Digital Noise: Music & Tech

I listened to two CDs for the first time last night, and while I'm very happy with both of them, the disparity in sound reminded me how much production can make or break a record.

Portishead's Third is one of the best-sounding CDs I've heard in years.

(Credit: Portishead 2008, design by Marc Bessant)

The first one was Planet of Ice by Seattle band Minus the Bear. I've read good things about this band for years, but the descriptions of this 2007 album--it's apparently more progressive and "math"-y than their previous releases--finally got me to make the purchase.

Musically it's a fantastic achievement, one of the most progressive and interesting modern rock albums I've heard since Mirrored by Battles, which also came out in 2007. Odd time signatures, check. Guitar synths, check. Glitchy electronic breaks, check. Self-consciously repetitive pentatonic guitar riffs, check. Long songs with multiple parts and at least one false ending (the last song, "Lotus"), check. It reminded me of 70s progressive guitar/keyboard bands like Yes and Styx, but without the high-pitched vocals and lyrical pretentiousness. My wife heard some Police influence, and I have to mention Sunny Day Real Estate and Rush as well. It would be a great driving record. I'd love to hear the band live.

But as engaging as the music was, about 2/3ds of the way through the album I found myself tuning out, to the point where I had ... Read more

Amazon released a new MP3 Clips Widget today that lets you build playlists with 30-second samples from any of the 5 million+ songs on Amazon's MP3 store, then embed those playlists in any Web page. The process is brain-dead simple: first you run a search of song titles or album titles against Amazon's database, then select from the results. Second, choose the size of the widget. Third, select from a list of 15 popular blogging and personal home page sites (Blogger, Yahoo 360, and so on), or paste the code directly into your page, as I've done below.

Of course, every sample contains a link back to Amazon's store--this is commerce, after all--and Amazon encourages you to become an affiliate to earn money when people click through and make a purchase. (No, I'm not an affiliate, so don't worry about my making money from the widget on this page.) Amazon also lets you post information that's more obviously promotional, such as a list of recent purchases at Amazon, or Amazon MP3 bestsellers in a particular genre. Still, this is a quick and useful way to post music, such as songs running through your head as you're blogging or clever topically relevant music.

If you've followed the RIAA's antipiracy efforts, perhaps you've wondered how they find suspected pirates. Yesterday, the The Chronicle for Higher Education published an article in which an RIAA spokesperson--anonymous for fear of hate mail--outlined the organization's surprisingly low-tech methods.

Do you use LimeWire? So does the RIAA.

The RIAA hires an organization called MediaSentry, which has developed an automated program that scans LimeWire for song titles that match titles of copyrighted material in an RIAA database, collects the IP addresses of the computers where these songs have been made available, then reports this information back to the RIAA. The article doesn't reveal how the RIAA picks among these IP addresses to decide where to focus but I'm guessing that volume of pirated material plays a large part.

If the RIAA sees a lot of piracy happening on a university's network, it might issue a takedown letter to the university asking it to remove copyrighted songs. In this case, MediaSentry will gather more specific information about the songs being offered, including checking them against a digital fingerprint to make sure they actually represent a real copyrighted song, or having real people listen to them if the digital fingerprints don't quite match. There's more detail in the piece.

Notably, the RIAA only checks to see which songs are being offered. It doesn't check--and it appears like it has no way to check--if anybody's downloading them. This is why the RIAA ... Read more

Smartphone fans are excited about yesterday's announcement of the Blackberry 9000, aka Blackberry Bold, aka Research In Motion's iPhone killer. But Blackberry users are a different breed than iPhone users--the Blackberry's reason for existence is always-connected e-mail, and Blackberry users tend to be all business, afraid of being out of touch for even a moment. (An old friend in Washington D.C.--where Blackberry users are legion--had to make a vow after her third child was born not to check her e-mail after 6 p.m.)

Coming soon to the Blackberry: iTunes music syncrhonization.

(Credit: RIM)

So while the iPhone grew out of the iPod, and thus counts music playback as one of its primary features, the Blackberry Bold focuses more on its core communications features--e-mail, messaging, and telephony--as well as new physical improvements, like a bright color screen. You can see this focus in the first detailed hands-on review of the product at Crackberry.com, where media playback isn't even mentioned until part III (of IV) and gets no more than a paragraph. And 1GB of onboard memory isn't really enough for serious music listeners anyway, although it's expandable to 16GB.

But the clearest indication of all: while the 9000 might echo past Blackberries and ship with a Roxio application for organizing music on your PC and transferring it to your phone, RIM is also preparing a new application called Blackberry Media Sync that will let you use Apple's iTunes to transfer ... Read more

I have a theory about indie rock hipsters: you can tell how old they are by which R.E.M. album they say was "the last good one." Specifically, it was the last R.E.M. album that came out before they turned 22, the age at which most four-year college students graduate.

Will that be CD, CD+DVD, or CD+45 rpm double LP?

That puts me squarely in the Green camp. And in fact, while their next two albums made R.E.M. a household name, with songs like "Losing My Religion" (from Out of Time) and "Man on the Moon" (from Automatic for the People), I didn't like them. I don't really know why, except that Michael Stipe was no longer mumbling and his voice was mixed above the guitars, and MTV played them too much.

But I'm not a real hipster because I've bought and liked a few R.E.M. albums since then, and I love their 2001 studio album, Reveal, which places me in a very select group. (The album sold about 415,000 copies in the U.S. as of early 2007, according to Soundscan figures reported by U.S.A. Today--a great figure for most bands, but well off R.E.M.'s multiplatinum peak.) The trick was buying it on vinyl: when I heard the CD, I was lukewarm about it, but the record was on sale for $10 at a local Tower (remember those?) and ... Read more

Some new intellectual property (IP) enforcement legislation passed the U.S. House yesterday by a wide margin. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, which has been against the proposal since its inception, put out a release highlighting the silliness of creating a new presidential appointee (complete with official seal) specifically to oversee IP policy. But reading through the coverage of the bill, and wading through most of the bill itself, there's another part that seemed more alarming to me.

