alternapop.com » tech

Recording Studios Face Uncertain Future (NPR)

chris — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 14:56:57 +0000

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=121304883

Here is an interesting story on how digital recording (your laptop) is replacing expensive recording studios. There is a 6 minute audio segment from NPR at the top of the above link.

“”The real value for most bands isn’t the equipment,” says McTear. “A guy at Guitar Center or Sam Ash would like you to think it is. They’d like you to think if you just spent 3 grand, you’re on your way to making your record because you bought the equipment. The sort of unseen, disappearing player in all the records being made today is collaboration — between artists, engineers and producers and studio musicians — all those people.”"

Apple buys LaLa.com but I’m sure I still won’t get my dream features

chris — Sun, 06 Dec 2009 03:11:32 +0000

Apple has bought online streaming music service LaLa.com. While this surely changes the game, I’d really like to see a site offer the depth of features that I’ve been dreaming about for at least 4 years now. Yet I don’t even see people trying. I can’t be the only one with these ideas in my head.

In case you’re wondering just what these features are… I sure won’t mention them here. If you’d really like to know and want to open a professional dialogue about it… I’d be delighted.

NY Times article

PC World article

MOG introduces All Access on demand music for $5 a month

chris — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 20:00:37 +0000

“Today MOG launched MOG All Access, a revolutionary new online music listening service unrivaled in quality and ease-of-use.

MOG All Access is the extraordinary music listening service we full-time music fans have always wanted. You can listen to just about every album and song you can imagine (about 6 million songs), all-you-can-eat and on-demand for just 5 bucks a month. Yeah, pretty much all the music you can get at your nearest record store, for the cost of parking. And no, we are not pulling your leg!

In a cybersea overpopulated with subpar machinery, MOG is your state-of-the-art periscope to the sublime. On-demand music is just the beginning of the MOG paradigm. We’re creating a league of our own with features like:

Personalized radio capabilities that put other online radio & satellite radio to shame
Easy playlist creation and cool tools for discovery and sharing
Sky-high quality streaming at 320 kbps…the highest sound quality in the industry

Highly regarded tech blog Techcrunch.com says “…it is a significantly better user experience than any other music service I’ve tried, including Spotify, MySpace Music and Pandora”.

Get the free trial right now, no strings attached:
http://mog.com/plans/trial

Want to learn more before embarking on our fantastic voyage? See the video guided tour here and see for yourself why we’re so pumped about the service that’s changing the online music listening experience forever:”

http://mog.com/promos/overview

Microsoft replacement of black man causes uproar over a common advertising practice

chris — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 21:41:57 +0000

Microsoft recently used a different version of a photo within an ad for two different markets. Apparently this has caused an uproar, Microsoft has apologized, and replaced the changed photo.

huffingtonpost.com

All they did was photoshop out a black man and replaced him with a white man. Advertisers and marketers have been doing this since the beginning of advertising and marketing.

I was part of a similar plan in 2003. I was a model for a Microsoft ad where they hired 3 men and 1 woman. The other two men were of Japanese and Chinese decent. Their intent was to use a different version of the ad for different markets, US, Europe and Japanese.

Click on each photo icon above to see the full size ad.

Why is this just now being brought to light and frowned upon? Because the man was photoshopped and it wasn’t reshot with a different actor?

interesting last.fm tools

chris — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 20:51:22 +0000

last.fm – Chart to M3U Playlist Generator:
http://lastm3u.powha.net/

chart/graph your music taste:
http://lastgraph.aeracode.org/

Fetch your Last.fm data, munge it and then do wonderful things:
http://l.alanedwardes.com/my/

Visualise Last.fm’s network of similar artists and bands:
http://pattie.fe.up.pt/i_know_that_artist/

find music on twitter

chris — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 22:01:12 +0000

http://musebin.ws/
http://twisten.fm/

last.fm music listening habits data graphs

chris — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 21:36:32 +0000

http://www.leebyron.com/what/lastfm/

This site presents some very interesting graphic charts for displaying music listening habits using last.fm.

