Max Tyrie’s Hand Made Modest Mouse Video: http://www.woostercollective.com/2007/05/shit_were_diggin_max_tyries_hand_made_mo.html

(Via: Photojojo)

As it is, I’ve already found 3 or 4 standout tracks that are calling out for me to buy full albums directly from the artists, which can’t be a bad thing at all.

whomix – doctor who theme remixes: http://whomix.trilete.net/

What a lot of work – a few select examples also came with the link, with my favourite being the Nyman one:

Nyman: http://whomix.trilete.net/download.php?remixid=45
007: http://whomix.trilete.net/download.php?remixid=167
Flamenco: http://whomix.trilete.net/download.php?remixid=106
Morse: http://whomix.trilete.net/download.php?remixid=97
Piano: http://whomix.trilete.net/download.php?remixid=169
Cyberdisco: http://whomix.trilete.net/download.php?remixid=120
Ambient: http://whomix.trilete.net/download.php?remixid=128

BBC NEWS | Entertainment | Unsigned band make chart history: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/6260995.stm

Number 31. Now I might just have to find out what they sound like, but to be honest that secondary to what they’ve done:

“Murphy added that they had been contacted by a number of big record labels, including one who recently turned them down.”

BBC NEWS | Entertainment | Unsigned band set to crash charts: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/6248535.stm

Unsigned, and tipped to make the UK Top 40: not without plenty of hard work (500 live shows), but with a cracking quote:

“If someone comes along and gives us an offer, we’ll talk to them.

But it depends whether we need it. If we can get enough exposure and get in the top 40 by the end of the week, do we necessarily need a large label?”

Superb ! Sunday could prove to be very interesting.

Canadian Music Creators Coalition: A New Voice: http://www.musiccreators.ca/

This is very satisfying to see: artists signed to (major) labels publicly gathering to point out that the aims and desires of the Artists are not the same as those of Labels themselves.

“…not in our names…” is a very apposite statement indeed, and it behoves the labels to notice that this time it could hurt even more: whilst there appears to be a limitless supply of small-time copyright infringers to sue (even with the public relations damage it entails) there is a much smaller set of artists, and making them rethink their affiliations when contracts are up for renewal could be a very expensive lesson.

Writers Block Live | Blog Archive | The HD Boycott Begins Now: http://writersblocklive.com/part-156

Well said that man, and what is interesting is that this isn’t from an uninformed teenager, but from Apple’s former director of video product marketing.

Again, I tend to sit a little more on the fence, and don’t, per-se, have an issue with the end of analogue content, but I do have a major issue with the idea that only big firms are legal content creators, and that the ‘little people’ are all out to rip them off: have a listen to almost any collection of independent artists online and see how many of them appeal to you more than commercial radio does, and it’s mind numbingly apparent that now more than ever it’s people who tinker in their spare time to satisfy their own creative urges than can create more satisfying content than big business does.

[from Macworld]

LOW MORALE ::: Presents Radiohead Music Video – CREEP: http://www.lowmorale.co.uk/creep/

Wow.

Wow.

Wow.

Now that animation was so well conceived and executed it actually made me forget that it was Flash, and totally blew away more recent work I’ve seen on TV in odd spots (mainly BBC3 and C4) – it was back to the days when bizarre Canadian stuff made its way onto a regular BBC2 spot, back when BBC2 was the place you went to get away from sports coverage…

Of course, I’m now going to have to go and devour the entire web site in some Flash based frenzy of discovery, but my CPU fan has been idle for too long so it could probably use the exercise.

(apologies for anyone who came here from my email about the ‘post before last’ and has found it’s now the ‘post before the post before last’, but it was wandering through Marcus‘ archives and then messing about on Dan’s site that did this.

Thank you !)

The Shure E2c’s are different in concept and are basically earplugs that can make a noise. I ordered mine from iPodWorld at around 10pm on Thursday night for £59 with £3.99 for 1st class recorded delivery and a full, sealed retail blister pack turned up on Saturday morning in a nice sized jiffy bag. Excellent.

