01.29.08
Posted in music at 10:58 am by coldclimate
Here’s one of those crazy facts, which makes perfect sense to ecomonist, and mystifies the rest of us.
EMI pays £25m a year to scrap unsold CDs, yes £25 million. They pay to make them, and then they pay to scrap them. If ever there was a motivator to move to a digital distrobution method, this would appear to be it.
Why don’t they just give them away, I hear you say? Or sell them really cheaply? Because by doing so, they would undermine the value of their product, and no longer would you be willing to pay £15 of a cd, because you know that they COULD sell it for a fiver. Or £3. Or in fact have to pay somebody to take it away.
Now here’s the interesting bit, in my book; why would you ever pay £15 for a CD now? Why not download it illegally, or better yet buy it in digital format for far less, either through 7digital, or CDBaby or even iTunes. best option, buy it from the artist themselves in whatever format you like. I love getting cds in the post from fakeIndieLabel and Distraction
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01.23.08
Posted in music at 5:59 pm by coldclimate
Nothing beats sitting in a huge open plan office, looking at a bunch of cival servats, with Pendulum’s Slam thumping into you ears on the headphones, content nobody else can hear it. The juxtaposition is brilliant.
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01.15.08
Posted in music at 3:38 pm by coldclimate
MostlyI play whole albums. I rarely can keep playlists up to date. Very rarely do I have my music on random because it’s just too mixed to not sound terrible. At the moment im using the seach function of Windows Media Player to find tracks. All todays music has “dog” in it somewhere.
Dogmonaunt 2000. Danny the Dog by Massive Attack. Snoop Dogg. Resvoir Dogs soundtrack. Dog chewed the handle by terrorvision.
So far, DOGday is working out ok.
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01.02.08
Posted in music, randomosity at 3:26 pm by coldclimate
At the weekend I met a lady who had…
a)Seen The Fall live
b)Met John Peel
c)Snogged Mark E.Smith
Well, two out of three isn’t a bad score on the JealousOmiter. I imagine snogging Mark E Smith to be something like, actually I haven’t the words. There must be a lot of siliva and buck teeth involved I hesitate to imagine.
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12.12.07
Posted in music, randomosity at 12:55 pm by coldclimate
Anoter musical moment just highlighted itself. As I work from home on some mind numing dull crap (yes - thank you Microsoft Sharepoint - you are broken my heart and soul), Frankly Mr Shankly by The Smiths came on Last.fm (station based on Pavement). It’s all about how you have to quit you solid and stable job that will get you somewhere if you want to get somewhere you truely want to be. I guess it’s the musical equivalent of Seth Godin’s The Dip (which is excellent by the way).
“Frankly, Mr. Shankly, this position I’ve held
It pays my way, and it corrodes my soul
I want to leave, you will not miss me
I want to go down in musical history
Frankly, Mr. Shankly, I’m a sickening wreck
I’ve got the 21st century breathing down my neck
I must move fast, you understand me
I want to go down in celluloid history, Mr. Shankly”
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12.06.07
Posted in ideas, music at 11:58 am by coldclimate
I’m a big fan of last.fm, party because I’m a data whore (it must be useful for something! Must keep all of it!) , and mostly because I can use it to draw pretty pictures. Last.fm will recommend other music to you based on the theorythat if you like Song X, and A.N.Other (and crowd) like Song X and also Song Y, you might well like Song Y. Mostly it hold true, though it can be self re-inforcing, because you listen to what it recommends, and because so many people do, it keeps recommending that combo.
Pandora is different. Each track on Pandora has been “graded” in over 40 catagories by a musical expoer, thus creating a musical genome for that track. It can then create you a custom radio station based on a track you give it. Eg. You liked Song A, and it’s drum heavy and really long and has a pixel female vocal, and so do Songs B, C and D.
I have no idea how, and no time to, start comparing the data that the two systems hold about artists relationships. I would expext that the two are roughly in sync, with people listening to lots of things that sound sort of simalar. I like The Decemberists and The Shins, and they certainly play the same sort of festivals, and sound a bit simalar, so I imagine most people who like one probably quite like the other. The interesting data would be where two tracks, or artists, are completely different, but often listened to by the same people. Do Leonard Cohen fans listen to lots of Lisa Lashes hardcore mixes? Do fans of The Boredoms love a bit of Lancashire folk music
Somebody else harvest the data and show me the answers, I’ve just not the bandwidth!
