Technology Blog

No, that’s not misspelled. It’s the Spanish-language version of Enrique Iglesias’ song Hero (and how freaking cool are those Google music links? I’d never seen that before. Very useful.) I’ll admit that I really liked the English version when it came out, and bought the CD because of it. Hadn’t listened to it in ages, though.

Today, through the magic of Party Shuffle in iTunes, the Spanish version popped up while I was listening on headphones here at Panera (my favorite grading spot). And…wow. In Spanish, the emotional power is much greater. Yes, yes, it’s still a silly love song. But it made me happy to listen to it.

And now, back to grading projects. <sigh%gt;

source: heroe

Optimo have a new mix up — the
First Hour Mix:

Here’s the fourth in a brief series of mixes where we present something a
little different. This mix isn’t really a mix in the conventional sense but
rather 17 tracks blended together. To us, the first hour of Optimo, or to be
more accurate, the ‘Espacio’ part of Optimo (Espacio) is a vital part of the
night. It is our chance to play absolutely what we like without thinking
about the dancefloor.

It’s a great mix — certainly not dancy, but some really interesting tracks
here. The Optimo guys put together some really great music.

In fact, I went to see them play last Saturday — or, at least, myself and a
couple of mates tried to. Supposedly, they were supporting The Juan Maclean at the Bud
Rising festival over the weekend, but the show was such a shambles, without
anyone having a clue when it started or who was on stage at any time, I’m
pretty sure we missed their set entirely.

On top of that, it was EUR20 in, and to add insult to injury, the only lager
on sale was Budweiser! I
mean, I wouldn’t mind that if the “Bud Rising Festival” deal meant free
entrance, but charging 20 squids and then cutting off the supply of decent
booze as well, is just a crime.

Ah well, the Filthy
Dukes were pretty good at
least.

bud rising budweiser dublin festivals ireland live music mp3 music optimo sponsorship

This post was written by Justin, source: Optimo vs. Bud Rising

I’ve realised I like the endings of songs; whether I like a song
or not, entirely depends on how it ends.

Apple’s iPod shuffle algorithm is incredible. I’ve been spending quite a bit
of time listening to it, and I’m sure it’s not random; I think it’s picking
next tracks based partly on the similarity of metadata between the current and
candidate tracks, which is quite neat as an automated mixing technique.

So is it random? Google says:

• yes
• no; a commenter on that article notes the same thing I’m talking about
• yes
• no; can’t say I’ve noticed the Beatles getting a push on mine
• yes
• and finally, no answer here, but a pretty cool stats experiment

apple ipod mp3 music randomness shuffle

This post was written by Justin, source: Music, and iPod Shuffle

Via
Cory at Boing Boing, here’s a great Wired
post-mortem on how all
the corporate vested interests (including Apple!) turned a nice concept for a
new, music-playing mobile phone, into a useless, DRM-hogtied,
designed-by-committee turd.

That’s worth a read, in itself. However, what really blew my mind was this:

Anssi Vanjoki, executive vice president of Nokia and head of its multimedia
group, has bad news for the [music] labels. … He pushes a couple of buttons
on the [phone’s] keypad. Up pops Symella, a new
peer-to-peer downloading program from Hungary.
As the name suggests, Symella
is a Symbian application that runs on Gnutella, the P2P network that hosts
desktop file-sharing apps like BearShare and Limewire. It was created earlier
this year by two students at a Budapest engineering school that for four
years has been exploring mobile P2P in conjunction with a local Nokia
research center.

Symella doesn’t come installed on the N91; Vanjoki
downloaded it from the university Web site. “Now I am connected to a number
of peers,” he continues, “and I can just go and search for music or any other
files. If I find some music I like and it’s 5 megabytes and I want to
download it - the carriers will love this. It will give them a lot of
traffic.”

I had no idea the platform was that open, at this stage. It’ll be interesting
to see what happens next…

apple design by committee filesharing flop itunes motorola mp3 music p2p phones via:boingboing

This post was written by Justin, source: Wired on the Motorola ROKR iTunes phone

AKMA just blogged something that triggered the following thoughts…

When I visited AKMA in Chicago we talked about music. I met up with my old DJ friend, Jeff Pazen after seeing AKMA. The mission was, how do we talk about music and share our musical tastes. Jeff is a godlike figure in my DJ past and I really wanted to sync up with him on what he was into and remember some of the great tracks we used to listen to together “back in the day.” I also wanted AKMA to understand what music was like back when I hung out with Jeff a decade ago. Technology finally allows us to do this. Jeff could give us each a Nano with playlists of his music and we could listen to it… like would have listened to a mixed DJ tape a decade ago. This is how we shared our knowledge of music.

