This is MP3Monster's blog. The blog covers music, technology, photography and anything else Monster considers worthy of blogging about.Should my children enjoy my taste in music?
Posted by monster in new Daddy
Any parent, who also happens to be a music fan is or has probably been pondering the question Graeme Thomson tussles with in the Guardian blog (Guardian Unlimited: Arts blog - music: Should my kids enjoy my taste in music?) - specifically how do you educate your children in good music?
Graeme, doesn’t arrive at an answer. I did wonder if there is any credence in taking a similar approach that us brits are stereotyped as using with non in English speakers - just talking more slowly and loudly. But a friend of mine with two youngsters seems to be having a degree of success - his wife doesn’t get a look in on what gets played on the HiFi, and he has for as long as I’ve known him tried to educate her tastes. Oh, and music is always playing so the children haven’t really had a chance or need to find anything else musically - although they haven’t yet reached their teens yet, so there is still time for it to all go wrong.
Review: Bitter Bitter Weeks - Peace Is Burning Like a River
Posted by monster in Music, Music Reviews
Rather than reviewing an obvious release like Ryan Adam’s latest release, I’m continuing with the less known stuff.
Bitter Bitter Weeks latest release Peace Is Burning Like a River have diverged from their more somber sounds in a big way. This is full of bright shiny 60s style guitar work, imagine The Delays swapping their synths for guitars. Brian McTear’s vocals match the mood beautifully with a light and sweet vocal. Even the lyrical content feels more cheerful.
I’ve been listening to this album, both in the car and on my MP3 Player - I have to say it does sound far better when given a chance to breath in an open space than with earphones - even these cracking Sennheisers.
My recommendation is atleast have a listen to the tracks on Bitter Bitter Weeks’ MySpace site. If you’re a Delays fan then don’t waste time - order the album NOW!
Lots of thumbs up from the Monster.
SCRUM - Mindmap
Posted by monster in Technology
An initial cut of my Mindmap on the SCRUM Agile project management methodology is available in the Technical part of this website (go here).
Radio & Webcasters getting demands from all directions - Real pressure for innovative stations
Posted by monster in Music
With the push massively hiked broadcasting fees for web radio stations, a lot of stations are pushing back as hard as they can, with now a ‘Day of Silence’ where normal broadcasting is being suspended completely or a looped programme (in the case of KCRW) explaining what the issue is and the impact on them. The only players who seem not to be getting involved are the biggest, who are probably both the least innovative and can weather the increased costs - namely Clear Channel and AOL (more details -Additional Details Emerge Ahead of Webcaster Day of Silence).
To add to the pain, live sessions that some stations are noted for and attract a lot of good publicity for the artists involved - such as Morning Becomes Eclectic (on KCRW) and the famous Peel Sessions for the late great John Peel on Radio 1, are under pressure. A number of artists are now pushing for performance or royalty payments (more detail here Musicians To Radio Broadcasters: “Clearly, We’re Not Wealthy Enough” and Variety article). The irony is that the artists that I’ve seen involved probably are smallest beneficiaries from such sessions, and I’m sure that the likes of Christina Aguilera and Mariah Carey can manage without the extra few thousand that such a change would introduce. But those need and benefit from the exposure of live sessions - the smaller and indie artists like Wilco will lose out on the publicity as stations are likely to cut back or stop doing such sessions.
SeeWhy Releases Business Process Management Integration Kit
Posted by monster in Work
To press releases to day for SeeWhy, one about the ‘BPM Integration Kit’ with a nice quote from Matt Cumberlidge (SeeWhy Releases Business Process Management Integration Kit). The second is finally announcing Version 3.2 of the product (SeeWhy Adds Advanced Profiling to SeeWhy Community Edition 3.2 ) with a good quote from IDC analyst Alys Woodward.
EMI sees boost in sales thanks to iTunes Plus
Posted by monster in Music, Technology
According to The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) it would seem that brave move by Apple to sell their music without DRM (iTunes Plus) has resulted in sales increase by 350%, that’s even after there being a few teething problems when iTunes plus was launched.
Although an element of this surge will be novelty factor, even having allowed for that the increase in sales, it is a clear testament to how much people loath the idea of DRM. Hopefully other labels will now follow EMI’s lead.
Another exciting development is that V2 have signed up with WE7 - the new free download site as long as you’re happy to accept small adverts attached to the front of the MP3.
