Bee Gees singer dies. Maurice Gibb, who had hits in five decades as part of legendary harmony group the Bee Gees, dies in a Miami hospital at the age of 53. [BBC News | Front Page | UK Edition]
I’ve never been a fan, and don’t have any Bee Gees in my music collection.
I guess it seems one of those awful happenings that we don’t have any control over.
Now this does sound cool!
Where Hi-Fi Meets Wi-Fi: A Wireless Music System. The big hurdle to wiring a home stereo system to play music in every room is the wiring. But today, Yamaha will unveil a server that can provide music wirelessly to as many as five locations at a distance of 150 feet. [New York Times: Technology]
I probably could make room for something like this.
The Compact Disc Will Turn 20 This Spring.
After the Internet, the compact disc also will celebrate its 20th birthday this spring. But the CDs you buy today are essentially the same that you purchased 20 years ago. Paul Boutin explains.
This spring, the compact disc celebrates the 20th anniversary of its arrival in stores, which puts the once-revolutionary music format two decades behind Moore’s Law. The IBM PC, introduced about a year and a half earlier, has been revved up a thousandfold in performance since 1983. But the CD has whiled away the time, coasting on its Reagan-era breakthroughs in digital recording and storage. The two technologies, the PC and the CD, merged not long after their debuts — try to buy a computer without a disc player. But the relationship has become a dysfunctional one. The computer long ago outgrew its stagnant partner.
The author says it doesn’t have to be this way.
The modern recording studio is built around computers, Macs or PCs. Beefed up with high-performance analog-to-digital converters and super-sized disk drives, they digitize music up to 192,000 times per second, storing it as 24-bit data samples. That “192/24″ standard captures more than a thousand times as much detail as the CD’s “44.1/16″ resolution. Moreover, this music data is just another computer file, an icon on a desktop. Double-click it, and it plays. It would play on your home computer, too, if you could get your hands on it.
But instead of gearing up for digital home hubs, record companies have rolled out two more shiny-disc formats: DVD-Audio (DVD-A) and Super Audio CD (SACD). Both sound great, but you’re forgiven if you haven’t heard of them.
Paul Boutin concludes.
It’s no wonder that gearheads who buy the latest, greatest everything have ignored DVD-A and SACD in favor of MP3 players and CD burners. Computer-friendly music formats let you archive hundreds of albums on a laptop, create custom playlists that draw from your entire collection, and download them to portable players smaller than a single CD jewel box.
[Note: For a review of the introduction of the SACD last summer, you can read "Get More Satisfaction with a New Audio Technology -- and the Rolling Stones."]
Source: Paul Boutin, Slate, January 6, 2003
I’m not sure I agree with this. MP3 is a crap music format, worse quality than the CD that’s being maligned in this piece.
I still buy CDs for proper listening - we have two hi-fis, a mini system and a reasonable quality ghetto blaster scattered around the flat – but that doesn’t stop me having a ton of MP3s sitting around as well, tasters and stuff I’d never buy.
The home network solution isn’t there yet – we need enormous hard disks and WiFi like we haven’t seen yet to make those studio-quality files a viable source around the home.
If you like electronic music, this feed is for you, Discogs is a user created online database of electronic music releases, it currently has 88,101 releases, 63,006 artists and 10,764 labels in its database, and the releases are all cross referenced by artist, remixer, vocalist, and other electronic music related meta data. So now I’ve created an RSS Feed of the latest additions to the discogs.com database, here.
Thanks Adam.
Brad Mehldau’s Largo as My Top Pick For The Year.
That’s probably overstating it a bit, but this year when I’ve searched out a CD to put in the deck for that drive for late-night milk, or the many food excursions since the move and kitchen remodel, it’s been Largo. And as the most awesome of apologies for a most weak website, you can hear each tune, IN ITS ENTIRETY, or the entire CD by clicking the tune titles or that really small link at the bottom of that page. Redeemed. I always play “Wave / Mother Nature’s Son” and will probably use it as part of my contribution to the Music of 2002 appearance on The Lounge (KPBS Radio 89.5 FM) this Friday, 12/20/2002, at 6:30 pm. You can also pick it up on the Internet. [Vince Outlaw: The New Jazz Thing Live]
Well, I can’t get it to play 
Anyone got any suggestions?