iTunes On OS X Finally Has Competition

chris — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 17:46:03 +0000

The following is from, Slashdot: Apple

iTunes On OS X Finally Has Competition mallumax writes “The truth is, iTunes is an average music player. Though the UI is simple and good like most Apple products, it has lagged in features compared to music players available on Linux and Windows. A feature as basic as monitoring a folder and adding the latest music files to the library is unavailable in iTunes. There are no plugins or themes. Despite the many faults, many of us continued to use iTunes because of the lack of options available. But today the wait is finally over. Not one, but two music players have become credible contenders. Songbird: An open source music player which has been in the works for more than 2 years has finally released its 1.0 Release Candidate builds. The team behind Songbird has members who previously developed for both Winamp and the Yahoo Music Engine. It has support for extensions and themes (‘feathers’ in Songbird parlance). Amarok: The undisputed champion among Linux music players is finally coming to OS X, thanks to KDE 4 being ported there. Amarok developer Leo Franchi has been able to run a Amarok on OS X natively. So we can expect a reasonably stable Amarok to hit OS X in a few months’ time. Hopefully these players will gain traction among OS X users, which will finally force Apple to either step up in terms of features or open up iTunes for extensions.”

favtape.com (& opentape.fm)

chris — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 17:06:23 +0000

favtape.com is a muxtape-like website. The difference is that it doesn’t host the music files. It has a lot more features though. “Top Songs by Year”, genre, decade, etc.

Or you can host your own muxtape-like playlist on your own site with opentape.fm

iTunes 8, using the Genius playlist option to do what you want

chris — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 15:47:15 +0000

iTunes 8 features a new playlist creation tool called Genius. To create a playlist with it, you find a song you like and select it in your iTunes library, then you click on the ‘Genius’ button at the bottom right of your iTunes window. iTunes then gives you a few, albeit overly simplified, options. One, select how many songs you want in the playlist. Two, ‘Refresh’ the playlist with different songs. Three, “Save Playlist”. In theory I like the idea but in practice, it’s half useless.

What if I don’t want songs rated 1 or 2 stars in this playlist? What if I only want unrated songs in this playlist? You may be thinking, “who rates songs? what’s the point?”. The answer to that is rather long and I will go into that in a later post when I explain how to create customized and dynamic playlist to vastly improve the “shuffle” ability of iTunes and your iPod.

To achieve a Genius based playlist that consist of only unrated songs, this is what I did.

1. Create a Genius playlist for a song. Select a song you like, click on the ‘atom’ looking icon at the lower right of your iTunes window. Select “Limit to 50 songs”. and click on “Save Playlist”. You may repeat this step and create an unlimited number of Genius playlist. I call each playlist “g: song title”.

I try to rate all of my music, so when iTunes creates a Genius playlist, probably about 50% are rated. This only gives me about 25 songs per playlist that aren’t rated. Depending on how many songs you have rated, and how many unrated songs you want to achieve for the final playlist, you can adjust the parameters to match your needs.

2. Create a Smart Playlist that contains “any” and for the options, select “Playlist” > “is” > (the genius playlist you created in step 2). You may continue adding any and all Genius playlist you’ve created in step 1. I called this playlist “g: all”.

3. Create another Smart Playlist that contains “all” and for the first option select “playlist” > “is” > (select the playlist you’ve created in step 2). For the second option in this playlist, select “rating” > “is” > “0 stars”. I called this playlist “g: unrated”.

Here is a screenshot of the playlists I’ve created. I named them all with “g: ” to make it easier to find them and to know what they are for just by the playlist name.

So now if you want to play unrated songs based on the iTunes Genius feature, just select the final playlist you’ve created in step 3. Which for me is “g: unrated” in the screenshot above.

This is also a good way to find songs that you knew you liked but for whatever reason haven’t gotten around to rating yet. As each song plays, you can easily and quickly rate it. Or you can eyeball the list and batch rate songs with a few mouse clicks.

This is how I currently rate my music:

5 stars: My absolute favorite songs that I very rarely skip
4 stars: Songs I like
3 stars: Song I’m indifferent to. They may grow on me.
2 stars: Songs I don’t like
1 star: Special case songs, “live music”, “spoken word”, self-help tracks (instructional, tutorial, etc)