Archive for December 28th, 2006

[The Home Music Project] Update on the Home Music Project

Published December 28, 2006 Music , Technology Leave a Comment

Back from vacation on Kauai, and starting to dig out from the mass of email messages (50 gazillion messages, of which 25 are important – but how to find those except by looking at all of them?).

In the meantime, an update on the Home Music Project.

Over Thanksgiving weekend I finished encoding all of the CDs that were in my CD cabinet, and those are now ensconced in boxes in the garage. There’s still a few CDs lingering around – several in both cars, a pile on my desk at work – but that’s by far the bulk of the CDs.

So far the total is 12,075 songs, from 965 albums, taking up 74.09 Gigabytes of disk space.

I’m thinking that at some point it might make sense to use a big iPod as both as an additional backup and as a portable version of the whole library. It would all barely fit on the current 80 Gb iPod, but that doesn’t leave much room for growth. I wonder if we’ll see a 100 Gb iPod unveiled at MacWorld next month?

For those who care about the details, I encoded in mp3 format, variable bit rate, with 192 Kbps minimum sample rate. I know there are some who will say that I should have encoded in a lossless format at a high bit rate, but mp3 is by far the most portable format, and the sound quality is good enough for my fifty-three-year-old rock-and-roll-veteran ears.

I created an iTunes playlist for each album – it’s a pleasure to scroll through the albums and set them playing. For Thanksgiving day, when we had a house full of people most of the day, I created a long playlist of a bunch of mellow party music and just let it play unattended – that was great!

I grabbed what cover art iTunes could find, but it only finds cover art for albums that are being sold on the iTunes Store, which leaves out a lot of my music (starting, but by no means limited to, the entire Beatles catalog). I’m thinking I should write a mashup that would figure out which albums don’t have cover art and go grab the covers from Amazon. So far, however, I haven’t figured out how iTunes 7 keeps track of cover art – there doesn’t seem to be an entry that represents cover art in the iTunes Music Library.xml file.

The Mac Mini came with a remote and Front Row software, which I thought I’d use a lot, but so far we seem to just wander over to the computer and use the keyboard and mouse to pick direct from iTunes.

Here’s a picture of the setup – you’ll notice I haven’t yet removed the 6-disk CD player, though I will soon. The cabinet is now resuming its former purpose of storing table linens, candlesticks, and the like.

Homemusic

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Second Life – some realistic coverage

Published December 28, 2006 Technology Leave a Comment

Second Life has had an amazing amount of press coverage lately, with the mainstream press proclaiming the immersive environment the greatest thing since sliced bread – like this article in the Globe and Mail, for instance, calling Second Life a Signpost For the Future.

There are a couple of good responses to the hype from a couple of the most insightful and knowledgeable commentators on social technology, Clay Shirky and danah boyd.

Clay points out that lots of people are trying Second Life, but it’s likely that not many are yet spending lots of time in the environment, or even becoming regular users.

He then goes on to note that we’ve seen all this before, in the hype a dozen or so years ago about MUDs and MOOs, and rightly points out that If, in 1993, you’d studied mailing lists, or usenet, or irc, you’d have a better grasp of online community today than if you’d spent a lot of time in LambdaMOO or Cyberion City. Ou sont les TinyMUCKs d’antan?

danah comments on Clay’s post, correctly noting that the most successful social software environments, like MySpace, are being used as complements to the physical social world, not as virtual replacements for it, and that people don’t want to socialize with lots of people they don’t know from some other context.

If you look at the rise of social tech amongst young people, it’s not about divorcing the physical to live digitally. MySpace has more to do with offline structures of sociality than it has to do with virtuality. People are modeling their offline social network; the digital is complementing (and complicating) the physical. In an environment where anyone _could_ socialize with anyone, they don’t. They socialize with the people who validate them in meatspace. The mobile is another example of this. People don’t call up anyone in the world (like is fantasized by some wrt Skype); they call up the people that they are closest with. The mobile supports pre-existing social networks, not purely virtual ones.

I think Second Life is cool, but I think these well thought out perspectives from Clay and danah are spot on.

Technorati Tags: ,

Second Life – some realistic coverage

Published December 28, 2006 Technology Leave a Comment

Second Life has had an amazing amount of press coverage lately, with the mainstream press proclaiming the immersive environment the greatest thing since sliced bread – like this article in the Globe and Mail, for instance, calling Second Life a Signpost For the Future.

There are a couple of good responses to the hype from a couple of the most insightful and knowledgeable commentators on social technology, Clay Shirky and danah boyd.

Clay points out that lots of people are trying Second Life, but it’s likely that not many are yet spending lots of time in the environment, or even becoming regular users.

He then goes on to note that we’ve seen all this before, in the hype a dozen or so years ago about MUDs and MOOs, and rightly points out that If, in 1993, you’d studied mailing lists, or usenet, or irc, you’d have a better grasp of online community today than if you’d spent a lot of time in LambdaMOO or Cyberion City. Ou sont les TinyMUCKs d’antan?

danah comments on Clay’s post, correctly noting that the most successful social software environments, like MySpace, are being used as complements to the physical social world, not as virtual replacements for it, and that people don’t want to socialize with lots of people they don’t know from some other context.

If you look at the rise of social tech amongst young people, it’s not about divorcing the physical to live digitally. MySpace has more to do with offline structures of sociality than it has to do with virtuality. People are modeling their offline social network; the digital is complementing (and complicating) the physical. In an environment where anyone _could_ socialize with anyone, they don’t. They socialize with the people who validate them in meatspace. The mobile is another example of this. People don’t call up anyone in the world (like is fantasized by some wrt Skype); they call up the people that they are closest with. The mobile supports pre-existing social networks, not purely virtual ones.

I think Second Life is cool, but I think these well thought out perspectives from Clay and danah are spot on.

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