A Little Ludwig Goes A Long Way

We love ipods so much that we have four in the house.

And itunes really sucks at handling this. we like to keep all our music on one server and this just creates a legion of problems. Getting itunes on all machines to take notice of new music on the server. Sharing playlists across the network. Ratings collision — we all have different ratings we want to maintain. And doing different loads of music onto each ipod.

Here’s how we manage the last item today — getting different subsets of our collection onto each ipod.

• We keep all our music in one huge directory, with subdirs per artist and album.  Makes backup, searching, and all other operations easier.
• In itunes I create partitioning playlists.  Basically a playlist per user that represents the music they want on their ipod. In our case this is fairly easy as our interests break cleanly on genre lines, and it is easy in itunes to create playlists like “female vocal OR male vocal OR new age OR holiday”.
• Then I configure our respective ipods (in the itunes app) to only pick up these playlists on synch.

As I said it is not perfect. Ratings collide. We have to avoid fights over genre tags. I have to do tag maintenance every once in a while. But it works ok for our household.

I am playing around with a different approach — using Beyond Compare to fully replicate our music collection to a bunch of individual machines, and then letting people tag and rate their music as they want on that machine and sync on that machine. This creates a whole bunch of other problems, best solved if we only rip cds on one machine in the house (which is the case today), but it does work better in some ways with itunes.

Paul Thurrott’s Internet Nexus — “Tunebite supports customer to hear their music everywhere they want. Did you purchase your music online and do you find it frustrating that you can?t listen to it wherever you want to? Tunebite is fully automated to free you from this annoyance when you listen to music. With Tunebite you can listen to your music everywhere from now on, even on your MP3 player. Legal & foolproof: Tunebite runs in the background on your Windows PC. When you play back a piece of music, Tunebite automatically re-records the song. This is legal and foolproof.” Awesome.

Last night at the Key — just awesome.

JamPlug Miniature Guitar Amplifier

Besides watching movies this weekend I also did a lot of mindless music bit twiddling.

• Installed two new ipods. Downloaded the latest itunes and ipod drivers. Point itunes at my server with all my mp3s and had it crank away and import them all. While my laptop was doing this…
• …I Installed ExactAudioCopy, which requires Lame and AccurateRip, and you might as well install dbpoweramp. Ripped all the latest CDs i have purchased. While my desktop was doing this…
• Bittorrent churning on another machine, downloading various (completely legal) torrents, which come in RAR files and Ogg Vorbis encoding. Downloaded a RAR unpacker, and the Ogg Vorbis Codecs. And now I really needed dbpoweramp to convert the Ogg Vorbis content to MP3.
• Then back to the laptop to jam it all onto the ipods.
  What a production. Man this has to get easier.

I?m worse at what I do best
And for this gift I feel blessed
Our little group has always been
And always will until the end …

I don’t understand how the music industry is going to evolve, but I sure love artists that are attempting experiments and not just sitting back and letting the RIAA lob bombs at everyone.

Kudos to Prince for his own music store, I loved his original body of work and am going to have to give him a try again.

And kudos to Jay-Z I think — the Jay-Z construction set is totally cool, allows users to build their own mixes. I’m not sure if Jay-Z actually sanctions this work, maybe he hates it. But letting users interact more deeply with the music seems like a great way to add value to music and thereby encourage people to buy it.

Nice pointer from John Battelle’s Searchblog to Findsounds — great for SFX.

Freaky, now you can create synthesized singers from correctly annotated lyrics and scores — Slashdot | Yamaha Releases Singing Synthesis Software. I wonder what range of vocal performances this can encapsulate — I was listening to Led Zep/Robert Plant in the car this am, can you specify a vocal performance in his style? I am sure the answer is no, but how many iterations of Moore’s Law and algorithm development will we need before you can do something like this?

I like what Olivier Travers has to say: ”The cost is so low delivery is basically free on a per-song basis. In the face of changing consumer demand, no matter how hard RIAA members try to stick to their cartel solidarity, the same kind of pricing pressure that is destroying the long distance and international phone call troll tax is going to work in the music business as well.“

BBspot – Reviews: Digital Music Stores

bubblegeneration – strategy, business models and technology — found via slashdot.

Haven’t been yet but I hear it is great…the Triple Door

PlanetGriff Home — this may be the answer

10 Reasons Why Elliott Smith Was Cool

a plug for my friend Chris’s band — LP33

I’m listening a lot to their latest album. Well the Lindsay Buckingham tracks anyway, I can’t stand the Nicks compositions or the performance. It is cool that they let you download the first single — Fleetwood Mac single download | How It Works — using paypal for just $1.49. Way better option than making me subscribe to some music service.