A few days of misc

Thursday, October 18, 2007 ~ 9 Comments

OK, a conscious decision to not think about this blog has meant a fair amount of stuff is getting ‘done’. But I won’t bore you with the minutiae of the past few days as it mainly consisted of shuffling stuff about (mainly into loft), a fair amount of tidying up, a large amount of throwing crap out, and a growing pile of stuff to be “put in car to take to charity shop”. You know how it is.

Aside from that a few things have floated to the top of the pool of things “to be considered”, whilst others have merely skimmed the surface leaving only minor ripples in … yeah, enough of that..

Some thoughts from the past few days:

1. I am really REALLY beginning to miss running, starting physio on knee next week, and dieting has started (ish). Hoping to lose weight, tone up, and whatnot before I start pounding the pavement again. Considering not running until next year to give me a chance to improve other areas first. Thoughts?
2. Hard drive enclosures - I have two large hard drives sitting dormant in my old PC. Whilst looking for enclosures I spotted some ‘media capable’ ones with various outputs and gubbins. Anyone got something like this? Is it worth it? I’m thinking: download TV episode in HD, copy to media enclosure, watch on HD TV. Yay or nay?
3. Bluetooth mouse - I am still loving the MacBook (alas I can’t make it my main machine) but have never enjoyed using a trackpad. So I’m in the market for a bluetooth mouse. A quick Google found me the Logitech V270 which looks OK but, of course, I’d love to hear your suggestions. No cables please (duh), and I need two buttons!
4. Leopard - new version of the Apple operating system out on 26th of this month. £80 from Amazon.
5. Speaking of paying, after downloading In Rainbows for £0.00, I’ve since been back to offer the princely sum of £7.43. I think that’s fair.
6. Ohh yeah, I’m now, as of Wednesday, 34. Birthdays are becoming increasingly pointless, I think my 35th may be the last I acknowledge (more on this later).
7. Cape Apple and Mango juice is delicious. Alas the packaging is cack and it’s impossible to pour it without “glugging” and splashing juice all over the place. Me does not like wiping up in the morning (wait, that sounds worse than it is…).
8. Linux - old PC lying dormant (see point 1), so maybe a chance to play with.. Ubuntu? No idea where to start though, pointers welcomed.
9. This weekend will continue the decluttering and should see me finally finished with ripping all my CDs to MP3 and most of them will be stashed in the loft. That means I’ll have 6 Benno CD towers (from IKEA) which I would like to find a use for… creative suggestions welcomed.

Normal service will be resumed at some point, although I do have another blog you know, and I am still twittering away like an idiot.

A pound of guilt

Thursday, October 11, 2007 ~ 9 Comments

Needless to say, portions of the internet are abuzz, discussing the ins, outs and possible impact of the way Radiohead have handled their recent album sales (they are allowing the buyer to set the price when downloading the MP3s, and yes, you can set the price to zero - more on that here).

Having heard on the radio that the band won’t be releasing (at least not in the short term) the sales figures, I am starting to wonder why they did it. Aside from the obvious “all the money goes to us and not a record label” reason of course. Protecting their artistic investment is fairly valid, rather than having earlier versions and whatnot floating around the internet, and it is pretty obvious that the band don’t place value on chart positions and so on.

However they must have known that releasing their album, without a record label, through their own website, would be looked on as a test case for a way forward in the industry. There seems to be the view that all record labels are evil, and the people that work for them are idiots. That is patently not true, yet they do seem to be slow to react, and let’s face it, there is hardly a lack of opinion in this area…

So, if Radiohead aren’t going to release figures then the record labels won’t find out if it was a success or, and you never know, if it failed. More importantly the same holds true for other bands.

But, on the flip side of this, the way people are dealing with this neatly focusses attention back on the consumer. By allowing you to set the price of purchase, the price of your integrity, then perhaps this is a (rather bizarre) yardstick of how humanity is fairing.

When it comes to digital content, it’s not that hard to find out where to go to be able to steal it. It’s a little like entering a new neighbourhood and learning which bars to hang out in to get the best score… umm… allegedly. However many people, myself included, argue that what we are really doing is previewing the content first, before purchasing it later on.

As an aside: TV shows are an odd one. I downloaded the entire first series of Heroes from the internet, but as I pay my license fee (and it’s shown on BBC2, yes?) then surely I’ve already paid for it?? Ditto for 24 and Smallville which I pay for with my Sky package and by being blasted with adverts. No?