So far I’ve only tried the foam adaptors as I read that they are the easiest to fit correctly for novices and only listened to 192kbps MP3 files (ripped from my own CD’s with iTunes) on Nicci’s iPod Shuffle. I’ve not noticed any discomfort, nor have I found them to be lacking in bass which seem to be the major complaints against them: The bass will disappoint if you’re used to the sound from ‘walkman optimised’ headphones as it isn’t large and intrusive, but because of the lack of background noise it doesn’t need to be boosted to be heard, original balance is preserved and there is no boom to the bass to mask out other more subtle sounds.

When no music is playing it is possible to make out sounds from the real world as the isolation isn’t as great as pure foam earplugs (earplugs don’t have a hole in the centre) but as soon as any music starts the relative volumes mean that everything apart from the music simply vanishes. The sound response is one of the most linear that I’ve heard, certainly at this low price point: The Chemical Brothers’s Under the Influence has a great diving bass that sets my sub (and occasionally pictures) rumbling but rather than being a note that drops off in volume as it falls it retains it’s relative place in the mix. The Scribes narration in Philip Glass’s Ahknaten really stands out, with every vocal nuance apparent. The stereo image is also quite remarkable when the sound is just in one channel as the lack of any noise at all in the other ear is most unusual; I hadn’t realised until now the amount of subtle ambient noise that still intruded into even the most engaging track.

The main drawbacks so far: I’m going to have to listen to my original CD’s to decide if 192kbps MP3 is now too low a quality setting for these headphones, which could be expensive in both time and disc space. The other is a much more immediate one: it’s not possible to eat a digestive biscuit whilst listening to music as it sounds as though half a ton of gravel is being dumped right next to my head. Still, that might save some money on snacks…

BBC NEWS | Entertainment | Music | Net label plans music revolution: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/music/4176486.stm

It’s taken long enough: the bottom line is probably that any given act that pushes hard enough to get a contract these days (and isn’t simply a set of manufacturered-to-order puppets) is likely to have mastered the basics of recording and mixing: a couple of thousand pounds for computer and software might well give results that are up to 80 or 90% of the quality of using a full recording studio. Add in the fact that downloads are lossily compressed and it’d probably be hard to tell the results apart, although I’d be the first to admit that an experienced sound engineer would work wonders, are you going to get one for your first single ? No, probably not.

The best bit ? A startlingly honest usage of someone elses talent:

“…artists retain ownership of their masters and copyrights while signed to this label.”

That’s the part that I like the most, as it removes the biggest problem (in my view) of a big label although it could make life hard for independents. Perhaps they have realised that the biggest drain of their profits is paying the army of laywers and politictians, and if they just reduced all legal exposure to next to zero and simply spent on marketing and a really fast internet connection they’d make more money.

Nice to see they’re only 5 to 10 years behind the rest of the planet, then. Now, about the law suits aimed at 9 year olds and the retail price of the music vs the cost of manufacture and the artists profit margins…

Macworld: News: Nine Inch Nails releases GarageBand 2 project: http://www.macworld.com/news/2005/04/15/thehandthatfeeds/index.php?lsrc=mwrss-0405

Wow – that’s more than just one better than releasing music online; now we just need to wait for the first live fan based remix via the internet…

What you need to do is throw caution to the wind, and HexEdit the iTunes.app/Contents/MacOS/iTunes file to change the capitalisation of the strings that iTunes uses to match the MuVo. Beware – this could easily kill iTunes, and has only been tested on a MuVo 64MB model (blue and white, no display – DAP-TD0001).

For iTunes 4.7.1, the strings appear around byte 0×45a9d0 – use the search function on MuVo (ignore the case for ease of typing). Be careful not to add any extra characters, but change the first string from Nomad MuVo to NOMAD MUVO and then change the next string from CREATIVE to Creative. I used HexEdit’s Auto file open mode to take care of resource fork information, and simply saved the file out again.

