Fear of the upgrade

There was a time when I would constantly upgrade to the latest version of software. I was a junky for new useless features. There was sometimes a secondary reason, like keeping certain file types up to date (due to the unfortunately still present but thankfully diminishing days of proprietary file formats). That changed as the years passed. I now find myself skeptical of upgrades. Oddly, the inevitable increase in bloat (both in size increase and speed decrease) is less the reason than the problems that invariably get introduced. It seems that these days an upgrade signifies an introduced incompatibility, instability, or worse.

Off the top of my head the first program that I purposefully abandoned upgrading (versus just didn't need to use anymore) was PaintShopPro, from back in the early 90s. It was freeware or shareware then. It was small, fast, and useful. Then at some point the upgrade was no longer free to get. It became around $30 and later $100. I kept the old free version around for many years and refused many upgrades. Eventually I abandoned it for other things, but I still remember liking it a lot. A copy may be lying around on a disk somewhere.

Another example is MusicMatch. It was one of the first decent mp3 ripper-players around. I was fond of it not as much because of its real quality (it was good but kind of clumsy in some ways), but rather because the owners did something absolutely right: free lifetime upgrades. Now that policy deserved my money. I despise being forced to buy essentially the same software over and over again every year or two. For every software purchase, there should be at least 2 free major upgrades or like 4 years of upgrades included. But lifetime? that was awesome. Then Yahoo bought it, but I remained pleased because at least they still honored the lifetime upgrade. I saw an end to that coming when they changed the name to Yahoo Jukebox. Eventually it was unrecognizable as MusicMatch. And eventually, I stopped installing it and even stopped using the old version. Why? because I upgraded once too often and it kept pestering me to upgrade, and then gave me a stern warning that my version's days were numbered due to an interface change (basically a forced connection with Yahoo Music that I didn't want). Oh well.

Apple software gets my goat because I'm convinced they purposely break something just to keep things more proprietary. e.g. every new version of iPod firmware seems to be designed to break other peoples attempts at using their product not in the "vision" of Apple. iTunes is similar, only every major update seems to cause my iTunes to stop working properly. My new rule is to wait two updates minimum before updating.

These are kind of trite examples. The major one is Windows. Now there's an important piece of software that they force you to re-buy every couple years whether you like it or not. My latest excursion, I got a laptop last year that had ONLY Vista as an option. Of course a month after I got it the backlash forced Dell to offer an XP version. I stuck with Vista though because I didn't want to buy another copy of XP and also I'm lazy. I admit that it has some added niceties, mostly trivial in my opinion, but DEAR LORD IS IT ANNOYING. It has never stopped pestering me for something or other whenever I boot. I'm always getting these damned bubbles popping up in the corner, especially annoying when I'm playing WoW. Every major piece of software wants to put crap in my taskbar and wants to poll for updates and yadda yadda. Windows of course is the second worse offender (first being McAfee), especially with its constant "are you sure", "do you want to allow this", etc. It drives me nuts. The real issue here though is stuff just doesn't work cleanly in it that worked fine on my XP box. Even stuff that's certified for Vista in some way encounters problems.

As if that wasn't bad enough, along comes SP1. After some pestering, I allowed the update. And wouldn't you know, iTunes won't run. I was getting a "iTunes has stopped working" message before even the window popped up. Dangit, I wanted to swap in some stuff onto my nano NOW. I spend a couple hours scouring the interwebs for some solution and even tried the ol' uninstall and reinstall. The searches were kind of scary with all the notes on how iTunes and Vista were problematic from the get-go; I felt lucky that I got it to work at all. It took me a while to get the right incantation of the Google search to get me to this link which at least one solid and tangible solution to try. I downloaded the noted patches but turns out I didn't need them. For the benefit of the search engines: the trick that worked was Control_Panel -> Programs_and_Features -> Quicktime -> Repair. It runs now and thankfully even though I uninstalled and reinstalled iTunes, my library info remained intact. A miracle I know. Sigh, I really wish I didn't HAVE to use iTunes... but it's the only iPod compatible program I'm aware of that supports the "resume playback where you left off" (or "save played position") feature that I need for audiobooks and podcasts. That's the critical deal-breaking feature.

Backing up to the upgrade subject, I do not sport this upgrade fear on Linux. Maybe it's because nearly everything I use on Linux is below version 3 with a non-trivial chunk of it below version 1. This basically means that most of it can still be a bit unpolished and upgrades are welcome. But there's also this sense that when it comes to open-source software, it really feels like the upgrades are needed somehow. Most updates really are bug fixes and often times optimizations. When new features are added, it's as if by committee it was decided that the new feature really was a good idea. Another related reason might be the tendency that when some piece of software gets old -- like versioning past 3 to 4 but often much sooner -- that by then something else similar but cooler comes out and people move to that even when it's in alpha. Yes, upgrading and changing and tweaking seem natural in the Linux world, but it works because you don't have to pay for each update and it's often not even required. Sigh... it always feels like I'm just on the cusp of going completely Linux, but for the durned expectation that everyone uses Windows and may only make drivers and software compatible with Linux as an afterthought, maybe.

Open formats reaffirmation

I very nearly got burned by a proprietary format again. In my recent mission to collect, collate, and back up my data, I stumbled upon an old collection of .SNG files that I had long since thought I had lost (with sadness). These were recorded a DOS Midi sequencing program from back in the day, circa Windows 3.0's intro, when I was a bit more into music and had a Midi box to connect my digital piano to my computer. I used it to record and later transcribe some songs I learned and even managed once to capture some of my dad's old songs he knew from his more serious piano playing days (sadly, didn't record enough of them).