Music wise, this kind of ‘preview downloading’ is akin to the days when you could stand in your local record store and ask to listen to the latest Adam Ant album. However as no-one shops in stores these days, and typically most online music stores only offer a 30sec snippet from which you can preview a track (completely useless for a lot of Pink Floyd tracks, many of which seem to just be starting around the 25sec mark), then currently this is the only way to replicate such a service.

Except it’s not, is it. Services like Pandora, and Last.fm allow you to search for, and listen to, entire tracks and albums. So why do people still download them?

Because it’s free.

It doesn’t cost anything (internet access prices aside), and you have no emotional buy in when you download music tracks from the internet. You only have your guilt to deal with and the price that you pay for that varies from person to person.

The question then becomes, how many people will suffer the guilt, and how many will “do the right thing”?

How much for free?

Tuesday, October 9, 2007 ~ 13 Comments

Tomorrow, in case you hadn’t heard, Radiohead release their new album. You can purchase it to download from their website as they don’t currently have a record deal. You can also purchase a £40 box set with additional tracks, artwork, vinyl and so on, and I believe the band are in talks with a record label with a view to releasing the album on CD sometime next year.

The big news is, of course, that the band are letting you choose how much you want to buy the tracks for.. and you CAN choose £0.00 (although you still have to pay 45p for processing the payment, bloody banks).

I’m a fan so I’ll be getting the tracks but the question is, of course, will I pay for them?

A lot of people have said they will, and a lot of people and artists in the music industry think this could be a tipping point, presuming the band make money from this of course. If it sells enough, the record labels might just take notice and might, maybe, concede that there is a slim chance they have been a little rash and that, possibly, there are other ways to treat the music fans out there. Maybe. Sort of.

Me? I won’t be paying a thing. I will log onto the Radiohead website at some point, presuming it doesn’t spend half the day on its arse, and offer to pay £0.00 for the tracks. I’ll download them and listen to them with no guilt whatsoever.

Why no guilt? Because I do this already. I download albums, without paying, and listen to them. If I really enjoy the tracks then yes, I do then go and pay for them.

But that doesn’t always happen. Why doesn’t it always happen? Because I’m lazy and it’s hard and I’ve got to jump through hoops and, even once I’ve done that, I am then restricted as to what I can do with the tracks I’ve just purchased. So, what I tend to do is purchase the tracks, or CD, and then… continue to use the tracks I download (unless they are low quality). I have CDs on my shelves which have never been opened, and I know for a fact a couple of them still have the cellophane wrapper intact.

However, Radiohead have given me a way to continue to sample music, and have made it very easy for me to pay if I like it. If I choose to purchase the Radiohead album (which I will I know, so this is a rather academic discussion but I’m trying to make a point here..) I will go back to their website, “buy” the tracks and then NOT bother downloading them again.

Which, I guess, still brings me round to the question of how MUCH I’ll offer to buy the tracks for, £1 a track? Less? More?

Considering the eyes of the music industry are watching this ‘event’ very keenly, I’m almost tempted to pay well over the odds as a weird kind of protest. I’ll be sticking two fingers up and proclaiming: “See!!! We WILL spend money if you make it easy for us and don’t kibosh the tracks with DRM nonsense, don’t you get it?!”

Nothing is free, everyone knows that (ok ok, apart from air and stuff like that, don’t be so bloody pedantic) so it ultimately comes down to a single question: How much should you pay for something that is free?

Let Go

Thursday, September 13, 2007 ~ 11 Comments

I’ve mentioned this before, and much as I hate to go on, it’s a subject I want to try and tackle one more time. I’m going to focus on one particular application, but the principals are applicable across many, they are not limited to a particular type of file but there are some thresholds which factor into this discussion.

Specifically, I want to discuss iTunes and the MP3 phenomenon.

I don’t want to discuss whether MP3s are ‘killing CDs’ or why Ogg Vorbis is a much better format, nor do I wish to bemoan the features of iTunes. However I think it’s easier to talk about a specific example, than to talk about “library applications” (applications which will act as the interface to your files) and “numerous files” (as we are only talking about applications that handle 1000s of files at a time, not those that are concerned with one file at a time). So, with that in mind…

Whether you like it or not, MP3 is the de facto choice for music files. It has won the battle and is unlikely to be replaced and, as such, the number of MP3 files is only going to increase. Making the decision of which file format to use was something I didn’t really bother with, I just followed the crowd. Many others have done exactly the same.

