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Transcript of The Talk Show Episode 1

Title: All iPhone, All the Time

Hosts: John Gruber, Dan Benjamin

Release date: 28 June 2007

Description: In this, our inaugural episode, we discuss the impending release of the iPhone, speculate about costs and service plans, waiting in line for a phone, and more.

John Gruber: That’s what you’re going to say.

Dan Benjamin: That’s what I’ll say when I start recording.

Gruber: Right.

Benjamin: Which I did.

Gruber: Right. All right. And who are you?

Benjamin: I’m Dan Benjamin.

Gruber: I’m John Gruber.

Benjamin: How are you doing?

Gruber: Doing all right.

Benjamin: Why don’t we start talking about the iPhone?

Gruber: The what?

Benjamin: The iPhone, that’s the big thing.

Gruber: Oh, right, right, right, it’s like the iPod phone.

Benjamin: It’s a phone that can play songs. I think it’s an MP3 player.

Gruber: Right. So...

Benjamin: Big question, I mean, are you getting one?

Gruber: Right, am I going to get one. I think we’ve got to get at least — I think the question is how many will we get. Do I need one for each pocket?

Benjamin: [laughs] So you’re getting one, I’m getting one. Are we sort of people that are — are we unusual, are we really going to be seeing the kinds of lines and people waiting like people saw for the PS3 and things like that?

Gruber: Well, I don’t know, maybe I’m just not connected, I don’t even know how many people were waiting for PS3. I think it’s a very different crowd. I mean, certainly nothing I’ve ever been interested in — I can’t remember the last time that I was interested in something where I was worried would I be able to get it.

Benjamin: You’re actually thinking there’s a fair chance you’re not going to be able to even buy one of these things?

Gruber: Well, nobody really knows — how many are they going to have available on day one? I’ve heard the number three million bandied about. But that’s certainly isn’t definitive. That’s not a statement from AT&T or Apple. Nobody really knows. I don’t even know where I saw it.

Benjamin: Who said that, who actually said that to begin with? I thought Steve Jobs said three million.

Gruber: No, I don’t think so. The only number that Apple has said is that the vague idea that they think they’re going to sell 10 million total by the end of 2008, 18 months from now. So obviously, if they had three million of the first generation model available on day one, that would be huge. I think partially I’m biased — you’re probably in the same boat — where years of following Apple — whenever they come out with something that’s really, really anticipated, it’s hard to get immediately. It’s never widely available or seldom widely available on day one.

Benjamin: When I called up Cingular, the 888 number, the Cingular people told me even just in their stores they didn’t see any problem. Nobody who wanted a phone would have a problem getting one. When I called a local Cingular shop — AT&T I should be calling them, right — when I talked to the local people, they’re behind the curve on what they know. They don’t seem to have any information that’s up-to-date. I actually was telling them, I said, “Oh, so I hear that the basic iPhone plan is going to be $20 a month.” And they were, “Oh, where did you see that?” And I gave them the URL, they were like, “Well, I wrote it down, and when I go home, I’ll read about it.”

Gruber: “I’ll ask my manager.”

Benjamin: “I’ll ask my manager if we can get online tonight, if we’re allowed to read something on Apple.”

Gruber: You told me yesterday that they told you that as far as they knew yesterday, this was late yesterday, that they still thought that you’d have to activate your phone at the point of purchase. Go through a 10- or 15-minute activation process per sale.

Benjamin: Right, so it’s kind of a puzzle. My main question — and something I’ve heard other people who are under an AT&T/Cingular contract as I am — one of the concerns, I think, was what happens to the existing contract, do we need to pay some kind of a fee or a fine in order to get the iPhone, and the answer is no, definitively no. The thinking is, the only reason that you would ever need to pay anything would be if you were canceling your contract, which you’re not, you’re extending it when you get the iPhone. And the only other time where you’d be forced to pay some kind of amount above and beyond something normal, is if you’re under contract and you want to upgrade to a brand new phone, you’re not eligible to do that until your contract is up, then you don’t get the discount price on the phone. What you get is the full retail price, so you want to buy one of those Razors or something, and it’s like $39 if you’re not under contract. If you are, then it’s $500. So in case of the iPhone, we have to pay full price anyway, so the answer is a simple one. You’re buying the phone for full price anyway, and there is no fee, just the activation.

Gruber: Right, and just to be clear, what we’re saying, we’re not reporting that this is news that you’re going to have to go through that sort of hassle if you buy at the AT&T store. We’re just saying that the retail employees are so in the dark that that’s what they think. I mean, I don’t even think that’s possible. I think that the way this is — from everything I’ve read so far, it seems like you have to — the fact that none of it works without iTunes — if it’s tied to your iTunes account, how would it even possibly be activated in the store unless they’re going to —

Benjamin: It makes absolutely no sense. Unless they have a Mac sitting up there or a PC for you to go up to, sign in with your iTunes account, which of course everybody has memorized, and you’re going to log in and activate it right there, and of course that’s not a security risk for you.

Gruber: [laughs] Right, like a public iTunes machine.

Benjamin: It’s just some guy’s — the manager brought his PC from home for you to use. I mean, it’s ridiculous. So they just don’t know yet, and I’ve heard that they’re receiving their training on the iPhone today.

Gruber: Well, and I think the big problem is that from an Apple Store retail employee’s perspective, it’s certainly going to be a big day, probably the busiest single evening in the store’s history, but it’s going to be a very Apple-style process, it’s not going to be that different than December 23rd iPod shoppers, where they’re going to have those little portable credit card swipers, and they’re going to move people as fast as they can. It’s not just going to be one guy at a checkout. Whereas from an AT&T retail store employee’s perspective, this is like nothing they’ve ever seen before. There’s never been this sort of — 150–200 people trying to buy the exact same thing in three hours on Friday night.

Benjamin: And I think something else that we had talked about a little bit before is there’s a big difference not only in what I think those people are used to selling but in the actual process itself. AT&T/Cingular stores are really becoming much more of a retail outlet than usual, they’re very much — and I think you made the comparison that buying a cell phone sometimes is more like buying a car as far as the experience goes. When you go to the Apple Store, if you want a straightforward experience where you just go in and say, “I would like this”, they’ll go and get it for you and you’ll buy it.

Gruber: My comparison was that the average cell phone store employee comes across more like a car salesman, it’s more like a personality type.

