that’s whacked

Angele Dubeau

Thursday, Oct 30. 2008  –  Category: Music

We went to see Angèle Dubeau & La Pietà at Yoshi’s Jazz Club last night as part of KDFC’s classical concerts in nightclubs series. T’was a fantastic show… she played a concert she called Myths & Legends, with pieces inspired by or based on legends dating back to 200 B.C. On the setlist were a couple of pieces from her new album, Fairy Tale. Specifically, the second track from the album, Lady Caliph was incredible. I’m hardly a classical music critic by any means, but that piece was filled with some of the most moving sounds I’ve ever heard come out of a violin.

The pianist, double bass player, and third violinist were amazing… their facial expressions showed how much they enjoyed playing… even when they weren’t! There was one piece that was sans piano, so the pianist was basically just sitting in her chair for the whole piece… but she sat there looking around at the other players, and you could just sense how much she was into the music and enjoying it. Really really awesome to see that kind of energy in a 9 piece classical concert.

… their final encore piece was a rousing cover of Paint it Black which was absolutely brilliant.

best song i’ve heard this week

Friday, May 16. 2008  –  Category: Music

YouTube video here: Lily Allen – Alfie

seriously had me cracking up when i heard this on 1.FM’s Trance stream just now.

Ooooo deary me,
My little brother’s in his bedroom smoking weed,
I tell him he should get up cause it’s nearly half past three.
He can’t be bothered ’cause he’s high on THC.
I ask him very nicely if he’d like a cup of tea,
I can’t even see him cause his room is so smokey,
Don’t understand how one can watch so much TV,
My baby brother Alfie how I wish that you could see.

magnatune mostly complete

Thursday, May 1. 2008  –  Category: Music, Songbird

worked some more on the magnatune store interface for Songbird. got the following up:

it’s neat. you can browse the 7600+ tracks available at magnatune and play the full length of the song exactly as if it were a local library. right now clicking the “buy this track” button pops up a new browser tab and takes you to the page to enter your info to purchase the MP3 (without the magnatune nag voice at the end of each track that you hear when you play directly from the store)

they have an API for doing purchases directly, but it involves transmitting a credit card number via a URL. ick. i need to test to see if it accepts those variables via POST instead of GET to make it a little more secure. if that works, then this would be pretty neat. if i can get a better integrated purchase experience, then i’ll consider this complete.

update: uploaded the add-on here

magnatune for the bird

Wednesday, Apr 30. 2008  –  Category: Music, Songbird

I first heard of Magnatune at LUG Radio Live where they had a booth setup. I didn’t get a chance to check them out until yesterday, and it’s a pretty cool site. There’s some neat electronica up there along with the other usual genres. Their business model looks pretty interesting too, along with their CC friendliness and promotion of music sharing.

I started mucking about with a Songbird add-on last night and got something working a few hours ago that builds an additional “Magnatune” library in Songbird to represent all the tracks available on Magnatune. You can play them directly from the remote track (yay open web!) currently. I plan to add a way to purchase the track so it can be added to the local library as well (which should also allow it to be sync’d after purchase then too). It’s been an interesting challenge… and I’m still running into a few hiccups, I suspect because of the way I now effectively have two local libraries (which shouldn’t be that big a deal since devices, etc. all have their own libraries from Songbird’s perspective).

Anyway, it’s been a fun project so far… and I have to say, there’s something cool about having all 7600+ Magnatune tracks available for direct play within Songbird. I’ll definitely post this to the addons site when I’m done.

french celtic rock?

Wednesday, Apr 16. 2008  –  Category: Music, Songbird

bizarrely intriguing.

i came across Bézèd’h's Ton jour viendra album clicking through Jamendo yesterday and have found it pretty catchy.

the french celtic rock sound is definitely unique. and hey, it’s creative commons licensed with 192kbps MP3 and Ogg Vorbis torrents available. now this is what we’re always harping about as the Open Media Web.

rockin’.

i sent $10 their way. the best part?

Donation to the artist Bézèd'h       9.50 USD
Promotion on Jamendo.com    0.44 USD
Tax     0.06 USD
Total with taxes    10 USD

how awesome is that? Bézèd’h gets $9.50! that shit ain’t happening on iTunes, i can tell you that much.

the timeliness of the Open Media Web

Thursday, Jan 3. 2008  –  Category: Music, Songbird

Songbird has been pushing the concept of the Open Media Web for a while now, and openmediaweb.org’s first interview with Lucas Gonze is now live.

