Thu - September 4, 2008

Vinyl's Come Back


I went to Music Saves the other day and drooled over their collection of new vinyl. Once I'm financially back on my feet, I'd love to start collecting (and paying for) high quality analog recordings. Here's an article talking about it's resurgence.

Another Spin for Vinyl (NYT)

"The ranks of vinyl devotees are growing. Lately, the anachronistic LP has experienced an unlikely spike in sales, decades after the mainstream music industry wrote off the format as obsolete. Major labels are expanding their vinyl offerings for the first time since they left records for dead nearly two decades ago, music executives said."

Posted at 07:44 AM     |

Wed - August 13, 2008

Finally... I have an iPhone!


This has been years in the making. I remember I was so excited when I got my first Palm Phone (Kyocera 7135) with the ability to sync information from my computer (a Mac) to my phone. It was clumsy and inconsistent, but it existed. Even then, I had dreams of Apple reviving something like the Newton, but with the ability to make phone calls. Finally, after all these years my dream has come true. From the Kyocera, I went to a Treo 600, then to a Treo 650. Hard to believe it's been almost 3 years since I upgraded to to the 650, when I thought it was the best phone ever. :-) How times change.

Of course some of the best features of the iPhone are music related, with Pandora's iPhone application being one of my favorite! There's also YouTube (obviously), LastFM, Eventful, and this new website / app I have yet to figure out called BlueHaze, involving the ability to view/submit concert photos being taken in your area. Something worth looking into. I'm hoping that the camera for the iPhone will fare slightly better in low-light concert venues. Hell, with the Wordpress application (if I change my blog location), I could even do live blogging from my phone... (we'll see).

My ONLY complaint at this time is the lack of ability to just listen to any artist I want. I can't navigate to their MySpace page because Flash isn't supported on the iPhone yet. Any suggestions on any apps or sites that would work on the iPhone, just let me know!

Posted at 07:45 AM     |

Tue - August 12, 2008

MP3 technology, are we settling?


The technology of MP3's have been on my mind lately... the more I hear about their overall poor quality, I wonder if we're getting used to mediocrity when we could easily be experiencing much better quality music if we just put a little effort into it (similar to our food consumption).

2 Articles recently breezed through my RSS reader recently talking about this and I thought I'd share:

Five ways to make digital music sing

Neil Young says the tech industry doesn't care as much about music quality as it should.

Perhaps that's because the average iPod-toting iTunes customer doesn't give a second thought to whether the digital file of the latest single they just bought is uncompressed or lossless.

Young told a bunch of tech luminaries gathered for an industry conference as much on Wednesday: "People's understanding has been skewed by MP3s and convenience. It's important to get music out there...but not at the expense of quality."

He's not the only one who feels that way. Grammy-award-winning producer T-Bone Burnett (who says audio nowadays is so degraded it's akin to viewing "a Xerox of a Polaroid of a photograph of a painting") is spearheading CODE, a new high-definition audio format distributed on a DVD.

(keep reading...)

Wrong! 5 Reasons Lossless Formats Will Not Destroy MP3

Rumors of the imminent demise of the MP3 format are exaggerated, and I for one won't stand for it. A recent DVice article claims that the compressed MP3 is going the way of the Dodo bird because everybody's going to switch to lossless formats, which retain every audio bit on the CDs from which they were ripped.

According to the article, lossless codecs will "destroy" the MP3 format because hard drive and media capacities are on the rise, Blu-Ray movie soundtracks are encoded losslessly, iPod docks are showing up in high-end home stereos and Apple could flick a switch and have iTunes start encoding into Apple Lossless by default. Balderdash, I say!

(keep reading... )

Posted at 07:48 AM     |

Thu - December 27, 2007

iLike Sidebar for iTunes


I just downloaded and using the iLike Toolbar for iTunes... Pretty cool stuff. I haven't mastered it yet, but I can tell you it's worth downloading and playing with.

Get it here: http://ilike.com/download

Heard about it here:

iLike vs. Facebook: The Battle For The Music Artist
http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/11/06/ilike-vs-facebook-the-battle-for-the-music-artist/


Posted at 07:06 AM     |

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