Benjamin: It’s all about the upsell. “Oh, you need a charger with that, don’t you?” And I think there’s a huge difference in the mindset, and I think when you go to the Apple Store, they’re expecting you to just buy something, and maybe you need help, if not, no problem, if you do, come back. The idea I think is that the individual person would be able to activate their own phone. I think it scares the crap out of the average AT&T salesperson.

Gruber: It just sounds crazy.

Benjamin: You can’t do that.

Gruber: Right. Assuming it’ll work, and presumably it’s pretty well-tested, but obviously, the one thing they certainly — I mean, in theory, maybe you could test it somehow, but live practice is always different — is how is the system going to stand up when 1.5 million people are trying to do it at 8:15 PM EST, simultaneously.

Benjamin: That’s actually good because I can’t answer that question, that’s a perfect segue into something I can answer, or I can talk about. These reviews have come out, the Mossberg review and some of these other ones, where they essentially say the iPhone is phenomenal, the keyboard issue is a non-issue, I think was one of the quotes. And that’s really great, but they seem to —

Gruber: I think Mossberg had the best line about the keyboard, and he really sort of backed up the Jobs’s line that you have to give it a week. And Mossberg said that three days in, he was so frustrated by the keyboard he wanted to throw the iPod [sic] against the wall, and five days in, he had like a breakthrough and felt like he could type just as fast as he does on his Treo.

Benjamin: That says a lot because those Treo people are kind of freaky. Or Blackberry, or whatever they are.

Gruber: And I think I know where you’re heading, but on the keyboard point — my thing with the keyboard is that — I’m a touch typist, I type pretty fast on a regular computer keyboard, so anything other than that to me has always been incredibly frustrating, whether it’s trying to type on somebody’s Treo — anything that I can’t touch type on to me feels like I’m completely and utterly hamstrung. So the way I feel, of course the iPhone on screen keyboard is going to suck. What’s the best portable keyboard ever made? A Blackberry, a Treo, or something like that? To me, they suck too. Do you want it to suck really, really bad or just sort of bad? So I feel like that’s where Apple made a trade-off where the best they were going to possibly do anyway with the hardware keyboard was still going to be something that you had to peck on, they traded that off for, compared to a Treo or Blackberry form factor, a much larger screen, and compared to any kind of slider phone, something that’s much thinner. Although I guess the BlackJack is pretty thin, but that’s not a slider. There’s no slider phone that compares to that sort of thinness, pocketability.

Benjamin: Where I was actually going with this was, the one thing that everybody sort of unanimously is criticizing now is the AT&T EDGE network. People talk about how sort of horrible it is. I have a phone now that is on the EDGE network that I use for checking email and very occasionally browsing the web. If you’re used to things being instantaneous, then it is horribly slow. If the idea of getting something like an email on your phone is still a novelty, then you probably won’t mind it. But I think one thing that’s actually a discussion point is why do you suppose Apple’s decided to partner with AT&T, and then as a second question, why do you think that the iPhone is only ever necessarily going to work on AT&T’s network? I think I know the answer to both, but I’d like to hear what you think.

Gruber: I think the answer to why AT&T was simply — I don’t really think it came down to networking capabilities or who had the best network, I think it was that AT&T/Cingular at the time offered Apple the best deal, that Apple, I think, came in with the minimal amount of “here’s how much control we want”, and maybe they didn’t even get that much, but I think Apple certainly wanted as much control in terms of pricing, in terms of the plans, in terms of the features they’d be allowed to add on the phone without any interference — a couple of people from Cingular have said they didn’t even get to see the iPhone until after they agreed to it. So obviously, Apple had a lot of control in it, and I think, I forget who had it, but a couple of people said, obviously, they did talk to the other networks, they certainly talked to Verizon, and I think it just came down to control, how much control was AT&T willing to — say, “Okay, you can do your thing if we’ll be exclusive for the iPhone.”

Benjamin: I think you’re 100 percent right, I think at the end of the day it came down to the company that was the most willing to say, “Okay, Apple, do whatever you want, essentially, but just promise us that it would be just us.” But I actually think that there is something else behind the reason why the iPhone is slated to only be on AT&T for as long as it is. I think a big part of it is the business reason that you gave, but they have done so much — and I’m saying this coming from a background in the telecommunications industry and telecommunication billing systems — there’s so much that happens behind the scenes from the billing and the processing and all of that. The idea that Apple would go and write software that would handle all of that, essentially replacing all of the point of sales systems, all of the prepackaged software, and all of the companies that are building software that does this, and Apple has actually gone and written something that on the front end is basically iTunes that we’re going to interact with, and on the back end is something that’s going to plug into all of this really, really old, ancient, legacy C-like type systems, in other words, all the software that Cingular and AT&T have — there’s a lot of work involved, I think, behind the scenes, in making that process be as streamlined as it appears to be on those videos. I think that took probably many months to get right, and I think the idea of Apple trying to build the system that’s going to continue to work seamlessly with multiple carriers, that seems almost impossible.

Gruber: Yeah, I think that’s a good point that they needed to get somebody who they were — pick one, work out the best deal, but then commit to it for the long term because they built their own custom iPhone back end on top of the network, for the visual voicemail and a couple of other unique features, or at least especially the visual voicemail, I can’t think of anything else at the top of my head. It wouldn’t just work with another carrier.

Benjamin: So tell me, what are some of the things that we don’t know about the iPhone.

Gruber: The two that come to mind for me are the calendar app and the notes app because while Apple has revealed so much in the last week and a half with these videos that they’ve been unveiling, showing off, you know, detailed how to use your iPhone, how the stuff works, the how-to video doesn’t show the calendar app. And I don’t even think they’ve shown screenshots of the notes app. And the notes app was also definitely one of the apps that back in January, when they let a couple of people at Macworld play with the early pre-production models, wasn’t even an application, it was just a screenshot. You’d tap the icon, and I think David Pogue said there were couple of the apps that at the time were just — just a screenshot would show up on the phone. So what happens with the notes app? Like I said, I don’t really think keyboarding — it’s not like you’re really going to be a good typist on this thing anyway, it’s not like anybody’s going to take — I think — really extensive notes on it, but if you type a note, where does it go? How does it sync? What is it, a text file? Is it an RTF file? It’s a total mystery. And with the calendar stuff, how does the syncing work? If you sync calendars from your Mac on iCal to the iPhone, can you edit and move those dates around? Can you change events and then sync it again and it goes back to your Mac and it keeps track? What happens while after you’ve untethered your —

Benjamin: What’s the point of a view-only calendar on an iPhone? I want to be able to enter an event right there, sync it up.

