It really does pain me to say this, especially with my fervent distaste for DRM methods, but it’s here to stay for the time being: every new medium has its own DRM methods built in, be it HDTV or Blu-ray. Of course, the ingenuity of those who would not wish to be encumbered by such draconian restrictions on their use of the media which they have purchased will always eventually triumph over the efforts of the media conglomerates: just as BD+ was cracked in a matter of months the first time, it will be again with this new revision.

Price

Hah, I always start reviews with price: it’s important, I maintain. I paid £120 for the Zen Micro in 2003, I think; £40 for the Zen Touch in 2007 and £60 for the iPod, last week. Granted, I can’t objectively compare prices when one was bought new and the other two used, but it is relevant somewhat, I suppose: it shows the transience of value for such goods, and what a shame that that is. Clearly, the winner here is the iPod, the features:price ratio is much higher than the other two.

Player Firmware and Controls

I’ll treat the Micro and Touch as one entity for much of this: they pretty much have the same firmware and most functions are carried out in the same way; with the only exception of the dedicated volume control on the Touch increasing its usability above the other two greatly. It really is a tragedy that I have to somehow get to the Now Playing screen on the iPod or open a context menu on the Micro to be able to change a volume which I want to change immediately, not after a few seconds’ fiddling.

The Creative and Apple firmwares are much the same (with Apple leasing Creative’s menu style for their players) in operation and in features: with only the colour screen of the iPod allowing for cover art, photos, video etc.

One (unintended) advantage of the iPod (of this generation) is that alternative, non-stock firmwares can be used, such as Rockbox and iPod Linux (the site of which may be down), allowing for a more diverse range of features. As is oft the tragedy of open-source efforts, neither offering is completely feature-complete, with Rockbox in particular suffering from a terrible battery issue. The stock iPod firmware suffers from a little bit of slowdown, but nothing as bad as the Creative players’ 15-30 second large playlist loading time: plus, it has games, and a calendar!

The issue of firmware is another win for the iPod: the execution is a little smoother, a little slicker, and a little prettier. Again: the games help.

Looks

This is not fair. At all. iPod win again: another 3 years of design-schooling for Californians means that Creative’s offerings just look heinously ugly. The Micro is elegant, but the Touch is just blocky. And fat. Below, we have the players in order of sheer sexiness.

Software

I hate iTunes.

There, it has been said: I hate the single most popular computer media player. Why, you ask? It’s fat, it’s slow, it’s not pretty. Again, yes; I said something which could be considered a cardinal sin. Isn’t everything Apple beautiful?, I hear you scream, and the answer is no: it is not. On Windows, at least, it looks so out of place: the screen elements suit OSX just fine, but look so dreadfully out of place on Windows, and indeed in Linux (through Wine). I can’t see the hubbub about not-even-subtle supposedly-metallic gradients which are not at all pleasing to the eyes. I’m starting to think that Apple are putting something perception altering in the Kool-Aid.

Enough about aesthetics: I also hate the functionality. We have a choice between syncing all files with one computer, or managing everything manually: why can we just not sync with a sole computer and add elsewhere? Oh yes, I forgot: Apple’s yielding to the RIAA and MPAA over the ability to copy music/movies back from the player through an Apple-endorsed method (of course, this can be done through other means). It’s really a chore to add new music from a computer that isn’t at home, not to mention backing up music. I know that I could use something such as vPod, but I don’t feel that I should have to turn to 3rd parties for something that the manufacturer should provide as a courtesy for such a fucking expensive purchase – and such products don’t synchronise album art in such an elegant manner as iTunes. All this said, I love the automatic album art downloader, event though it couldn’t find any for half of my music.

Creative, on the other hand, turned to using MTP for both of my players: a universal transfer protocol engineered by Microsoft and reverse-engineered to support Windows pre-XP, Linux, Mac OSX and BSDs. This was wonderful to use: you could copy and back and forth, without the threat of being labelled a pirate. These were the good old days: these were days of trust. Drag and drop anywhere, without the computer moaning about syncing and possibly destroying everything that you have on your player: they way things should be. The Creative players win here, undoubtedly.

Durability

They are all awful in this regard.

The Verdict?

I like my not-so-new toy: I really do. If I didn’t have to use iTunes, I would like it more, but I will cope with my lack of coding prowess and not expect someone else to fix it for me.

Price

Let’s face it: price is very important. It always will be: this is an investment of a medium-term, so it has to be tenable. Here, CheapVPS live up to their name most aggressively: 128MB RAM, 10GB of space and 150GB of bandwidth per month for a mere £4.75 per month, with discounts at 3-month, 6-month and 12-month renewal intervals of 5%, 10% and 15%. Elsewhere, it’s practically impossible to find these prices. DirectAdmin can be added at £5 per month and cPanel at £10 per month.