Over the years as I’ve slowly added MP3s to my music collection, I’ve swayed between different MP3 applications, FooBar, Winamp, and others. Winamp held the floor for quite a while, and when they added a library function to help organise the thousands of MP3 files that soon accumulated I started to rethink how I handled my MP3 collection.

In the Winamp days, I spent a lot of time managing the MP3 files themselves. Making sure the internal information, or tags, correctly listed the artist, track, album and so on. I would then make sure the files were in appropriately named folders organised by first artist, then album name. Even the filenames themselves were carefully managed and all in all I had a fairly streamlined workflow that kicked in whenever I was ripping a CD to MP3. It used two different applications, one to handle automating the tagging process, another to tidy up any erroneous tags and intelligently rename the files (Tag & Rename if you must know).

Then one day a company called Apple released a version of their iTunes application for Windows. I’d heard a bit about iTunes and, curious as to what all the fuss was about, I downloaded it and gave it a shot. First impressions were not good. It was slow, clunky, ate RAM and, worst of all, it screwed up my carefully managed folders. How very dare it!

After some searching I found some answers to solve that problem, mainly some settings to change but it wasn’t enough. iTunes just wasn’t for me. As far as I was concerned it didn’t fit in my workflow so the application was unsuitable to the way I ‘worked’.

I hadn’t factored in the Apple marketing department though, and soon as I was back in iTunes-land. Why? Mainly because my shiny new 10GB iPod preferred it.

However I was still embedded in my MP3 workflow. Rip, rename, tag, file, repeat. Rip, rename, tag, file, repeat. All my files and folders neatly arranged and tagged. This continued for some time until, and I’ll be honest and admit that I don’t recall exactly when, I had ripped a large number of CDs into iTunes and didn’t have time to properly clean them up. I figured I’d do it later.

A few days later I sat down at the PC, fired up iTunes and searched for the one of the CDs I’d ripped.

That’ll be about when it hit me. That’ll be the precise moment I realised that my renaming and filing days were over, as iTunes found my music and started playing it, based purely on the tags containing the artist, album and track information. It was, laughably, a light bulb moment. The sudden realisation that I could just leave the filenaming and storage location to iTunes and largely not really care what it did as long as I could search for a track by any of the variety of information held within the MP3 file itself.

Since then I have done exactly that. Other than specifying the parent folder into which iTunes rips or copies MP3s, the underlying folder structure, for all I care, may be a complete mess. I really don’t care as I interface with the files through iTunes.

I know there are some of you out there that are baulking at this idea and I will state that it is not solely because I use iTunes. I think the same revelation would’ve occurred if I’d been using Windows Media Player, or if the Winamp Library facility had had a search function.

I now treat my photos in a similar manner, worrying only about the metadata associated with them (location, date, occasion) and not really caring how they are stored.. Picasa takes care of that for me (and if I could find a way to get iPhoto to scan networked folders I’d have a shot with it but it seems to insist on copying the photos to the drive first).

And finally, with reference back to my post on RSS feeds, as Google Reader (my tool of choice) now allows you to search through your feeds, what does it matter if I have more than 1000+ unread items in any folder. The folder isn’t important, searching for content is.

I agree this kind of approach to data isn’t for everyone but, in our current climate of “too much”, anything that minimises the amount of work that I need to do for menial tasks like organising my ever expanding music collection is very much a GOOD THING. There is, of course, an argument for cutting back and decluttering your digital life, but that’s a different discussion.

As Obi-Wan once said, “Let go”.

Covers

Sunday, September 2, 2007 ~ 31 Comments

I remain unashamed by my musical tastes but there is a quirk in there which has recently surfaced. Regardless of the genre into which they are dragged, I do have a love of cover versions. At the moment Mark Ronson’s album, Version, seems to float to the top of my playlist. The reworking on Toxic, originally by Britney Spears, a favourite, closely followed by a version of one of my favourite Radiohead tracks, Just.

Previously, cover versions were the remit of live acts and the occasional B-Side. However, in the past few years, and this may just be because I’m starting to notice them, there have been a spate of entire albums of cover versions. Particularly of note are the Nouvelle Vague albums, taking punk tracks and reworking them into lounge acts with a little sprinkling of je ne sais quois, and the Johnny Cash American Recordings albums.

But what is the appeal?

For me it’s similar to hearing a track played live, hearing, sometimes for the first time, a distinct nuance or the use of a specific instrument. Such things are sometimes only revealed during a live gig, with the sound mix adjusted and the volume playing a significant part, or perhaps the arrangement is different, there are a variety of reasons I guess.