Gruber: I mean, I don’t know. Doesn’t seem to me like they’ve really said anything about that. And really, to me, the calendar stuff really sort of is this thing that really cries out for networking, somewhere to IMAP for email. You do most of your email on your desktop computer, and while you’re using your iPhone, you’re connecting via IMAP. The whole point of IMAP is that your inbox is going to be up-to-date wherever you go and look at it next. You sort of need the same thing for calendaring. But where would that shared calendar live? Obviously, I don’t think that’s going to be ready for any kind of official — here’s the official answer from Apple — it’s not going to be ready on Friday, but obviously, something like that is a much better way to deal with calendaring on a portable.

Benjamin: Absolutely.

Gruber: And it’s certainly one of those things, I think, people will criticize, people who are used to handhelds that connect to Exchange that already handles that sort of stuff.

Benjamin: Is the fact that it’s not going to do 3G — and I have used phones on AT&T 3G network, and they’re screaming fast, they’re really, really great. You could watch streaming TV on them, they’re really good. They don’t have much of a battery life but —

Gruber: I have to wonder because that’s one question nobody really seems to have a good answer for. It’s not like AT&T doesn’t have 3G networking, they do. I just read today —

Benjamin: It’s fast!

Gruber: — 160 markets that have phones, AT&T sells 3G data phones. So why isn’t the iPhone 3G? My only guess — I have two guesses: a) it’s about battery life, or b) it’s about widespread availability, that Apple wanted to have one device, just like the iPod. We’re going to ship the first time with one thing, or in this case there are two variations that are exactly the same except one has 4 GB and the other one has 8 GB of memory. But that’s obviously the single most insignificant — I mean, in terms of manufacturing, it’s a very insignificant detail.

Benjamin: So if they had built 3G capability into it, at least my understanding, which I could be wrong, but my understanding was that it can live happily on a 3G network, and if you step down to an EDGE network, it will jump on that.

Gruber: Yeah. I don’t know, maybe it’s battery, maybe it was cost. Battery might make sense. I don’t know. I mean, it must be something.

Benjamin: The battery lasted about an hour and a half on the 3G phone.

Gruber: And that to me is also, the battery angle, is the most surprisingly good news of the initial reviews from the newspapers this week. And even Apple’s announcement — what was it, about 10 days ago — when they said that battery life was higher than previously announced. Because I remember when the iPod [sic] was first announced back in January, there were so many of the initial people — there were two reactions: there were the people who said, “Oh my god, this is awesome, I cannot wait to get one.” That’s me, I was certainly there. Me and you were right there saying, “This is incredible, I cannot believe that they built this.”

And then there were the people who were saying, “They’re full of it. This is not going to work like they’re saying it is”, immediately began doubting it. And there were a whole bunch of people who said that it’s going to get about an hour of battery life, it’s going to get 90 minutes of battery life, it’s ridiculous that they built this thing, that with all these features and Wi-Fi it’s going to get so little battery life, and the battery is not replaceable, that it’s never going to get the battery life that Apple claimed — five hours or whatever they said. And so here they get closer to the release, and they say, guess what, by the way, eight hours. And the reviews more or less back it up, some of them said it ended up at seven, for music playback — 22–23 hours, nine hours of internet playback, I think, Walt Mossberg got, using the web and surfing Wi-Fi. And that’s with Wi-Fi on the whole time. The battery life is for real. Obviously, it’s not the sort of thing where you can use it for days at a time, but nothing with Wi-Fi is. In terms of its competitors, other phones that do even vaguely similar things, the battery life — iPhone blows it away. Blows everything else away.

Benjamin: So what are we really saying, are we saying go to the Apple Store, not the AT&T store to buy one, even though —

Gruber: Yeah, that’s a good — where do you go to buy one if you want to get one on day one? I think you and I both agree, go to an Apple Store if you live near one because I would say a) I think the retail staff is going to be better prepared for it, b) I refuse to believe that they’re not going to be at least as well stocked as Cingular stores, if not better. I just cannot believe that Apple Stores would not have more than Cingular stores, or at least as many.

Benjamin: Doesn’t seem possible that they wouldn’t have tremendously bigger volume going through those stores, and be able to move them faster.

Gruber: The big question is, is it worth gambling, if you really don’t want to wait in line for hours on Friday and spend the whole day in line, is it worth risking trying to swing by on Sunday morning or Sunday afternoon and pick one up? Or do you think they’re going to be sold out?

Benjamin: Well, yeah, that’s the question, are they going to sell out, and everything I’ve heard says no. And that’s the thing for me is, I don’t need to have one Friday evening.

Gruber: But I want it over the weekend.

Benjamin: Yeah, if I could pick it up Sunday, that would be great. If I could get it Tuesday, that would be fine. The point for me is, I don’t want to be the guy that thinks, “Ah, there are not going to be any lines”, and then on Tuesday I try to pick one up, or even Sunday try to pick one up, and now I’m the guy that’s not going to get one until August.

Gruber: I’m going to guess it’s not going to be August, but I’m the guy who’s been waiting since the first week of January to get a Wii because I don’t feel like showing up anywhere on Saturday morning at 6 in the morning. So every time I go to Target, or every couple of weeks I look in Best Buy online to see if they have any, and still can’t get one. I don’t think it’s going to be like that, I think that worst case scenario, you may have to wait till July, but who knows. I don’t want to take a chance. I want an iPhone a lot more than I want a Wii.

Benjamin: So you’re going to wait?

Gruber: No, I think I’m going to go Friday. I still haven’t really decided though.

Benjamin: You’re going to wait in line on the curbside?

Gruber: I guess so, I don’t know. I’m hoping they’ll let you stay inside, it’s going to be hot. What are you going to do?

Benjamin: I’m going to wait outside the Apple Store.

Gruber: Yeah, I think that the malls around here, I think they’ll let you wait inside. I mean, I don’t see how they would keep you from waiting inside, really. Today, right now, it’s like 97 degrees with like a 100 percent humidity in Philadelphia. Waiting outside for six hours is —

Benjamin: That’s like a nice fall day in Orlando.

Gruber: [laughs] When was the last time you waited for something?

Benjamin: Ah, that’s a good question. I think I waited for tickets when I was in college.

Gruber: Yeah, I don’t think I’ve waited in line, like a serious line, like got there hours before —

Benjamin: You’re not talking like at the local grocery store to buy milk or something.

Gruber: Right. I don’t think that I actually got in line hours before something went on sale since — I don’t know, must have been some concert back in college. 10–12 years ago.

