TeledyN - slay the RIAA - Comments

How do I know I understand

a stranger — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 09:07:32 -0400

How do I know I understand something? Can I prove my knowledge without recreating what I know? I know that I know something when my knowledge feels "right". Therefore, I define quality of my life through feelings. These are based on feelings I get from objects created in past, grouped with other objects, structured into more or less organized architectures, fractals. My memories. Memory is a picture, connected to and through infinite number of other memories, where emotions are inseparable from memory itself. Level of my good feeling depends on depth of memories understood.

Virtual worlds to which I would be connected via not only my sensors (audio,video,touch), but through feelings are one of the frontiers for information providing and spread. Creation of more organized memories seems to be the goal. How close are we and how can we get closer?

Currently, we use technologies to interconnect ourselves with others. From the consciousness mind, fed with information through human body via sensors like eyes, ears, skin and muscles. Subjective picture of objective world surrounding the mind is created by the mind itself.

Human conscious mind depends from the moment of birth on not only existence of body iteslf, but personality as well, which is nothing more, than memories created more or less automatically thanks to existence of outer world. Future and current perception of anything is dictated by memories created while experiencing outer world and inner memories at the same time.

I completely depend on technology I am part of, human body, with existence of my consciousness, with my life. It seems that my logical goal is a creation of never lost consciousness with good feeling about itself and understanding if itself and everything that surrounds it and is part of. How can I optimize this process?

It might be better, if:

* More senses were part of memory creation
* More elegant, beautifull and mind soothing inputs existed
* More organized and optimized information is provided
* Less quantity, more quality

Since human mind can knowingly process only little information for a short period of time before needing rest, information providing should be organized in a way to count on this fact. Maybe, psychology can come up with a way, how mind can be put into a more optimal shape before creating memories. No knowledgable sportsman starts training without warmup.

Helping ourselves and others on the journey is a fantastic quest and we depend on technologies more than we seem to think.

Good luck and thanks for providing good food,

Jakub / jakubsafar@gmail.com

p.s. philosophers might finally provide humanity with few simple, easilly understood facts about life and purpose of it. They already spent few thousand years thinking it over, god damn it. Am I supposed to loose faith about about their aspiration?

Another evil pirate nipped.

mrG — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 10:19:00 -0400

Another evil pirate nipped. His horrible crime? Doing for musical ensembles what Project Gutenberg did for educators by making quality score prints of public domain music freely available to anyone who wants one, completely within the bounds of the law of This Land of Ours where he lived. Unfortunately, Universal Editions USA didn't like it:

"after lengthy discussions with very knowledgeable lawyers and supporters, I became painfully aware of the fact that I, a normal college student, has neither the energy nor the money necessary to deal with this issue in any other way than to agree with the cease and desist, and take down the entire site"
[ International Music Score Library Project ]

The ultimate copy protection

mrG — Sun, 11 Jun 2006 21:42:38 -0400

The ultimate copy protection. That's what it is, and it all came out in a conversation today happening on the SATURN-L mailing list where I was taken to task over my exhuberant and unrepentant fan-taping and sharing, and then having the unmittigated audacity and gaul to suggest that this was the digital age, and that nothing short of a strip search could prevent fan-recordings, so musicians (and promoters) had better grow up and just learn to live with it.

And that brought me back to this page, this story and the brilliant stroke of copy-protect genius that is the Voice of Fire.

time to wake up Margaret: the digital millenium is here. it arrived while you are out. Modern recorders are smaller than your thumb and take better sound than most FM stations; many cellphones have video capabilities using low-light CCDs. The McLuhan notion of technology extending our bodies now extends to our senses and our memory.

