This is where you say something clever
According to a report about a new study:
Almost half of all “tweens” (kids between age 9 and 14) who consume digital music get it from the iTunes Store, according to a survey from the NPD group released this week.
I always have said that one of the things that would bring down the amount of illegal downloading would be good convenient legal sources. The other thing would be to get the prices down further.
It’s fall in Seattle again – leaves are changing colors (that’s a picture of the Japanese maple in front of my house, taken with the iPhone), it’s raining most of the time, the days are short, and it’s almost time for the Earshot Jazz Festival.
John Gilbreath and his crew have put together another top-notch lineup, starting with the wonderful pianist Ahmad Jamal on October 19 at McCaw Hall. Jamal is an influential figure in jazz who’s been recording longer than I’ve been alive. Jamal is just the first of a whole bunch of terrific pianists this year, including local fave Bill Anschell, French master Jacky Terrasson, the great Cedar Walton (who played in Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers in the early ’60s with Wayne Shorter and Freddie Hubbard), and one of my recent favorites, Fred Hersch, who the Boston Globe called “a pristine pianist with a poet’s soul”.
There’s lots of other great stuff too – including the venerable Belgian harmonica player Toots Thielmans, vocalist Dee Dee Bridgewater, bringing her Red Earth ensemble of Malian musicians, the Zimbabwean guitarist and singer Oliver Mtukudzi, and lots more.
The only hard part is picking which shows to attend!
I’m glad to see that eMusic will be offering audiobook downloads with no copy protection.
I’m not a major audiobooks listener, though we do tend to listen to them on long car trips a few times a year, and Michele likes to listen to books when she exercises. I’ve been frustrated by trying to get audio book content into the digital shape I want – which is on an iPod. Ripping CDs from the library is a royal pain because many of the audiobook CDs either aren’t in or are inconsistently coded in Gracenote, which means you have to manually edit all the track information in iTunes. The format of online audiobooks that the King County and Seattle Public libraries offer has Windows DRM encoding, which doesn’t work at all on Macs or iPods, and buying the books from iTunes at $20 or more a pop seems way out of line to me.
eMusic has been my major source of new music for a while now, and I’ve been really happy with the selection – for my eclectic taste the lack of major label content is mostly a feature rather than a bug.
This quote from the New York Times story on the new audiobooks rings true to me:
“Our customers don’t steal music,” said David Pakman, chief of eMusic, of the company’s 300,000 subscribers, who pay from $9.99 (for 30 songs) to $19.99 (for 75 songs). “A lot of them are technically sophisticated, but they’re not prone to piracy.”
I have to say that to my mind, $10 for one book a month still seems a bit pricey – I would think that they’d at least undercut the price of a paperback the market for audiobooks would really take huge leaps.
Technorati Tags: emusic, audiobooks
I’m glad to see that eMusic will be offering audiobook downloads with no copy protection.
I’m not a major audiobooks listener, though we do tend to listen to them on long car trips a few times a year, and Michele likes to listen to books when she exercises. I’ve been frustrated by trying to get audio book content into the digital shape I want – which is on an iPod. Ripping CDs from the library is a royal pain because many of the audiobook CDs either aren’t in or are inconsistently coded in Gracenote, which means you have to manually edit all the track information in iTunes. The format of online audiobooks that the King County and Seattle Public libraries offer has Windows DRM encoding, which doesn’t work at all on Macs or iPods, and buying the books from iTunes at $20 or more a pop seems way out of line to me.
eMusic has been my major source of new music for a while now, and I’ve been really happy with the selection – for my eclectic taste the lack of major label content is mostly a feature rather than a bug.
This quote from the New York Times story on the new audiobooks rings true to me:
“Our customers don’t steal music,” said David Pakman, chief of eMusic, of the company’s 300,000 subscribers, who pay from $9.99 (for 30 songs) to $19.99 (for 75 songs). “A lot of them are technically sophisticated, but they’re not prone to piracy.”
I have to say that to my mind, $10 for one book a month still seems a bit pricey – I would think that they’d at least undercut the price of a paperback the market for audiobooks would really take huge leaps.
Technorati Tags: emusic, audiobooks
Over the years I’ve played with several iTunes scripts that generate web feeds of what I’m listening to. I just updated the “What’s Oren Listening To Today” link on the blog web page to link to a Twitter feed called orenmusic that gets fed from iTunes via Doug Adams’ Current Track to Twitter applescript.
Given that it’s Twitter, you can also get an RSS feed or follow it from Twitter itself.
Slick!
Over the years I’ve played with several iTunes scripts that generate web feeds of what I’m listening to. I just updated the “What’s Oren Listening To Today” link on the blog web page to link to a Twitter feed called orenmusic that gets fed from iTunes via Doug Adams’ Current Track to Twitter applescript.
Given that it’s Twitter, you can also get an RSS feed or follow it from Twitter itself.