Movie industry thrives, “piracy problem” notably nonexistent. What piracy problem? The LA Times reports that “more Americans went to movies this year than anytime since 1959,” despite what Jack Valenti characterizes as “the choices technology now provides, including VCRs, cable television, satellite dishes and the Internet.”
Remember, Jack Valenti is the man who predicted, on behalf of the film industry, that Hollywood would collapse if the gub’ment didn’t outlaw the VCR, and is pushing for outrageous restrictions on the Internet to keep Hollywood afloat.
Box office revenues continue to climb, as they have every year since the Supreme Court told Valenti to get bent — which one is it, Jack? Is Hollywood sinking or flying higher than ever before? Link Discuss [Boing Boing Blog]
And how does all this square with the whinging of the music industry? Maybe we’d buy more cds if they’d give us something we wanted to buy?
Another boy/girl band, please!
more on internet radio, moving into the “hifi” arena… [Tim Strafford-Taylor]. from The Guardian Is your hi-fi ready for internet radio? LIke the look of the Streamium, though not “Philips is endorsing only one router….. “ and “doesn’t actually let you type in a station’s web address (although it may offer this in the future). Instead, it offers a “walled garden” of stations accessed easily via the Streamium’s jog-dial control.” so no wfmu then (yet)… Now the Turtle Beach hi-fi separate looks more like it, inc. “…can be factored into an 802.11 network with internet radio stations streamed wirelessly to a hi-fi. “ and “…listen to any radio station by keying in its URL”… [Ecademy: user blogs]
Maybe I’m missing something, but I achieve the same thing with a pensioned off PC, the free version of Real Player and a £7 interconnect – I joke it’s my £1000 radio, but it’s all gear I had already, apart from the interconnect. Then I can choose if I want to subscribe to some services.
” ‘You want to stop piracy?’ asks Jack Scalfani, CEO of independent music site FightCloud.com. ‘Make your CDs affordable. I’m not going to spend three hours turning and burning a CD … if it’s an $8 CD. I’m going to walk across the street to Tower Records and go, ‘Here’s my $8, thanks for the new Madonna.’ My time is worth more to me than the money, so I will put the money out if it’s a good price.’
At FightCloud.com, the price is right. Scalfani sells CDs for free. That is, if you don’t count the $4.95 ’shipping’ charge. Of course, that would be a mistake. Buried in the shipping charge is the secret ingredient: a modest profit. Less costs of $2.31, the company nets $2.64 on each ‘free’ disc, half of which goes to the artist. But with only 1,000 or so CDs shipped to date, no one’s getting rich. Yet.
In 2000, the average suggested list price of a CD was $14.02, according to the Recording Industry Association of American (RIAA). The CD itself costs about 32 cents in a large production run, according to Michael Pardo, V.P. of sales for CD duplicator Greenwood Solutions. Add packaging and the price goes to 54 cents. Add the cut for a new artist, somewhere between 10 and 50 cents, and your cost nears a buck. Add $28 million to cancel your estimated $80 to $100 million contract with Mariah Carey, as EMI recently did, and adjust your costs accordingly.” [Salon.com]
Finally, a record label gets it! You can even preview the songs. Scalfani is spot on when he notes that my time is valuable and that I’m willing to pay a reasonable price for convenience. NetFlix is one of the best examples of this, which is why they had a pretty good IPO today.
I think I might be “buying” my first CD of the year!
Thought: FightCloud, meet Emergent Music. Emergent Music, this is FightCloud.
For you and me, the muddle of MP3s downloaded on to hard disk, collected and burned on to CD (or transferred into an MP3 personal) makes it unattractive.
But what about the cost of the average teenager’s (or student’s) time? CDs are going to have to get soooo cheap.
I think the horse has bolted, folks!
Tomasz Stanko Quartet Soul of Things (ECM) [eJazzNews.com]
I’m not sure I would go quite as over the top as eJazzNews.com have done, but Soul of Things is a wonderful album, by a mature voice at the height of his powers. It doesn’t shout ‘listen to me’ but the album’s been growing on me playing by playing over the past week.
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