6 posts tagged “audio”

Microsoft, please cease all efforts to compete in the portable music player/online music store space. You're embarassing yourselves.

I remember a time, early on in the iPod's domination, when some bigwig or other at Microsoft slagged off the iTunes Store ecosystem, saying it didn't give customers choice. It didn't take them long to release the Zune and the Zune Marketplace, effectively copying the Apple model wholesale... albeit totally ineffectively.

Oh, and by the way, early on the Zune couldn't play files from Microsoft's partners' stores that used their similar but incompatible PlaysForSure DRM. Oopsies! Needless to say, the devices didn't sell well, but that may be because they were only available in the US, and looked like they were fashioned out of Bakelite.

Then when Apple announced that it was trying to get rid of the DRM the record labels had insisted on, Microsoft were caught on the hop and fumbled a response.

And now their latest bullshit. Now they're trying to put the boot to the iPod by saying their Zune Pass allows you to fill your Zune for less than iTunes allows you to fill your iPod:

http://www.zunepass.net/?WT.mc_id=Display-MMN#/videos

Many, many, many things they neglect to mention here.

1. If you cancel your Zune Pass membership, you do not own that music. You get ten songs free every month, and that's that.
2. They suggest that you can only fill an iPod with music from iTunes. I pay just ten bucks more than their Zune Pass and get 100 DRM-free MP3s from eMusic every month. I also buy CDs, with prices as low as $7 a disc - far less than the $1 per song they quote for the iPod.
3. Not all of the songs in their library are even available with the Zune Pass.
4. Song purchases are slightly cheaper with the Zune Marketplace, but you have to buy fucking point cards in blocks of 400 at a time to shop on their store. You can't use a credit card directly.

I'm not an Apple fanboy. I have many criticisms about their devices and software. However, Microsoft are constantly ragging on them while totally glossing over their own more abundant flaws. The Zune HD looks like an attractive piece of hardware, certainly compared to its siblings, but it is far too little, too late.

What's your favorite TV commercial?
Submitted by MexicanRobot.

This, because it made me fall in love with The Silver Seas.

This is my second favourite song by them...

Their site is borked right now so I can't order my copy, but the new Nine Inch Nails album - Ghosts I-IV - is now available. It's a collection of instrumental music.

Having tested the waters by releasing rapper Saul Williams' album online (an album he produced), NIN frontman Trent Reznor has adopted the digital/physical combination Radiohead were offering and then some. The different versions of the album are:

- Free: Download the first nine songs from the album as unprotected MP3s with PDF artwork.
- $5: Download all thirty-six songs with the PDF.
- $10: Same as the $5 offering, but you also get the album on 2 CDs.
- $75: Same as the $10 offering but with 1 DVD featuring the songs as multitrack audio to remix and 1 Blu-Ray (which I assume contains the songs set to video footage) in fancy packaging.
- $300: The same as the deluxe edition, but with the album on 180 gram vinyl and two artwork prints. Hand numbered and signed by Trent, limited to 2,500 copies.

Although $300 sounds ridiculous to me, especially when the only slightly less cool Radiohead box was $80, it's great that another successful act is embracing the internet mere years after Metallica and Dr Dre spazzed out over Napster... and in such a way that their fans can choose how much the music is worth to them.

As I've mentioned before, when I moved to the US, I had to leave all my CDs behind so I ripped all 11,000+ songs to my portable hard drive and back them up to a second hard drive I bought here. Any new CDs bought since the move have also been ripped to the hard drive - whether Jess bought them or I did - and the number of songs is creeping up.

Today, we both bought a handful of CDs. I got...

- Juno (Official Soundtrack)
- Origin Of Symmetry, Absolution and Black Holes & Revelations by Muse

Jess got...

- Chase This Light by Jimmy Eat World
- The Con and So Jealous by Tegan & Sara

The best part of having such similar tastes is that we can split the cost of buying CDs. So I ripped them and the b-sides to the recent Radiohead single, Jigsaw Falling Into Place, before deciding today was the day to start tackling something I had put off for so long: ripping all the CDs Jess owns that I don't.

