Category Archives: Tech

Columbus, Ohio Spotify Playlist

I’ve been loving Spotify ever since I started to use it earlier this month. I know people seem to be into Rdio a little more but honestly I never tried it out and am too busy lazy to check out the other service.

Playlists are a big thing on Spotify and I figured I’d share one that I’ve put together. My
Columbus Ohio playlist features music from as many Columbus bands that I could find (two albums max). The playlist includes Ron House, Royal Crescent Mob, Blueprint, Envelope, RJD2, The Black Swans, The Sun, Megan Palmer, Lydia Loveless, New Bomb Turks, Times New Viking, The Whiles, J Rawls, and many more.

If there are Columbus bands on Spotify that I missed, let me know in the comments and I’ll add them.

Gorillaz New Album and the iPad Apps Used to Create It

The Gorillaz made a new album using an iPad:

Listen to it here.

Here’s the iPad applications used:

Speak It! / SoundyThingie / Mugician / Solo Synth / Synth / Funk Box / Gliss / AmpliTube / Xenon / iElectribe / BS-16i / M3000 HD / Cleartune / iOrgel HD / Olsynth / StudioMiniXI / BassLine / Harmonizer / Dub Siren Pro / Moog Filatron

WFMU Streaming Through iPhone Application

See here. If this is signs of things to come, I’d expect to see things like this from our friends at WOXY any day now.

Saul Williams + Trent Reznor + Free = The Inevitable Rise and Liberation of NiggyTardust!

Fader is releasing the Trent Reznor / Saul Williams collaboration The Inevitable Rise and Liberation of NiggyTardust! free of charge in DRM-free 192 kbps MP3 format. If you want a choice of formats, or you just want to directly support the artist, you can shell paxil generic out $5. The album will be available for download November 1, but .

In some ways this is awfully similar to the Radiohead model, with a few improvements. First of all, the higher baseline kpbs encoding is nice, but I really like the fact that if you pay, you can get the download in whatever format you’d like on up to FLAC.

Secondly, I don’t think this is physically coming out, so it won’t be viewed as a leveraging ploy / future CD-sales tactic. In fact it’ll probably give Williams more recognition than he’s (ever?) had. This is not just due to the sales model, since obviously Reznor’s involvement is pretty noteworthy … especially given his own recent outspoken disdain for the Major Label model of distributing music.

I’m liking these changing times.

Sell Your Broken iPods

If you have a broken (or working) iPod sitting around collecting dust, maybe you should sell it to the people at Buymybrokenipod.com. Seems easier than trying to sell it via Craigslist or eBay, especially if it’s broken.

BuyMyBrokeniPod.com wants to buy your used, new or broken iPod or iPhone today! We offer a fast, simple, and eco-friendly way for you to get money for used, new or broken iPods and iPhones. We accept Classic, Touch, Video, Photo, Nano, Mini, iPhones & Generation 4 to 1 iPods. We don’t care if your iPod has a cracked screen, the a busted hard drive busted, or shows a sad face, has buttons that don’t work, is acting weird, is old and creepy, has water damage, or if the battery is dead. We will pay you top dollar for your unwanted iPod MP3 Player or iPhone guaranteed! Keep your old iPod out of the landfill and you get cash in return!

[credz techcrunch]

Amazon Launches MP3 Store

Yesterday, Amazon launched their new MP3 store. Key features:

    – MP3 format, 256 kbs
    – No DRM
    – Individual songs priced at $0.89
    – Albums priced between $4.99 – $8.99

The store has albums available from locals like Miranda Sound, Megan Palmer, Eric Metronome and Jon Chinn. Indies like Spoon, The New Pornographers and Grizzly Bear. And major label artists like Kanye West and Radiohead.

This definitely isn’t going to be an iTunes killer – nothing will ever “kill” iTunes.. but I think it’s the first legitimate competition Apple has ever had. And competition is always a good thing.

Fight Vinyl Warping

dfv-1-b1.jpg For just $1,500, you can have your own crazy contraption that will un-warp your vinyl records. No true audiophile with lots of disposable income should be without one.

Fake Steve Jobs on the iTunes vs. Universal Deal

Reading about this battle is boring, except when Fake Steve Jobs talks about it:


So you’ve no doubt seen this story or one like it explaining that Universal Music Group won’t renew its iTunes deal. And you’ve seen people saying that the majors are trying to “recalibrate” their relationships with us. Actually what’s happening is they’re crapping in their pants. They woke up one day and realized that we’ve got 80% share of digital downloads. Suddenly all the power in the value chain resides in one player. Oops.

Read his full blog post here.

Tomfoolery and ASCAPpery.

ascap.gifFinally, a court ruling about digital music that seems grounded in some semblance of reality! ASCAP attempts to double dip into royalty streams by claiming digital download count as public performances has been slapped down by a federal court. This confused me, since ASCAP sells itself as being super artist-friendly, and this tactic was sure to hurt artist’s audiences by making it more difficult to distribute their music. I tried tried to get some insight into this from the local Chicago ASCAP office when the story broke a few weeks ago, but they didn’t return my emails.
As an aside, I’d like to point out that all my interaction with representatives from ASCAP has always been positive, and in Chicago they do their damndest to get exposure for artists they sign with. So I view this whole legal action as a gross misstep grounded in the greed of ASCAPpers in corporate positions … which would probably explain why our local reps had nothing to say. Would you want to go o0n record disagreeing with the actions of the boys upstairs? Probably not.

Exposing your roots digitally: A game you can play at home!

retropod_waist.gifWe’ve all gotten the emails / bulletins / memes asking to throw the iPod — or whatever music media player you prefer — on shuffle and post the first ten songs. Or put those songs into some sort of fake narrative for hilarious (not) results. As I was scrolling through the ol’ tankPOD today, looking to do some housecleaning, I noticed certain bands took up an awful lot of screen time as I scrolled through.
So that got me to thinking, wouldn’t those bands be the best litmus test when it came to really pinpointing one’s musical tastes? I mean, sure, I’ve got loads of super-obscure, truly indier-than-thou bands, unheard masterpieces by regional acts, IDM prone to inducing seizures, and white label singles in the tankPOD / diPOD team, but when pressed what really informs my tastes?
So I did an experiment and decided to list all the bands who have four or more albums on my MP3 / M4A / OGG / WAV player in hopes that such information would be rather revealing (full list after the jump). You see, in this age of instant gratification I think it really says something about a band if you feel the need to carry that much of their material around with you at all times. Such a list might prove unintentionally revealing and betray one’s actual musical tastes, even if they are usually hidden under a patina of hipster aloofness.
Of course such a list is automatically going to skew towards older acts, since it takes a few years to push out 4+ albums’ worth of music, but that would make such a list an even better reference for divining one’s musical tastes, since it would probably skew towards artists that helped formulate a particular individual’s musical background. Right?
In my case the result pretty obviously favored artists that came to the fore in the ’80s and ’90s, no surprise there. And it is pretty light on electronic artists, but that makes sense when you consider that most electronic music lives in the world of the single, not the multi-album arc.
The interesting about my own results, actually, is that I almost NEVER actually listen to any of the 4+ album bands on my iPod anymore. It’s almost like they’re there as more of a security blanket. Truth be told, I have so much new stuff coming in every day I need to listen to, for various reasons, I rarely get the chance to peruse deep cuts from my personal catalog … but it’s interesting to note because I think these are the sorts of discs I may not listen to every day (or even once a year), but that I might like to take to a desert island to keep me going in tough times.
Anyway, if you’re interested, my list is after the jump. Feel free to post your own lists in the comments and let me see where your musical soul actually dwells when no one else is around to judge.
Continue reading