Well, I found these song files and discovered that they are completely obsolete, undocumented and unsupported. I started to sweat a little and spent a good solid night looking for something, someone, anyone(!), to convert them to normal Midi files. Nothing, nada, zip. I checked the Voyetra site the company that made the sequencer and thankfully they're still in business. Posted in their help/faq/support area was a notice that the format was completely unsupported... along with this note:

NOTE:
We understand that a lot of SPG users have created libraries over the years (some with thousands of SNG files) that they need to use in newer systems. These users had a good chance to purchase the discounted. Upgrades that we offered for almost a decade. Unfortunately, at this time "Digital Orchestrator Pro" is a Discontinued product that is no longer available.

I read that to mean "you didn't keep shelling out for our software so tuff shitz for J00". Incidentally I was using a program much older than the one they mentioned here. I was furious and almost fired off a little former customer "feedback". But instead I kept searching and finally found a solution to my problem which ended up being their solution. They basically said I had to install my old DOS program version of the program, get it up and running, load the SNG files in (one by one) and re-save them. WTF! I don't even know where that stuff is from 15 years ago and countless moves. Heck, it came on 5.25 inch floppies and I don't know anyone that has one of those drives anymore. They didn't even have a simple program available that would simply convert or extract the Midi track items out of their own file format. No, you had to use the full blown DOS program, get it working, load the file in, then export it within the program. This blows my mind. As some consolation though, they did at least provide a version of the program (Sequencer Plus Gold) for free on their FTP site, with no manuals.

So I downloaded it and went through the paces to get it installed. Get this, I had to find some 3.5 inch floppies to copy the disk images too because it would only install from disk. Luckily I keep some around and even luckier that I had the foresight to a 3.5 inch drive added to my new computer (combo drive with the little media card readers, pretty cool). Installation wasn't a problem, but getting it to run was a little tricky with the whole WinXP compatibility mode stuff. Eventually, and after some scares, it ran. I spent even more time figuring out how to work it (this was pre standard menu interface) and then correcting for the fact that it was a "newer" version of the program I used and I had to figure out a correction to some of the differences. (It did something special with track 1 and the output Midi files would be incomplete or just empty.) After figuring out the right tweaks to make to the imported songs files, I was finally able to save all the tracks individually to Midi. At last. They even play in Windows Media Player. Hallelujah.

I guess I should have had some kind of inkling back then that I should have taken some steps to future-proof my data. I've lost a lot over the years due to negligence. But back then, the stuff was still relatively new. I was young and foolish and still of the opinion that so long as I kept the data, I'd be in good shape. Hah. Hindsight 20-20. I know that i still have a bunch of Wordstar, Word Perfect, DBase III, and a slew of other stuff sitting in my collection waiting to be salvaged before it really gets too late. Sadly, it will have to wait, because they're all on 5.25 inch floppies. I'm sure I'll find one of these drives somewhere, right? I'm having a similar problem with my zip disks, though I'm less worried about that at the present moment.

Anyhow, the (obvious) lessons to be reaffirmed are:

1. Use open, documented formats, or at least industry standard ones.
2. Always migrate your data (ALL of it) to newer media.
   

Final notes for anyone who happened to have used Voyetra Sequencer Plus:

1. download their Sequencer Plus Gold (sp_gold.zip), unzip it and copy each disk image to a separate 3.5 floppy.
2. the floppies are labelled disks 1, 2, 3, and 4 but this is wrong, it should be "install" disks 1,2 and "driver" disks 1,2. take this into account when going through the install.
3. when installing, select just the sequencer option, not the midi equipment drivers.
4. on WinXP, I set the install and the programs to Windows 95 compatibility
5. When firing up the program, there would be a loading message and then it would just hang there. I thought the bloody thing was broken and did several re-installs... but once unintentionally I let the window sit there and some 15 minutes later or more it actually run.
6. experiment with how to work their menus, eventually you'll get the hang of it. basically to load: F for filemenu; M for mode (click until mode is SNG); highlight .sng file (best to move the .sng files to their song directory beforehand); L for load. To save: same except put it in MIDI mode and S for save. I used the default options when saving to .mid.
7. Prior to saving the songs, make sure you have no real song information in Track 1. Use "J" to "jump" the track to another number
8. For my files, I would delete all tracks but one, and save each track separately, but you not need to do this.
   

Enough with the mp3

MP3's by themselves don't really piss me off. They were an important piece of online history. What irritates me is that it's the de facto standard for all players, especially portable ones. It's a licensed beast and it's also old. There are newer, modern, and arguably better encoding formats out now that have the extra advantage of being royalty and license free. Ogg is probably the most popular of these formats right now, having the backing of the geek community to keep it going strong. Problem is, I can only play it back on my computer and I don't want to be tied to my computer to listen to music. The vast majority of portable players, boom boxes, car CD players and that ilk don't support it... but they do support MP3. I wish they would just switch or add Ogg. Most notably, Apple should have at least have included it in their iTunes/iPod. I mean, the freaking encoder would be free for them to include, so what the heck? The second iTunes supports Ogg is the second that others will start to follow suit and this whole MP3 format thing, which has admirably served it's purpose, can finally start to step aside and let a modern public format prevail.

Ok, I know, pipe dream. Companies are more interested in DRM than free public formats, and I know that they only grudgingly support MP3 because it is so wide spread. Feh!

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