I love the fact that I can mess up around with my blog in whatever way that I wish, I cannot do that with some other websites, I can’t have everything blue or plug the image of my mp3 player in the header, LOL. I hope that you guys like the new design, I increased the body text width to have it fit more text in a shorter vertical area, I made the menu more readable, added pages for important info, and made a detailed footer.

I would also like to announce that everyone is free to use the content of my blog under the Creative Commons Attribute-NonCommercial License 2.5.

I’ve taken some nice shots of my little nephew and my litte cousin and I really wanted to post somewhere! I actually went on and printed these out, I didn’t know that it was so cheap to print these in Oman, it was like 100 baisa per photo. Anyway, here are two shots from the collection:

Apple today announced a new member to the iPod family, the iPod nano. It will come in two capacities, 2GB and 4GB. It is so thin!!! AND SMALL. It can be irritating to see new products that make whatever you have already outdated… but anyway. Read more at engadget.

What do you people use to listen to your music on your computer?

I have always been a Windows Media Player user, but recently, I was forced to move to iTunes because WMP cannot transfer songs to the iPod. I read a lot of praise for iTunes in the past, but now that I used it I really think that it was all biased, iTunes is seriously a horrible player, it has a very stupid library and a dumb interface. I am not a Microsoft fan, but I really appreciate the way their media player is made, everything is easily accessible and their library is extremely helpful and fun to use.

The first major feature to me that the iTunes and the iPod does not have is the artist name tag feature of Windows Media Player for multiple names. If more than one artist sing together in a song, (eg, a duo or somebody featuring somebody else), you can put both names as the artists so that the song appears under both names and NOT UNDER A THIRD NAME THAT COMBINES BOTH. For example, Craig David and Sting sang together “Rise and Fall”. The song Rise and fall will be found in iTunes and the iPod under the arist named “Craig David/Sting” and you will not find it if you went directly under “Craig David” or “Sting”. On the other hand, WMP tags both names by using a semi colon “;” so that Craig David; Sting sing the song, and this way it could be found under the songs for each of the artists separatly. The fact that iTunes does not support multi artist tags makes it so messy and makes finding the song harder.

Secondly, editing name tags in WMP is dead easy, you simply right click and edit. In iTunes, you have to right-click and the do ‘Get Details’ to EDIT the details, not get them. However, in WMP, you have a “Get Details” comman in the right click menu that actually connects to online databases and GETS the details of the song, in iTunes, I don’t know how to do that, it randomlly gets the details of some songs without me knowning, I can’t request to get the details of a specific song now.

I also hate the fact in iTunes that you cannot browse songs by the producer, I hate its interace, I hate the way it communicates with CDs…. the only feature that I think WMP is missing and is availalbe in iTunes is that you can edit the artwork of a song by dragging the JPG there, you cannot do this in WMP, but this still does not make it a good media player, I’ve been using it for months and I still hate it, I rarely listen to my music on my computer any more thankfully. I don’t feel like getting a 3rd party iPod agent either, I’m too lazy to try them out.

The expansion of the digital audio player market has effected the phone market clearly, playing an mp3 file has almost become a basic feature of any cell phone today, probably because of the usage of external memory means such as MMCs and Memory Sticks in all the major mobile lines make it possible to store a decent number of songs in those cards to be able to use the phone as a real mp3 player. Phone manufacturers have started making dedicated series to be marketed as primarily ‘music phones’ these are made to shame your digital audio player and claim to be the next ultimate gadget that can do everything for the multimedia fanatic.

Sony Ericsson’s Walkman Phone W800 is one of few released phones that has been aggresively marketed as a music phone even in OUR MARKET. The W800 (and W800i) plays digital audio files (I’m not which format though), it has a dedicated it music button.. and that’s it. Well, the phone does come with a 512MB memory card that you can use to save a claimed 150 songs on it. I have personally not played this phone personally to see how the UI is and what music playing features it has. More info.