Anyway, I’ve started compiling a list of my favourite cover versions:

• I Will Survive - Cake (original by Gloria Gaynor)
• Feeling Good - Muse (original by Nina Simone)
• Wind Cries Mary - Jamie Cullum (original by Jimi Hendrix)
• Heart beats - Jose Gonzalez (original by The Knife)
• Just can’t get enough - Nouvelle Vague (original by Depeche Mode)
• Just - Mark Ronson (original by Radiohead)
• You were always on my mind - Pet Shop Boys (original by Elvis)
• Personal Jesus - Johnny Cash (original by Depeche Mode)

Of course, I’m not the only person to come up with a list of best cover versions, but I’m sure you all have some suggestions.

So, have at it, the comments are open, what’s your favourite cover version?

Recently I have…

Tuesday, July 24, 2007 ~ 6 Comments

… laughed until I cried at the way Louise’s cousin tells stories. She is hilarious.

… bought some new music. More on that in another post though, but it’s been a while. I can always tell when I’m need a new ‘fix’ because I invariably start listening to old favourites on a regular basis.

… been enjoying the chorizo and black pudding tapas that Louise made. Recipe may follow if she can remember what she put in it.

… been cursing Sky+. I had recorded the European Grand Prix and settled down on Sunday evening to watch it (whilst flicking back and forth to the Open golf). What a race! 5 laps to go and Alonso is harassing Massa to try and take the lead when up pops a message on-screen. “End of Recorded Programme”. WTF?! OK, there were some delays because of the rain but I thought Sky+ could handle programmes that ran over their alloted time. Feckers.

… been loving the BBC and Peter Alliss. Like Murray Walker, he will be sadly missed when he decides to hang up the microphone. One choice phrase from Sunday, describing the impact of the championship on local businesses and of their return to normality: “The local newspaper shop will cancel the order for 9000 papers and go back to the usual order of 10 copies of the Dundee Courier and a copy of Men Only for the vicar.”

… sent away two race applications, both a little late so I might not get a place. One 5K in Hamilton in a couple of weeks time, the other a 10K in Cumbernauld in September.

… enjoyed the professionally quashed double-take I received whilst getting fitted for my kilt for my friends wedding. When I asked when the kilt would be ready to pick up, the salesman said he would just phone “Ehh.. Mr. Humphrey I guess… or is it Mr. Beattie, it doesn’t say”. To which I replied “Well yes, either of them would do”. He twitched slightly before glossing over it. Well done Mr. Salesman.

… spent most of the last two days alone. Well not alone but as good as, for “she who must be obeyed” has had her nose stuck in some book or other. Apparently joking about “just reading the last chapter” is verbotin.

… been writing up some posts for my other blog but struggling to finish them for some reason, just can’t quite pull the threads together properly.

… “enjoyed” a hill session on Sunday morning. Apparently some of our jogScotland coaches have sadistic tendencies! I thought they were all nice and fluffy but no, give them a whistle and soon you are sprinting up hills, repeatedly, until all the oxygen on the planet disappears and your legs go all wobbly. Jim, the coach who took us, said that we’d look back on it and realise we’d enjoyed it, everyone laughed. Dammit though, he’s right.

How does it know?!

Tuesday, June 26, 2007 ~ 10 Comments

In preparation for painting on Sunday, I filled the iPod with a random selection of ‘general listening’ music, or as Louise said “I hope you didn’t just fill it with your crap…”. As it turned out it was a pretty good selection, even if we only got through 108 of 784 tracks..

Fast forward to last night, I dash into the house, change into my running stuff, grab said iPod and dash back out the door (big dark clouds, and I wanted to try and remain slightly dry you see, yeah yeah I know, I’m a big wuss). I jump in the car and head off to the park and I’m halfway there before I realise that I’ve not changed the music on the iPod.

Oh well, nothing for it now, I think to myself and head off on my run.

First track, Take it Easy by The Eagles; “Well I’m a runnin’ down the road, tryin ta loosen my load..”. I laugh a little to myself.

20 minutes later, right after a large hill, Robert Palmer, Addicted to Love: “You’re runnin’ at a different speed,
Your heart beats in double time… Your throat is tight, you can’t breathe”. This time I grimace along, ironically.

And I actually think that, gosh, how ironic.. and that gets me thinking about.. bloody hell, the very next track.

I almost stop running in shock.