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10.23.07
Posted in ideas, music at 8:13 pm by coldclimate
Being away from my beloved ibook and synology cube for a few weeks, I have imported my entire music collecdtion into windows media player on a portal harddrive. I’d like a nice way to visualise the information about how many tracks by each artist I have.
WMP has one interesting feature (and many many wank ones), but listing songs by artist means that you get a nice easy to read list which says how many songs you have by a given artist. This throws up some interesting thigns about both my music collection and my mp3 tags.
Firstly - I have a shed load of tagging to do. 2166 songs by “unknown”
Secondly - mp3 tagging needs to find a new mechanism. ID3 tags don’t give you the flexibility needed, because I have 593 songs with Various as the artist. If you could “tag” mp3s with multiple artists, you could create album “clouds” and show collaborations in neater ways than “various” or the even worse “him, and such and such, and her” artist, which is normally followed by “Him and her” etc etc.
270 songs are labelled as “John Peel” whom has never recorded a song in his life as far as I know. ONly a certain number of these can be recordings of his radio program.
I have 168 tracks by Moby, whom I love dearly. I have 168 tracks by The Fall, who I occationally lisen to. This would seem unusually high.
I have 136 Eminem tracks. This is either a)wrong (please god) or b)because I nabbed someboddies entire music collection years ago when I had a harddrive crash and I’ve not edited them out (NB: WMP hangs when you try to delete tracks in this view, which is very annoying).
I have 114 A Guy Called Gerald tracks, which must e virtually his entire output thats avalable on CD. I own 28 Gun Bad Boy (a real copy! real!)
I have 101 songs by both Radiohead and Johny Cash. I don’t thing wither of them would mind the company they are keeping.
I have as many Cat Power tracks as Rolling Stones. I can’t explain this at all. I’ve loved the stones all of my life, and I only heard of Cat Power 2 years ago (maximum)
I have more Linkin Park songs that Massive Attack. This is wrong on many levels, though Metiora is still actually pretty good.
I have 80 tracks by blues legend John Mayall. I also have 80 audio tracks by insparational speaker Tony Robbins. I don’t think Mr Mayall would approve.
I have 72 tracks by Coldplay and only 68 by the Pixies.
I have one more track (64) by DJ Yoda who was very dissapointing live, than I do by Chris Murray, whom I would kill to see live.
I have only 56 Portishead tracks. I would have trought I had more, but aparently not.
I have 51 tracks who claim to be recorded by “Original Soundtrack”. More tagging required.
I have 44 tracks by The Decemberists, Green Day and Xen Cuts (poor tagging again!). I have 45 podcasts from radio4. I suspect The Decemberists would really like Radio4.
I have 40 tracks by Method Man. These can all be deleted.
I have 39 tracks by Bjork and Sufjan Stevens, they make for good company in my book, and a collaboration album would be great.
I have as many 10cc tracks, whom I have grown up listening to for many years, as I do tracks by The Bottle Rockets, whom I have only ever seen once, and never run across again.
32 tracks, I wonder what ever happened to My Virtiol, India Arie and who are Sevendust???
I have only 22 tracks by DJ Format and BT, both of whom I thing are geniuses (NB:should the word Genii exist. I believe so)
I have as many tracks by JOhn Egdell as I do The Fugees, Gorse, Ian Dury, Tracy Chapman and Teenage Fanclub. odd.
14 and 12 tracks seem to be the biggest groups. This would seem odd as both a little too large for a single album, and not quite enough for 2.
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10.05.07
Posted in business, music at 2:09 pm by coldclimate
Aways visionaries in music (Kid A - idiocy that sounds perfect), Radiohead have released (or rahter are releasing - it’s on pre-order at the moment) their whole next album and you can pay what you like for the download. Lots of people have lots to say, and I find the idea that they are behind the times for this, maybe in the concept of a downloadable album, but not in the mpayment method surely?
Good luck to them, I paid £4, and it came to £4.45 once you included the card charge fee.
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Posted in business, music, rant at 11:17 am by coldclimate
It would appear the music industry is just not thinking, listening or doing anything more than bitching a sueing to try and maintain a business model thats just got working anymore. They’re even contradicting themselves now, for example check out these gems, only lines apart.
“when people steal, when they take music without compensation, we are harmed”, a far point , if you want music you should be paying for it in some form, and for that payment you should recieve something that you can use in multiple places in my book (aka. DRM free, or some form of open DRM).
“When an individual makes a copy of a song for himself, I suppose we can say he stole a song.” Making “a copy” of a purchased song is just “a nice way of saying ’steals just one copy’,” she said.”
