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New Gig Poster Design: Swing Station w/ Aires Attic

New Gig Poster Design: Swing Station w/ Aires Attic

Jeromey Balderrama

My band, Amy and the Peace Pipes are kicking off an exciting season of shows with our first show at Swing Station, playing with Aires Attic. I really wanted to get away from posting the band photos straight-up and go with something that would portray a more artistic side of the two genres.  Since our pairing is a little different, I thought the design could really showcase that.

20160416-SwingStation

Most of this gig-poster is based on a Photo to Color Sketch Tutorial that I’ve been meaning to use.  I’m pretty pleased with how it turned out, especially with Amy and the Peace Pipes (the Aires Attic photo was already in Black & White, so I applied some color tine to the sketch effect.

Goodbye Rdio, thanks for the memories

Jeromey Balderrama

Sad to see this news about Rdio, the music streaming service that I’ve been using for years:

Rdio is shutting down and Pandora is buying up the scraps

Rdio

I’m especially sad because the truth is that I’ve been flirting with other music services over the years, and there are some key features that kept me coming back to Rdio. Now that it’s going away, I’m going to have to find another service that crosses off the most checkmarks when being compared to Spotify, Apple Music, Google Music, Amazon Prime and Microsoft’s Groove Music:

Remote Control Mode.  This has been the biggest differentiater between Rdio and other music services.  If you were running Rdio from one device (such as your computer or tablet), you could open the app on another device (like your phone) and remotely control all of the music.  This has been invaluable in many parties and game nights where I didn’t want to be tethered to the speakers all night.  I think Spotify may do something similar, but no services has been as elegant for me.

Family Plan Pricing.  If memory serves, Rdio was the first ones to feature this, and my family quickly took advantage of this, serving three accounts with one low payment. The other services have followed suit, but hats off to Rdio’s innovation in this area.

Last.fm Scrobbling.  As I’m fast approaching 60,000 scrobbles, this is paramount in my music consumption. I realize no one really uses Last.fm anymore, but as long as the service is around I’m deeply invested in the stats.  I know Spotify offers Last.fm integration, but I’m not sure if any other other major providers offer this (Google does through a hack).

Platform-Agnostic Apps. This is the deal-breaker. Rdio was ubiquitous across the internet. They came out the gate with the browser UI, then expanded to mobile apps, have a Windows 10 presence and even a Roku app.  Spotify is probably the most prominent in this space, but their browser-based UI didn’t compare to Rdio.  To make matters more frustrating, platform-based music systems (Apple, Google, Microsoft Groove and even Amazon) are more interested in using music to propagate their own platforms.

Playlist Lock-In. This is going to be the biggest frustration. I have dozens of playlists (not to mention my “collection”) within Rdio and now I’m going to be challenged to import that into another platform – although Soundiiz looks promising.

I’ve tried most of the major services and have a pretty good sense of the benefits and shortcomings in each

Apple Music: Loved Beats 1, but that was about it. While the selection is great, the interface is just awful. The deal-breaker is that in order to use it on PC you have to go through the bloated hog that’s iTunes.  The Android app is in an early (and ugly) beta, and it’s nowhere to be found on any TV platforms.  No remote control. I couldn’t cancel my free trial fast enough.

Microsoft Groove Music: Good interface and ubiquitous. The fact that it’s on Xbox makes it appealing as well – however the lack of Scrobbling and no family plan won’t let me take it seriously. I let the free trial lapse. No remote control.

Google Music/YouTube Red: This one is most murky, given the recent Youtube Red development.  On face value it looks like a great deal (ad-free YouTube along with Google Music Streaming, not to mention that you can upload 50,000 of your own songs to supplement the service).  However it’s not clear to me how their family plan works with YouTube Red, and you can’t Scrobble through the mobile apps. No remote control. I’m currently in the YouTube Red free trial, but will likely cancel.

Amazon Prime: As a Prime customer this has been a nice perk, but in no way will this be replacing Rdio.  The features just aren’t there.

Spotify: The most serious contender. They offer the platform ubiquity, the family plan pricing, Last.fm Scrobbling, (I think) a remote control. The interface is just so ugly.

So there we have it. Right now it really comes down to Spotify vs. Google Music, with a current edge to Spotify.  Writing all of this makes me really miss Rdio.  RIP to a wonderful music service.

I bought an iPad.

Jeromey Balderrama

Earlier this summer, I bought and iPad, then proceeded to start to write a thousand words about how I did it and why it was a big deal. This post has been sitting in my drafts for pretty much the entire summer and has served as the single biggest mental block to me posting anything, so for my sake (and to spare you from reading it), I’m scrapping here.

Here’s the gist:

  • I was a HUGE Android guy and hated Apple.
  • Over the years the OS’s have more or less coalesced into pretty much the same hardware and software feature set, removing most of the major reasons I was opposed to iOS devices.
  • I bought the iPad because it’s the best tablet on the market and wanted to see if I could live in an iOS ecosystem without pulling my hair out.
  • I still have hair.
  • There are things that do drive me nuts about iOS (which I’ll detail in upcoming posts), but for the most part I don’t hate it and will plan on buying an iPhone 6s this fall.

Let’s move on.

Is it time to give up Foursquare?

Jeromey Balderrama

foursquare

Yesterday turned out to be a pretty busy day for us. In addition go going out to breakfast and running errands, we were also treated to a date night (dinner and a movie).  Ultimately we went to over a half-dozen places, and for each one I neglected to check into Foursquare.

I started using check-in apps back in 2009 with Gowalla. At the time Foursquare was gaining popularity but wasn’t yet on Android at the time. When Foursquare finally released their Android app in 2010, I switched allegiances and was quickly checking in at every place I went. What initially attracted me to Foursquare was their presentation of your statistics.  I loved the gaming aspect of the app: the points you get from checking in and the mayorships you collect.  My whole family and a lot of friends got onto Foursquare, and we had a lot of fun trying to one-up each other in points and check-ins, especially when mayorships were on the lines.

As with all tech startups, Foursquare had to figure out how to generate revenue, and over the years you’ve seen the app design and focus shift from the gaming aspect to trying to become a recommendations engine.  If you look at the app today, the points you get for checking in are no longer display by default, and you have to dig pretty deep in the app to get your mayorships or the scoreboard with your friends.  Whenever you check in anywhere, it doesn’t even tell you who is the mayor or how far away you are from stealing their title.  The news feed showing where your friends last checked in still adds some value, but without the gaming aspects I find myself questioning whether my friends really do care whether I went to the grocery store or gas station.  Part of it is attributed to the fact that my activities are probably a little more mundane now that I have a baby, you don’t see as many bars or restaurants in my feed anymore, but even if I’m somewhere interesting: Foursquare is providing me with little incentive to bust out my phone and check in.

Just like with Twitter, I realize that Foursquare needs to monetize in order to be sustainable – but I don’t understand how you can call yourself a social network when you take out all that is social.  If I want an app that is going to give me good reviews and recommendations, I’ll go over to Yelp or just stick with Google Maps.  I can respect a company trying to pivot, but now Foursquare is pretty much out of bounds.