Benjamin: So that says a lot, says a lot for Apple. I think there’s a lot of people in our situation who are sitting there thinking, yeah, I think I’m going to wait.

Gruber: Yeah, and I still don’t know — how many people do you really think are going to show up per store? I really don’t know what to expect. I’m not going to get there that early, I’m certainly not going to wake up early.

Benjamin: When are you going to get there?

Gruber: I’m thinking, like, 2. My thought is all you have to do is really get there ahead of the sort of people who aren’t taking off from work, the sort of people who are just going to leave work early on Friday. So I feel like if I get there around 2...

Benjamin: Probably safe. You’re thinking you just need to beat the people who are going to cut out early from work?

Gruber: Right. I figure a lot of people are going to start taking off work at 3 o’clock.

Benjamin: You don’t think there’ll be a lot of people saying, “Hey, it’s Friday, let’s do a half day.”

Gruber: Well, I don’t know.

Benjamin: I think if you want to be safe, John, you need to get there at 10.

Gruber: That isn’t going to happen.

Benjamin: I think that’s the only way to be safe.

Gruber: Yeah, that’s not going to — are you going to get there at 10?

Benjamin: Don’t know.

Gruber: See, I just can’t see doing it.

Benjamin: Get some breakfast on the way and —

Gruber: I feel like, get there at 10 and there’s like three guys with beards, neckbeards who — with folding chairs, sat up watching — I just can’t see getting in line with them. And if I get there at 2 and there’s 400 people in line, I would just go home and order it from apple.com.

Benjamin: And in that case you’ll have it in less than a week, probably. I think that’s probably the smart thing to do, we’re giving away all our ideas, but I think showing up there at about 2 o’clock when the store goes dark, seeing what the line is like, if there’s less than a hundred people in line, I say you wait. More than a hundred — get out of there.

Gruber: That’s what I think, look for about a hundred people.

Benjamin: And then do you go to the Cingular store down the road? Is that your fallback? Or is your fallback ordering online?

Gruber: I don’t know. My thought is that I’m so — unless I read something in the next day or two that really makes me think that AT&T is going to be prepared, really prepared for what’s going to happen, I’m just too afraid that you’d get there and even with like 20–30–40 people ahead of you in line in an AT&T store that it’s going to be a nightmare of 10 or 15 minutes per customer in terms of them not being prepared to just zip people in and out.

Benjamin: Personally, I think it’s going to be a nightmare at the AT&T store.

Gruber: Have you ever done Christmas shopping in an Apple retail store? Like, late, like, pick up an iPod around the 20th of December?

Benjamin: They set up special lines, and they get in and out really fast.

Gruber: It’s just fantastic if you’re buying anything that’s one of the big ticket items like any of the regular iPods, just give me the middle of the line iBook. You just hand the guy your credit card, he swipes it on a little handheld portable thing, asks for your email address, the receipt goes to your email address, they put a sticker on the box, and you walk out the door.

Benjamin: Done.

Gruber: Takes less time than it takes to walk into the corner grocery store and buy a bottle of iced tea.

Benjamin: Yeah.

Gruber: So I guess we’re about half hour into this thing, and we haven’t even —

Benjamin: Yeah, we’re wrapping up.

Gruber: We haven’t even said what it is.

Benjamin: We have a show.

Gruber: The Talk Show.

Benjamin: Yeah. The Talk Show dot net. Which you seem to like the dot net thing.

Gruber: Right. I’ve got the daringfireball.net.

Benjamin: So now we have thetalkshow.net.

Gruber: We’ve talked about this before. When I registered, people often asked me why is it daringfireball dot net instead of dot com. I actually own the dot com as well but don’t use it, and it’s just some sort of weird — I got on the internet in 1995 or 1994, and to me dot com means you’re selling stuff. I’ve since gotten past it, but for whatever reason I’ve always had a thing about using dot com as the generic domain name.

Benjamin: Well, and it works out because the dot com wasn’t available right now.

Gruber: Exactly. [laughs]

Benjamin: So this is perfect.

Gruber: I don’t think anything dot com is available anymore.

Benjamin: No. And this is a show that I’ve been telling you I wanted to do for a long time, since the very first podcast we’ve recorded, and it actually took us finally meeting in person in San Francisco a few weeks ago for me to finally convince you that it maybe wasn’t a horrible idea.

Gruber: Right, that’s very true.

Benjamin: And we have a sponsor.

Gruber: We do have a sponsor.

Benjamin: Would you like to tell us about the sponsor, John?

Gruber: No, I don’t even know who it is.

Benjamin: That’s not true.

Gruber: [laughs]

Benjamin: Our first sponsor, and hopefully not our only sponsor, so if you’re interested, thetalkshow.net for information on how to become a sponsor.

Gruber: What you need to do if you want to be a sponsor is call Dan very, very late at night, Eastern Standard Time, call around 11 or 12, maybe even 12:30 in the morning. Just call Dan Benjamin and tell him you want to sponsor this show.

Benjamin: So, PeepCode. This is a company that my friend Geoffrey Grosenbach, very well-known in the podcasting world — he’s done the Ruby on Rails podcast for quite a long time. He set up his company, PeepCode, where he’s basically doing screencasts, and you can learn — it’s basically like instruction that’s on demand, you go there, you pick the topic you’re interested in, a lot of it has to do with Rails, but it’s not specific only to Rails, and you go and you — very inexpensive to actually buy the screencast that you want — you watch it, and you actually learn something.

Gruber: Right, it’s sort of tapping into some sort of psychological thing where it’s just easier to learn things when you’re seeing it than just reading it. It’s literally almost as good as being there and looking over his shoulder while he shows you the app. And it terms of getting the general idea — oh, that’s what you do — it’s just, you get it, it’s just the most effective way to learn it.

Benjamin: It really is. I think one of the things that Geoffrey’s really done with PeepCode is he’s taking things that generally are more difficult to explain in just a blog post, things that aren’t necessarily “first do this, then do that”, but involve a lot more of concept and involve a lot more multiple concepts coming together, and something where you can say, if you see it, you can learn this in five minutes, but if you have to read about it, it’s going to take you two hours, and that’s what he does.

Gruber: I think “concept” is the key word, in terms of getting the concept across, that sort of format is better. It’s the same reason people go to WWDC. You go there, and it’s not like it replaces the Cocoa documentation, but when you go to a 45-minute session on some new technology, and the guy who actually is an expert at it, from Apple, is telling you in 45 minutes, here’s the most important things you need to know about Core Animation, you get the basic gist. You’re like, oh, I see, I understand what it’s about.