NO NO NO - he bought that CD. He paid for it. You were not harmed in this process. If he rips it, and then does not distrobute it out to other people but just uses it for personal use in multiple places, you are not being harmed by this action!
Using this crazy logic, should I be expected to buy a different copy of each thing for the places I want to use it? I like music in my car, but it has a minidisc player (yes yes - I know, but I bought a car, not a stereo). Should I ignore the recordability of minidiscs and re-buy Nick Drakes back catalogue on mni-disc? Is it actually sold?
Should I re-buy all my Rolling Stones CDs on tape so I can play them in the kitchen when Im cooking? No, thats just plain stupid, much like this idiotic stance Sony BMG are taking.
Play fair, sell it for a fair price, in a fair format, so people will actually buy it and listen to it. Yes, people will probably distrobute it and other people might get it for free, but if you don’t stard doing this, you’re locked into an ever decreasing circle of lower sales, higher prices, more piracy, lower sales, continue until existing music industry is gone.
Personally, I like CDbaby’s mp3 downloads. A bit cheaper than the cd cost, open format, 90%+ of the money going to the artist, massive choice.
Why would I pay £15 for a cd only to be told I can only play it on my shelf bound stereo at home when I spend half my life onthe road. Idiots.
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09.26.07
Posted in interweb, music at 10:36 am by coldclimate
With their existing customer base, who are used to using their payment system and front end, I can’t imagine Amazon can go wring with serving up DRM free mp3s which you can then use on any device (and backup etc etc).
I wonder who’s tunes they are serving up, and what the payback for artists and labels is like?
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09.14.07
Posted in music, technology at 10:26 am by coldclimate
I own a lot of things digitally, and have a highly mobile lifestyle. My CD collection must be 500+, my DVD collection pushing a 100, and I average traveling 300 miles at either end of the week (give or take a hundred depending on where I am). I can pick up a handful of Cd’s and a couple of DVDs to see me through the week on a Sunday night, but when I end up being away for a longer period you get sick of the same 5 albums not to mention the jewel cases being destroyed, and the extra weight to lug about through airports, train stations and on my back.
The answer of course, was to digitize the lot, which I duly did over the course of about a month. CDEX tore through my CD collection (two desktops and a laptop working in parallel). DVDdecoder, acidrip and handbrake sorted out the DVDs gradually. In total the whole lot comes to nearly 300 gigs (no point ripping DVDs to low quality after all). Any new buys are then fed into the system as and when I get them, and now I’ve gone through the pain of the initial digitization, it’s easily managed.
Now this comes with two problems. Firstly, legality. I have bought every one of these items, either first hand or second hand, and I’m not distributing them, so I can’t see that I’m trying to rip people off. I’m just trying to watch/listen to stuff I own.
Secondly, and more importantly (in my book), is how do I store and transport all this stuff? When I went though the initial digitization hard-drives were pretty expensive. You can now get an external 500gig drive for under a hundred quid, so having two drives, one as a backup, is not difficult, but USB drives really really don’t take kindly to being lugged all over the country. I’ve lost one drive so far, and I imagine I’ll lose another fairly so as it’s making some horrible noises. USB also have the problem that it’s single computer only, and it would be very cool to have my music available to any of the computers on my network. Initially I bought an NSLU2 with the idea of hacking the firmware and installing an iTunes server. This would have been nice, but it was fatally flawed (for me). Firstly you need a spare USB hard-drive to use to hack it (install their OS, remount on another machine and thrash the shadow password file, remount and have root) and… it’s only USB 1.1 and thus indexing a 50,000 track mp3 collection is painfully slow, in fact, virtually impossible. Also - no movie streaming, only sharing by samba, which is not ideal.
So it looks like a NAS (network attached storage) device is the key. Out of desperation to get started, I bought A buffalo drive. You trials and tribulations with it are well documented on here.
I currently own 4 external hard drives. All USB2, I have an 80gb, 160gb, 250gb and a 500gb. The 500gb just about has a copy of everything on the other drives, and thus my total storage requirement is about 500Gb. At the moment if it wasn’t for the 500Gb backup, a single disk crash would loose my films, music or photos.
I need a setup which is resilient to single drive failure (well, preferably multi-drive failure but hey I’m not buying Netapp kit!). I’d like everything to be available everywhere via the Internet in a secure manner, but I’m willing to loose this. I’d like to have a couple of weeks of music and films with me portably because I end up working away form home in hotels quite a bit at times.
