things are this simple on Ubuntu Linux, which is free (as in "free beer" as well as "free speech"), why would anyone in their right mind pay several good silver spoons for Windows or OSX? These are not free, you know. They are just "included in the price" and if you buy a computer without them, you can save the money and buy an .OGG player instead. But for now, there are not enough stuff like the Z5 that let you do this. There are too many programs and peripherals that only work under this or that slow and expensive operating system. But for each passing year, you can do more without paying those silver spoons. One day, I like to think, we reach a tipping point, and the sheep flee from the shearer. If I can bring that day a little closer, this entry has not been in vain.

***

The tiny white and black headphones in the picture are Koss "Spark Plug" earphones. Another intuitive invention, you mold the black rubbery cone which is very soft and pliable. Roll it into a small tube and plug it into your ear canal, where it will softly expand to fill the available space but no more. It delivers the sound a bit deeper than a common earplug but still safely away from the actual eardrum. The result is a more realistic sound and earplugs that don't fall off if you (like me) have a mutant ear shape in one ear. I have yet to find any other ear plug that did not fall out during normal movement. It is comfortable and sounds great, and the price is perfectly ordinary despite the unique design. Warmly recommended. I have secured an extra set in case they are discontinued, as good ideas all too often are. (If nothing else, companies with good ideas are often bought up by people who prefer their bad ideas to prevail.) Get yours today, or next payday.