If you want to beat reproduction, here's how: Go to the National Gallery in Ottawa and look at Voice of Fire. It is astounding, and it totally defeats all attempts to reproduce it in books, texts, postcards ... and sneaky fan-photos like me (yes, I confess, I have covertly photographed art) How does it do this? By being. By its presence. Voice of Fire, look it up, google it (you will probably get my essay about it) [ie this page]

May has been listening to Sun Ra since we met. At first she thought I was in some kind of weird cult. She was right, of course, but the point is, she just didn't get it. My friends, same way. In the techno-enlightened 80's some of my friends would call it my "Time to Go Home music". Some liked Lanquidity and the trippier friends liked There Are Other Worlds; when it came time to go see Ra that first time in 1983 (I couldn't afford the Toronto 70's show, maybe I was in Winnipeg at the time anyway) I'd heard a whack of live bootlegs like the Donneschausen and Stockholm radio dubs I'd traded with the professor of architecture at U of Manitoba, and I knew I had to see this thing for myself.

There was, simply put, no comparison. I buy a "Yes" album and see them, it's the album with faces; I see the Stones in '66, it's the records with faces and Jagger's prancing, I'd seen Miles and Diz and Ornette in amphitheatres and small intimate clubs, but each was still only just a shade more than a nice quality stereo dub. But Sun Ra? Sun Ra defeated all that.

How did he do this? By being. By having an overwhelming all-embracing wrap-you-up-and-take-you-away presence.

My taping doesn't change that.

Far from it. My tapes, like the records, are like fuzzy pictures of Nessie, the porkpie-hat black smear of the UFO. But I saw it! you tell your friends and neighbours, but most just shake their heads and pity the poor kook's family. But I saw it, I felt it, I heard it and it was like St Therese with the arrow through her heart. Yeah, right. From some far out jazz band? He was born in Alabama, y'know.

Forget it, you can't make them see. Not unless you can coax them to come with you, and even that is no guarantee. But if they don't go, if they just stick it in their iPod, they are left out, though they still get left with that Mystery of why was he such a zealot about this band? Could they be? Do you suppose?...

You see, Sun Ra had also told his crew that if they only played music that machines could play, they were going to be out of a job because computers would overtake them and do it all faster cheaper better. I don't know that he said it in so many words, but he also clearly demonstrated how if you only play what can be captured in a bitstream, you are an endangered species so you can stand there in the headlights and chant that DRM will save you, or you can get the hell off the road and do something else. Sun Ra chose the latter path, a multidimensional Spirit Music that positively defies mechanical reproduction just as does the Voice of Fire.

Seems I'm not the only one to

mrG — Thu, 13 Apr 2006 10:20:57 -0400

Seems I'm not the only one to click to the necessity of a shared musical environment and the engineering oversight that left this out of the mainstream mp3-player designs: it doesn't say if the consumers actually buy them, but at the very least there are senior planners at Circuit City who have seen fit to include a whole fleet of mp3-player FM-transmitter accessories for all sorts of social situations.

Or even better, in both price and quality, get into a Hobbytron FM kit for portables or a really high quality FM basestation for your workstation, both as DIY bags of parts or fully soldered.

Disappointment sets in. Some

mrG — Tue, 11 Apr 2006 17:09:05 -0400

Disappointment sets in. Some good things still to say about the Muro MR-100 now 4 days into owning one, and some of the features are still features, but I'd have to say most of the utility I'd envisioned for this device is beyond its specifications; as with most modern 'high' technology, the crush comes from what the manufacturer's pre-sales won't say:

