This is MP3Monster's blog. The blog covers music, technology, photography and anything else Monster considers worthy of blogging about.Beyond the Sea with the Basingstoke Tappers
Posted by monster in Tappers
Another July and another show - completed now. You can see a blog entry about the performance from a friend of ours at : Beyond the Sea with the Basingstoke Tappers.
For the Tappers, this was the 15th year, although only the 7th for me, and third as stage manager. Unfortunately, on the first night we experienced a technical hitch that we managed to gloss over, but it prevented us showing a short celebratory film.
There are also a couple of pictures on Flickr that can be found here.
If you would like to know more about the Tappers please visit their website - www.BasingstokeTappers.co.uk
JBoss jBPM Book
Posted by monster in Technology, Work
I’ve previously posted on the involvement I’ve had with supporting Matt Cumberlidge’s book on jBPM, well I’ve found the book on Amazon now (go here).
Article on David & David!
Posted by monster in Music
Many will be going, who, what to the subject of an article on David & David that has been written for Crawdaddy (here). However, you may be more interested if I was to say that one of the David’s (David Baewald) did a lot of work with Sheryl Crow’s debut album and was a member of the Tuesday Night Music Club.
Apart from David & David I’d highly recommend David Baewald’s solo work - particularly Triage.
Video Editing
Posted by monster in Photography, Technology
With the Basingstoke Tappers’ show rapidly approaching and another year as stage manager it has been busy, busy, busy. With this year’s show I’ve also had to create some video clips. I have to say that I am very impressed by Womble Multimedia’s MPEG Video Wizard. Particularly it’s editing capabilities. The process of creating a MPEG file suitable for transcoding to DVD is a little more fiddly - although it does provide some default settings.
This batch of video clips I’ve been are actually stills assembled into sequences. Although there are cheap or free tools for doing this sort of work they aren’t easy or flexible in the results you can produce, particularly in areas such as transitions between images, manipulation of sequencing on the fly and previewing of results.
The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs: The music industry nobs have finally figured out what we’re doing
Posted by monster in Music
The spoof blog - The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs has a rather scarily accurate picture of the where the record industry is today. It would very funny if it wasn’t for the fact that in the process of messing around as Universal are they’re likely to trash the livelihoods of some of the more niche artists, and because of their ‘loan sharking’ business model it will be the artists that will pick up the tab for it as well in lost sales.
It is interesting that Apple don’t seem to have tried to deal with artists directly yet, for example Paul McCartney who signed to Starbucks earlier in the year, and licensed the physical media sales back to the ‘box shifters’. Is it only a matter of time before Apple take the last step and setup a record label, like Starbucks and other media delivery operations such as Yahoo.
Jesse Malin Comes Full Circle
Posted by monster in Music
Crawdaddy have got another good article on their site looking how in some ways the music industry has come full circle since the days of punk. But in other ways - so far away such as the rapidly fragmenting music scene and the technological impact upon music tribalism.
See the full article here - Crawdaddy! - Feature Story - Jesse Malin Comes Full Circle.
Blog improvements
Posted by monster in General, Website
I have finally got around to fixing some of the blog’s problems - the Catagories & Archives links now work properly! A couple of minor things to sort now relating to the footer.
Blog
Posted by monster in Website
I’ve upgraded the blog - as you may have noticed from the change in appearance. Although the upgrade doesn’t seem to have helped resolve the problems with accessing older blog entries. So I shall be investigating and fixing myself in the near future.
Dragons - Here are the Roses — Review
Posted by monster in Music, Music Reviews
Dragons - another new artist worthy of some attention. Their debut album Here are the Roses is a marvelous blend of pre-stadium rock Simple Minds, early Depeche Mode and Joy Division/New Order. The heart of these similarities come from the way they use synths and guitars, they 
intertwined often providing both rhythm and melody; the keyboard sounds are very synthetic like those used by the Minds and others during the earlier 80s - looking at the kit in the videos on their website it also looks very 80s.
The lyrics are pretty dark in content and delivery, something that David Gahan would be proud of, and enough for Ian Curtis to take note if he was still with us today. Unlike both, the vocal delivery is slightly smoother and sweeter on the ear.
Finally, the drumming, it doesn’t saturate the rest of the performance, they’re even edging towards sparse. But they really down pound - as the producer Hugh Padgham would say - if you stand next a drummer giving it some welly - its bloody loud, and correspondingly that should be the case on record. The drumming certainly isn’t muted - driving the music along brilliantly without dominating.
If you like some rocking, synth based music then go give them a try - or at least have a listen to what they’ve posted on their MySpace site or the clips on their own site.
Websites:
home page : http://www.dragons.cc/
MySpace : http://www.myspace.com/dragons1
MP3Monster’s Open Source Solutions
Posted by monster in Technology, Website
As a website administrator for several sites built using Mambo & Joomla 
I’ve had to build a few small bespoke components and modules. I’ve started to make the source 
for these available. The first being my email forwarder, the details of which can be found at in the techie part of my website, or accessed directly here.
The code is very rough and ready - but does a job, and it is my intention to tidy it up and improve the componewnt over time.
Second Life gets its own Festival
Posted by monster in Music, Technology
A number of bands including the likes of the Pet Shop Boys, New Young Pony Club and Digitalism have gone completely geek and are performing at a digital festival in the virtual world of Second Life. The festival called Second Fest is sponsored by the Guardian news paper and Intel comes complete with multiple stages and a substantial line up over three days. Given the geek element, it isn’t too surprising that the artists appearing have a general electronica bias.
More information can be found on the Guardian site - http://www.guardian.co.uk/secondfest/.
Bye bye AllOfMP3 hello MP3Sparks
Posted by monster in Music, Technology
According to several sites, the Russian AllOfMP3 website that sold MP3 files for a few cents has shutdown, although whether this has been a result of the legal battles driven by the likes of the RIAA and the IFPI is not clear. However a new site MP3Sparks has popped up which reportedly is essentially the same site. Currently the site appears to be down, but this may well be simply a network glitch or pure server pressure. Looking at aom3.org which is a forum about AllOfMP3 the close coupling suggests this is in fact the same people.
The interesting thing is that the domain change may not hide the activity, but is likely held by new organisations which means that all the legal proceedings will have to be restarted from scratch. If this is anything like the Kazaa maneuverings a few years ago to try setup shell companies to frustrate legal processes then the IFPI are going to have some real headaches.
Articles:
- NME - Russian download site shut down
- Engadget - AllOfMP3.com shut down, replacement already launched
Quote …
Posted by monster in General
For the introduction of a new kind of music must be shunned as imperiling the whole state; since styles of music are never disturbed without affecting the most important political institutions.
Plato
