This is MP3Monster's blog. The blog covers music, technology, photography and anything else Monster considers worthy of blogging about.Sony/BMG Under Investigation for Software Piracy
Posted by monster in General
Various press organisations (including Wired.com here) that Sony BMG have been found to have a substantial level of pirated software within the organisation. If this is the case then they seriously need to get their house into order before they continue to support the RIAA’s pursuit of downloaders. What is almost as bad is the article indicates that Sony/BMG asked the press to keep quiet as well.
It is kind of ironic that the record company’s parent Sony invest so much in trying to prevent the very thing that appears to have happened here.
Lot of ‘chatter’ from Led Zeppelin
Posted by monster in Music
There seems to be a lot of news coming from the remaining original members of Led Zeppelin at the moment with Jimmy Page suggesting that last years O2 gig performed to commemorate Ahmet Ertghun could see a DVD release. John Paul Jones has reportedly suggested that the band may even return to the studio to record a new album. Robert Plant has su8ggested that they may perform live again, although there has been a lot of speculation and rumour about this for some months now. If we’re lucky then perhaps all three suggestions may come to occur in 2008.
Why Buy Digitally Recorded Albums On Vinyl?
Posted by monster in Music
The never ending debate over whether vinyl is better than CD or digital encoding is covered bi Idolator in their article Format Wars: Why Buy Digitally Recorded Albums On Vinyl?. To be honest I think this is a debate that will never end. But in the arguments that rage I’ve never heard any consideration that when listening to vinyl it requires a lot more effort and commitment from the listener (got to care for vinyl and handle it with care compared to CD, then you have to swap sides after twenty or so minutes) and as result it is less likely to be just slapped on in the background which is so easy with CD and mp3 etc. When you invest more effort to playing the music you’re probably going to listen more carefully and therefore pick up the nuances more easily.
The other consideration in the debate is the fact that vinyl has gone through faces of production quality changes. Back in the time when CD started coming in the vinyl was lighter (therefore more susceptible to warping and distortion) had more grooves crammed onto a surface. Now with the re-emergence of vinyl the discs are a lot better quality - to the point you’ll see the vinyl weight included in the advertising. With it is also the willingness to split albums across more surfaces meaning that the grooves aren’t jammed together tightly.
Regardless of what is done to settle the argument scientific analysis, blind tests the entire subject will continue to be seen in a incredibly subjective light and never be settled one way or another.
Music Maps
Posted by monster in Music, Technology
A while back I read an article on Guardian Unlimited which used Google Maps used to pick out places that had been referenced in song lyrics (go here for the Guardian Map). I had thought it would be interesting to see a global one - even the most anglophile groups reference all over world (Return of the Los Palmas Seven, New Delhi, Night Boat to Cairo - just examples from Madness). Well in my search of an example I did come across England Rocks which uses Google Maps to highlight significant locations in British musical history (where Jimi Hendrix used to live) but no map like the Guardian one. Admittedly the search is difficult because it gets clouded by lots of lyric sites.
So I started to tinker with Google Map’s maplets to produce something. I found two things:
- firstly the maplet lists all your points which is no good when you’ve accumulated a lot of entries - you can see my attempt here.
- I found that working with Google Maps through Firefox 2 to be a bit flaky with Firefox crashing regularly when trying to edit the annotations.
Having looked at the Google Maps proper API so we could underpin the map with a database of entries so we can slice and dice the data points more effectively it doesn’t look too challenging to build something, so hopefully I’ll find time to try it out. The real effort looks to be around the protection of the data from being filled with spam, whether to put in an authentication mechanism or the common random image/text combination. Once I’ve got a solution running and primed with some initial entries then I’ll blog again and popup things for people to try.
Quirks of Internet Radio and the Music Genome Project
Posted by monster in Music
Crawdaddy! has managed to release another interesting article about the quirks of internet radio and the application of the Music Genome Project - check out the article here. The article does close with a statement I’d like to quote:
I’ll take one David Gilmour note over 38 Malmsteem notes played over the same number of beats.
Dolly Parton - going it alone
Posted by monster in Music
Dolly Parton isn’t the sort of artists I’d usually blog about. However, one of country’s legends has gone it alone with her latest record rather than working through a record company. In part this has been because she had been dropped by her record label (as recorded here).
If Dolly has been dropped by her label, you’d think that her record sales are pretty trivial, far from it this latest album has clocked up over 50,000 sales (details here) in the first couple of weeks of release and a top twenty sales ranking.
This isn’t the first time such a decision has been made - just look at what happened to Wilco around the time of the Yankee Hotel Foxtrot album. This begs the questions how do record companies determine which artists to drop and are record labels so burdened with costs or inability that they deem a 50,000 sales as not being sufficiently profitable enough?
