A Few More "Thoughts on Music"
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The first time I heard the phrase "digital rights management" was in 2000. It came from the mouth of Dick Brass, who at the time headed up Microsoft's (MSFT) automotive computing division.  I didn't like the phrase from the start.
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There's been a mostly fantastic discussion about fair use in this neighborhood for the last few days.  It started when a photograph of Lane Hartwell's was used in a video spoof of the Billy Joel song "We Didn't Start the Fire."  The first I heard of this was in a Twitter post of hers where she said she was turning off access to her entire Flickr collection because this picture was used without permission. A series of communications with the people who did the video resulted in the video being taken down. Later Mike Arrington, who is a lawyer, wrote a piece saying she didn't have right on her side, and that the video's use of her picture was probably fair use. I found Mike's piece compelling. Others took offense. It thought it was a useful part of the discussion. I understand Ms Hartwell's point of view. I hate it when people copy a whole post of mine and paste it into theirs. But then I grab bits of images and put them on my blog and people rarely complain. The blogosphere is built on being loose about copyright and fair use.  I'm doing a deal with a content company and all these issues are coming up. We haven't been able to write a contract that covers all the things they want covered and make it possible for me to do what I need to do, and they want my product to work. It's a real mess we're in. Bloggers are supposed to be radicals when it comes to fair use and copyright, but that generalization doesn't work with many creative people. Hartwell's position in some ways is like the RIAA or MPAA, who bloggers often dismiss as clueless. How can we have it both ways? How can some defend her position yet not defend the entertainment industry? There's a lot to discuss here, and a lot of the discussion on the blogs has been informative and respectful. Not all of it, but to an unusually high degree.  So, I am interested in doing an in person "flash conference" on the subject of fair use in a few weeks. I'd say next week if it weren't Christmas. Most conferences are so boring. I want to do a conf on a hot subject when it's still hot in the blogosphere. This may be a good subject for such a quickly organized conference. What do you think of the flash conference idea for this??
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The British Department for Education and Skills (DfES) recently launched a "Music Manifesto" campaign, with the ostensible intention of educating the next generation of British musicians. Unfortunately, they also teamed up with the music industry (EMI, and various artists) to make this popular. EMI has apparently negotiated their end well, so that children in our schools will now be indoctrinated about the illegality of downloading music.The ignorance and audacity of this got to me a little, so I wrote an open letter to the DfES about it. Unfortunately, it's pedantic, as I suppose you have to be when writing to goverment representatives. But I hope you find it useful, and perhaps feel inspired to do something similar, if or when the same thing has happened in your area.
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I'm not the kind of guy to toot my own horn, but I believe most of you understand, sympathize and approve of tooting my country's horn. While us Finns have plenty of things to be proud of - Nokia, sauna, and I'm sure there's other stuff - our music is a wide-open door into the dark well of the Finnish psyche, a nation with one of the highest suicide rates in the world and 24 hours of darkness in the winter. With that marketing speech out of the way, behold how hard we rock, how fast and loud we are below the fold.
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Some music companies get it, others don't.
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Rui Capela's software has appeared in this column many times. I've written about it directly (see At the Sounding Edge: Using QSynth and QJackCtl and HDRs and DAWs For Linux: The New Breed) and it shows up in almost every article I write. I'm not exaggerating when I state that Rui's programs have become indispensable components here at Studio Dave, so naturally I'm interested in the mind behind it all. In this entry I'll recap the nature and state of Rui's software, after which we'll meet the man himself in another lively interview here at the sounding edge.
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Review Can it appeal to novice and pro alike?
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One of these things is not like the others ...
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Classic(al) advice from Munger and Mozart.
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In the marginalized world of music education, a good deal of serious thinking needs to be done.
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Buying music from your computer over the internet is cool, but buying music from the portable player in your hand is cooler. Commentary by Eliot Van Buskirk.
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Though digital music has come a long way, today's online music stores still have significant problems. Here's my fix-it wish list.
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Several concerts this year set me to thinking about bigger matters, and for that I am grateful.