Benjamin: peepcode.com.

Gruber: Yeah.

Benjamin: Okay. So what’s next? I guess we try and go get some iPhones, and we’re going to talk about it.

Gruber: All right, I guess next week’s show we’ll record on our iPhones in a conference call.

Benjamin: Excellent.

Gruber: [laughs]

Benjamin: And by the way, we’re going to try and do this every week.

Gruber: Right, no, every week.

Benjamin: And you know, it turned out, John, to be more than — we’re trying to stick to half an hour, I’m going to have to cut 10 minutes — I told you I didn’t want to have to edit this thing. You did really good by not cursing very — at all.

Gruber: I think there were only two times where I wanted to curse.

Benjamin: Is that all?

Gruber: Two where I had to cut myself off.

Benjamin: All right. Well, hey, good talking to you, and good luck, hope you get the iPhone. I’ll be looking for some live twittering and picturing.

Gruber: I’ll call you from the line on Friday.

Benjamin: Not if I call you first.

Gruber: You know, why don’t you get two and just FedEx me one.

Benjamin: Oh yeah, okay. Done. Easy.

Gruber: All right. Thanks, Dan.

Benjamin: Thank you. Talk to you next time.

#John Gruber #Dan Benjamin

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markwatkinsconsumerguide · 5 years

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Consumer Guide / No.87 / Top Of The Pops LPs archivist & blogger Terry Wilson with Mark Watkins.

MW : Tell me about your background...

TW : I grew up in Aylesbury, and from as early as I can remember, I loved music - and it was these very Top of the Pops LPs which were the earliest I had, bought for me as presents when I was four or five, and spun on an old mono Dansette. Little did I know, the LPs were being pressed in a small plant five minutes from where I lived (I found that out about forty years later!).

I guess Top of the Pops started me on the road to what would become quite a serious record collecting habit, and a love of music generally. I went on to play in a number of unsuccessful bands, before taking up music writing (plug: Tamla Motown - The Stories Behind The UK Singles). I'm now 50, and live in Sussex with my wife and child, and although I completed my Top of the Pops vinyl collection years ago, I still splash out on the odd rarity or overseas pressing when I see it. The overseas ones especially fascinate me, although I'm no longer able fill my home with records, like I did in my bachelor days.

MW : When & why did you set up your Top of the Pops website?

TW : The project started around 1999, and I knew nothing about web design at that point. I'd started collecting the series (as an adult, that is - my childhood LPs were long gone), but this was when the internet was still in its infancy - nothing like we have today. For example, there was no such thing as a Top of the Pops LP discography, so I had no idea how many I needed, what the catalogue numbers were, or what the LP sleeves looked like.

The website project actually began as an Excel spreadsheet, where I started listing the volume numbers, catalogue numbers and so on. A few of the albums had gotten into the LP charts back in the 1970s, so the relevant chart books were consulted and provided a few more snippets - that's how hard it was to find anything out before the internet, young people. That listing gradually expanded to the point where I thought I'd try my hand at making a website, which was a steep learning curve for me. I guess it went online around 2005.

MW : How have you developed the site since its beginnings?

TW : The first site I made was quite different to the current one. The technology was much more clunky, and the pages were all out of line. It wasn't great, but at least gave me a grounding in web design, so I knew what I needed to do. I made the decision around 2008 to re-invent it using a different host, whose layouts I much preferred, and that's where it still lives today. From my perspective, the website was more than just a space to write up and organise the discography; it was also a forum for research. I've lost count of the number of kind people who've contacted me through the site, and given me information, photos and even records over the years.

A Russian collector, for example, used to send me Top of the Pops records from the old Soviet Union, pressed on flexi-disc and coloured vinyl - I'd never even have known about them otherwise. Plus, every new discovery meant a new page for the site, and whole new sections came into being - it has expanded to the point where it's now quite vast. It's because of the size of the site that I started a blog (http://copycatcovers.blogspot.com) where I could flag up new discoveries which might otherwise not get noticed - not just Top of the Pops, but across the whole genre of what I call copycat cover versions.

MW : How do you store and maintain all your vinyl?

TW : I'd love to say I have a dedicated room with security cameras and temperature control - but in reality I store my collection in a humble way on ordinary shelves.

I used to have them in a series of proper LP cases, but they became unwieldy, so I took them out again. Just having them stacked vertically away from undue heat or humidity is all the care they need. The more precious ones are in heavy-duty protective covers, but I don't go to great lengths to look after them, or treat them like precious jewels.

They rarely encounter a record deck, though, as I got together with a few fellow collectors some years back, and between us we digitised the whole set - so the vinyl can stay safely inside the sleeves while I listen to MP3s. The rarer tape editions in my collection are less hardy than the vinyl, so they are housed in protective cases and kept in a safe place.

MW : What are your views on these kinds of LPs - in the sense that they were once seen as cheap and cheesy - until The Mike Flowers Pops lounge music revival in 1995…

TW : There's a part of me that sees them exactly as you describe - cheap and cheesy - but there's another part of me, which I guess is the dominant voice in my head, which sees them as creative fun. It's important to remember these are not compilation albums. The making of them required a band to go into a studio, red light running against the clock, and capture track after track after track - and in this way, the original 'Top of the Poppers' group recorded around 70 full LPs in ten years - by any measure, that's dedicated musicianship, arranging and singing. I can't think of any band in history with such a prolific work rate. I once wrote a tongue-in-cheek article in which I argued these were the most important albums ever made, and by the end of it, I'd almost convinced myself! Two of them even made Number 1 in the UK album charts. That's two more than Frank Zappa, The Velvet Underground, The Doors, Jimi Hendrix, etc…

MW : Do you search charity shops and similar for these albums? Your best finds? Any missing?

TW : My UK collection is essentially complete, and has been for a few years - so I no longer hunt them down. For better or worse, I'm past the point where I still find anything I need in charity shops. Overseas releases are a different matter. I buy them when I can, but I probably have more missing than I will ever know. (To my knowledge, I am the only person who's ever researched them.)

When I was buying the UK albums, charity shops and car boot sales were my main source, and I frequented them religiously - there was Ebay, of course, but it costs a lot more to have an LP posted to you than to chance upon it for 25p in a charity shop - so I held out and gradually finished the set. My best find was probably Volume 90 - I'd never seen it, and I was killing time in a town in West Sussex when I had a rummage in a junk shop and found it for pennies. Back then, Ebay was around, but the number of sellers was a fraction of what it is today. On the very rare occasions something like Volume 90 or Volume 91 turned up, they would command prices in the £100 bracket - and that's no exaggeration. (I thereby learned I was not the only one collecting them!)