New Elvis Costello Album released on Vinyl and Digitally but No CD?
Posted by monster in Music
A story(here) that has been showing up on the web over the last couple of days is the surprising indication that the next Elvis Costello album to be released through Lost Highway wont be available on CD. Given that I’ve yet to see a correction to this story, can only suggest that there is some truth in it, although the decision is certainly surprising. I would have put Elvis Costello’s fanbase demographic (horrid music-business expression, but no other easy to express) in the area of those people who would still rather have something tangible in their hands and fall into the vinyl or CD generations.
It leaves me in a puzzling situation of how to get the album as someone who likes to have something tangible in my hands. My local music shops have abandoned vinyl, and ordering vinyl over the ‘net has not been the best experience for me with a number of occasions of the sleeve being damaged and in one case they vinyl actually having been warped.
Matthew Ryan - The Allmusic Blog Artist Spotlight
Posted by monster in Music
A change from All Music’s seemingly frequent blogging of American Idol they’ve actually written a brief artist spot light blog on Matthew Ryan here. With Matthew’s new album coming out this can only help.
Seewhy for JBoss jBPM
Posted by monster in Technology, Work
With the big push at SeeWhy to get Version 3.4 out of the door coming to an end, I’m expecting to get time to finalise SeeWhy for JBoss jBPM - a BAM solution for JBoss jBPM (JBoss’ Business Process Management tool which is also used to provide orchestration of the JBoss SOA platform) using the SeeWhy realtime BI product. The core of this has been largely finished for some time, as we demo’d it in Orlando for JBoss World but the production quality finishing and the final piece of functionality - providing the closed loop capabilities such that SeeWhy can start new jBPM processes or get existing processes to resume had been held up. Unfortunately trying to get a good grip on this and the threading implications hasn’t been so straight forward giving the limited amount and quality of documentation (for example javadoc for jBPM is very sparse) and example code available. Although I am very pleased with the quality of documentation that the next generation of jBPM is likely to have having seen the PVM (Process Virtual Machine) source code for its first release.
Sir Arthur C Clarke - Rest In Peace
Posted by monster in Technology
In addition the the sad passing of respected writer and film director Anthony Minghella, it is sad news that the visionary author Arthur C Clarke has also died today. Although best known for writing the film 2001 which was filmed by Stanley Kubrick he was a well established as visionary and respected author long before this. Clarke had published papers describing things such as geo-stationary orbit years before it was achieved - something that is central to our everyday lives and take for granted. The BBC has full Obituary here.
Photography and The Law
Posted by monster in Photography
If you pick up photo magazines regularly you’ll know that they will devote pages to tips and techniques, interesting places to go take photos and so on. But I’ve never read anything addressing the issue of the law beyond the usual model waiver (giving you copyright to your photos that they appear in). So it has been good to read an article at photojojo (here) which describes in simple language the basic legal position of taking photos in public places. Although photojojo is American based the principles of their ‘10 commandments’ should be valid in most western nations, but they have made the attempt to also provide links to sites that outline the legal situation other English speaking countries (to have a list of sites covering non English speaking countries would make the ultimate reference for this sort of thing - particularly for when you’re on holiday in a country that maybe a little more sensitive).
Fuel Prices
Posted by monster in economy
With the government backing down on the 2p (~$0.04) per litre fuel increase in the last budget, and the feeling that fuel prices seem to be continuously and rapidly climbing, I decided I’d like to see a graph of the price changes. Thanks to the folks at PetrolPrices.com I’ve got a set of figures (from the AA) that have allowed me to build a graph.
The figures are a lot more comprehensive than I have currently made use of. If I get time to build something richer then I’ll post that. If there is any interest then I’ll make the spreadsheet available.
del.icio.us tags: Fuel, pricing, AAC, PetrolPrices.com, cost, motoring, petrol, diesel, car
An ear attuned to sounds of greatness
Posted by monster in Music
The FT (FT.com - article here) have an interesting interview with Tom Whalley the CEO of Warner Brothers Records. Rather than blaming P2P etc for the problems the industry are experiencing he is highly critical of how the business is being run. For example …
“One of the excuses people were making [for stealing music] was that there were not enough good songs on CDs. And they weren’t wrong,” he said. “What had happened was we took the single out of the marketplace because it wasn’t economically viable and you had to buy a full album whether you liked it or not.”
The argument that killing the single off has contributed to file sharing isn’t one I had considered. But the single is definitely being murdered. It used to be that you would be able to get a single and get several bonus tracks. Now its one extra track which is usually a remix or even cheaply the instrumental version.
