I grew a big beard and turned into a londoner and made this video. I hope you like it.
Via Warren Ellis
Category Archives: Music
Concert: Marisa Monte
Tuesday night I went out with Nate and Claudia to go see Marisa Monte, a Brazilian singer-songwriter. I understood none of the songs, but it was very good music – chilled out stuff with lazy beats and happy melodies.
The staging was sparse but very effective. A few lightboxes, a platform, a few lights on movable booms and a spot. That was it, but it allowed for so many different moods.
Sometimes it suggested a warm homey room, sometimes a night out at 3 am when it’s just you and the moon, sometimes a city night under streetlights… I wish I had pictures that turned out well.
I was also pleasantly suprised that when I googled Marisa Monte, the first result was a link for more info on Google Music – what’s all this? Those guys keep indexing all of the world’s information in new ways!
Battle of the bands
This reminds me of adult swim – but before “Tom Goes to the Mayor”.
Via the Wooster Collective.
Music for free: The Black Angels
I subscribe to the internet archive’s public domain music feed and caught this: The Black Angels Live at Chop Suey on 2006-06-19.
I’d only heard the excellent “Young Men Dead” before, but if you want a good feel for this band then give a quick listen to track 3: “The Sniper at the Gates of Heaven”.
The whole concert is available for dl in 64K mp3 or vbr mp3. You can also give a listen using the embedded flash player.
Why don’t ratings travel?
I’m using musikcube as the player for my music and it has 5 star ratings. So does windows media player on my pocketpc. So does iTunes. But they never translate between them!
How could they?
One way would be to store it in the id3 comments tag. Both id31 and id3v2 formats support comments. This is a great place to store ratings as text. ***** is 5 stars and anyone can read it. What would make sense is to store ratings in the last 5 characters of the comment field. Then, when changing or loading ratings, you can push or pull from that location.
After doing a little more research, I found that id3v2 supports freeform key=value tagging. Now it seems that all you need is for players to start reading and writing a custom ratings tag.
Why is this important? Because time you spend rating songs in itunes or musikcube or anything else is valuable. That’s valuable info about your song that only you know. If it is lost everytime you switch from an ipod to an iriver, it is less valuable.
If I download a creative commons track or rip a cd at work and rate it in musikcube, I should be able to take that track to my home and have my ratings show up there. The information I put into it loses value if it is bound up in one location or one player.
Update:Â It turns out that Foobar2000 in some configurations does store ratings in id3 tags.
Music for One Apartment and Six Drummers
Great headphones on sale.
http://www.dealhack.com/archives/2006/04/electronics_spring_sale_quick.html Saw this in my feeds. I’m using these headphones and they’re great.
Couldn’t tell from a $150 pair of Shure E4C’s.
This american life goes MP3
My favorite NPR program “This American Life” has made the move from awful real audio to mp3. This is good and bad. It’s good because mp3 works more places, it’s bad because it breaks my greasemonkey userscript. Here is a workaround:
Right click on the link-> save as.
Change the file extention from .m3u to .txt.
Open the txt file. In it you will see a url. That is the url to the mp3.
I’ll fix the script in a bit and it will be automatic, but this should be a stopgap till I get it done.
Intellectual Property Run Amok
Intellectual Property Run Amok: “AMONG THE 16,000 people thus far sued for sharing music files was a 65-year-old woman who, though she didn’t own downloading software, was accused of sharing 2,000 songs, including Trick Daddy’s “I’m a Thug.†She was sued for up to $150,000 per song.” This is a long, funny, sad list.
via: LessigBlog
Viking 2GB Secure Digital Card only $65 at PC Mall – Dealhack
Viking 2GB Secure Digital Card only $65 at PC Mall – Dealhack
This is a pretty damn good deal. I paid quite a bit more for my 2 gig sd card and it has made a big difference in how I use my axim.
Just thought I’d let you know.