CDRs mimic the vinyl they replace

Sacrilegious to some, fascinating to others I guess. CDRs could certainly do with being made a little more interesting.

Link: product page
Via: Tokyomango

Good introduction to ear-canal headphones (Playlist)

As more and more people own iPods, Zens, and Zunes, and use those players in noisy environments, in-ear-canal headphones—commonly known as “canalphones” or “in-ear monitors”—have become increasingly popular. As a high-quality option for replacing the cheap headphones included with portable music and media players, the selection of canalphones has, over the past decade, evolved from a few expensive models to a wide-open market with dozens of choices across a wide price range.

I bought my first pair of ear-canal headphones a couple of years ago – Shure E3Cs. Once I’d got the hang of how best to wear them (over the ear, but with the cord hanging down under my chin), I’ve found them to be really comfortable to the point of not being aware that I’m wearing them. The sound is generally excellent – though the sub-bass of Dubstep and Jungle does get rather lost, however I suspect the same would happen to other types of headphone as well. Needless to say, I’d love to hear what the top end ear-canal versions sound like. Even before buying my Shures I used what the article refers to as canalbuds, but the difference in the general richness of the sound is really noticeable. I did notice when getting friends to try out the canalbuds that the sound took a little while to get used to – particularly when swapping from the iPod default headphones which although woolly and undistinguished sound initially a little fuller. Once acclimatised there was no way of going back though.

Link: Playlist article

There’s another shorted and less detailed introduction just been published at MacWorld.

Brilliant music technologies video

I just stumbled across this video on an MP3 blog and think it’s absolutely brilliant. It cycles through and literally explodes a small number of key pieces of music playback hardware, ending up with what my awfully limited knowledge of Spanish translates as ‘music is never going to die’ (la musica nunca va a morir). It appears to be an ad for a Spanish design/music/technology magazine. Do follow the link below to watch it all!

(Oh and seeing one of the old cassette players with the piano keys and integrated mono speaker (do they still make them?) reminds me that I used to borrow my dad’s one – a weighty brushed metal and black plastic affair protected by a leather outer cover – and take it to school. In particularly boring lessons I’d plug in a mono ear piece, snake the wire through my jacket, plug it into the cassette recorder secreted in my school bag and listen to my recently recorded John Peel compilation tapes. This was, for sure, before the mainstream popularity of Sony Walkmans. I never did get caught…)

Link: dailymotion.com page
Via: Original Funk Music

iConcertCal – a gig notification plugin for iTunes

iConcertCal is a free iTunes plug-in that monitors your music library and generates a personalized calendar of upcoming concerts in your city. It is available for both Windows and Mac OS X.

iConcertCal is a bit of a clumsy name, but I like the implementation. The idea of a gig notification website was something a friend and I did a little preparatory work on a few months ago. It’s a distinct gap in the market – how many times have you discovered too late that a band was playing in your local area, but the concert is sold out or it took place two days ago? How great would it be if you could visit one easy to use website, select the bands whose gigs you want to be notified of, submit your email address and forget about the whole thing until you receive an email saying that band X have announced they’re visiting your town in two months’ time and you can ‘buy your tickets by clicking on this link’. After some initial research, it turned out this wasn’t exactly an original idea and ultimately, it looked like too much work so we shelved it. None of the sites we looked at though, were as easy to use as our concept which was built around a set of expanding choices in an Ajax interface that aspired to the simplicity of the Google homepage.

These people (their About page states “We are not a company and this is not a commercial venture. We are just two grad students in electrical engineering. We wrote this plug-in in our spare time because we were tired of missing concerts for our favorite bands and we figured other people probably are too” – my hats off to them!) have taken an attractively different approach by integrating their interface into iTunes and using iTunes’ library as a basis on which to search the web for relevant listings. Very nice. Unfortunately it doesn’t list a single upcoming concert. I know I have fairly obscure music tastes, but a quick read of the FAQ revealed that it doesn’t do listings outside the US which is a great shame. Fingers crossed that the service can be extended.