5/5

Range of Features Available

For the price, you get everything that you could ever need. There are OS installation templates for several flavours of Linux; namely CentOS, Ubuntu, Debian, Slackware, Fedora Core, Gentoo and OpenSuse. There is also an option of a pre-installed control panel with the CentOS template in the form of LXAdmin, which really seemed more than adequate from my dabblings with it. As is expected from an unmanaged VPS, everything was configure-it-yourself; which suited me fine.

The VPS itself is managed through HyperVM: a rather feature-complete control panel. The option to non-destructively re-install the OS-templates is also useful for those moments where you touch something that you shouldn’t have. It did, however, seem a little bloated and slow.

4/5

Uptime and Reliability

The only real let-down from each of my 3 experiences with CheapVPS is the reliability of their service. I got emails stating that Apache had been restarted far too often for my liking: on my own servers, I had never had Apache go down at all. Ever. Each time, I always ended up with some awful connection problems with one service or another, usually SSH and FTP. As much as support would tell me otherwise, I would swear that the problem was node-side, not a problem with my VPS’ configuration: reinstallation of all software and disabling of the firewall would not help me in any way, shape or form. To the credit of CheapVPS, I never had the VPS go completely down: I could always ping it.

2/5

Support

The support team was wonderful: every question that I asked would be answered within minutes, and they seemed to have no issue with me running a Tor node from a ToS or technical point of view. Each time that I had difficulty, action would be taken swiftly, as soon as they had all information that they needed to know that any fault was not due to my wrongdoing. Support claims are even often answered by one of the company’s bigger cheeses, in the form of Rus Foster.

4/5

Overall: 15/20

Aside from the technical flaws with plagued me, my times at CheapVPS were affordable and well-supported. If their reliability could be worked on, it’d definitely be a complete, permanent winner.

Though, I suppose that prices would rise if that did happen.

The last.fm library view. (click for full view)

First of all, we’ll look at the new library view, which provides an at-a-glance view of all of the artists which you have ’scrobbled’ to be ordered by plays, A-Z or those artists recently added. This could turn out to be ridiculously useful in analysing the musical tastes of others (or indeed your own) and looking for new artists to listen to based upon recommendations, or in showing trends in your own listening habits in a more descriptive way than the old charts ever could. Another feature of the library is the ability to view, from the artist blurb on the library page, the list of tracks that you have listened to by that artist in order of their play count: potentially useful for identifying your underappreciated albums of any given artist.

Secondly, the charts have been overhauled to be more relevant: instead of the old weekly ‘we only update on Sunday’ charts, we now have 7 day rolling charts for both artists and most listened to tracks. As an example, Explosions in the Sky have entered my top artists for the last seven days in the time taken to write this, even though iTunes says that the last time that I had listened to them was 3 months ago: this immediacy can only lead to a better experience of last.fm.

Recent activity widget (click for full view)

The new ‘recent activity’ feature is also an interesting one: it takes last.fm beyond its previous bounds of music played logger and turns it into a more fully-featured social network-esque service. Of course, some people may worry about the privacy concerns raised by this, but the logger can always be turned off for display on the user’s profile. The ‘events’ feature now even has iCal integration for those using Mac OSX, and RSS for those not.

Last.fm’s user dashboard has also seen modifications in line with the introduction of the library: the first thing that the user is greeted with is now a list of tracks recently added to their own individual library: a nice touch so far a feel of full integration of all elements of the site goes. It’s also a nice indication of where your music tastes have changed of late and what new spice you have added to your musical life.

The music recommendation element of the site has had somewhat of a reinvention, which is something I am really glad of: compared to the old model of a list of artists with their counterparts which you listen to and an ‘obscurity’ slider (which, no doubt, pleased snobs everywhere) and a maximum of about 20 (I think) suggestions, we now have a list of around 40 bands, ordered based upon their suitability for the listener, judged by the number of plays of similar artists – it’s a much better system, and it’s free of any genre ‘class’-bias. It’s a more socialist form of music recommendation, I suppose.

However, in spite of my intentions to only expose the good, I must say that the new site is altogether less aesthetically pleasing, if only for the horrid ’scruffy-edged’ top bar: it seems a lot less sleek than the old model, and it is unfortunately quite a big detriment (to me) to the site’s ease of use. You are constantly reminded that this pseudo-grunge look is so 1990’s, and it really isn’t befitting of one of the 2000’s greatest Web 2.0, gloss-and-reflections success stories.

My conclusion is that the redesign is indeed a success for the experiences of any users using Last.fm frequently, but it is only really let down by its newfound lack of prior sexiness: the internet buzzings of the dissatisfied are merely those of changephobics and inadequates. This redesign should be judged by the new features that it allows people, not by a change from what said people are used to. This is evolution.

Viva la last.fm Revolución!