But most of my truly astonishing finds have been via the internet. I'll never forget discovering one of the LPs had been issued in Argentina, and I bought it immediately. When it arrived, I slipped it out the sleeve to find it was pressed on starburst multi-coloured vinyl. Amazing! And still it goes on - just last year I chanced upon a UK release, a double album of disco tracks by The Poppers, which I'd never even heard of! You never know what will show up next.

MW : Tell me about some of the famous (now) but not famous (then) musicians who started their careers off doing Top of the Pops cover versions...

TW : It would be great to say a succession of stellar names cut their recording teeth on these Top of the Pops albums, but in truth, there aren't that many examples. Those who know about the cover version sub-industry (and Top of the Pops was only one LP series among many) immediately think of Elton John. He did record a good number of anonymous cover versions in the late-1960s for labels like Avenue, Marble Arch and Music For Pleasure, but only one for Top of the Pops - ‘Snake In The Grass’, issued on Volume 5 (which is, consequently, worth a few pounds).

It's frustrating that the session men and women are largely unknown to this day, but a couple more famous names can be confirmed. Tina Charles, for example, who had success with her hit, ‘I Love To Love’, can be heard singing ‘Stand By Your Man’ on Volume 45, while well-known singer Laura Lee performs ‘The Man Who Sold The World’ on Volume 36. We might also mention Elvis Costello's dad, Ross McManus, who sang on more than one LP - including the same Volume 5 which Elton was on. Rumours that David Bowie appears on some are probably not true, but who really knows?

MW : What are your favorite album covers...why?

TW : It may seem paradoxical, but I've never really been a fan of the album covers. There are many collectors of the 'cheesecake' sleeve genre, but I'm not one of them. Mostly, I find them amusing, with the ridiculous poses and whacky clothing - they are sometimes described accusingly as soft porn, but I think that's taking them too seriously. Maybe they were considered more shocking back in the day, but there's one in particular, Volume 8 - in which the model sports a fur bikini! Can you think of a more absurd garment?

I like the quasi-psychedelic cover of Volume 16 but my favourite is probably the ultra-hideous Volume 22 - one of the ones I had when I was a kid. That's famous actress, Nicola Austin, in what can only be described as a roll-neck leotard, capped off with matching sailing hat! We should give a shout-out to Bill Graham, a designer for Pickwick Records, who came up with the iconic sleeve design in 1968. Even into the mid-1980s, when models like Sam Fox and Linda Lusardi were by then appearing on the covers, the design was essentially unchanged. He came up with a classic.

MW : What are your long term plans for the site / collection?

TW : The site continues to grow, every time another record comes to my attention. One area I never did get into was reviews of the LPs. I would have, but a fellow enthusiast, called Tim Joseph, has been preparing a book about them for years, and I didn't want to tread on his toes, so to speak. It's something I might do one day though. As for my collection, I don't know what will become of it! I have some bona-fide rarities in my possession - autographed sleeves, advance promo copies, a genuine gold disc award, and numerous overseas pressings, one of which accidentally includes a real hit recording by Elton - don't ask me how that happened, but so far as I am aware, the album is unknown to his fans and collectors. If they found out about it, they might make me some handsome offers! But who, besides, me, would really want the rest of it?

I doubt I will ever sell my collection, so I guess I'll keep it until I shuffle off this mortal coil, then what will become of it, I don't know. I could offer it to a museum, but I fear they would die laughing! In a sense, I feel I've done my bit in preserving the LP series by photographing, cataloguing and documenting it all - at one point I actually lent some records back to Pickwick so they could make digital versions of some they couldn't locate - and so they were my copies, loaded up globally to iTunes. It's a honour for me, and that's reward enough.

MW : Away from the website, what are your other interests?

TW : I've always had many interests to pursue - I have what's sometimes called the collector's gene.

So when I'm not mulling the small print of old record sleeves, I might be cataloguing every Aston Villa football card ever printed, or compiling a collection of every King George VI postage stamp.

I tend to go for ambitious projects - all or nothing - so when I wrote my Tamla Motown book, for example, I researched and wrote up every single 45 they ever released - a mammoth task which had to be squeezed between building websites, playing football, playing in a band - and also, a full-time job (Special mention here to my patient wife!). I've always had in interest in writing. I used to work as a journalist and edited a few magazines.

These days, much of my spare time is consumed with mixing and remixing music on pc. It's great fun, and the technology is so freely available, anyone can do it.

MW : What's to see and do in the area you live in?

TW : I grew up in the countryside, and moved down to Brighton in my 20s. It's a place I still love - so much going on all the time with bands, nightlife, festivals and so on - but one way or another, I've ended up back in a village.

Life here is quiet, and the village is a bit other-worldly - which is fine - but very different from the pace of city life. Cars will actually pull up to a stop in the middle of the road, if someone's waiting to cross!

The village has its own events - an annual village day, a dedicated fireworks society and various arts’ groups, which I take a passing interest in. Fortunately, there's also a choice of good pubs.

MW : How do you intend to spend the summer holidays?

TW : I have no plans yet for the coming summer - which is leaving it late, to say the least. I quite like the idea of getting a last-minute deal and flying off to who-knows-where, but I'm not sure what we'll do. I get bored easily and like to have things to do and see, whereas my wife likes to lay in the hot sun and do nothing. So, we find things which work for both of us. Last year we headed down to Cornwall to a seaside resort and went out on a few adventures, so it worked for both of us. This year, who knows?

http://topofthepopslps.weebly.com/

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degrafa · 7 years

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Hollywood Must Face The Music

Raw talent is undeniably the most important thing for someone to make it big in the industry. Of course, a pleasing personality and a beautiful face to boot are also big factors but not all the time that famous musicians and singers are always good looking. Many things have changed in the music industry over the years. Gone were the days when people used to listen to cassette tapes or their walkman to enjoy a good song or two.

Nowadays, everything has gone digital. Although conventional CDs are still sold by music labels and make up a big chunk of music sales, music is now being sold online through iTunes, for instance, where everyone can listen to their favorite music from the comfort of their smartphones. Technology may have helped the music industry grow and reach out to more people but it has also limited the industry in some ways. Even the movies are also affected by all these changes.