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Still listening to this classic Dead song.  And writing about it on Twitter... It's an MP3 that I ripped from the Mars Hotel album. Which I bought on CD many years ago. I've listened to this track about 1000 times. When I play it it puts a smile on my face. Because Cucamonga is a place with no pride, imho.  It's a joke, kind of like Truckin makes fun of New Orleans, a town that done the Dead wrong, once, a long time ago. Now if it were on vinyl I would have wore it out a long time ago. I'm sure there was a copy of the song on the disk Apple stole from me. There you have it RIAA. You can go after Apple. I'll support you because they stole from both of us. They have no right to listen to PofC. I imagine Steve Jobs and Phil Shindler sitting around smokin a doobie listening to Phil Lesh sing, thinking "Dave has good taste in music." BTW, Cucamonga is a suburb in southern CA. Near Ontario. Probably very non-descript. Might have been interesting 70 years ago. And that's your bedtime story for Saturday, boys and girls. Have a nice day, don't hit your brother (or sister) and be nice to the sitter!
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Reviews of new releases by Ulrich Schnauss, Loudon Wainwright III, Mem Shannon, Tiny Vipers, Bob Brozman, Mogwai and more.
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Tycho:  We still think about Eye of Judgment quite a bit - sometimes I will sit in silence and think about it, or think about it while I lay dormant in my charge casket.  I think about placing cards carefully on its luxurious cloth mat, smirking as distant foes are gnawed by my lizard proxies.  We are overjoyed (joymax!) that they stuck with the new concept, the card thing, as opposed to the brutally sardonic original.    I don't like constantly being pushed to pre-order things, but there is also a point (it would be easy to graph) where I'm not willing to let fate's whimsical machinery determine what I play.  So during a recent mall run I put down some money on whatever I could remember at the time - unscientifically, it was Metroid, Stranglehold, Halo, Stuntman, and Mass Effect.  This doesn't account for everything between now and November, certainly, but it kind of felt like a quiz show and I was intimidated.  Then I remembered Eye of Judgement and its manifold pleasures, endeavoring to append it, listwise.  It was at this point that "John" told us that both the game and the Playstation Eye peripheral had been cancelled.    At this assertion Gabriel stood up straight and still, like a meerkat.    "No, it wasn't," said he, quietly.  A cold quiet, like space.        When I am confronted with mere distortions of facts, I can typically slice through them to the beating truth.  But when a person says something that is flatly false, this is very disorienting for some reason and I am without my mind's full power.  Then the guy compounded things by saying they had very few preorders, and this was accompanied by a sneer, as though the number of preorders was some crucial consideration when assessing quality.  He actually thought it was funny that I wanted to buy it.    I wanted to ask him if he understood that a product not being available for preorder and a product not existing, or never being allowed to exist constituted profoundly different states, but these are the deep thoughts that occur to a person while they are tucking in at the food court and not when they are face to face with strange men at the EB.       When we returned from the store, almost as if on cue the product began to appear at online retailers - for sixty dollars.  Yes, that's correct.  The Playstation Eye peripheral plus the card game, for ten dollars more than a Sixaxis?  I won't say that I expected extortion, but I at least expected profit.  Assuming you have the Triple already in hand, they're making the Eye (and Eye of Judgment) an easy decision.    Let me take a moment to welcome PAX attendees to this year's celebration, even though it isn't especially useful to readers in Glasgow.  I hope the new venue is to your liking.   Be kind to each other, even to your defeated foes!  And be kind to your Enforcers, for they have toiled in your service.
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Continuing the thread from yesterday. I got absolutely nowhere, some people suggested I use a smart playlist, missing the point that I'm a developer working on a podcatcher, not a user trying to use iTunes as a podcatcher. I'm sure it's an excellent way to subscribe to podcasts, but I have my own ideas how podcatchers should work, and I want to integrate them with other stuff I'm working on. Integrating with iTunes is proving to be quite a challenge, or maybe it's an art, we'll see.  As usual Mac users are superior sumbitches.  (Quoting the James Brolin character the first time we meet him in the third season finale of The West Wing.) Anyway, the search continues, I tried another more direct tack, and looked for glue for iTunes for UserLand, and bingo, there's a match, from 2001, a well-known Frontier programmer Sean Elfstrom, apparently converted glue for the Sonic SoundJam app that iTunes used to be, before Apple acquired it.  I installed the glue in the OPML Editor. It's daunting, for sure, but let's see what I can get working.