Just Dump Amazon Dammit

Thanks for contributing. I want to comment on some of your points, and respectfully disagree with one or two of them.

Quote:

>Amazon sucks. Even when it worked, a third of covers were wrong (at the very least). So I don't mind if you drop it.

In fairness to Amazon, they provided a completely free service that kept a lot of people happy and enabled a lot of people to download an awful lot of covers with little or no effort.

If the covers were wrong, it was not really the fault of Amazon that the Number 1 Search Result ended up being for another product. There are a lot of common words in album titles and it's fairly easy to see how they could get mixed up from time to time.

The real shortcoming lies in Synergy, because I didn't implement a means to skip through search results until the correct one was found. Needless to say, this is something I plan to do.

Quote:

>The way Synergy is now, it is *broken*. I've quit using it for quite a while now and I certainly won't recommend it to *anyone* until it is fixed.

I wish the feature weren't disabled, but I still believe Synergy can add a lot to the iTunes experience. The feature list is very long, and I won't repeat it here. Of course, this is a matter of opinion. And importantly, for me, it can still display the art, even if it can't download it.

Quote:

>Most of us out there wouldn't mind assigning cover art manually. I won't.

>Even if automatic cover art fetching is available, I *still* want to be able to set them manually. As quite a few people have pointed out, the way it is now, it is *madness*.

>Dragging covers manually does not even require a decent interface. Using a directory tree and the Finder would do just fine in the worst case...

I agree it would be nice to have an in-Synergy UI to facilitate assigning covers manually. Until this gets implemented, the alternative for people who want to assign manually is to drag the art into iTunes (Synergy will automatically use it), or to stick it in the Synergy album covers folder; instructions on how to do this appear in this thread.

Quote:

>You say you will have to increase the price if we drop Amazon? GO AHEAD!!!! I'll be happy to pay whatever you ask for your software, and so will many people out there. Well, as long as the price is less than iLife '04 and it isn't crippleware.

To clarify: the price would increase if I had to provide a caching web server to shield Amazon from traffic. I have no idea how many people are using Synergy. All I know is that there have been about 38,000 downloads counted by VersionTracker alone. It wouldn't surprise me if 100,000 people had downloaded or tried it in all.

So, if I implemented an album cover caching server I imagine I'd need to invest in multiple machines to do the serving, and pay a bandwidth bill that could easily run out of control with multi-gig traffic every day.

Not only that, but there's the question of copyright infringement. Amazon's Conditions of Use expressly forbid the copying of content. This would have to be negotiated with them, and lawyers would have to get involved.

This doesn't sound like a good idea to me. So hopefully I can resolve this problem without any such drastic measures, and Synergy can continue with the low $5 price tag.

Quote:

>Dropping covert art after a certain amount of time to keep Amazon satisfied is UNACCEPTABLE. DON'T EVEN THINK OF SCREWING WITH MY COVERS!!!!!!

Once again, to clarify: Synergy doesn't touch iTunes' album covers, and it never would delete anything that you had added to your library. I was talking about Synergy managing the covers that it had downloaded and stored in its own album covers folder.

What you do with your art once its downloaded is up to you. So if you want to stick it in iTunes, you can and it would never be interfered with.

I am still not 100% of this, but my reading of the Amazon terms of use indicates that you are allowed to keep copies of the images for "caching" purposes, and no time limit is specified. But that's only my interpretation of the legalese. In the email communication I've had with Amazon they reminded me that there were "time limits", but in my own reading of their Web Services Agreement and their Conditions of Use I can't see anything explicitly specifying such a time limit for images downloaded from the server (and by extension, for album covers).

Quote:

>If you need some ideas, perhaps you could look at the way Sofa manages covers. [No, don't look at the way it *displays* them. It makes me sick.]

I am not familiar with the details, but I understand that it just saves the covers in its Application Support folder, like Synergy does; although the folder layout and naming conventions are different. There is a legal question mark over this practice. But as I said above, my reading of the jargon indicates to me that there's nothing explicitly forbidding it.

The copyright holders of the images (ie. the record labels, not Amazon itself) might not like it, but the Amazon documents are understandably not specific about it.

I am thinking long and hard about this because I want the Synergy implementation to be bullet-proof in the legal sense.

Quote:

>Amazon sucks. Period.

>Synergy will continue to suck as long as it relies on it.

>You need to add only *one* feature to keep your customers satisfied. Really.

Don't really agree with your first two points here, but clearly we're both entitled to our opinions.

You're right that this one feature is crucial. Believe me, I care about it just as much as you do. I am sure I would've sold a lot more copies of Synergy if this hadn't happened, and I would be that much closer to being able to devote myself to full-time programming work. I am going to continue to strive towards that goal!

Unfortunately, if "Amazon sucks", as you say, the problem is that Synergy is pretty much wedded to it. I never really foresaw the way Synergy would evolve, and so the Amazon stuff ended up getting grafted on. Welded to it, you could say. So these changes I'm having to make are proving to be quite involved. I wish "dumping" Amazon was an option. But for Synergy, it isn't...

Synergy Advance, the companion product I am working on now, won't be tied to Amazon. It will be much more modular and extensible. You won't have to depend on one source for album covers. Support for other sources can be added. But Synergy Advance is still some distance off public release (don't even ask), so this means that for the immediate short term future the only way forward is to get the Amazon/Synergy thing worked out... I will keep you posted as progress is made.