Apple's little problem with ripping off artists - A list of Apple's marketing rip-off offenses. I'm not sure why they don't get more heat for this as Apple is loved by the artsy types.
The White Glove Tracking project is done. I did a few frames a few months ago:
On May 4th, 2007, we asked internet users to help isolate Michael Jackson's white glove in all 10,060 frames of his nationally televised landmark performance of Billy Jean. 72 hours later 125,000 gloves had been located. wgt_data_v1.txt (listed below) is the culmination of data collected. It is released here for all to download and use as an input into any digital system. Just as the data was gathered collectively it is our hope that it will be visualized collectively.
There are already some visualizations, very neat stuff.
Quiltsrÿche - Metal quilts. "Bangover" is my favorite.
As a follow-up to my hard drive terror I guess I'm now in a full-blown Windows apocalypse. I was fairly sure it was the power supply crapping out on me and it was only crashing during the night, so I was waiting till this week to get a new one. Then yesterday it rebooted in the middle of doing something. Then would only give me an "lsass.exe - System Error Object Name not found" error and reboot when I hit OK. Much research and fiddling hasn't righted things so I think my Windows is just toast.
Anyway if I'm extra slow to answer your emails that is why.
Canada Day celebration on Parliament Hill was good, packed full of people and the fireworks were fantastic. Most of the entertainment was a little too American Idol for me but Feist was great. Too bad she was only allowed three songs.
Hey happy Canada Day everyone, even if you don't happen to be of the Canadian persuasion. I'll be down around Parliament Hill today gathering data for Operation Don't Get a Hangover. I will report my findings.
June 29, 1888: Handel Oratorio Becomes First Musical Recording - it was called Israel in Egypt and Biblelicious.
Scott has some great ideas for Music 2.0 services. I've been meaning to write up mine for a while as I've learned I'm too busy to launch any new sites.
My big idea lately is one I've been meaning to pitch to Magnatune:
Independent record labels should provide hook-ups to their artists for services such as graphic design, manufacturing, merchandise, booking, bio-writing, press kits, photography, advertising, PR and more. These are all things artists will pay for but it's hard to weed through the scams and overpriced poor quality services out there.
The record label would find quality professionals to perform these services at a reasonable price. Record label makes itself valuable to the artists by simplifying their lives, record label takes a cut or referral fee from each service transaction, artist has access to quality resources to improve their career, sells more music, everybody's happy.
Woke up this morning to my desktop machine frozen on the Windows boot-up screen. I hit a key and it rebooted. What the. Let it go through, it froze again. Tried safe mode, froze again. And a second time. Uh oh.
Tried some rescue LiveCD rescue stuff, maybe my Windows install was just barfed. My hard drive seemed to be gone. I fearfully checked the state of my backups -- was pleasantly surprised to see they were intact. Also Gmail meant my email still worked and Google Browser Sync meant I had all my bookmarks and cookies on my laptop. Sweet.
I started going through the motions of getting a replacement hard drive, rebooted the desktop again for kicks and everything worked fine. "Windows has recovered from a serious error." I'll say.
Hard drive on the way out? Power supply dying? Heat? I don't know but that was a dumb way to kill a couple hours.
And the award for "most annoying music loop used in a Flash product demo" goes to Creative for the Zen Stone Plus! Way to go guys! You've driven me insane!
Seriously though, you make audio products. Let's show some hustle.
Scott asks where Touring 2.0 is. Eventful's okay but he's right: it could be so much better. Things that suck about Eventful:
- It hassles people to sign up for Eventful accounts. People tell me it's required, but like for Louisville, Kentucky there are 13 demands but I can only see that 3 Eventful users are demanding it.
- Regarding the above -- how am I supposed to contact those other ten people if I wind up in the area? Why don't I see their email addresses? It can't be a spam thing -- they signed up!
- The Eventful interface is cluttered as hell, I never know where the hell I'm supposed to be looking for things. Could use some serious streamlining.
If it didn't annoy me in those ways I'd think about running my whole gig list off of them. But not if they're going to be all stingy and into the lock-in.
Peter Kirn has a good article on the Internet Radio Day of Silence, which is today. There's a huge service-killing hike in the pipe for web radio royalties.
I want to care about this but I don't listen to web radio, I'm not American, I think big music screwing themselves creates great opportunities for musicians like me, and I don't think protesting will do much good if they're determined to do it.
So I guess I'm a web radio dick, I'm sorry.
The 23 John Henry Bonham Drum Outtakes - I'm not sure how to verify these are actually him, but they're some nice drums regardless.
Holy crap: musical tesla coils. This would be a sweet live show. Here's the Super Mario Brothers theme on solid state musical tesla coils:
The theme from Weird Science:
Beetlejuice:
And here's the introduction and explanation:
13 Great moments in the co-option of hip-hop - seems like Run-DMC/Aerosmith "Walk this Way" should be on there, but a lot of great (awful) videos on this list.
The history of Vinyl Data has some surprises. I didn't realize there were artists encoding Sinclair ZX Spectrum programs into their records as far back as 1983 such as Pete Shelly from the Buzzcocks and the Thompson Twins. That's awful hardcore for 20+ years ago. I would say it beats the crap out of manipulating spectrograms.
Even more awesomely The Thompson Twins included an adventure game (called The Thompson Twins Adventure) where you wander around beaches and caves for no real reason:
You can actually play it online here. OH GOD I FOUND A BOTTLE OF SPICE.
My favorite of course is Urusei Yatsura's 'Everybody Loves Uresei Yatsura' album:
Examining the source for the program reveals the following comments:
"Hi Nick, is Robin there?""Judas Priest Satanic Message #3"
"What is sadder: a.) finding this b.) writing it"
Lick his cloven hoof.\m/ (via kotaku)
SOUNDTRACK - Rob aka thehipcola's new album set to drop October 31st.
Why I Love Power Chords - First issue of guitar teacher Rob Hampton's newsletter. His blog's packed full of info and I expect the newsletter will be the same. Worth checking out.
Here's a weird one for y'all: Brad Sucks - Tracker Array [10mb MP3].
As I've mentioned in a bunch of interviews I took classical guitar lessons when I was 8 or so but got bored of it. It wasn't until I came across trackers on the PC around 1993 that I got hooked on making music (and realized that song files were the future) and it's been downhill ever since. The trackers I spent the most time in were Scream Tracker and Impulse Tracker, though I did my time in Composer 669 and Farandole Composer as well.
Recently I came across one of many stashes of tracker files I had converted to MP3 years ago. I thought about putting some of the songs online as a joke -- some of the ideas are okay but the sound quality of the samples is so low it makes me gag. Instead I compiled them into one retro audio highlight reel. These songs are all from around 93-98 I think. You can picture me working in DOS, chatting on BiModem, running a Telegard BBS (Renegade is for lamers) and not getting much sun or healthy social interaction while you listen to this.