More press for SeeWhy
Posted by monster in Work
A couple more articles about SeeWhy have appeared in the major press:
Sony - struggling in the online music world
Posted by monster in Technology
According to Digital Music News it would seem that Sony is going to pull the plug on its online music store (Connect), and on recording facilities in LA and New York. This hasn’t been the first concession to loss of influence in the music space with the decision to no longer develop its ATRAC compression format.
I think a time has come where Sony can no longer see itself as dominating & influential player in this market space, until it can come up with something revolutionary (like the original Walkman, not just evolutionary) in a manner that doesn’t look you into Sony.
http://www.digitalmusicnews.com/stories/061707connect
Statr for Flickr
Posted by monster in Photography, Technology
I came cross this cool extension for Flickr provided by http://linuxside.org which give you page view stats on a daily basis for visits to your Flickr pictures. An example of the results can be seen below.
If you have a Flickr website (ours is here) then its worth checking out.
Tom McRae - Shepherds Bush Empire
Posted by monster in Music, Music Reviews
We got to see another fine performance by Tom McRae at London’s Shepherds Bush Empire as he tours supporting his latest album King Of Cards. I managed to capture some pictures with the mobile phone - more can be seen here.
Tom, has over a number of albums proven himself to a fine singer songwriter. But, for me the songs taken on something special when you hear him perform them live. Even last night, whilst suffering ‘man flu’ sounded good, and delivered the songs with passion and emotion that lyrics carry.
Not only does he perform well, everytime we’ve seen him, he engages with the audience joking and telling stories, something that really makes it feel that he is there for you.
This time around Tom’s support was Steve Reynolds, who played a great little set, and went down a treat with the audience (no mean feat for a support artists). All that and playing his guitar while struggling with a broken collar bone. Steve’s performance was engaging enough that we’ve ordered the album (another import).
The final gem, of the evening is picking up a EP of Tom’s that I’d not heard of - The Strongroom Sessions (autographed as well). Having not heard about it, I thought I’d search around for it today on the web and can’t find any reference to it - is his record company letting him down?
Copy Protection Upsets Another Music Fan
Posted by monster in Music
Following on from my earlier blog about a Crawdaddy article - here is a post from a music fan who has come against CD copy protection resulting in it breaking the CD standard (despite the CD carrying the CD logo) and no warning of copyright protection. After the fiasco with Sony’s rootkits, you’d think that record labels may have learnt a thing or two.
Article here - Some Sort Of Copy Protection Crawling Around In The New Linkin Park CD - Idolator
The important thing is that the blog’s author will no longer buy music (legally atleast) from Warner Brothers.
Business Process Management with JBoss jBPM
Posted by monster in Technology, Work
As part of the work I do for SeeWhy I’ve been providing some help to the author Matt Cumberlidge who is writing a book on JBoss’ JBPM which will include details on SeeWhy (and how SeeWhy integrates with jBPM). Matt has just kindly send us a link to the publishers site for the book which can be found at Business Process Management with JBoss jBPM. The book is expected out late July or August.
Insightful, but scathing article on the state of the music industry - by Crawdaddy
Posted by monster in Music
Crawdaddy have written a good piece, albeit scathing of the state of the music industry is in. Using the actions of Paul McCartney, now releasing music through Starbucks rather than EMI, with whom he has been since the start of the Beatles recording career as a proof (backed up by an article in New Yorker by Macca himself).
If you don’t read the article - then just take a look at this quote:
because they [Big Four record companies] care about the marketing more than they care if the act is worth a crap to begin with. As a result, they turn and blame illegal file sharing for the decline in sales, despite the fact there are now mounds of studies showing that file sharing does not hurt sales. Some, like the writer of a recent article published in the Journal of Political Economy, even find that albums being shared on peer-to-peer networks see increased sales as a result of being shared.
The article can be found here: http://crawdaddy.wolfgangsvault.com/Article.aspx?id=1452
One Little Indian go Podcasting
Posted by monster in Music
The record label One Little Indian, the home to some great artists such as 
Jesse Malin, Fluke, Pernice Brothers and many others has started podcasting to help promote its artists. The podcast is done through iTunes (click here),via a direct link from the announcement email(s) if you register for the news emails or via the Podcast Directory. The first podcast includes material from Jesse Malin.