Tom also is critical of the position that record companies are just trying to exploit their existing artists and not putting effort into A&R (diametrically opposite to EMI’s new boss who seems to think A&R are a bunch of overpaid slackers). He also says in the article that the new 360 degree deals where the company’s cut in on touring profits can also be dangerous. Keep the artists on the road, and they’re not in the studio creating new material for you to sell, and the dividend ration despite the piracy still has to favour recording.
Jesse Malin - Video & pre-order link
Posted by monster in Music
ordered mine 
Music Industry Proposes a Piracy Surcharge on ISPs
Posted by monster in Music, Technology
The radical idea of adding a surcharge to the fees that ISPs charge for broadband connectivity as levy for P2P piracy is to be discussed at the SXSW conference according to the wired article here (Surcharge on ISPs). It is an interesting and brave move, and already has presidents for example the Performing Rights Society (PRS) levy in the UK on venues who play music (just about any public venue), or Canada’s charge for blank media. The achilles heel to this that I can see is the move could seriously hurt the download what you like for a fixed monthly fee services, whilst the majors mess about with licensing contracts.
Hopefully a download of the session will be made available as the arguments for and against this will be very interesting.
Graphical representation of Net traffic out of New York
Posted by monster in Technology
MIT have implemented a fascinating site that analyzes net traffic showing which cities around the world the traffic is travelling to and from. The traffic is then being brilliantly visualised. The project was developed to help people analyse and understand the volumes of traffic and how it changes over time. To see the site go here.
Jesse Malin - in this week’s Uncut newsletter
Posted by monster in Music
On Jesse Malin in this week’s Uncut new letter which primarily focuses on Neil Young …
Coincidentally, one of the new records I’ve been playing quite a bit recently is On Your Sleeve by Jesse Malin, an album of cover versions of some of Jesse’s favourite songs. I’m not entirely sure the world needs another version of “Wonderful World”, but elsewhere there are affecting takes on Paul Simon’s “Me And Julio Down By the School Yard”, “Sway” by the Rolling Stones, The Hold Steady’s “You can Make Them Like You” and Neil’s “Looking For A Love”.
You can hear tracks from the album here: www.indian.co.uk/jessemalin/player/player.html
80s Electro Pop
Posted by monster in Music
If you’re a fan of 80s electro pop such as Human League, Depeche Mode, Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark then I can pass on a recommendation that a friend of mine made to me, Northern Kind’s 52°N (go here), they can also be found on myspace (here). Both their own site and myspace have tracks that can be listened to. Go check it out.
March and preparations for another Tapper’s show are underway
Posted by monster in Tappers
The last weekend in July is traditionally the weekend of the Basingstoke Tappers & Jazz Dance Company’s summer show at the Anvil Theatre. Back in January the dance company’s director set the theme for the show and started developing ideas for routines. The dance classes now will start to incorporate the development of the routines now.
As the webmaster and for the last few years stage manager my involvement comes in short bursts. Currently the site is getting updated with show details, the information has to be disseminated to various (largely) community sites. This is a slow process as these sort of sites and their impact change year on year. This year I’ve been using Google Alerts to help identify when sites get updated and how quickly Google picks up the information.
Once all of that is done, it is increasingly quiet, largely because my other half is going to classes five days a week plus performances for community organisations to help with PR. Then at the start of July (a couple of weeks before the show) it all goes a little crazy. I need to attend the rehearsals so I can see how things should work and produce a set of notes for the crew. Plus contributing with some media for the dancers and last year late on I had additional video media to produce for the show.
Things don’t end after the performance. Between shows if there are any little hitches from the previous night these get worked through - which could be a technical job for the crew with the scenery, or rehearsing part of a routine for the Tappers. Then there is the get out - stripping all the staging, lighting, sound (and there is a lot of cabling for a 20 piece Jazz Orchestra plus mics for picking up the tap from the stage plus monitors for the sound around the Orchestra and dancers), band, scenery that is being ‘flown’ in from above need to be backed and shipped out of the theatre straight after the last show.
If you would like to know more about the Basingstoke Tappers - go here. To book tickets with the Anvil Theatre go here.
tough times for the RIAA ahead
Posted by monster in Technology
The RIAA are being sued by a woman who was mistakenly sued for file sharing. The case is likely to result in the RIAA disclosing both their process model (lawyers fees, what money goes back to the artists from settlements, how organisations such as Media Sentry are paid, how settlement figures are arrived at) and how they acquire the information on which their cases are built. Given the RIAA’s apparent track record in the area of acquiring information this could look bad, if not criminal.
If the disclosure of such information does look criminal and reach the public domain then it could trigger off a class action from all those who have been on the receiving end of the RIAA’s claims. It would be very ironic if the class action does come to court as it could end up costing the RIAA more than they have recovered in settlements. It would validate the argument that its bad business to sue all of your customers.
What ever happens, the outcome is likely to be months away, possibly even years. For more detail on the case see the Wired article here.
