Concert: Marisa Monte

Tuesday night I went out with Nate and Claudia to go see Marisa Monte, a Brazilian singer-songwriter. I understood none of the songs, but it was very good music - chilled out stuff with lazy beats and happy melodies.

The staging was sparse but very effective. A few lightboxes, a platform, a few lights on movable booms and a spot. That was it, but it allowed for so many different moods.

Sometimes it suggested a warm homey room, sometimes a night out at 3 am when it's just you and the moon, sometimes a city night under streetlights... I wish I had pictures that turned out well.

I was also pleasantly suprised that when I googled Marisa Monte, the first result was a link for more info on Google Music - what's all this? Those guys keep indexing all of the world's information in new ways!

Battle of the bands

This reminds me of adult swim - but before "Tom Goes to the Mayor".
Via the Wooster Collective.

Tags:

• video
• music
• animation

Music for free: The Black Angels

I subscribe to the internet archive's public domain music feed and caught this: The Black Angels Live at Chop Suey on 2006-06-19.

I'd only heard the excellent "Young Men Dead" before, but if you want a good feel for this band then give a quick listen to track 3: "The Sniper at the Gates of Heaven".

The whole concert is available for dl in 64K mp3 or vbr mp3. You can also give a listen using the embedded flash player.

Tags:

• music
• free

Why don't ratings travel?

I'm using musikcube as player for my music and it has 5 star ratings. So does windows media player on my pocketpc. So does iTunes. But they never translate between them!

How could they?

One way would be to store it in the id3 comments tag. Both id31 and id3v2 formats support comments. This is a great place to store ratings as text. ***** is 5 stars and anyone can read it. What would make sense is to store ratings in the last 5 characters of the comment field. Then, when changing or loading ratings, you can push or pull from that location.

After doing a little more research, I found that id3v2 supports freeform key=value tagging. Now it seems that all you need is for players to start reading and writing a custom ratings tag.

Why is this important? Because time you spend rating songs in itunes or musikcube or anything else is valuable. That's valuable info about your song that only you know. If it is lost everytime you switch from an ipod to an iriver, it is less valuable.

If I download a creative commons track or rip a cd at work and rate it in musikcube, I should be able to take that track to my home and have my ratings show up there. The information I put into it loses value if it is bound up in one location or one player.

Tags:

• id3
• mp3
• tagging
• ratings
• microformats

Music for One Apartment and Six Drummers

For Ed:
YouTube - Music for One Apartment and Six Drummers

Tags:

• youtube
• video
• drums
• improv

Great headphones on sale.

http://www.dealhack.com/archives/2006/04/electronics_spring_sale_quick.html Saw this in my feeds. I'm using these headphones and they're great.
Couldn't tell from a $150 pair of Shure E4C's.

Tags:

• shopping
• audio
• headphones

This american life goes MP3

My favorite NPR program "This American Life" has made the move from awful real audio to mp3. This is good and bad. It's good because mp3 works more places, it's bad because it breaks my greasemonkey userscript. Here is a workaround:

Right click on the link-> save as.
Change the file extention from .m3u to .txt.
Open the txt file. In it you will see a url. That is the url to the mp3.

I'll fix the script in a bit and it will be automatic, but this should be a stopgap till I get it done.

Tags:

• radio
• podcast
• greasemonkey
• audio

Intellectual Property Run Amok

Intellectual Property Run Amok: "AMONG THE 16,000 people thus far sued for sharing music files was a 65-year-old woman who, though she didn’t own downloading software, was accused of sharing 2,000 songs, including Trick Daddy’s “I’m a Thug.” She was sued for up to $150,000 per song." This is a long, funny, sad list.

via: LessigBlog

Viking 2GB Secure Digital Card only $65 at PC Mall - Dealhack

Viking 2GB Secure Digital Card only $65 at PC Mall - Dealhack

This is a pretty damn good deal. I paid quite a bit more for my 2 gig sd card and it has made a big difference in how I use my axim.
Just thought I'd let you know.

Tags:

• deal
• shopping

Get Paid: You bought a cd from sony.

Sony really played fast and loose with you, whether you know it or not.
If you bought any cd listed here, then you are owed money by sony. This is your money. The EFF has kindly set up an easy way to get your money from Sony. Go check the list. Go get paid by someone who's done you wrong.

Tags:

• security
• money
• sony
• law

Build It: A Homemade Media Center PC

Feature from PC Magazine: Build It: A Homemade Media Center PC


Actually, this is just a test of a script change to make blogger's blogthis extension play nice with the greasemonkey script I use for tagging.

Edit: the test worked. But I'm going to read that article anyway.

