Ade Bradshaw vs Reading Comprehension

In which Ade blogs about how massively complicated and onerous the Ubuntu One Music Store sign up process is when compared to Amazon. Ade, I’d reply to your blog but...

In which Ade blogs about how massively complicated and onerous the Ubuntu One Music Store sign up process is when compared to Amazon.

Ade, I’d reply to your blog but I’m not about to sign up to yet another system just to leave a comment, and I’m certainly not giving your blog my twitter password, or encouraging the use of Facebook as a single sign on. Maybe you should look at getting an Ubuntu One account, I hear they are implementing Single Sign on.

“Maybe its just me, but am I missing something?”

You are. You’re missing the bit of my blog that you copied and pasted into yours which reads:-

“Right now the process by which a new user to the Music Store is walked through the sign-up process is in flux. It could be a popup application which prompts for an email address, account name and password, or something embedded within Rhythmbox. Alternatively a browser could be spawned which sends the user to the sign-up process at login.ubuntu.com. Once Ubuntu Lucid releases in April, this process should be sorted out, but for now I’d recommend signing up to Ubuntu single sign on before using the Ubuntu One Music Store.”

In which I explicitly detail that this process isn’t the final one, and that there is still some work to do on the whole sign up process. The reason for the blog post was so that people could be ready for when the open beta of the music store starts – which is apparently real soon now.

Those of us who have already been using Ubuntu One to sync files and notes won’t have to do any of the stuff in that blog post because we’re already set. The store merely requires the file sync setup to be working, and my blog post aims to cover all the bases of making sure that’s the case. Yes it’s long winded, yes it’s comprehensive but as I previously said – its not finished.

What’s also important to note is that your friend Stuart is keen to get this finished and doesn’t have a massive amount of time to do that between now and Lucid release at the end of April. So I thought I’d do the ‘nice’ thing by creating a blog post which gets potential testers (who could be very useful to Stuart in terms of finding bugs) ready to get going with no delay. It also (as mentioned in the blog post) serves to reduce the amount of time Stuart has to spend triaging bugs, marking duplicates and basically ‘not coding’.

Leading on to where you asked “Really?? What a pain in the arse !! Why would anyone prefer the later?”.

You’re sat in a hotel on a business trip, bored with the TV and you left your ipod at home. So you spark up the music store and purchase some music. But disaster, on your trip the laptop gets mashed/lost/stolen and you lose the valuable data, work, emails – and your music. If you’re lucky and have the presence of mind you might be able to get the tracks from Amazon up to a certain number of days after purchase. With Ubuntu One, your music (and potentially your data, address book, email, notes) will all be safely backed up in the cloud. That’s quite a compelling reason to use the store for me.

There’s also the fact that the Rhythmbox plugin is open source, supported by Canonical and in the repositories. Compared with the binary-only 32-bit only Amazon deb which isn’t any of those things.

Of course there’s also the benefit that Ubuntu One gives me file sync as well as music download, plus Tomboy notes sync and whatever else they’re cooking up for the future which helps me to keep all my stuff backed up.

Maybe my blog post wasn’t clear enough, if so, I apologise and hope this one clears it up.

Also hotlinking is bad mmmkay.