Two things

Two things I am very enamored with right now: SecondSpin and CDDB. Yes, both have been around for a long time, but I just got some CDs I ordered and am happily listening to them on my computer while at work.

For those of you not in the know, SecondSpin is the largest (according to their Web site) buyer and seller of used CDs, videos and DVDs. Because CDs are so resilient, it really doesn’t reduce the quality of the product when you buy it used. Sure, the jewel case might be a little worn or scratched and the liner notes may be a little wrinkled, but hey, they’d get that way after a few months of use anyway and paying half or even less than half of the new price is worth it. It’s especially great for:

1. CDs or DVDs that you want, but are not willing to pay full price for. Case in point: my newly procured copy of Center Stage.
2. Older CDs or DVDs that you want to get either just to have or to fill out your collection. Case in point: my newly procured copies of old Erasure albums that I was missing.

The other magical thing I am enamored with is CDDB. It’s very convenient to pop your CD into your computer (or stereo system that has CDDB recognition) and have album art, album information, and track titles all show up in your player. It’s also very convenient when creating compilation CDs or mp3s– no need to rename files or put in your own ID3 tags.

Magical.

Ta da!

Going to Stanford during the beginning of the digital music revolution, I was taking advantage of MP3 technology early on. Back then, when we wanted to create digital copies of our CDs, we had to rip the songs off of CD, converting them to WAV files and then encode those WAV files to MP3 files, each step requiring a separate piece of software. In fact, MP3 codecs were hard to come by, so we had a little pirated utility. And I have to admit, since I knew the old skool way to do it, the few times I have encoded music since then, I would do it this way.

Oh, but how times have changed. I recently reformatted my hard drive and thought that it might be time to join the rest of the world in my MP3 encoding ways. I recently bought an IPod (which is awesome) and that comes with the MUSICMATCH Jukebox software. It has a handy little utility that “records” the CD, automatically creating MP3 files that are then added to your music library. While CD burning and music software has been doing this for years now, I have to admit that I’ve only just started using this feature and find it very convenient.

The funniest part of this whole thing is that when the software is done recording the CD, it plays a little sound to signal the completion. Amusingly enough, the default sound is the tada.wav file that has been on Windows system since at least Windows 95. It’s almost as if it’s saying, “Ta da! I’ve created some MP3 files! You’re now on the road to sharing copyrighted materials with the world!” Ha ha. It’s like a little magic trick.

Living in Oblivion

The music industry continues to live in denial as it insists on squashing digital music file sharing. Specifically, the RIAA recently filed lawsuits against three college students for operating campus file search software that faciliated file swapping on the campus network, presumably to help students find illegally shared music files.

Ironically enough, one of my coworkers did this in a semi-official capacity, setting up a Gnutella server in our office and advertising it to our student employees. The server was not set up to share music files. Instead, it was set up so that Stanford students could list it as one of their hosts when connecting to the Gnutella network. With Stanford students connecting to a common on-campus host, they would find each other instead of off-campus computers and take advantage of unlimited bandwidth between on-campus computers, reducing traffic travelling in and out of the campus network, traffic that uses very expensive bandwidth the university has to pay for. Realizing how much file-sharing does go on and how much it uses up network bandwidth (despite our packet-shaping efforts), the real aim of this little experiment was to decrease traffic between campus and the commodity Internet, a goal of any good university network and systems administrator. Apparently, the MPAA did not find the experiment as interesting and innovative as we did. They faxed a threatening letter to the university and the server’s network connection was promptly turned off (while most of us were away on Winter break). The decisive action was certainly a shock– while we have, in the past, shut off students’ network connections after the MPAA and RIAA notified us that they were illegally sharing copyrighted materials, staff network connections are rarely, if ever, shut down, especially not without notifying the staff member first. After meeting with many important people, including the Provost and Stanford’s in-house counsel, they decided it was a good idea to leave the server shut down. While Stanford maintains a liberal attitude toward network use, a university provided way to faciliate file-sharing didn’t go over so well.

Fee for service? Not in education!

Despite the .org suffix for my domain name, I am very much a for-profit person. However, I think there’s little place for a for-profit, fee-for-service model in education. I work for the residential computing group of a university and the department, in turn, is part of larger computing group that aims to serve the academic needs of the university community through the provision of public computer clusters and consulting and technology resources for faculty, staff and students. (This organization is separate from the overall IT organization for the university that is more focused on university-wide systems and infrastructure, such as the network and central databases.)

Somehow, the larger computing group that my department is part of was given the responsibility to turn around a fee-for-service group on campus. They were something like two million in the hole, but the university hoped to give them to us so that we can make them self-sufficient and possibly, profitable. While I’m sure they’re good people and don’t want them to be put out on the street, I don’t really see how the group fits into our department’s, much less the university’s mission as a whole. In general, they provide Web services (Web site design, online surveys, logo design, etc.) to groups on campus that can pay market prices for their services. They are encouraged to conduct business only with university organizations, although they can work for outside clients on a very limited basis (if only to break even).

There are two major problems I have with this model (outside of my own reservations about the quality of their work):

1. A fee-for-service group of qualified professionals is a great resource for those university groups that can’t afford to, or even want to hire full-time staff for special projects, like conducting an online survey or having their Web site redesigned. However, if they are charging market prices, it makes the entire endeavor less cost effective for the client. Because they are a fee-for-service group, long-term support is either non-existent or existent, but very expensive, cancelling out the value of having the fee-for-service group in the first place.
2. The group was made part of a regular university department, I’m assuming, to be tied into that department’s and the university’s mission and to take advantage of the management resources available within the department. They are required to be financially self-sufficient (which is good in this economy and the current state of budget cuts), but they still take resources from the department. Besides the management resources required to keep the group running, management has been encouraging “working together,” which essentially amounts to taking homegrown software solutions and other tools built within the department and selling them as part of their services. While we are being monetarily being compensated for use of our products and staff time (as we normally do since we offer them as services for other departments ourselves, albeit at a much, much lower price), they are essentially getting to offer a much more valuable suite of services because of their attachment to our organization. In exchange, the theory is that they offer their own services– free Web design work, consulting, etc. However, since we are a computing group, we already have staff that are specifically assigned to work on those types of projects. So, the question is: is the exchange equal or even necessary?

In my opinion, no.