With theater attendance at a two-decade low and profits dwindling, the kind of disruption that hit music, publishing, and other industries is already reshaping the entertainment business. From A.I. Aaron Sorkin to C.G.I. actors to algorithmic editing, Nick Bilton investigates what lies ahead.

The future looks dismal and it is expected to get worse than it is now.

In the mid-90s, the first time I downloaded an MP3, I realized that the music industry was in grave trouble. People who were my age (I wasn’t old enough to legally drink yet) didn’t want to spend $20 on a whole compact disc when all we coveted was a single song on the album. Moreover, we wanted our music immediately: we preferred to download it (illegally) from Napster or eventually (legally) from iTunes without the hassle of finding the nearest Sam Goody. It turned out that this proclivity for efficiency—customizing your music and facilitating the point of sale—was far from a generational instinct. It explains why the music industry is roughly half the size it was one decade ago.

These preferences weren’t confined to music, either. I also felt the raindrop moment firsthand when I began working at The New York Times, in the early 2000s. Back then, the newspaper’s Web site was treated like a vagrant, banished to a separate building blocks away from the paper’s newsroom on West 43rd Street. Up-and-coming blogs—Gizmodo, Instapundit, and Daily Kos, which were setting the stage for bigger and more advanced entities, such as Business Insider and BuzzFeed—were simultaneously springing up across the country. Yet they were largely ignored by the Times as well as by editors and publishers at other news outlets. More often than not, tech-related advances—including e-readers and free online blogging platforms, such as WordPress and Tumblr—were laughed at as drivel by the entire industry, just as Napster had been years earlier.

The glamour of Hollywood is slowly disappearing as technology starts to dominate the world. Compared to other industries where high-tech gadgets are the main products, it is easy to see how much the music industry has fallen behind.

Hollywood, these days, seems remarkably poised for a similar disruption. Its audiences increasingly prefer on-demand content, its labor is costly, and margins are shrinking. Yet when I ask people in Hollywood if they fear such a fate, their response is generally one of defiance. Film executives are smart and nimble, but many also assert that what they do is so specialized that it can’t be compared to the sea changes in other disrupted media. “We’re different,” one producer recently told me. “No one can do what we do.”

That response, it’s worth recalling, is what many editors and record producers once said. And the numbers reinforce the logic. Movie-theater attendance is down to a 19-year low, with revenues hovering slightly above $10 billion—or about what Amazon’s, Facebook’s, or Apple’s stock might move in a single day.

(Via: http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/01/why-hollywood-as-we-know-it-is-already-over)

And it does not help that performers and artists invest too much of their time and attention to political issues that the nation faces and attack the new president every chance they get instead of focusing on their artistry.

So who are the A Listers who’ve ruled out performing at Donald Trump’s Inauguration balls?

For his part, Trump denies that he cares. After stories circulated that top names were refusing to perform at his January 20 inauguration, Trump tweeted that he preferred to party with “the people.”

The biggest name to surface so far, the Beach Boys, were a “maybe.” But that hasn’t yet panned out. The Rockettes are performing. The Mormon Tabernacle Choir is too. Jackie Evancho of America’s Got Talent is confirmed. The latest performer to say maybe: British inger Rebecca Ferguson, who says she would “graciously accept” but only if she can perform Strange Fruit, a protest song about lynchings, according to BBC.

Tim Rushlow and His Big Band, which performs retro hits by American icons like Frank Sinatra, will perform as Donald and Melania Trump make their first dance, Buzzfeed reported. Toby Keith, 3 Doors Down, and Lee Greenwood are also lined up to perform.

(Via: http://heavy.com/news/2016/12/donald-trump-inauguration-musicians-list-performers-said-no-rejected-celine-dion-garth-brooks-kiss-andrea-bocelli-kanye-west-elton-john-chainsmokers/)

It is hard to tell what’s in store for the music industry in the years to come because the world is still changing as we speak. Technology becomes further advanced as the days go by and the industry has to keep up with all these changes if they want to stay relevant in the new world that is to come.

Even though the people will always have a place for music in their lives, the first thing that artists, music labels, and record companies should address is to overcome challenges involving technological advancements so they can reach out to more people who will listen and patronize their music.

The post Hollywood Must Face The Music was first published on Degrafa Blog

from https://www.degrafa.com/hollywood-must-face-the-music/

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latestbycloud-blog · 7 years

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The Diamond Rio PMP300: Can this great 18-year-old MP3 player still cut it? I have 64MB of capacity and a parallel port association. This will work.

Do you recollect the times of flicking through racks of CDs on a Saturday evening, searching for the collection of a craftsman you simply found out about, maybe a £3 deal, or even simply cruising for eye-getting covers? Euphoria. While the appearance of the iTunes store everything except finished the requirement for physical media, there was for a brief span a component of boasting rights joined to having a multi-gigabyte music accumulation on your iPod—however even owning advanced music is blurring. Our once-immeasurable music accumulations have been winnowed for advantageous gushing music benefits that give us access to all the music we would ever dream of in only a couple taps.

In any case, would we say we were in an ideal situation some time recently? Will discover.

How about we make MP3s extraordinary once more

My voyage down the MP3 rabbit opening began amid an evening spent thinking back about the different music players I've possessed throughout the years—the iPod Classics, an iRiver H140, a concise stretch with an overlooked 20GB Philips box, and a Rio Riot, the Atari Lynx of disliked MP3 players. Each has an appeal you do not see anymore, now that everything fits into an Android or iOS piece. All things considered, aside from the grouping of bizarre and wacky audiophile players (I'm taking a gander at you Pono Player), some of which could have been shot straight from 1998.My top pick, however, was the Creative Nomad Jukebox, which I purchased in the mid 2000s night-time of stacking solidified livers down at the nearby grocery store. The span of a versatile CD player, it donned a phenomenal 6GB of memory obligingness of a little 1.8-inch hard drive, and was fueled by a Texas Instruments TMS320DA25x ARM processor. It had two line-out jacks, a line-in jack for recording, a parametric equalizer, spatialisation settings, and natural settings that made utilization of Creative's EAX sound augmentations. At the time it was the most capable MP3 player around—at any rate until a specific natural product marked organization got in the activity.

I still strikingly examined what LAME and EAC implied—this piece from the Ars Technica of old clarifies it in detail—and illicitly downloading single tracks off of Napster utilizing a dial-up association and a dodgy US Robotics 56K modem. Obstructing the telephone line was an across the country leisure activity for a considerable length of time.

