It was not exactly a sunny and warm day but, as long as the roads are dry, I like to go out for a motorcycle ride on Sunday afternoons. Winter riding is actually very nice and refreshing — as long as you have the electric vest and gloves plugged in. They really did the job today when the wind chill was in was single digit territory. Today’s ride was on the trike through lower Westchester County, New York and was especially enjoyable because I listened to some great music from the Harley-Davidson MP3 player. The music came from iTunes, hence the term "iTrike Riding". First I will review the motorcycling and digital technology involved and then discuss some of the issues and implications.
The trike started out as a Harley-Davidson Ultra Classic Electra Glide (model FLHTCUI for Harley afficianados) and was then converted to a trike by the nice folks at Baer Sport Center in Honesdale, Pennsylvania. I have been buying bikes from the Baers for quite a few years and I trust them completely. You definitely want somebody you trust to tear a brand new bike apart and convert it into a different vehicle. The conversion kits are made by Lehman Trikes, Inc., a Canadian company. They matched the H-D two tone paint scheme perfectly and the trike looks like it was made to be that way from the factory. Here are a few photos. Riding a trike is quite different from riding a regular motorcycle. It is actually more like driving it than riding it. You have to forcefully turn the handlebars in order to turn — as opposed to a very modest turning of the handlebars and leaning as on a two-wheeler. Turning on a motorcycle is actually a deep topic. If you are traveling at high speed and press on the inside of the left handlebar grip, the wheels turn to the right, as you turn to the left! Seems to defy common sense but it is actually true and the phenomenon is caused by precession. Like with a gyroscope, when you try to turn a rotating object (the front wheel), you produce a force at 90 degrees to the direction of rotation. If you are interested in this, take a look at the writeup in the Wikipedia.
The Harley-Davidson MP3 player is quite well designed. It has just four buttons: power/play/pause, repeat one/repeat all/random/normal, skip/search forward, and skip/search backwards. This is good for safety because it enables you to easily make a musical change without having to become distracted from riding the bike (or trike). The LCD shows the status and track number being played but there is really no reason to look at it while riding. The player came with a 64MB Secure Digital Card (SD card) which will hold roughly an hour of CD stereo MP3 music encoded at 128,000 bits per second. Fortunately, the cost of the SD cards has dropped significantly. I got a one gigabyte card from memorysuppliers.com for $99. The one gig card holds more than six hours of music — 356 tracks currently. I enjoy the random feature so there is a constant change of genre: opera, jazz, blues, rock, sacred, symphonic, baroque, country, etc.
Getting the music from the ThinkPad to the SD card was not as easy as it could have been. Most of my music tracks are mp3 and I created them by ripping CD’s that I had purchased over the years. The library contains roughly 5,000 tracks. The SD card for the Harley MP3 player will hold roughly 350 tracks. Which ones to pick? Enter iTunes. iTunes is remarkably simple music software. You can play the entire library in sequence or in shuffle mode (random). You can play randomly by album or randomly across the entire collection — the latter is my favorite option because it results in a constant variety of selections. iTunes also makes it very simple to create playlists. Some of the playlists are basic, like most recently played or those played most often. By using "smartlists", you can easily create much more sophisticated playlists. A smarlist might include randomly selected songs from your library that you have rated more than two stars out of five, have not been played for more than thirty days, are longer than 2 minutes and less than 7 minutes, exclude songs by Bon Jovi, and have an aggregate size for all songs in the smartlist less than one gigabyte. You could name the smartlist "Harley music". There is no limit to how many playlists and smartlists you can have. The lists are stored in an xml file along with information about each track of music in the library. Everything is organized and tagged. The track information includes artist, album, track number, track name, length, when last played, the rating you have given it, etc. and the playlist information includes a list of the track numbers from the library that are to be included. Brilliantly simple. Now how do I get the actual tracks of music associated with the Harley playlist onto the SD card? iTunes is designed to work with an iPod or iPod mini. It not only works, it is automatic. The playlists of your choice (and that will fit) are always kept up to date on you iPod. If you make some changes to your playlist, the next time you connect your iPod to your PC, those changes are made in the iPod. But for the Harley MP3 player, or any other player except an iPod, iTunes will not export the music. Enter Anapod from Red Chair Software. I knew there had to be a solution somewhere and I found it on ipodlounge.com. Anapod Explorer, "made by music lovers for music lovers" integrates your iPod into Windows using Explorer folders, right-click menus, and drag and drop. One right click and "copy to computer", and the music tracks were all transferred to the SD Card. Slip the card into the MP3 player and off I went for an iTrike ride with Mozart.
Aside from the proprietary/closed design of iTunes, the power and simplicity of it are awesome. Apple really does make music playing simple. What I find profound about iTunes and the iPod is the "My Rating" feature. It is time for a trip somewhere so you pack up your ThinkPad and iPod into the briefcase. You settle into your seat in the airplane, put on your noise-canceling headphones (I use Radio Shack Noise-Canceling Foldable Stereo Headphones Catalog #: 33-1218), and begin listening to one or more playlists that you have brought from iTunes. If you encounter a song that you don’t like, you press the center button of the iPod and five stars appear. You move your finger over the surface of the iPod to light up the number of stars you want to assign — this is "My Rating". When you return home or to a hotel, you place your iPod in the docking station. It automatically starts iTunes. If one of the parameters you have set for your playlist is "My Rating is not *", all of the songs on the iPod that you rated as a one-star are replaced with new songs from your library. Every time you go through this process, your playlist gets better. Says who? Says you. For years technologies have been available to make book or music suggestions to you based on sophisticated algorithms. "If you liked this song, then you will probably like the following songs". iTunes has taken this concept to a new level. The algorithm requires no higher math. It is you pushing a button. You in effect interject yourself into the media. No one knows better than you what you like or don’t like.
Finally, there is the issue of copying music. I copied mp3 music tracks from the iPod mini to the Harley-Davidson MP3 music player. Is that stealing? I don’t think so. I purchased the original CDs, ripped them into MP3 files which I play through a digital audio system in my home using iTunes. If I am on an airplane or train, I play them on the iPod mini, or if on the trike, play them on the H-D MP3 player. I consider this "fair use". I purchased the music, royalties were paid to the appropriate parties, and the music is used strictly for my own enjoyment (or for guests). I have heard speeches from music industry executives saying that it is not legal for me to do what I am doing. They want to grant permission, "protect" their music, charge extra fees for extra use. Ultimately, the resolution will be determined in court. Meanwhile, I have not bought a CD for years but I do buy music from the iTunes Music Store. So do many others. Apple Computer reported in July that iTunes had delivered 100 million downloads. Consumers pay Apple 99 cents per track. They buy only the tracks they like, unlike a CD where they have to pay $15+ to get a song they like plus a bunch of songs they don’t like. With iTunes you listen to 30 seconds of a song and if you like it, you click and pay for it with PayPal. If you don’t like it, you move on. The issue isn’t about "stealing". People are showing they are willing to pay for music and now there is finally a way to do so in an attractive way. Too bad for the music industry that it wasn’t one of them that figured this out.
Epilogue: The music I have purchased at the iTunes Music Store is not in MP3 format. Apple uses a format called AAC. It is very good quality but can only be played on the iPod. My smarlist for the Harley MP3 player excludes any music I have purchased from Apple. So much for power to the people.