The issue of open-ness and captive data is especially timely given Scoble’s Facebook-ban. Granted, Scoble’s case is more around who owns what data – but it boils down to the same idea: it’s never as easy to get data out as it is to get data in. Web services should capture audiences and users through continuous innovation, not by holding our data usage.

Gonze’s primary message is that all media on the web should have canonical, authoritative URLs. This is not too surprising a message from the creator of the XSPF playlist format. I guess I’m conflicted here since protecting and charging for content is a reality of life. I’d love nothing more than to see album tracks by artists published for free with revenue coming from fan contributions and tours, but the reality is that isn’t happening. So music stores and publishers/labels will continue to charge for content. But notice that Gonze’s message doesn’t say that content should be free. In fact, expanding upon this, I’d love to see platforms that provide canonical URLs with standards-based APIs for basic media functions and commerce, e.g. a way for all music stores to provide:

1. an authoritative canonical URL to each artist, album, and track
2. a standard API to preview a 30 second sample
3. a standard API to authenticate (OpenID/OAuth?) with another ecommerce/financial site (PayPal, Bank, etc.) to purchase track
4. a standard API to download said track to media library

This same API would be applied (only without step 3) to free/CC-licensed/etc. content on the web thus enabling media players like Songbird to provide standard and uniform ways to interact with, sample, purchase, and acquire music thus freeing up labels and music stores to focus on innovation and creativity rather than the dull drudgery of running an ecommerce store.

girl talk – night ripper

Monday, Dec 24. 2007  –  Category: Music

heard a few tracks from the night ripper album by girl talk last night, ended up being compelling enough to go buy and wow. what a great album.

i don’t think i’ve ever heard an album with so much sampling, it’s fantastic. the mixing of all the different samples is genius. to hear some old Stevie Wonder overlaid with DJ Funk transitioning into Elastica is just brilliant.

highly recommend this album.

If Asimov produced electronica….

Friday, Oct 12. 2007  –  Category: Music

… it would probably look something like Hexstatic’s “When Robots Go Bad”

I’ve been listening to this all morning and it’s thumpingly cool. Makes me want to bang on things.

voices of the lifestream

Thursday, Sep 20. 2007  –  Category: Music

ocremix has always interested me… what can i say, i’m a fan of video game music i guess.

what kid from the 80s/90s can’t remember their favourite video game songs? everytime i went paintballing in college, strains of Contra went through my brain. i remember wandering through a dark castle in Switzerland and the Castlevania soundtrack seriously popped into my head. and everytime i smashed my head into a brick wall, Super Mario wafted through my ears.

okay, maybe not the last one – but i did have the SMB themesong as my ringtone for quite a while.

anyway, 1997 was memorable for a few things for me. graduating high school was one i guess. but much more memorable was Final Fantasy 7. probably one of the best Final Fantasies ever, and it had a truly amazing soundtrack. Square has always had good soundtracks, but for me, FF7 was the best. so i was super-psyched to see ocremix announce its Final Fantasy VII: Voices of the Lifestream remix album, a whopping 4 CDs of video game musical goodness.

what video game geek can’t love that?

anyway, after finally grabbing the 2.3 GB torrent, i’m just finally starting to check it out now. so far, it’s been great. Deliverance of the Heart is a great track.

hanako oku

Monday, Jun 11. 2007  –  Category: Music

on our honeymoon, wendy and i spent a couple of nights in tokyo. on one of the nights, as we passed through the Shinjuku station, we heard a really innocent female voice singing. and innocent is probably about the best word i can describe it with… especially as it floated across an insanely busy metro station.

in the middle of the metro plaza she’d setup an speaker/amp, hooked up to her electric keyboard and microphone and she was singing and playing away. we were absolutely mesmerised by her voice and ended up staying for about 25 minutes or so listening to her perform.

after she was done, she sold a few CDs (which we bought), and that was about the end of that. i ended up looking her up on the net and ended up downloading a few more tunes and buying another CD.

her name is Hanako Oku, you can see one of her music videos here on YouTube.