There's albums I don't have by bands I like, albums by bands I've never heard of, and albums by bands I personally would never by albums by (I won't mention names in case Jess is embarassed by some of them). I'm guesstimating that there's around 100 CDs to rip in here, at least. By the time I'm done, I'm sure the number of songs wll be over the 14,000 mark.

This is how I'm spending my Sunday.

I spent my Friday at work. I didn't leave the office until 2am as we had to get the two sites we're working on into the staging environment and working ahead of a client demo on Monday. That was fun. I have a few issues to fix tomorrow morning, but nothing scary.

My body wouldn't let me lay in yesterday, so I got up and played some Burnout Paradise. After cleaning the house and watching Waitress (a great film made more poignant by the fact writer/director/co-star Adrienne Shelley was murdered before she got to see the finished product), we went out for dinner and drinks with our friends Jason and Brad.

All in all, it's been a fairly relaxing weekend. Now we're just waiting for Rock Of Love to come on before getting an early night.

So you might hear all these bands talking about how they use Pro-Tools to get that generic, over-produced sound that's really popular with the kids these days. I don't use Pro-Tools for my personal recordings because, well, I can't afford it, but I do use audio devices manufactured by Digidesign sister company M-Audio.

I started out using the Fast Track USB - a small, portable audio device that gives any computer a mic and guitar input. I used it for a while before deciding to upgrade to the Ozone: it's a guitar/mic/MIDI interface housed in a MIDI keyboard... double bonus, as I left my synth back in the UK.

Not long after I got the Ozone, Apple released the latest version of Mac OS X - Leopard. Unfortunately, for some reason the Ozone's driver software wasn't compatible with Leopard. I looked on the M-Audio web site and found a news story that was all "M-Audio welcomes Leopard!" - but it basically said drivers would come at some unknown point in time. Nice welcome.

It happens. I mean, ignoring the fact Apple had been seeding Leopard to hardware and software companies long before it came out... and numerous small, independent software companies got their software working with Leopard at launch... I understand. And heck, Windows Vista came out a whole year before Leopard and the Vista drivers for the Ozone were still in beta.

Anyway, it's three months on and while they've finally released M-Audio drivers for some of their devices, i.e. the most expensive ones, they still don't have drivers for the Ozone or Fast Track USB. And there is no estimated time of arrival or response from their support team when I ask.

I've said it before, but the recording industry is run by a bunch of backwards cowboys.

The Recording Industry Association Of America are up to their usual tricks, suing Arizona resident Jeffrey Howell for being a dirty, rotten pirate. His crime? Copying his 2,000 CDs to his computer. 2,000 CDs he bought. Legally.

The outcome of this case worries me. As someone who owns a lot of CDs (although not 2,000), I would not have been able to move to the US had I had to bring them all over the ocean with me to listen to them. Being able to copy them all to a hard drive that fit into my minimal luggage was a godsend; and being able to have my entire collection on my iPod is vital to me.

Our good friends at the RIAA are trying to suggest that even that is a horrible violation of copyright law. This baffles me for many reasons, but not least because one of their main four members - Sony BMG - is, as I said in a previous post, a subsidiary of one of the major manufacturers of a variety of devices that allow for the copying and playback of copyrighted music.

I cannot vouch for Jeffrey Howell, but I don't make my music collection available using file sharing software. I share a handful of songs using this blog, but almost always telling people to buy the albums they come from (and my playlist tool features Amazon links for every song for that reason). And they're trying to suggest I and others like me are common criminals.

One forum I visit said the RIAA might as well just subpoena the millions of people who own iPods. I would write to them to recommend this, but they and several of their members make it very difficult to contact them online.

If you're reading this and work for the RIAA, I would love to talk to you - as a fan of recorded music - to explain why your current strategy of vilifying music fans is only going to further the sales decline you're witnessing right now. You can cling desperately to the old world all you want, digital audio is the future and consumers aren't going to re-purchase their music digitally when there is no valid reason for them to do so.

Update: Turns out Howell is being sued for illegal filesharing after all, but the RIAA is still going off on this whole "ripping your CDs is illegal" thing.