I've never studied law, but it looks like the bill allows the government to seize any computer used in the process of making unauthorized copies of audio recordings. In other words, if you're convicted in a civil or criminal case of posting songs to file-sharing networks, or making unauthorized live recordings and posting them to the Web, or using DeCSS to make unauthorized copies of a movie from a DVD...then say goodbye to the PC used in the process. (You can read the entire bill by submitting a search for "HR 4279" here.)

Obviously, this is intended to stop large-scale pirates--the folks burning millions of CDs for resale--but looking at some of the individuals sued by the RIAA, I wouldn't be surprised if some average folks are caught in the net. Of course, if you're on the hook for $220,000, like Jammie Thomas is, losing your PC is a small part of the overall penalty, but expanding goverment forfeiture rights to crack down on digital audio ... Read more

You know those movies where you think they've killed the last zombie and then the hero turns a corner and here comes a whole new crop of them sprung fresh from the graveyard? That's how it feels with DRM in the last couple of days. First, the New York Times' Bits blog leads with a questionable assertion from an NBC exec that Microsoft is considering building some sort of content-filtering into the Zune which would block transfer of non-approved video. (I know, this isn't quite the same as DRM, but bear with me.) Then RIAA exec David Hughes claims that new forms of music distribution will create a comeback for good ol' DRM.

Want...technical...solution...to...piracy...NOW!

(Credit: Joel Friesen via Wikimedia Commons)

Let's start with Hughes first. He says he made a list of 22 ways to sell music, and that 20 of them required DRM. OK, but are those 20 plans wishful thinking or actual business models with demonstrated success or at least a fighting chance? I mean, I could sell my last band's CD at $100 a pop and quickly cover my recording costs, but nobody would buy it. Subscription services haven't taken the world by storm, and I can't imagine consumers buying lots of play-per-view songs or ad-supported songs either. Why not?

Let's go over it one more time.

1. Horse, meet barn door. Free unrestricted downloads are already broadly and easily available. Any time you ... Read more

A quick recap of Neil Young's recent announcement at the Sun JavaOne conference, as reported by CNET's Dan Farber. The long-awaited (by fans) Neil Young Archive project is coming out this year. It'll be on Blu-ray, which is the first digital format to satisfy Mr. Young's needs (with a regular DVD, you couldn't watch high-resolution video and listen to music at the same time). He recommends buying a Sony PS3 as a Blu-ray player because the PS3 has an Internet connection and a fat hard drive, and he wants to update the content over time. And he hates the sound of MP3s. (No surprise from the man who's been speaking out against the CD from the time it was introduced.)

At recent shows, Neil Young's been dusting off "The Sultan" as a final encore, introduced by this gentleman banging a gong.

Now, there's a new promotional video on YouTube, which apparently replaces the old one from his Archives Web site. The compilation looks exhaustive, the optional update feature is shown, and his sense of humor is apparently intact judging from his decision to include the very Spinal Tap video of him singing in a buckskin jacket with sideburns.

Best of all is the backing music: Neil Young's first single, a surf-guitar instrumental called "The Sultan" from his band The Squires.

It was just two months ago that Nine Inch Nails released its album Ghosts I-IV in multiple formats, from free nine-song download all the way up to a deluxe LP/CD/Blu-ray set. Today, the band started taking orders for free downloads of its next album, The Slip; like Radiohead did with In Rainbows, the band will subsequently release the album on CD and LP format.

The download era may see a return to the kind of prolific output we saw from The Beatles and other artists in the 1960s.

Everybody's interested in the business model--has free-then-fee already gotten old?--but when's the last time you saw a band release two albums in two months? Sure, Trent's interested in making a living, but he's also got lots to say and he wants you to hear it.

And over here in the other corner, we have Beck rumored to be following the Raconteurs and planning to "surprise" release his next album within the next four to six weeks--no advance copies to reviewers, no pre-release radio single, no preparatory wave of marketing hype. Across the pond, The Cure plans to release 13 singles over the next 13 months leading up to its next album release--and some of the B-sides won't appear on any albums.

This all sounds a lot like what the Beatles and other pop musicians and labels used to do in the 1960s--quick-release tons of music, mostly singles, and let the fans decide which sink ... Read more

I've had a chance to play around with Zune 2.5, the latest software update to Microsoft's iPod-competitor, and I'm happy to report that all of the basic fixes Microsoft promised, such as the ability to edit song information and sort songs by genre, are there and work as promised. They also fixed a number of other niggling problems--for example, you can now update album art by copying a file (say, an album cover you find on the Web) and pasting it immediately into the Zune software in the appropriate spot; previously, you had to save the file in the file system and then navigate to that spot from the Zune software. (Just typing that wore me out.) They also got rid of the weird "list" and "browse" views--they don't need "list" view anymore because you can edit song information from within browse view, which is the only view, and isn't called anything anymore--it's just the interface. Phew.

From within the Zune software, I can play a 30-second sample of Joy Division's "Let the Movie Begin" from my friend ILUVSPOKANE's playlist.

(Credit: Screenshot)

With those fixes, the Zune software is no longer a show-stopper, and I can recommend the Zune as a credible alternative to the iPod. I still like the wireless sync, although other reviewers seem underwhelmed by it, and some of the new social features seem pretty cool--you can now see your friends from within the ... Read more