The problem is that it has become so easy that fear has taken over and there are laws and technologies that prevent what I personally believe is one of the fundamental ways that good new music spreads. Like AKMA, I’m not against professionals getting paid, but I think that the broken business model and the industry’s reaction to it is hurting the business more than they imagine.

Although AKMA and I are clearly not “normal”, I think we are typical “consumers” in many ways. I’ve been bored by the music around me and don’t listen to it as much. If someone like Jeff could “turn me on” again, I’d probably “get back into music”. I’m quite sure I would spend more money on music if I was “into it” again. (Although the hardware guys will get their healthy share.) And no. Clear Channel and MTV will not turn me on.

I realize I don’t make a constructive argument in this post and many of the points have been raised over and over again, but I think this is timely in the context of the Nano and the idea that you could/should be able to “make a Nano” for someone with your favorite music and “turn them on.” How cool would that be. (If as AKMA points out, things like the Nano finally become cheap enough to toss around.)

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source: AKMA on Nani, DRM an sharing music

I had set Mizuka up with iTunes music store on a Mac Mini with an external drive. At some point, she had filled up most of the external drive with stuff and she alleges that iTunes told her it was going to start moving stuff to another drive. Then certain songs stopped playing. I sort of ignored her mumbling until I asked her to run disk doctor on the drive. The utility told us that her disk was irreparably broken. The songs are broken on her iPod too. (The bad songs skip.) Apple says back up, or when you disk dies you out of luck.

Is there nothing we can do? I’m about to copy all of the music onto a new drive, erase any files that don’t play and call it a day. Does anyone have any advice or a better idea?

UPDATE: Kevin Marks recommended Disk Warrior, which seems to have fixed the drive, but now many of the files are 0 bytes long. I guess we just lost a lot of music. Hmm…

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source: iTunes mess

Aaron Flores, videoblogger at theVoiz.com posted a video of his kids dancing to that Kelly Clarkson song. I actually kind of like the song, but this video takes it to a whole other level. Videoblogging your little kids dancing is rad….

Last.fm has done a re-design and has fully integrated with Audioscrobbler. You can tag music now too. Good job guys.

Disclaimer: They are friends and I’ve been “helping them out” a bit… Not that I should get ANY credit for the great stuff they are doing.

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Cory Doctorow @ Boing Boing Blog

Amazon directory of free MP3 downloads

Amazon has put together a single page listing all the free, no-DRM MP3s you can download from their site, as promos for CDs.

Link

(Thanks, Ben!)

Update: Erin sez, “Amazon actually launched Free Music Downloads in February of 2001. The page mentioned is just the top 200 downloads, there are a lot more available here.

Excellent!

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source: Amazon directory of free MP3 downloads

MetaBrainz

The MetaBrainz Foundation is a 501.(c).3 tax-exempt non-profit based in San Luis Obispo, California that operates the MusicBrainz project.

MusicBrainz is a user maintained community music metadatabase. Music metadata is information such as the name of an artist, the name of an album and list of tracks that appear on an album. MusicBrainz collects this information about music and makes it available to the public.

With the creation of the MetaBrainz Foundation, the MusicBrainz project enters its second phase of life. In the first incarnation, the project was privately maintained and focused primarily on basic music metadata described above. Today the MusicBrainz project has the legal backing and infrastructure of the MetaBrainz Foundation, which will allow it to embark on a mission to expand its scope.

This is a very important project because, unlike CDDB, MetaBrainz is protecting the data from capture by corporate interests and if successful, will allow us to make information about music interoperable and the data will provide a foundation for this interoperability. This will allow people to share playlists across languages, meta-search on music across services, etc. I have joined the board together with Dan Brickley, Cory Doctorow, Lawrence Lessig and founder Robert Kaye. They are doing a fundraiser and we’d be happy for your support. Congratulations Robert.

Listening to: You Trip Me Up by The Jesus and Mary Chain from the album Psychocandy

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source: MetaBrainz goes 501(c)3 and announces board

source: More on the Fifty Quid Man

source: Fifty Quid Guy