What I’m planning to have in there end it the following setup:
A Synology 407e cube, which will provide RAID5 across 4 SATA II drives (probably 250Gb each, total storage roughly 750GB). RAID gives me some fail-over at the cost of a about a quarter of the disk space. The 407e will also provide an iTunes server (locally) and media streaming for films, but luckily you can ssh to it securely over the net, so I should be able to use some ssh-tunnel magic to access to the music remotely. It has built in USB ports, so I can get the family machines sharing the printer over it too which is handy, and you can also backup it’s content across the USB to off-site it every so often and prevent a fire wiping out everything I own (though it would take out every other bloody thing I own!).
So that should cover all my on-site needs, but I still travel and would like some local content too (trains, planes and automobiles not having wireless access). At the moment a USB external drive is chunky, but brings with it a wedge of stuff, however it is also heavy and externally powered, making using it on trains etc difficult unless you carry a powerstip (ironically, I often do). I think what I’ve going to do it buy a bloody great USB flash pen. 4gb would be 2 films and 20 Cd’s (a film is roughly a gig, a CD roughly 100megs). This is a little more than I need for a week, not quite enough to 2 weeks, however if I had remote ssh access to the rest of the collection every so often because I was at work, I could top up. An 8 gb keyring would give me more than enough for 2 weeks however.
The total cost of this setup - it’s not cheap. The NAS would be 400 notes barebone. The 4 SATA 250GB drives, about another 120 quid. 50 quid should easily cover the USB pen, and I can reuse my 500GB and 250GB drives, leaving me 2 free smaller portable drive to flog/hold in reserve/ give away to family. Phew.
With all of us storing more and more things digitally, I can’t help but thing that most people are unlikely to shell out nearly 800 quid (once you’ve factored in everything and a bit more) to provide a terabyte of storage, but at the moment, a single drive failure (of a re-install of XP or Vista) would wipe out most peoples legitimate content (iTunes downloads for example) and family photos!
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09.12.07
Posted in music, rant, technology at 9:56 am by coldclimate
Just when I thought the music industry was getting the hang of the new economic models that are around, they come up with a totally moronic idea. Did they thing they were being innovative? Maybe. Did they think this would kill downloading? Possibly (though I imagine even the painfully optimistic realized this was unlikely). Did they repackage an outdated, superseded, unfair music distribution mechanism and hope we won’t notice quite how idiotic it is? Yes.
So, from the Sony who brought you rootkit loaded CD’s and the RIAA who keep suing people, I present: The Ringle!
Key features:
A CD single (circa 1994)
3 songs (ish. Most likely 1 A-side, 1 B side (effectively) and a remix I imagine)
A ringtone (how? DRM’d versions for each mobile phone type? An mp3 (unlikely)? An online service with some for of unique identifier (most likely).
A price of $6-$7! Thats £4 even with the fucking brilliant exchange rate.
Loons. You really thing this will work? have you noticed how well iTunes is doing, and that’s even with it’s DRM, lock-in, limited catalogue (ok, the catalogue is pretty extensive, but its got whole wedges missing), slight-overpricing. I know Apple make the most money out of this, but surely it wouldn’t be too terrible for you to band together, form some sort of alliance, exploit the Long Tail theory and charge a sensible amount, not rely on some crack-ass crazy local software (lets not mention what NBC wanted iTunes to include if they were to deal with them).
Why not decide to play nice, and as a result, be well through of? Gone are the days of advertising telling you what to buy. Gone. Completely. I don’t watch TV, I listen to the BBC and I have ad-block installed to destroy banner ads. If you want to sell me something, it needs to be a) great, good. b)accessible when and where I want it. I’m not buying a Sony piece of hardware just to play your songs. c)reasonably priced. I buy cd’s for a tenner when I’m at gigs because I loved the band and because I watch that tenner go into their pockets. I will not pay this in HMV, and I certainly won’t download it for that price when a hardrive crash will loose me the lot.
Think about what you want (money), and what I want (music) and what you don’t want (me downloading) and what I don’t want (no money, lack of choice, the feeling that the aetists maybe aren’t making any money out of this). In that sweat spot in the middle is where we shall all be happy. I’ll buy more music, possibly thus spending more money, not feeling the need to download it, and thus… you make more money! Free market economics at work gentlemen, its a wonderful thing. The harder you make it (DRM, prices, back catalogue, etc), the more incentive there is for me to not pay you, and don’t you dare say that I’m not a music lover because I’m not paying you, it’s a very long time since I spoke to anybody from a major label at a gig.
