Misu: Hands-on Review and Thoughts

Previously, I wrote about three different apps that allows you to take control of your iTunes/iPod music here. I stated that I did not have another iPod to test Misu. Earlier today, a friend of mine requested me to fill up her iPod with songs. I saw it as a perfect opportunity to test out Misu. I would like to thank Ollie Wagner for giving me the opportunity to test out Misu’s app at its fullest potential.

Upon launching Misu, you can click on the iPod icons to swap their places. This allows you to choose which iPod is providing the music, and which one is receiving them.

Here, you can see that my friend’s iPod is smaller than the amount of music that I have. Misu intelligently prompts you to choose if you want Misu to stop copying music when the target iPod is full, or you want to overflow the target iPod (I have no idea what overflow does because I chose the first option).

Misu’s progress pie doesn’t seem to be accurate. It was stuck at 100% for quite some time (about 5 minutes). I think this could be due to the “Stop copying when Full” option. Nevertheless, it’s just a cosmestic issue and harmless.

When copying is finished, a pop-up will appear asking if you want to copy Misu’s app into the iPods so you can launch Misu from any Mac. This is a very clever option in my opinion.

The copying of approximately 4gb worth of songs took about 10 minutes for me. After copying, I realised something – the songs are actually copied into a folder inside the target iPod. For some reason, I had the impression that Misu would automatically add the songs into the target’s iTunes library. I think this feature is not impossible and I hope it would be added in future releases.

For the techie geek like me, I would’ve preferred MacFuse + iTunesFS over Misu if I would like to painlessly copy music over from one iPod to another. Misu, on the other hand requires you to do one more step when you connect your iPod to your own computer, and that is to add them to your iTunes library and then sync them to your iPod. In the meantime, Misu is great and easy-to-use for people who don’t wanna fiddle with MacFuse. I believe there is a lot of room for improvement for Misu.

With more and more people getting iPhones and iPods (and storage getting bigger and better), Misu will no doubt be popular in the future because with the snap of a finger, you can have your friend’s music collection.

Interested in trying out Misu?

Misu is available for a free trial (with 15 songs limit) or you can get it for $19 per copy or $29 for 3 copies.

Put Your Music In Control With These Great Apps

iTunes has been my #1 music player on both Windows and Mac platforms for years. Don’t get me wrong, I love iTunes. However, your music collection is often stored in a way that you can’t easily retrieve your music and share it with your friends. So, I am here to introduce several apps that can help you put your music in control.

First off, let me introduce iTunesFS. This app requires MacFUSE installed to be functional. iTunesFS lets you browse your iTunes and iPod music collection as if the playlists were folders with music as files in them. This way, you can copy out some music quick and easy and then share them with your friends. Simple to use. Nice and clean.

Installation directions:
1) Install MacFUSE
2) Install iTunesFS
3) Launch iTunesFS whenever you want to access your music files

Download iTunesFS here

Download MacFUSE (required for iTunesFS to work) here

MacFUSE (Tiger) direct download

MacFUSE (Leopard) direct download

 

 

Ok, so what if you’ve got another friend with a relatively large, filled (no, not that) iPod and both of you would like to sync both music collections together? Misu to the rescue. Misu is a relatively new app and its concept is brilliant. I haven’t got another iPod here to test it but from reading comments about it most people seem to be happy about it. What Misu does is, you plug both your iPods to your computer, and it will do its magic. It will detect which music on one iPod is missing on the other and merge them both.

At time of writing, you can get Misu for $9.95 at MUPromo (original price is $19.00). Offer ends in 10 hours.

You can visit Misu’s website here

 

 

Lastly, what if your friend doesn’t have an iPod or he’s somewhere far far away. Mojo is the answer to powerful music sharing over the internet. Mojo is dead simple to use. All you need is to get an account with Mojo’s service, then you can just add your friend’s account and browse his/her music collection just like that! You can even play or download music that you like. However, Mojo doesn’t support accessing music on connected iPods. Hopefully, this feature will be added on future releases.

Mojo is available for both Windows and Mac platforms, free

P/S: Both you and your friend need to have Mojo in order to browse each other’s music collection.

I hope you liked this tech tip. Any questions or comments are welcome.

Qtrax is a JOKE

Pic: WOW QTRAX IS AMAZING IT LETS YOU PLAY SONGS AND SURF THE WEB I DIDN’T KNOW THAT!!!

Qtrax – First Impressions

So, the beta is up for download. Only for Windows at the moment (Mac version will be released on March). However, you can’t download a single shit using the app. All you get is this pop-up:

You can’t even download any songs off their Artist of the month – Foo Fighters.

Also, the app which is based on Songbird is still really buggy (that’s what you get in beta I suppose). I tried searching for Will.I.Am and the search box CONCATENATES it to one word “WILLIAM” and all the search results are only related to William. WTF!? Did the app think I was trying to do scripting or programming in the search box?

Just for fun, I tried typing 1+3+5 to see if the search box can do math. Turns out it doesn’t, it eats up the plus signs and concatenates everything into 135. Same thing goes for whatever non-alphanumeric character you throw in ( ! , . – + & * ). I guess the search box is just plain hungry.

Free and Legal Music Downloads!?

While surfing Digg I stumble upon something really interesting. The digg entry is titled “From today, feel free to download all the music in the world“. What!? You gotta be f**king kidding me, mate. It’s just too good to be true. I’m not surprised a large number of digg users reports the story as inaccurate.

After reading taking a quick glance at the article. I’ve found out that the company offering the free downloads is Qtrax.

“With CD sales in free fall and legal downloads yet to fill the gap, the music industry has reluctantly embraced the file-sharing technology that threatened to destroy it. Qtrax, a digital service announced today, promises a catalogue of more than 25 million songs that users can download to keep, free and with no limit on the number of tracks.”

Source: Times Online

Looking at their website, the first thing that caught my attention is this:

Where is the “No E-mail from RIAA” entry? When I was about to look for the download link, I was cock-blocked by this:

I guess we’ll find out at MIDNIGHT EST eh? whenever that actually is.

The application that they are using is [not so popular] Mozilla Songbird (but I guess now it’s gonna get a bigger slice of the pie eh?)

Wow, just wow. Featured artist is FOO FIGHTERS? And I can even see Alicia Keys down there.

So, what are your thoughts on this before we hit MIDNIGHT EST!? Scam or not. Personally, I think even if it turns out to be real, there will be 8072387282 catches. Music non-transferable/non-playable by other players, not iPod compatible (unless they make the album art for each song an ad LOL)- you name them.

P/S: No RIAA agents were harmed during the writing of this post.