Analog Anxiety

Nintendo has always excelled in filling its games and consoles with memorable music and sounds. This care can be seen in the big theme songs that everyone remembers, but also in the small bits and bops that play whenever a button is pressed on a system menu.

That didn’t make it less surprising when Nintendo decided to announce a Spotify like music app dedicated just to their music. More surprising yet is that it’s actually pretty good!

At first, it seems a bit superfluous to have a separate app for something that could just be an artist page or category on an existing music streaming service. But Nintendo put a lot of its charm into this specific music app that makes it unique and appealing.

What jumped at me first was how the search is separated by default by console. Essentially, this means you can travel through time to previous generations of consoles if you want to indulge in some nostalgia, including hearing the great system music that Nintendo has made. Currently, only Wii system music is available, hopefully more are added soon. Another highlight of the search panel is how it shows the games present in your Nintendo account right at the start. This is something that couldn’t be done without this bespoke app and that has a lot of potential.

Besides the search, I’m also enjoying the default playlists Nintendo has created, like mood specific, character/game based and thematic ones (like just Zelda dungeon music). Trying to put my four-month-old baby to sleep using Nintendo slow jams was not in my plans.

I would say that, apart from the catalog still missing games and songs, the biggest knock against the app is how it doesn’t contain any credits for the songs. No artists or musicians are mentioned or searchable. Everything is made by “Nintendo” in a sad erasure of individual artists. Not only is it a disservice to these artists, but it’s also a missing opportunity for fans to discover interesting connections of their favourite songs and games. I would like if Nintendo rectified this.

Overall the release of this app was a pleasant surprise and I have been using it often. However, it’s only a first version and Nintendo should keep improving it and adding to it. If you have a Nintendo Online Subscription, give it a try!

(As a side note, hearing all this game music also reminded me that I play too many games on mute, and I’m probably missing a lot of good music and sounds)

I was poking around the website from Cabel Sasser (due to my recent love of the Playdate console) and came across this history of their MP3 software Audion that I found fascinating.

It’s cool to read about the software industry around the 00s and how things worked back then. It also included some fascinating twists and turns like the fact that Apple almost bought Panic and wanted them to build iTunes! Just reading about Apple pre-iPod is a trip.

This exchange beween Sasser and Jobs on the showfloor of Macworld was an highlight:

"Well, Steve, I really think it'll still find an audience," I replied. "We've got a lot of higher-end features that you guys probably won't ever add."

"Yeah? Like what?"

"Well, umm.." I was a bit stumped. "You can keep a count of how many times you've played a song, or you can even rate your songs by popularity..."

"...why the hell would anybody want to do that?"

"Well, maybe you want to sort your playlist by your favorite songs..."

"...you've got to understand, this is just 1.0, of course. You can only imagine where we'll be by the time we release 2.0!"

Jobs first dismisses the idea of star ratings just to put Cabel on the spot to pitch the feature to him and explain it. iTunes did end up having this shortly after so he saw the value.

It’s a great read and Sasser is a great storyteller.