Link: iConcertCal site
Via: MacUser

A retro moment: vintage transistor radios

Here’s a lovely Flickr gallery of vintage transistor radios. Sigh…

Reminds me of the time a few years ago that I visited a friend of my parents who lived in a small and quite ordinary cottage in a nearby village in the Yorkshire Dales. However, in his garden he had not one, but three sheds. Each was brimful of valve and transistor radios as well as stacks of gleaming 50s car radios that looked like miniature versions of those huge American cars that seemed to have existed in another galaxy, let alone another decade.

Link: Roadsidepictures’ Flickr gallery
Via: Retro Thing

iTunes Catalog

This looks like a potentially intriguing programme. From their website:

iTunes Catalog creates dynamic web catalogs of your iTunes music library. It’s also a versatile artwork manager, and can get artwork from the internet and add it to your music. iTunes Catalog can create web catalogs that look just like iTunes. You can browse by playlist, genre, artist and album, right in your web browser.

iTunes Catalog can also create web catalogs that look just like an iPod, right in your browser! You can choose from a variety of models and colors. Browse by playlist, artist or album—even play music using QuickTime.

Unfortunately I didn’t have much success using this application. Although it installed smoothly, when it came to created the catalogue I was presented with two options, to publish to a PHP-enabled webhost via FTP or to a local directory. I tried the latter first, but although I turned on sharing as requested by the program, I experienced repeated notifications that the browser couldn’t find my page. When I tried to upload to my hosted website iTunes Catalog successfully created all the files, but they failed to open/work in my Firefox browser. More worryingly, when I tried to open the index.php page I experienced a steadily multiplying number of Firefox windows which I couldn’t stop. The only way I was able to stem the tide was to force quit Firefox itself. This worked, but I was worried that I’d lose the 30+ web pages I had open, fortunately I didn’t.

I use the latest version of OS X, perhaps it works better for PC users and/or someone more technically literate than myself – a shame as I’d like to have tested this programme out properly. If anybody has better mileage with it, please let me know.

Link: product page
Via: Playlist

DRM as Tower of Babel

Cory Doctorow writes:

Eboy has posted a new graphic entitled “Tower of Incompatibabel” that very neatly makes the connection between DRM and proprietary formats and the dystopia that followed the fall of the Tower of Babel.

Link: eBoy page
Via: BoingBoing

Gizmodo: three months with the iPod

Gizmodo deliver an admirably even-handed overview after three months with Microsoft’s Zune. Though a long-term Apple user, I found myself dismayed by the negative reception accorded the Zune and felt that the interface was a step-up from the iPod in terms of attractiveness and customisability. Caveat: said observation made only from viewing online video, not personal experience.

Gizmodo find that the player does have some advantages over the market leader, but end up recommending Apple’s product because of the latter’s better infrastructure. It could also be that the Zune will be rather more embattled if there’s a significant iPod update announced at the rumoured Apple special event on 20th February.

Link: Gizmodo article

Access your iTunes library anywhere

Avvenue allows anyone to access their iTunes library anywhere as long as they store their music on a PC and leave it awake and on:

The Avvenu Music Player™ lets you remotely listen to music you have stored (“ripped”) on your Windows® PC. Simply install the Avvenu Music Player and you can listen to your music using the web browser on any other Internet-connected Windows or Macintosh® personal computer, laptop, or Windows Mobile® 5 Smartphone.

This can be done via mobile phones as simply as via a remote computer. It’s an attractive concept, though I wonder a) what this would do to your phone bill and b) to global warming, it being one more reason to leave your PC on rather than turn it off. Rather attractively, it’s free to download.

(If memory serves, this used to be possible on a Mac, but I may be wrong.)

Link: Avvenu product page
Via: TechCrunch

Ross Rubin writes about the boombox market

Good overview of the current boombox marketplace. I can’t say I’m particularly interested in purchasing speakers for my iPod, but do wish that my various portable music players had a line in for the same purpose. Then again, the fact that my Sony CD player in the kitchen doesn’t have that facility means that I play a lot of CDs I wouldn’t otherwise listen to and which if I ripped, I wouldn’t be able to fit on the iPod in the first place. (Ultimately I’m a fan of diversity and the prospect of all music being virtual is distinctly unattractive.)

Link: Engadget article