— पाच हजार चौऱ्याण्णव —
There's little to report on today, except to say that my scheduled Apple Support call yesterday was a little dispiriting. I spoke with a "senior advisor for Mac" who basically led me to believe that a recently passed U.S. law regarding copyright is behind the bulk of my frustrations in the Music app and getting my library synced to my phone. For the first time, I was considering the possibility that I will have to throw up my hands and surrender to the notion of paying for a monthly music streaming service—just as I long ago did with multiple streaming services for movies and TV.
The thing is, he made it sound like it had to do with the number of times a given music file was copied or moved within my hard drive. This would suggest that I
could have solved this problem merely by ripping my old CDs all over again. Except . . . a couple of years ago, after more than a decade of resisting Shobhit's insistence that I should do so, I finally got rid of nearly all of my old CDs. The vast majority of my CD collection is now just gone. It was precisely because of the possibility of something like this happening that I resisted getting rid of the CDs in the first place. Now I feel completely vindicated in having kept them all those years, and like an idiot for finally caving to the pressure to get rid of them. To be fair, I was finally convinced myself that I no longer needed them and did not for a long time. But it looks like I may have been wrong.
This is the frustrating part, though: the music files are still on my hard drive. It's not like they disappeared, it's just that random ones will or won't sync to my phone, which I previously had no issue like this. Besides, I while I could not find a specific example while on the phone with the Senior Advisor—who openly admitted he lived in Canada, and did not know the details of the copyright law in question—I later went to look up Kesha albums and was completely mystified to learn that only the final five tracks from her album
Warrior had synced, but not the rest.
Something occurred to me only just as I was writing this, though. I was thinking I had purchased all of
Warrior through iTunes, but I'm realizing now—I may not have. Oh, shit. I just looked up my annual list of albums I keep for every year, and just as I suspected . . . I ripped that album from a library CD. The five tracks that did sync properly, I think, were purchased in iTunes when I bought later bought the extra tracks needed to fill out the deluxe edition.
This would suggest the guy was right, whereas last night, because I was remembering this detail about that particular album incorrectly, I thought he was wrong. I think this is indeed an issue specifically with music ripped from CDs. And I do have a lot of music files ripped from library copies.
Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck. The guy on the phone last night characterized it like when we all had to re-buy our entire music libraries when the world switched from vinyl to CDs. It's a format change, and if you want it on the new format, you have to pay for it. I've just been able to get away without looking at it that way for fifteen years. The guy said the new copyright law, though he didn't remember exactly, was something along the lines of a CD music file being protected from getting copied more than once—you can rip it to your computer, for instance, but you can't make more copies of it. This would explain the disappearance of ripped library CDs more than anything, as those CDs no doubt have been ripped multiple times by multiple people.
There's also the inexplicable duplication of music files in my hard drive, which I still have no explanation for—but the very fact of their duplication probably makes the same rules apply. What a pain in the ass.
This leaves me with two options. Either I actually go through and purchase all the music ripped from old CDs, which would entail a lot of work and money, or I finally give in and just subscribe to Apple Music. An individual account is $9.99 a month, which doesn't sound like much, until you extrapolate that to $120 a year. Considering that these days I only buy nine or ten new albums a year (it's only been seven this year), and most albums are about ten bucks, I figured I was still better off sticking with paying directly for new music. Except, I suppose, paying an extra $20 or $30 a year just to avoid this much bullshit going forward might be worth it.
— पाच हजार चौऱ्याण्णव —
— पाच हजार चौऱ्याण्णव —
Anyway, the phone call took about an hour. And after I saw that crap with the Kesha album last night, I scheduled another call for this weekend, which I am thinking about canceling now, having realized the mistake I made in my memory about where I had gotten those tracks from. (I had ripped all of Queen's back catalog from library copies early this year, and this would also explain why those already don't play anymore either.
. . . And, guess what? I just went to look into subscribing, and they offer a free trial for
six months before they start charging ten bucks monthly! That's more than enough time for me to figure out whether it works for me. I'm starting to feel better already.
(As it happens, I already signed up for the free trial for Amazon Music while in Palm Springs, just so I could play an album I could not get to play on my phone. I already set that one not to auto-renew, that one being after three months. I have no idea why I didn't just look into Apple Music to begin with, which I clearly should have done.)
I think I will have to reconstruct all my playlists. But, it was looking like I would have to deal with that regardless.
— पाच हजार चौऱ्याण्णव —
So, the rest of my evening: I watched the HBO Max documentary about Alanis Morrisette, specifically her smash
Jagged Little Pill album, which I never owned or even much liked in the nineties but the story is still interesting. There was about half an hour of it left when Shobhit got home from work. We then watched three episodes of
Maude on Prime Video, two of them the famous two-parter "Maude's Dilemma," about her decision to get an abortion. The show is consistently funny and clearly laudable for how it tackled a lot of controversial issues head on, including her white guilt about hiring a Black housekeeper. It's curious, though, how progressive it tries to be about Black people, and then it has casually racist lines about, say, Asian Americans. It really made me think about how I had been conditioned growing up to think about racism as strictly an issue between white and Black people, without it ever occurring to me that you could be racist about other ethnic groups as well. (I learned that the hard way when discussing Native Americans once in college, and Gabriel called me out on it, noting that my point of view had been racist, and I was taken aback:
It is? And yes, it was.)
In any case,
Maude was clearly ahead of its time in a lot of ways, and stuck in its time in others.
The Mary Tyler Moore Show, which ran during the same years, was far more ahead of its time in far more ways. Not perfect either, don't get me wrong, but it holds up better than
Maude could ever hope to. I'm still enjoying the show.
We went to bed and Shobhit read his library book. He's on the third in the
Golden Compass trilogy, which he tells me apparently gets very sad. So I guess we have that to look forward to whenever HBO gives us the third season of their TV adaptation.
— पाच हजार चौऱ्याण्णव —
[posted 12:29 pm]
