Month: June 2004

The Economist: disk-based music players are the future of portable music

The meaning of iPod

“As anyone who has got one of these players will know, if you haven’t got the right music then you’d rather not listen to any music at all. So the iPod really changes the game because you can always guarantee that the thing you want to listen to is there. Apple was right to bet that this was something people were prepared to pay more money for.”

The article is premium content and I’m not a premium subscriber, but the print edition is quite clear: Apple’s strategy was designed to let you take all your music with you, rather than making your choose. Flash memory players won’t let you do that yet, and with 100,000 units of the ipod Mini pre-sold, even the smaller model — 25% smaller than the original model — is a winner. Couple that with Apple’s customary attention to stylistic detail and a pioneering interface, and nothing else comes close.

2 out of 14

The New York Times > Washington > Procurement: White House Officials and Cheney Aide Approved Halliburton Contract in Iraq, Pentagon Says:

[I]n the fall of 2002, in the preparations for possible war with Iraq, the Pentagon sought and received the assent of senior Bush administration officials, including the vice president’s chief of staff, before hiring the Halliburton Company to develop secret plans for restoring Iraq’s oil facilities, Pentagon officials have told Congressional investigators.

 Fourteen Defining Characteristics Of Fascism:

9. Corporate Power is Protected – The industrial and business aristocracy of a fascist nation often are the ones who put the government leaders into power, creating a mutually beneficial business/government relationship and power elite.

[ . . . ]

13. Rampant Cronyism and Corruption – Fascist regimes almost always are governed by groups of friends and associates who appoint each other to government positions and use governmental power and authority to protect their friends from accountability. It is not uncommon in fascist regimes for national resources and even treasures to be appropriated or even outright stolen by government leaders.”

I found a bug

FreshPorts — devel/gettext – commit details

This has been annoying me since March, I think, and I finally managed to get it resolved. It didn’t take the FreeBSD team all that time: I only sent in the problem report a few days ago, and it got fixed quite quickly — hours — once someone took a look at it.

Imagine if this had happened to a user of proprietary systems? Oh wait, it does . . .

the cost of fighting the RIAA

In an earlier post, I pondered some questions about how the Electras — John Kerry’s garage band from 1961 — can have their material re-released while other stuff languishes in the vaults, what if they didn’t want it re-released (who owns it, in other words), and since the Beastie Boys’ new CD has DRM on it, why can’t they fight it?

I took my questions to Larry Lessig and his replies to the Electras questions pointed to the usual vexatious copyright issues, but I was surprised at the DRM response. He said it likely wasn’t worth the cost, and when I asked for clarification — monetary or political — he said ‘political, sadly.’
Continue reading “the cost of fighting the RIAA”

metadata

Albums in MP3 Format (Sun Jun 13 21:17:21 2004)

I spent some time cleaning up the lack of useful ID3 tags in my iTunes music collection. When you rip from vinyl to mp3, cddb won’t help you. (Caveat: there are some tools that purport to do all that for you: given an LP, they will look up the track names, break the tracks on timed boundaries, and write out your choice of file formats with well-formed names. I have never gotten any of it to work.)

Morbus’ script does a nice job of organizing all this stuff, but his collection is not at all like mine. I have quite a few single tracks and partial albums (on Led Zep’s ‘four symbols’ LP, “When the levee breaks” is the only decent track, as far as I’m concerned, so the I didn’t even rip the rest of it.)

I made a couple of small mods to the script and sent a diff to Morbus. One of them was the option to add your Amazon affiliate tag to the Comments field in the ID3 tags: this means when you run iTunes2HTML against your iTunes library, the HTML page would have your ID and you might pick up a buck or two.

Morbus rightly points out that hardcoding your affiliate ID in the ID3 tag links the file back to you. I hadn’t thought of that, but the modification I made makes it possible to preserve your anonymity: it allows you to populate the Comments field with URLs but the affiliate ID would be appended only when you run the iTunes2HTML script.

proof that it’s all about the money?

So RCA can find and re-release masters of John Kerry’s 1961 garage band. And whoever’s selling it is charging “only” $14 a copy.

Boing Boing: The Electras: John Kerry’s high school band rocks out:
“Due to increasing intrest, RCA has re-released the Electras’ album and you can buy it for $14 (previously, it was nearly impossible to find). It’s crazy that RCA kept the masters in their catalog for all this time. But you never know when the bass player from some […] garage band might get nominated for President.”

So think of how many artists whose work languishes in the vaults while the RIAA cartel works on alienating as many of their customers as they can. Nothing against the Electras, but I’m sure there are artists with more commercial and aesthetic appeal tucked away.

New Beasties disc has DRM — Fight! For your right! To cooo-oopy!
The Beastie Boys’ new CD, To the Five Boroughs, has DRM on it that prevents you from ripping it or making a copy for your car. I got the MP3s last week — it’s a great album — and was going to buy the CD while I’m in the US this week, but now I think I’ll just erase the MP3s and not bother. If the Beasties wanna treat me like a crook, I don’t want to be their customer.

Note that the only thing that this DRM is doing here is pissing off the honest fans who want open CDs; the DRM on the CD didn’t stop my source from making me a set of MP3s. In other words, if you plan on listening to the new disc on your iPod or laptop, you’re better off downloading a copy made by a cracker and posted on Kazaa — if you buy it in a shop, you’re going to have to go through the lawbreaking rigamarole of breaking the DRM yourself.

I always hear record execs whining that they “can’t compete with free” — but maybe the real competitive disadvantage is that they’re selling a product that’s less useful than the one being served up on P2P nets.

Link

(Thanks, Jon!)

Update: Ian sez, “Hi, I’m not sure who posted re: Beastie Boys copy protection, but I just spoke with Mike D and their management and they wanted me to pass along that a) This is all territories except the US and UK — US and UK discs do not have this protection on them; b) All EMI CDs are treated this way, theirs isn’t receiving special treatment; c) They would have preferred not to have the copy protection, but weren’t allowed to differ from EMI policy.” [Boing Boing Blog]

Questions come to mind here:

* what if Kerry or one of the other Electras didn’t want this re-released? Would they be able to block it?

* What if they wanted to give it away under a Creative Commons license?

* why can’t a successful group like the Beastie Boys take control of their material and tell the record company where they can put their DRM?

The answer to these of course is copyright: neither a group of pioneering neophytes like the Electras or savvy pranksters like the Beasties can escape signing over the copyright in their recordings to The Man.

cleaning up old vinyl

As I wander through my old vinyl, converting it to digital recordings, I am trying to ensure I get the best recordings I can. Even the smallest dust, the finest hair, can make a mess of things. It seems to me there must be a solution (pun intended) for this problem.

What I have been doing it using the old school DiscWasher brush with filtered water. I either drip some onto the brush or gently spray the vinyl and then use the brush. It seems to work OK, but I wonder if anyone has tried any kind of carbonation to get into the grooves and lift out the goodies without leaving any deposits. My guess is a professional outfit would do something like that with a good washing afterwards.

On a somewhat related note, my new iPod earbuds are so good, I’m thinking a lot of the digital music I hear is converted from vinyl just like I’m doing. Aural hallucinations are possible, but on some, I’m sure I can hear the scratchy leadin tracks oldsters like me can remember.