3 posts tagged “bandwagon”

Bandwagonmodal

Someone pointed out to me that my calling the Bandwagon initialization popup dialog box a modal window was not quite accurate. So to clarify exactly what it is, above is a screenshot of said dialog box. (This is the latest version that I have downloaded today.) This initialization window stays above all other windows, with no way to close it or put it behind other windows or to even hide it. If it only stayed up there for a short time it wouldn't be so bad, but it stays up there it seems for as long as it takes to do what it says it's doing. I can use other programs, but always have that dialog box stuck right in the top middle. To me, this is just extremely poor interface design, on top of all the other problems noted previously.

I gave it  one last shot, as it were (partly to take the screenshot, but I also wondered if there had been any improvements. Unfortunately they are still all there as far as I can tell, despite at least 7 updates since the 1.0 release. The Bandwagon Google Group has numerous problem reports.

I should mention that when I installed the newest update and logged on to my account, I was informed that "Bandwagon was already running on another computer and that all my data there would be lost. I never used it on another computer...only on my Powerbook. So, anything that was uploaded/saved previously was lost. Great.

On top of everything though, it seems as though they've underestimated the storage needs of many users...so the initially set price of $69 per year for 'unlimited storage' may not work.

In short, I feel as though I was lured into beta-testing an extremely buggy product with the promise of a year's worth of free service (they now offer a free account to anyone and are issuing refunds to those who paid.)

Normally I wouldn't criticize a small software developer like this in public - I've downloaded and/or beta-tested plenty of buggy software in my time. In this case though, I feel that they gathered a lot of interweb airplay with their viral blog-marketing
tactic, and therefore have exposed themselves to this. (They really, really need to do a lot more beta testing. A LOT more.) Since I inadvertently sort of recommended software that I hadn't tested yet, lured by the promise of free, I'm writing my actual experience with it also in case someone was tempted to try it out and even pay for it. (I do wonder if the big tech blogs who gave this so much free publicity will mention its pitfalls.)

I am sure Xackup has the best of intentions, but to me this is an unmitigated disaster of a debut for a new software program. If anything it's a model of what not to do.

And, note to self: never ever link to or recommend software you haven't tried first personally again.

(I'd normally write about this kind of thing on my personal blog but I'm writing it here since I casually mentioned the damned thing here in the first place.)

About that Bandwagon service I blogged last time...

I can't recommend it for now, after trying it out for a day. It's way too rough. The interface is rough. It's buggy.

When it starts up for the first time, it tries to upload your whole music and other content catalog at once initially, in a modal window (that's one that stays open above all other windows no matter what) - without even warning you that it's going to do so. How annoying is that. I have about 160 G of a combination of music, audiobooks and a few TV shows. Waiting for all of that to back itself up initially would take a long time. I could not even quit the program, so I had to go into the terminal and kill the process. (Note, they seem to be doing some rapid changes, and I don't know if the program works like that even today. As of yesterday, it did.)

But even worse than that, if I try to play music on iTunes while Bandwagon is doing its backup thing, iTunes locks up between tunes, so there's like a 10-15 second pause. I like my Gapless playback.

I think I'd much rather just backup my tunes to a second hard disk, using scheduled backups while I sleep. Bandwagon, free or no, is not for me. (They want to charge you $69 per year for this.) The idea of having a backup on something like Amazon S3 itself is still interesting, at least for a limited part of my collection such as iTunes store purchases - maybe I'll just get me an account and back it up with good old FTP myself.