Image Editing Freeware
Posted by monster in Photography, Technology
There a number of small picture manipulation tasks that don’t need huge great applications such as PhotoShop or PaintShopPro such as quickly creating DVDs of your photos, looking at RAW or JPEG information. There are a lot of smaller apps on the net that provide these sort of features for a small license fee, and a few that are actually free. Finding the free ones can be a pain, but someone has set up a neat little site - Photo-Freeware.net - Image Editing Freeware Download Source with links to the free applications and related useful information.
Tori Amos - American Girl Posse
Posted by monster in Music, Music Reviews
A Little slow reviewing this - having been out for a month or two. But I have found that Tori’s later albums take a lot longer to digest as her lyrics tend towards the obscure. Although the subject of the 
opening song on latest album American Girl Posse leaves little space for misunderstanding as criticism of George Bush.
The album’s song fluctuate from style to style as it delivers songs from different members of the ‘posse’ which it does with a fair degree of success. It seems that its each of the songs intros provide the clearest indication of which character is performing.
Unlike earlier albums the presence of the drums and guitar are a lot more noticeable giving album a more driven feel overall where as earlier albums the other instrumentation tended to be lower in the mix giving space the vocals and piano.
Overall not a bad album, but not Tori Amos at her best. But still distinctive and a cut above other the other ‘kookie’ female singer/songwriters.
The Great CD Digitisation
Posted by monster in Technology
I came across rather interesting article about the challenges and questions involved in migrating a substantial music collection to a digitised solution which allowed the media to be streamed around the home (the article can be found here ongoing ยท The Great CD Migration).
Its a challenge that both a friend of mine and I have been dealing with for a couple of years now - both of us have significant amounts of media (legitimate I hasten to add). We’ve both arrived at slightly different solutions, but they reflect the difference in emphasis of source - one being music the other video. But the core solution seems to be the same - a small box stashed away acting as a file server and a dedicated D/A component (Squeezebox in on case and a modified XBox in another).
With hard disk capacities rapidly rising the cost of a file server - we’re very close to a single drive holding 1 terabyte now. As well as the fact that the processing power of the machine doesn’t need to be powerful - a simple Pentium with the right O/S will be enough.
The thing that may intimidate less techie people is avoiding the loss of the digitised media once the mammoth task of conversion has been completed. We’ve both ended up configuring the storage into a basic RAID array - so a single disk failure can be recovered from.
I think that as the media solutions such as slim devices becoming increasingly more mainstream it is the ease of managing things like storage that will become the next big challenge.
SeeWhy Software Selected by eCourier
Posted by monster in Work
The news about our success at SeeWhy with eCourier is clearly starting to spread. Rather than blow my own horn (as Software Development Manager) for SeeWhy just take at look at the article on ebizQ - Link to SeeWhy Software Selected by eCourier.
Hopefully we’ll have some more news soon.
DAB digital radio on your iPod
Posted by monster in Technology
We recently introduced a DAB radio into the house more for Mrs Monster than myself; but I’ve discovered listening to radio can be a pleasing experience (until now I’ve always got annoyed at the sound compression, and noise if there are poor atmospherics or tuning drift).
I also happen to an iPod owner, and rather attached to the little box of magic. Until the arrival of DAB I’ve never been worried by the idea of not having radio incorporated into 
it, always believing that dedication to a single purpose is a good thing. But now I’d like to combine the two, rather than having to carry two larger devices which are bound to have overlapping features, I wanted something small and compact so it can travel with me and my iPod which can use the iPod’s audio capabilities.
So trawling the net I thought I’d find a raft of possibilities - but this isn’t the case! There are radio alarm clocks that will dock your iPod and have a DAB tuner - but something small enough to travel with the iPod - nada, nothing. The best I can find is an article (Get DAB Digital Radio on your iPod) about a product due out later this year. The picture I found of a prototype elsewhere makes it look pretty funky - and will be going on my wishlist.
If you know of anything available now though - I’d love to hear about it.
MindMaps & Other Site Tweaks
Posted by monster in General
I found yesterday that there was a problem with the amount of screen real-estate being given over to the Fash display of the mindmap. The problem was fixed last night - so it is pretty much full screen now. I’ve also made a few other tweaks to the site such as the About page.
I’ll be doing a few other site tweaks in the coming week or two.