Slick!
I recently had a birthday and got showered with a bunch of CDs from friends (which made me wonder how we’re going to give specific music as gifts in the download age), and realized I hadn’t posted anything about my current listening in a long time – so here are some snippets.
“Truth and Reconciliation” (Darrell Grant)
I was driving in to work one morning and heard a piano trio version of the old Jerome Kern classic The Way You Look Tonight, one of my favorite jazz standards, with a completely intriguing reharmonization. It turned out that it was by Portland pianist and music prof Darrell Grant. I immediately downloaded his latest recording from emusic and have been listening to it frequently. There’s a renaissance of good piano trios happening these days, and Darrell’s is among the finest.
“Something Like Now” (Moutin Reunion Quartet)
“Power Tree” (Moutin Reunion Quartet)
I caught the Moutin Reunion Quartet at the Ballard Jazz Festival in April and was totally
blown away by the musicianship and energy of this French quartet led by brothers Francois (bass) and Louis (drums) Moutin. Intense (but not humorless) modern jazz with lots of swing and post-modern bombast (in a good sense). Well worth listening to!
“Bad Blood in the City: The Piety Street Sessions” (James Blood Ulmer)
Blood Ulmer was part of the harmolodic fusion scene around Ornette Coleman and his Prime Time band in the seventies, playing extremely dense and multi-layered free funk. It’s interesting to watch him in the new millennium reinventing himself as a down-home blues musician, along with his producer and collaborator (and guitarist extraordinaire) Vernon Reid. To my ears none of Blood’s blues recordings has been entirely successful yet, but this outing, recorded in post-Katrina New Orleans in three days, is the best yet.
“My Heart’s in Memphis: The Songs of Dan Penn” (Irma Thomas)
As an old R&B and soul musician I’d been vaguely aware of Dan Penn as a Memphis songwriter associated with the Muscle Shoals recordings of the sixties, who wrote such classics as Do Right Woman for Aretha, Dark End of the Street for James Carr, I’m Your Puppet and others. A few years ago a friend (happy birthday!) turned me on to Penn’s more recent recordings, and I became a fan. On this CD from 2000, New Orleans soul great Irma Thomas sings some old Penn songs and adds some new ones. I have to say that overall I think the old songs resonate more than the new ones, and the production is a little slicker than I’d like, but it’s great to hear some real old-school soul music from some worthy masters.
“Night & the Music” (The Fred Hersch Trio)
Another lovely piano trio recording, with the terrific Drew Gress on bass and Nasheet Waits on drums. Somewhat introverted but deep, with great interplay among the trio. A modern take on the Bill Evans tradition.
“Live at the Fillmore East” (Neil Young and Crazy Horse)
I was a big fan of Neil Young’s Everybody Knows This is Nowhere when it came out in 1970, and this is a great live set from that era. Crazy Horse – wow. I have to agree with a review I saw that it sounds like an early version of Tom Verlaine and Richard Loyd in Television.
I chanced upon this 1997 release on an emusic list of the “50 Greatest Summer Recordings” (it was number 39) and downloaded it. As the band says on their own web site, they play “dreamlike, hot-buttered pop music that sounds delicately handcrafted, yet effortless all the same.” I intend to check out their new release, Everybody, too.
Technorati Tags: music
A few months ago Tom Lewis turned me on to the great concerts available for streaming at Wolfgang’s Vault, many of which come from the Bill Graham’s vault of treasures. Lots of great stuff from the sixties, seventies, and onwards. Now they’ve also made some of those concert audios available for purchase, in unprotected mp3 files. Today I bought a fabulous 1974 Ry Cooder session with Jim Dickinson on bass and Jim Keltner on drums. Worth checking out!
Technorati Tags: music
We had a chance last week to try recording our regular weekly jazz trio (sax, bass, drums) get-together with Sony’s new-ish PCM-D1 portable recording device. The Sony device is probably the most high-end of a new class of recording devices that record from built-in microphones directly to common digital formats in memory. In this case we recorded at regular CD-quality resolution (44.1 Khz) to wav files.
Mostly I was trying to figure out if the sound from a single set of stereo microphones would work for this type of music. Our ears have become used to years of hearing recordings that are created with multiple microphones placed extremely close to instruments, so that the sound of microphones that pick up some of the quality of the room the music is played in tends to sound more hollow and “unnatural” at times. I have to say, I came away impressed. The quality from the built-in condenser mikes was really good, and while the mix isn’t perfect, I think that by spending some time working on the placement of the device we could come away with perfectly useful recordings.
One of the tunes we recorded is available for listening as an mp3 from http://homepage.mac.com/oren.sreebny/ned-oren-kurt.mp3 – it’s only a 128 bit converted file (and we didn’t play great) but you should be able to get the general idea. Many thanks to Tony Tudisco from First Choice Marketing for arranging for the demo!
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.
Technorati Tags: music