voice record - with a 16khz sampling rate, this is early twentieth century telephone sound quality, which means you can soundbite a lecture or jog your own mental notes, but only if the ambient sound is hush. I'd hoped for a kind of digital camera for sound, clip the kids singing in the car, the songbird in the wood, weird winds or whatever with that simple one-push red record button. Nope.
line-in - ok, it is called 'line-in' but I thought it might be sensitive enough to catch the 50mv wave off typical portable recorder mics. Nope.
FM broadcast - I haven't given up on this, and it is still useful here in the house, but on the road, which is really the intended use, it is highly sensitive to the position of the headphone wire (which doubles as the antenna) and very succeptable to interference from overhead wires and flourescent lights and maybe even engine electronics. It could be I just need to pick a better frequency (I'm using 91.5Mhz) or it could be there's just not enough oomph in the transmitter's amp. Seems to work best when hung from the rear-view mirror, but still way noisier than the old cassette-adapter.
speed adjust - this was going to be so cool, listen to ebooks or lectures at upped speed, dissect arrangements and tricky melodies at low speed. Sadly, instead of the usual digital-delay based accellerators, Muro does a simple sample re-sampling that changes the pitch with the speed; you can't listen to a lecture on planetary physics given by Alvin of the Chipmonks and seriously concentrate. It's not a complete loss since there is a 20% variance which, in music terms, means you can shift to at least a viable key, but it doesn't go to 50%, so from a musician's studies standpoint it's another nope.

that's the bad news. now the good news:

With all it's mobile warts, FM broadcast is still a feature. It fits the requirement of seamlessness. I can confortably play a clip for anyone with a radio handy. You could bring your music to the office and not feel like a dork plugged up in your own sonic island. And there's a power to being a walking muzak machine.

Excuse me, waiter? Would you be so kind as to tune that to ninety-one point five for us please? Baby needs some big band bop.
Because voice record is only 16k, you don't have to leave a ton of space for voice notes and that's important when you don't have much to begin with. Two minutes of sound is less than half a meg.
The low RAM may even be a feature because of the unintended consequence of that scarecity. It's the old "if you were stranded on a desert island and could only take 5 CDs" scenario, but for me it's also very true that there is at any given time only about that many arrangements that I really want to study over and over and over again. Since the thing mounts very easily as a USB drive, I can keep it wired in as a habit so swapping tunes in and out is like composing my own podcast.
A feature I hadn't noticed before and might be this thing's saving grace: On playback there is a one-touch button control for A to B repeat mode, which is very useful for isolating those difficult passages to be endlessly repeated until you can 'get' the damn thing. Very, very useful, whether it's musical study, complex prose or linguistic practice.

and therein is the clue that decodes the why of this machine: I don't think the Muro MR-100 was intended as an entertainment device or even intended for any musical purposes -- especially considering its debut in pre-ipodmania 2004, I think it was intended as a language-study aid, to host the audio lessons and capture live samples or the practical lab-work, and then re-framed as an MP3-player to get in on the billion-dollar music download market.

Unfortunately, even at the discount price of $100 I don't think it really sits well with the ipod generation, and that might explain why eskynet appears to be sitting on a stack of them. In Sears today I was looking at some comparably-priced voice recorders from Panasonic, and this Muro had all of them beat feature for feature no question the better bang for the buck, but that's a tough market to find and it's a shame because this thing could have ruled that domain.

As it is, it's probably a really good example of the Shinto proverb, "When we hold a bow, we shouldn't hold two arrows." - it's being sold to people who won't appreciate it, regardless which of those two audiences they attempt to target, too ipod-y for the lecturers, too lecture-y for the downloaders. As for me, I'm still carrying it about, but with some reluctant reservation, a disappointed disaffection looking at the siren buttons and dreaming of what could have been if-only had they been true, and saving up my coin to replace it with that still undiscovered something that does do what I want.

A few bits more for those who

mrG — Fri, 31 Mar 2006 08:35:00 -0500

A few bits more for those who thought I was talking through my hat while talking to brick walls, and although still rooted in a tacit assumption that name-brand music is the only music worth having, at least these legislators across the pond recognize an unfair monopoly ploy when they see one ...

Apple and its popular iPod control 75% of the digital media player market in the USA, and 70% in Europe. Now, European nations are taking notice - and treating Apple more like rival and software giant Microsoft.
[ France wants compatible iPod tunes ]

I'm tellin' ya, folks, we gots to stop playin' w'folks that's out to gets us. I don't care what kind o' candy they's offerin', pedophiles is pedophiles and monopolies are monopolies, and both run a dangerous game what's got your'n an' mine interests last in their plan. Now, I never seen one up close, but tell me, perchance, might the iPod's headphone jack be on it's backside bottom? Just wonderin'. Just thinkin' maybe it would be a fitting metaphor ...