Tags:

• mce
• htpc
• mediacenter

Stereo Bluetooth Headset - this is what I want

Stereo Bluetooth™ Headset HBH-DS970 - Specifications - - Mobile phone accessory - Sony Ericsson

I want to wear my headphones and listen to music. Use the tiny remote to see what song is playing and fastforward, skip, etc. When a call comes in, the music pauses and I speak using the mic in the remote, then back to the tunes.
Why isn't everything like this?

Tags:

• bluetooth
• music
• pda
• gadgets

ghstnguitars - great late night subway music

Saturday was busy. I went up to hunter mountain for some riding and then deeper into brooklyn for a pal's birthday party. Coming back late at night this guy gets on and begins playing guitar, his amp strapped to his back. He gave me this crappy little xeroxed card that gave his myspace address - this stuff is great for a late night subway ride.

Blues For Haifa
Pocket Change
Saras Street

Tags:

• music
• subway
• nyc

Video of a guy driving from LA to NYC

Guy jumps in his convertible and shoots a timelapse movie driving across the united states. It's awesome.

via the occasionally awesome eyebeam reblog

Bonus - another timelapse movie, but all about paris hilton's facial paralysis - ignore the dirty sounding url.

Tags:

• paralysis
• timelapse
• movie
• travel
• parishilton
• awesome

Movie: Dark Days - amazing

Just watched Dark Days, a film by Marc Singer. The story isn't so much the story in the movie as the story of the movie. It is a documentary about how over 150 people came to live in an abandoned tunnel under penn station. The people are endearing and honest about themselves and how they got there. They've managed to build houses and wire them with electricity. They salvage thrown out cookware, refrigerators, televisions, couches etc. This is all very nice and interesting.
Then you find out how the movie was made. It's the director's first film. He was just hanging out with these guys and then they all decided to do a movie. The film is donated, the camera is rented, the crew is made up of homeless people, the tracking dolly is made out of shopping carts, and no one has a clue what they are doing.
It's a miracle it got made. But you owe it to yourself to see a miracle every once in a while, and this is one. It won a slew of awards at sundance etc. Don't just watch the movie, take time to explore the dvd. This is one dvd where the special features are worth an extra hour of poking around.

Get it from amazon, get it from netflix, but do check it out.

Tags:

• moviereview
• "marc
• singer"
• documentary
• film
• ********
• movies

Sony Audio CDs Damage Your Computer

In case you hadn't heard, Sony has admitted that their audio cds install a spyware rootkit on your computer.

Ed Felten has a guide to dealing with the Sony Spyware.

How to tell whether the rootkit is on your computer: On the Start menu, choose Run. In the box that pops up, type this command:

cmd /k sc query $sys$aries

and hit the Enter key. If the response includes “STATE: 4 RUNNING”, then your machine is infected with the rootkit. If the response includes “The specified service does not exist as an installed service”, then your machine is not infected with the rootkit.

One caveat - I have heard reports that some Sony CDs do install spyware on Mac computers as well. If I find out how to check this, I'll point you to it.
I highly recommend you take a look at this, it's a terrible security hole. You may also want to consider your buying music from Sony.

update: boy, this didn't take long - there's a virus out there that takes advantage of Sony's carelessness with other people's things.

Filed in: security music

Evil Nine is Awesome

Skull in Paris Crypts,
originally uploaded by mr_matt65.

My man Raf turned me on to Evil Nine's first album and it's awesome! It's some amazing dj shit.
The first track, "Crooked", is a barn burner with Aesop Rock on vocals. Preloaded did a pretty cool flash video for it here. The whole album is this good. This friggin amazing. Listen with headphones, there's a lot going on here.

Also my homey, neighbor, and namebuddy Matt has started flickring with a bunch of pics from his europe trip and his Cali time. Also, he was in a crypt, SEE?!

Why is it that today I had a sudden urge to listen to Hate Kill Destroy by those lovely balladeers The Business?

Oh yeah.
My bad.

Steal this music

If you haven't heard, you should. First Jay Z released his supposedly final Black album and included an a capella disc. Then people started doing what they do if you leave that sort of thing hanging out. Hence came DJ Dangermouse's "The Grey Album", a mix of the great beyonce rider's Black album and the Beatle's white album, which inspired a video and a host of other mashups. I'm rocking "Jay-Zeezer: The Black and Blue Album" right now.

Also, I have to mention the Kleptones and their "A Night at the Hip Hopera" which should make Freddie Mercury smile, if not his estate's lawyers.

HATEBEAK

I was reading an MSDN blog and it mentioned HATEBEAK. No one at my office seems to find the concept of a death metal band fronted by a parrot as funny as I do, so I sit in my little cubicle, listening to their mp3 single over and over.

I hope there really is a band called caninus that is fronted by a dog.

After having seen a book on Cats Painting, is there any limit to where the lower species will invade our art?