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09.04.07
Posted in interweb, music, technology at 3:44 pm by coldclimate
I’m waiting for some scripts to finish running, and they were taking their time, which has given me the time to read the whole of this brilliant article about Rick Rubin. If you don’t know who he is, he’s the founder of Def jam records, and it turns out, the producer (and guru like muse) of some of my other favorite albums. he seems to have a very holistic approach to music, and the music industry.
There are some interesting rumination about future business models for the music industry, though I’m not positive on his subscription style model would work, but if I could pay $5/6 per cd amount of music (be that for a whole cd, or broken down per track), download it in some DRM free format (or with some form of DRM which actually works rather than limits me to certain hardware/operating systems), then I would. I spend enough on physical cds at the moment to prove I am committed to music.
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07.21.07
Posted in music, technology at 3:57 pm by coldclimate
I love the BBC’s listen again service, but since work banned streaming media, I’ve made no use of it because I have a radio in my house (numerous actually), a radio in my car, and now the onlyplace I am without BBC content is work. I do podcast several things that are available, but it would be really nice to be able to rip certain programs to OGG or mp3.
Step up tomtaylor and his rather neat bash script (spit, spit, cought, bloody bash),which makesuse of mplayer to rip the stream and then encode it. very neat.
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Posted in interweb, music at 3:43 pm by coldclimate
I like the look of bleep.com, serving up mp3 goodness at about 6 quid an album from lots of good labels like warp and XL.
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07.20.07
Posted in music, rant, technology at 8:06 am by coldclimate
This is really beginning to bug me. I have a large mp3collection, mostly because I spent 2 weeks ripping my cd collection to mp3 in case of theft and fire, and so I can take it on the road with me when working away from home.
I’ve been used iTunes to try and mange it, but it’s unfuriatingly slow. I’ve about 20,000 tracks, stored on an external drive, and sometime moving between artists takes a minute! Awhole minute, and iTunes crashes.
I’ve tried winAMP (and xmms) but a single list is just unusable. I’ve tried songbird, but it’s just painfully slow too. I’m about to lash some cash and buy a NAS which has an itunes streamer built in, which might solve the problem, but you can’t make playlists from iTunes streams, or burn mix cds (my current hobby), so that doesn’t solve the problem.
What software is out there than will let you manage 20k files, and the id3 tags (I’m slowly getting them sorted with iTunes and MusicBrainz and a set of iTunes scripts I’ve written), and not be slow as a dog with three legs. If only winAmp had the ability to build your files into a navigable system using the id3 data it would be top.
Speaking of which - how do you start to display so much music? Ideally I’d like to be able to select whole albums to play, so some sort of Artist>Album combo would be good, but the list becomes unmanageable. Also its annoying when you think “Oh - a bit of Dave Smith - that would be good” remembering his 1987 hit “Dave is great”, so you click on Dave Smith, and find you have his album “Dave Smith sings the blues” including the album art. Brilliant. Click on it and actually… you’ve got one song. Probably from a film soundtrack or something else, and no idea where the rest of the songs are, or how you even got this one track. Very annoying that.
I wonder if tagging isn’t the answer? I love the way that flickr creates a big cloud of files, and by the virtue of tags, they can be grouped infinatly. Each photo can be associated with all the others you took on the day, or all the other photos of the sea, and all the other photos that are predominantly blue. If you could do this with music it would be great! I could have a big cloud of music where each track could be a memeber of as many lists as you like. So I could add “Newcastle” , “Seen live”, “acoustic”, “sad” and “rare genius” tags to my John Egdel tracks as well as “(album)Your big day”, “(year)2005″ and “(label)Caw Records” and other such information such as is now found in mp3s. You could also manage your playlistings the same way by associating tags such as “(playlist:5)Running cd” denoting that this track should be track 5 in the “Running cd” playlist.
I’m no programmer any more, but surely such a thing it possible, possibly even not that ddifficult? You could build the init tag set form id3 tags, and store it in a clean data structure making is superfast to edit and search. You could even write some fothe stuff back to id3 tags maybe.
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06.26.07
Posted in music at 8:56 pm by coldclimate
Robert Wyatt singing “shipbuilding” written by elvis costello.
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06.12.07
Posted in interweb, music at 3:20 pm by coldclimate
I think the Eminem fans might have been allowed to edit the wikipedia moby page, because at the moment, half way down it says…
“He also released a porno DVD, called Player. Here he displayed his belief in beastialty.”
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06.01.07
Posted in music at 11:35 pm by coldclimate
Who wants to go to Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival next year?
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05.13.07
Posted in interweb, music at 2:56 pm by coldclimate
What more could you need than a Cillit Bang! Hardcore Remix?
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