BBC NEWS | Technology | Musicians ‘upbeat’ about the net: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4067031.stm

Shock Horror ! Muscians are able to think for themselves: maybe the RIAA should sue them next for not making enough money for the labels…

Pretty much all you need to know can be found at Shepmaster’s site, but there are only two pages that matter: how to turn the DVD into AAC files and then how to turn AAC files into stereo audio files.

Do Google for the most current sites, but at the time of writing you can find the 0SEx program here, and the mAC3dec project here. Download and expand both those binary files, shove in a DVD (in my case Koyaanisqatsi), quit any auto-launched DVD player app and start up 0SEx.

The only tricky part is figuring out which Title has the film – each Title can contain many Chapters, so choose the Title that has the same number of Chapter entries as the film inlay says it has scenes. Titles are used to contain menu items as well as the main feature, but in my case the film has 16 Chapters as so is easy to spot. Click on Ti and choose the correct title. If you don’t want all of the film chapters, click on Ch and choose the ones you want. Next, turn off the video decode (click on the Vid button, and click to turn off the tick mark), and then turn off the subtitle extraction (click on the Sub button, and click on each tick). There are menu items under Control that do this for you, if you are feeling more adventurous.

Change the format of the extracted files by clicking on Fmt and choosing Elementary Streams so that the audio comes out in it’s own file (and not in a VOB with no image data), and then click on Seg and choose Chapter, so that each scene is split into a separate file. Then click on BEGIN and choose a destination directory.

Wait a while and you should have a collection of .ac3 files in their own directory – the most useful thing to do is to convert them to .wav or .aiff files whilst downmixing from 5.1 to 2.0 and applying a global volume normalisation. Eh ? Ok: the AC3 files can have a much greater dynamic range than ‘normal’ 16-bit 44.1kHz WAV files, so the Normalising process means that the maximum and minimum volume of each track is noted and used to scale the final WAV/AIFF files so that the audio for the entire album fits comfortably into the range available. Still sounds odd ? Then trust me: without Normalising you will most likely find that the quiet bits are too quiet, and the loud bits too loud for comfortable music listening.

Start up mAC3dec. I’m aiming to playback the final result via iTunes, so choose AIFF from the Format menu, then 44.1kHz from the Sample rate options, tick Normalize and tick Globally, and check that Split Channels is left unticked. Now go to File->Add AC3 and select all of the files that make up your DVD audio. Once they’re loaded, click Start and wait: if you like to see graphical progress bars then make sure you’ve visited the mAC3dec->Preferences menu and unticked the Disable Progress Bar option.

The program will scan through all of the files once to record the volume highs and lows for each track, and then setabout converting them to plain 2.0 (stereo) AIFF files. Once this is complete, do with them what you will ! I opened up iTunes, added the AIFF files to the Library and then selected all of them and used Advanced->Convert Selection to MP3. After all had been converted I deleted the AIFF originals from the Library and added ID3 tags to taste.

Yes, you can skip a step and get mAC3dec to convert from AC3 directly to MP3, but I haven’t had chance to mess with the MP3 encoder in mAC3dec so I can’t vouch for what differences (if any) there are from the iTunes encoder. I quite liked the idea of having the AIFF files around for a while in case I wanted to burn a pure Audio CD from them, but so far haven’t taken that step.

Macworld UK – Online music ‘rewriting the rules’: http://www.macworld.co.uk/news/index.cfm?NewsID=9443

Yup, parts of the music industry are finally starting to get there, but it’s just so painful to watch… Is this just due to (unreasonably) expecting RL companies to move in Internet Time, or has a big ClueStick been applied at last ?

Mind you, it could be another 5 years before a ‘big’ label ‘gets it’.

CNN.com – Star names join Python on Broadway – Jul 7, 2004: http://www.cnn.com/2004/SHOWBIZ/07/07/stage.montypython.reut/index.html

Nice – the casting looks pretty good so far although I think I’ll wait to see if it comes a little closer before I go and see it.

They Might Be Giants – Downloads/News/Shows/Ephemera: http://www.theymightbegiants.com/

Similar pricing structure to the iTunes store (99c/$9.99) but the files come direct from the Artist, are encoded at 256kbps and come DRM-free. Nice.