Just in case you thought I was

mrG — Tue, 07 Mar 2006 13:24:55 -0500

Just in case you thought I was talking through my hat about other worlds with other ways to top up your 'Pod, here's not one, but two successful business models that demonstrate how ...

a decrease of copyright rigidities in the music industry could lead to an increase in total welfare
[ Beatpick flatters Magnatune business model | Creative Commons ]

you see, it's not about not selling music, and it's not about who owns what or what they are due in exchange for it. it's just about sensible ways to make it work.

You may have garnered too much

a stranger — Thu, 12 Jan 2006 11:15:02 -0500

You may have garnered too much attention as the site is down. Did you Oprah them?

"eMusic Temporarily Unavailable

We're very sorry but eMusic is unavailable at the moment. Our engineering team is working to correct the problem as quickly as possible. We appreciate your patience and apologize for this inconvenience. "

I haven't yet jumped on the trial

a stranger — Wed, 11 Jan 2006 13:30:36 -0500

I haven't yet jumped on the trial, but it sounds like an adjunct to, not a replacement for iTunes, et al. They don't overlap all that much, from what I can tell. You mention a lot of known artists, but for the kidz who want the kewl hits, they're gonna find them at iTunes, just like they used to hit the record shop at the mall [shudder].

I'm more interested in the tug-o-war between Jobs/Apple and the labels: Apple is quoted as being on the sides of keeping prices down and the labels are wanted to charge more for some tracks. I note no one wants the lower prices further: .99 seems to be the sweet spot for now.

Apple's most recent sales number for music were pretty amazing.

* 850 million songs purchased and downloaded
* 3 million songs per day

at a dime a track or whatever Apple is getting, that's not trivial. But the labels are wanting even more?

There is also one new legal torrent

a stranger — Mon, 02 Jan 2006 12:58:34 -0500

There is also one new legal torrent site - at http://www.datagalaxy.tk

Very good and growing nicely

Taking from the Grassroots

mrG — Mon, 16 May 2005 12:15:13 -0400

Somewhat in the vein of what Frank was saying, although lacking the means of network promotions and propagation that I advocate for the One Track Universe, I wandered today into the unforgetable memory lane of an online cache of both Fraser and DeBolt albums; if you don't know these two and have even the least interest in the psychedelic folk of the post summer of love 1969-1972 years, you'll want to check them out; in just two albums that didn't even make the mainstream (although they were on Columbia) Allen and Daisy dragged the troubadour tradition into the 20th century kicking and screaming all the way.

Anyway, back to the point, optometrist/webpatron Steve Briggs has worked with Daisy to give you all the swag, the reviews, lyrics, covers, and the full tracks to both albums; once you discover the resource, you have everything you'd had in 1972 to convince you to give them a listen.

what you don't have, though, is the network and here's where the mainstream still rule the bit-waves: You can get RSS of playlists made from Yahoo Launchcast subscribers, but dig, you won't be seeing any of these F&D tracks in those lists, or any of the indies who know that CD is dead meat, or any of the Internet Archive audio, or ... -- to play in that game, not counting how Yahoo! excludes non-approved browsers, the bands have to suck up to the right execs to get in with the in crowd.