The crowd’s favourits, Nokia, is releasing its ultimate music phone by the end of this year, the Nokia N91. The phone will host a 4GB microdrive that could be used as a harddrive, USB 2.0, wifi, and plays MP3, M4A, AAC, and WMA. Previous phones that Nokia made in the past with mp3 features had horrible playlist features, stupid proprietory headsets, and unpractical memory exchange procedures, the N91 along with its powerful specs seems to have corrected most of these faults for it will support standard audio jacks and will have a drag-and-drop features for transferring the songs to the phone. The mp3 player part UI and the playlist feature are the two worrying points that we are not sure of. The main drawback of the phone would probably be its battery life, can’t imagine how long can a switched on phone with wifi and audio playing the background stay on… And BTW, the hot Nokia thing will not come cheap. More info.

The Motorola iTunes Phone, Apple and Moto are going to officially announce this small gadget soon, I have never been really interested in Moto phones, but this one promises to be THE iTunes phone, the phone is supposed to be able to play tracks purchased from the iTunes music store, but it will also have a very small capacity so that it does not harm the sales of real iPods. The phone will probably also feature a direct download feature so that users could purchase tracks from the their phones. Madonna and Mya are among the artists that have recorded an adevertisement for the new iTunes phone, we’ll see how it does.

I personally cannot see myself purchase any ‘music phone’. I already have a hard-drive based digital audio player, why would I need a music phone. It might sound tempting to have a double task gadget, but that will obviously kill your battery, the benefit of carrying two gadgets instead of one is that you have double the battery life.

Virgin and HMV announced recently that they are launching their online music download stores soon, and by soon I mean, today for Virgin’s and three days afterwards for HMV’s. Both of the stores will mainly serve on a subscription service similar to Napster’s where you pay a monthly fee to download as much as you can eat music files that will stop working whenever you stop paying your monthly subscription. Both stores will offer a permenant download service where a single song could be purchased for 79p. All of these files will be served in DRMed WMA files that will obviously not play on an Apple iPod.

The greatest opponent to all of these stores is the Apple iTunes music store that offers AAC files under the extention of m4a that can only be played on the iTunes music player and the Apple iPod. The iTunes music store provides only permenant music downloads and does not have a subscription service.

I personally think that £15 a month is a great price to pay to listen to unlimited music, I would be happy to use this if I am was a permenant resident at the UK, otherwise I would never pay a fee for music that will ‘expire’ once I stop paying the montly subscription. Even though Napster’s service started long time before this, but I think that the fact that HMV and Virgin are now both starting their music subscription service is going to cause a decrease in the popularity of the iPod, the fact that there are no universal digital music players is making it harder for me to digest the whole idea of starting to use download stores a primary source for purchasing music, should I swear to keep my loyality for the iPod forever?! Do I want to stay loyal for the iPod forever? I am not sure if I want to start purchasing all my music online and then one day find myself unable to purchase a better non-Apple digital audio player simply because it won’t be able to play my ‘legally purchased music’.

We all know why music files are so damn DRMed, but I think that it is so unfair the way that we are allowed to use these files, the music industry has always been lucky in that there are no regional limitations or format wars such as those seen in the video industry (Just wait for the Blu-Ray and HD-DVD war next year), but all these different DRM features are making it really so bad.

It’s not really a big deal, I am probably just easily amused. We all know that selling alcohol is legal in Oman as long as you can get the license. I found this application funny because a company usually generalises so much when picking the categories to apply for the TM in question to cover the chances of expanding their business in the future into other products similar to what they currently make. However, not only that this company had no plans to include any other categories into which their business might one day expand to (eg. non-alcoholic drinks), but they have gone all the way and specified that they are going to especially apply it for beer, which was completely unnecessary as beer is obviously a clear example of an alcoholic drink, okay, they probably did not put it as an example of what products they are going to sell because they thought people here would not know that beer is an alcoholic drink, but it was probably because beer is in fact their only product… Bad news for Oman, R and Bailey & Co is not going to provide us with wine or champagne any time soon, just the cheap’ol beer.