But instead than swing to the generally refined Creative Nomad (hello, this thing had a Firewire port on it all things considered) for my excursion down MP3 a world of fond memories, I settled on something more well known: the brilliant Diamond Rio PMP300. It is the MP3 player frequently wrongly refered to as the main that was industrially accessible. It wasn't—that honor has a place with the MPMan—however it's most likely the soonest one that many will perceive. The question is, 18 years after it was initially discharged, can PMP300 could stand its ground as a MP3 player in 2016?

The pre iPod

The Rio PMP300 was discharged in 1998, just about 10 years before the iPhone, when the normal UK home broadband speed was around 33.6Kbps—very nearly a thousand circumstances slower than today's normal of 28.9Mbps. This was before the principal iPod, or in reality any extensive limit MP3 players existed. The possibility of a music jukebox that could hold everything is the thing that guided me into the possibility of a MP3 player, however it was really littler limit gadgets like the Rio PMP300 that set up the class. Rio's first form of the PMP300 had only 32MB memory, enough for 60 minutes of tunes—not even a full album.That's at a tightfisted 128Kbps bitrate as well. These days you can make not too bad sounding documents in light of present conditions, yet in 1998 encoding choices were significantly more constrained. Consistent bitrate MP3 records at 128Kbps in 1998 were dependably very nearly transforming cymbals into outsider sounding advanced jumbles, and making even the most capable of artists sound like they were singing into a container of can roll. How we endure it—especially given the nature of compact CD players, MiniDiscs, or even tapes—I'll never know.The Rio PMP300 was an early-adopter device. It cost about £150 at dispatch for that half-collection of capacity, however the music business perceived the danger in a split second. One month after the player was discharged, the Recording Industry Association of America documented a suit against Rio in light of the fact that the gadget didn't check for the copyright status of records before playing them. It asserted this was an infringement of the Audio Home Recording Act. The point was to stop Rio offering the PMP300 through and through. The RIAA needed DRM in MP3s appropriate from the begin, which isn't amazing, however the condition of advanced music today would be altogether different had the RIAA won its case back in the 90s.

All things considered, while the case was tossed out before long, the RIAA at last had its way over the long haul. Today's music spilling administrations are bolted behind month to month memberships, and even free promotion upheld administrations may soon disappear.The marvels of the Internet

I must hand it to the Internet; in spite of the age of the PMP300, I was as yet ready to purchase a fresh out of the box new, cellophane-in place gadget specifically from an outsider merchant on Amazon. Yes, the AA battery inside the crate was a solidified wellbeing peril, however it resembled opening a period case from another time. There are thick manuals, driver CDs, and ports the majority of us haven't touched for well over 10 years. It appears to be odd that a MP3 player can appear to be more similar to an Encino Man now than a record turntable.

Looking each piece the antecedent to Apple's first iPod, the PMP300 highlights catches masterminded around underneath a show. There's volume here and there, a randomize catch (extraordinary for randomizing those six entire tracks you've exchanged), a rehash catch, a puzzling A/B catch, and the typical play, skip, and stop buttons.My rendition is the "unique version," which accompanies a lavish 64MB of capacity and a "translucent greenish blue" packaging flaunting the toy-like circuit sheets. Be that as it may, would you be able to envision utilizing this still? At 109g it's lighter than generally telephones. Furthermore, the thick belt cut on the back makes it a prime focus for trendy person re-reception. Trinket quality aside, however, I really needed utilize this AA-fueled, SmartMedia-card-pressing relic. Be that as it may, getting the darn thing to work turned into a stark indication of exactly how simple we have it nowadays.

The Rio PMP300 was discharged in a period before USB. Mice and consoles would utilize a PS/2 connector, while printers and different peripherals utilized incredible huge 25-stick parallel ports. The PMP300 not just uses a parallel port connector as thick as the player itself, additionally an exclusive link. To lose it is to leave your PMP300 as a block that'll just play The Prodigy's Fat Of The Land, or whatever else you may have stacked onto a MP3 player in 1998.

Fundamentally, in case you're grumbling about how USB Type-C gadgets mean you need to purchase another £5 save link off of eBay, perhaps it's an ideal opportunity to check your benefit.

Kids today

My thought was to approach utilizing the PMP300 like an entitled Windows 10 millennial—with zero preplanning. As none of my working PCs had an on-board parallel port, a trek to Maplin was keeping in mind the end goal to attach the two gadgets—and I rose with the wrong link. Ten years of tech news-casting and a youth of baffled tinkering with config.sys documents to make magazine floppy circle diversion demos work still wasn't sufficient for me to take care of business first time.

Next stop: eBay, which we additionally didn't have the advantage of in 1998. The sale site has been around since 1995, yet even it didn't dispatch in the UK until 1999. The 90s are looking more terrible and more regrettable, what with no iPhone, no eBay, most likely no broadband, just parts and bunches of parallel ports. Satisfying its part as the closest companion you kinda loathe, the main parallel-port-to-USB link I requested from eBay was lost in the post. A unimportant three weeks after the fact I had the re-requested link. Time to get started.With weeks to spend tapping my fingers, I had done a touch of research by this point. Not exclusively do the portable workstations and desktops I right now have entry to do not have the optical drive expected to introduce the driver CD, Rio didn't offer help for the PMP300 past Windows 98. This highlights a few 90s-period registering issues the vast majority of us have had the advantage of overlooking: the driver procedure is presently so programmed it's adequately undetectable, and nowadays you once in a while observe famous contraptions that offer a huge number of units see their support vanish practically when the discharge buzz has faded away. Windows 2000 arrived under year and a half after the PMP300, yet it isn't bolstered!

Much the same as today, however, what the enormous organizations don't give, the group does. About six ventures to include PMP300 bolster for Windows XP and past have flown up throughout the years. RIOsitude is the fundamental one, the work of Indie diversion engineer Drilian, regardless it takes a shot at Windows 10. Indeed, kind of. Subsequent to attempting all the similarity modes Windows 10 brings to the table, my Rio PMP300 still wasn't being seen by the program. What took after was a day of attempting to motivate Windows to perceive the player. I even began with an old portable PC filled with malware and whose dodgy show association left the base inch of the screen a twisted wreckage, the begin bar darkened. Still no happiness.

Next up I had a go at running local with a virtual Windows 98 machine running on a MacBook utilizing Oracle VM VirtualBox, dumping the PMP300 right onto home turf. Yet, when notwithstanding attempting to get USB drivers to work brought about Windows 98 to hang at the logo screen, I chose to sack the entire attempt off and go for a raced to sweat out the worry of those late 90s tech cerebral pain flashbacks.

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