That's what needs fixing: In keeping with the ICT Manifesto from a few days ago and my iPod diss from even before, these distribution methods need to be decentralized and interoperate, and they need to be rooted in the grassroots websites like Daisy's tribute to F&D.

btw, Steve isn't an employee of Microsoft, he's just being lazy releasing all those tracks in Windows-only wma format with no normalization. If you want to fix them, here's what I did:

wget -r -l 1 -A .wma -nd -nH http://fraserdebolt.com/soundfiles/
for F in *.wma; do 
    rm -f audiodump.wav
    BASE=`basename "$F" .wma`
    mplayer -ao pcm "$F" |\
    ruby -e '$stdin.each_line {|l|; if l.match(/^[ ]*name:(.*)/); print $1.strip; end }' >"$BASE.txt"
   TITLE=`cat "$BASE.txt"`
   if [ -f audiodump.wav ]; then 
       normalize audiodump.wav
       lame --tt "$TITLE" --ta "Fraser and Debolt" --ty "1971" \
             --tg "folk" --tc "fraserdebolt.com" \
             -c -b 128 audiodump.wav \
             "Fraser and DeBolt - $TITLE.mp3"
    else 
        mv "$F" "Fraser and Debolt - $TITLE.wma"
    fi
done

Fixes up the whole lot of them into a format you can actually use and not strain to hear.

Seems I'm not alone in my assessment

mrG — Thu, 28 Apr 2005 12:38:05 -0400

Seems I'm not alone in my assessment of the iPod/iTunes situation, there's a very interesting summary of a truckload of concerns reported today in the BBC, everything from investigations by the European Commission for charging UK iTunes customers more than users in France or Germany, to a Californian lawsuit over Apple's right to digitally restrict what we've bought above and beyond what the law requires or allows.

The comments also include many testimonies of iPodders who shun the for-fee DRM stuff as Paul Beard had said, others who explain how the iTunes prices still isn't really competitive (considering it's not FLAC and you get no tangible swag with your purchace), and that all makes good sense except for this final chilling topper cherry of a stat: Apple, with their proprietary closed-pool format, now commands an 87% share in the for-fee music download market.

I've bought about as much music

a stranger — Thu, 21 Apr 2005 16:42:55 -0400

I've bought about as much music (probably more by length, a little less by number of tracks) from PlayItTonight.com as I have from the iTunes Music Store. I suspect in the long run, Smithsonian Global Sound (http://www.smithsonianglobalsound.org/) will get more of my money than iTMS and PlayItTonight combined. I know I'm atypical, and that this is not how most digital music consumers will operate. But unless Apple is prohibiting people from putting non-iTMS music on their iPods, or prohibiting indie labels from selling their digital tracks in both the iTMS and other digital music stores, I don't see how this is a monopoly any more than, say, Google has a monopoly on web search.

Is Apple prohibiting indie labels which sell their music on the iTMS from selling the same music elsewhere? That would definitely be wrong. But I haven't heard of that happening.

Yo ho ho ... Ottawa can do as they will

mrG — Sat, 26 Mar 2005 08:44:25 -0500

Yo ho ho ... Ottawa can do as they will because, just as I said above about the likelihood of lending your bud your ipod, apparently there's hard proof the hard-core of the file-trading universe will simply choose a less traceable path:

The struggle to enforce copyright laws in the digital age continues to be an uphill battle for content owners. Americansâ€™ attitude towards copyrighted material online has remained dismissive, even amidst widespread media coverage and legal action aimed at educating the public about the threat file-sharing poses to the intellectual property industries. Over time, the music downloading audience has grown to roughly 35 million American adults while about 26 million say they share files online. Young adults and full-time students are among the most likely to download or share files and are also the least likely to say they care about copyright. (Pew Internet Memo)

Although, it's a shame because I'd want them to care about Copyright! I want them to care about copyright the same way they care about sweatshop child-labour in the sneaker factories, the way they care about greenhouse gasses, composting and sorting their recyclables, the way their parents cared about fair-trade coffee and paraquat, and their parents about Union Made.

I'd be happier if everybody could stop a moment short of the cash register and ask, "Who am I helping here? And who will I hurt?"

Lessig on Wilco

TeledyN (trackback) — Mon, 31 Jan 2005 10:53:32 -0500

If you need any further proof that the one-track free-trade music-blog distribution system is the future of band/fan music communications, here it is ...

After its Warner label, Reprise, decided that the grou