Words cannot describe this escalating Rube Goldberg machine, just watch
Archive for category music
Last night was the grand opening of Bass concert hall after it was closed for remodeling. In order to showcase all the new features, they had a wide range of music for the bill, from opera to old American ballads to choral to jazz… to the most awesome finale featuring Ghostland Observatory. The University of Texas band and orchestra played alongside them!
And I do mean old. I will say that I had almost this exact same dot matrix printer that I used for many many years. Kudos on using the Spectrum, but the amazing thing to me is that the hard drives act as speakers.
Here it is… the remix of Radiohead’s “Nude” :
Big Ideas (Don’t get any) from 1030 on Vimeo.
ubiquitous super mario theme
tetris theme
zelda theme
and a little more… range
Guitar Rising
Feb 7
Finally, a Guitar Hero for people who actually play guitar. Not to say Guitar Hero isn’t a blast, but there was always that twinge of something missing. That feel of actually playing the music. Now a development group called Gametank is releasing details of just such a game: Guitar Rising.
This will be a PC game, and it is due out before the end of the year.
Here’s the teaser clip:
This guitar’s features didn’t really sound all that impressive at first, but that’s because the first news article I read didn’t really explain very well. Just watch this Gibson video below that shows a how-to on operation of the guitar. Anyone who plays will drool, especially if you love alternate tunings.
This is officially part of the Les Paul line. First off, this thing will tune the guitar for you, on the fly. Not with some helpful tones that help you tune by ear, but with actual servos on each key that turns and tunes the guitar for you. It will also automatically change to any alternate tuning programmed into it on the fly. And to top it off, it takes most of the work out of stringing the instrument. All of this combines with a MSRP of $2499, which actually was much lower than I was expecting, due to the fact that many Les Paul’s already cost about that much. 
I’ve been lax. I haven’t posted on anything relating to the Orange Box. I guess I really couldn’t say much more than the 5 bazillion other people who are playing it. I loved TF2, Episode 2 was short but a blast, and Portal was even better than I expected.
Especially the story… and the culmination in the end song. But again, this is definitely not a unique opinion.
But when I found this combining two things I really like… well, that’s enough impetus to post:
Pandora + Slim Devices
Jun 29
Last year, I posted about using Slimserver to stream your music collection from home to work (or anywhere). Slim Devices developed the Slimserver application mainly to interact with their Squeezebox devices, but were kind enough to allow anyone to use the app to try it out without owning any products. Back then, I wasn’t too interested in owning one of their devices beyond a possible convenience factor.
But recently, Slim Devices has incorporated Pandora service into the Squeezebox. This makes it much more attractive. Pandora is a web-based music service that utilizes the Music Genome Project. Basically, you tell Pandora what kind of music you like, and based on thousands of other people’s ratings and connections, Pandora will choose and play music that you will also (probably) enjoy. Last.fm operates on the same kind of principle, with added tag support. I have used Pandora in the past and it works very well. I use Last.fm more often because I appreciate the interface and tagging more, but both are functionally very similar.
With this merging of the two technologies, the Squeezebox moves beyond a convenience choice and becomes alot more droolworthy.
Well, rIaa does declare!
Jun 19
They declare they have “contained” music piracy.
Huzzah for them! They sure have a proper bead on all the happenings on the cybertown intarweb.
Because usenet, irc, and ftps just dried up and went away, AMIRITE? of their own accord, even!!
Apparently, he either got a really good deal on his record sales (I can see this as a record company PR move), or he got shafted on his digital media part of the the contract.
Tim Sloane of Ijamsville, MD asks: Al, which of these purchasing methods should I use in order to make sure the most profit gets to you: Buying one of your albums on CD, or buying one of your albums on iTunes?
I am extremely grateful for your support, no matter which format you choose to legally obtain my music in, so you should do whatever makes the most sense for you personally. But since you ASKED… I actually do get significantly more money from CD sales, as opposed to downloads. This is the one thing about my renegotiated record contract that never made much sense to me. It costs the label NOTHING for somebody to download an album (no manufacturing costs, shipping, or really any overhead of any kind) and yet the artist (me) winds up making less from it. Go figure.
The last week has been a hunt for me, to find a streaming mp3 server that I like enough to stick with.
At work, I have been lazy (Big shocker there). For the past many months I have just been using the free Launchcast from Yahoo to listen to music at work. I know the musicphiles out there wince at that, asiits mostly mainstream music. But i don’t to care too much at work, since I’m not “actively” listening, and they have enough songs I like to keep me happy. They have also greatly improved their discography in the last couple months. I was especially happy when they added most of the remastered Rush albums, which was one of my biggest pet peeves with the service. They cut me off on their free service though, as I had listened to too many that month.
So I looked for streaming mp3 servers. I had used edna many times in the past. Which worked well for 128kbit mp3s, but anything larger would skip badly. This is because my upload bandwidth is 384kbs (barely), and that can only carry 128kbit streams with any regularity. Recently I started using Streamsicle, which boatss a slicker web interface and will automatically generate playlists and start shuffling things when you don’t have anything chosen. This also had the bandwidth problem as well with higher quality streams.
So I started looking for downsampling/transcoding streamers. I didn’t really want to run a Shoutcast server, as I have done that in the past and was a bit too involved for my personal listening. I tried the ml_www plugin for Winamp. It is very nice that it is included into Winamp and can use the Media Library, but its web interface is slow and leaves much to be desired, and it doesn’t downsample.
Finally (after a few others that I looked into like Andromeda, Zina, Ampache, etc.) I tried one that I had looked into in the past but nver really tested it out fully. It’s called SlimServer. It is actually made to be used with their hardware called a Squeezebox, which will take music from your PC and play it through your stereo or whatever with a nice display. Luckily it also works like a charm for streaming to any PC, and they encourage it to be used that way. Best of all, it’s completely free. And, the clencher, is that it downsamples on the fly using LAME. You have to find install the LAME files yourself due to licensing issues, but that’s easily done. Not only does it downsample mp3s, but it will transcode from different compression types on the fly. I’ve tested it with FLAC and Musepack (mpc) and it will stream those as mp3 perfectly. This program is extremely easy to setup and has a nice little configuration menu on its generated webpage. It scans and categorizes your music very quickly and shuffles your playlists on the fly with each addition (I like that alot).
So, hopefully this saves someone some trouble in finding a good way to stream from home.
(I stress the one in someone!)
