Friday, September 30, 2005

Passing the time this morning and looking through the new offerings on iTunes, I noticed that there is some new act that Radio Disney is pushing called "Aly & A.J.". I managed to catch part of an interview that they gave (My son is an avid Playhouse Disney fan) on the Disney Channel, so I decided to see if there was some substance behind the "style".

One of the best parts of iTunes (according to me) is the Celebrity Playlist feature, where artists give a sampling of what's on their iPod and comment on the tracks. I find this to be very revealing, since when we give an accounting of the music that we are passionate about, it is a bit of a window into the soul, if you will pardon the cliche.

Delving into their "playlist" I saw very little music beyond what is relatively current. As a musician, I find this odd, since musicians/artists are generally VERY into their influences and love to share those with others, which usually include some unknown or classic artists from ealier periods. With these two, nothing. Their comments were as vapid as their musical depth. "This one has a good vibe to it." Having said this, I will be completely surprised if these two wrote any music that they perform, since their musical taste seems to go back a few months, if that.

One artist that is the polar opposite is John Mayer. I want to add that I am no huge fan of his music, but this young man knows his stuff. He writes a monthly column for Esquire magazine in which he shares his knowledge on songwriting, musical influences, and random thoughts, and for a person of his age, the depth of his musical knowledge is amazing. It gives us hope for the future that not all artists will be the musical equivalent of corrugated cardboard. If you have the time, go to the Esquire website and search out some of Mayer's articles. You will be pleasantly surprised. And additionally, some of the music may have a good vibe to it.

Saturday, September 24, 2005

Here I am again, with no particularly interesting thing to say. I want to comment about iPods. I have heard some people have a problem with Apple's control over the particular technology....at least with regard to the iTunes music store, and I think it is interesting. Apple complained for years about various things regarding Microsoft and their predatory approach to things (with good reason methinks) yet they don't seem to have a problem doing the same thing with iTunes. If you have an iPod, (as I do) you can't buy songs from the other online services such as Napster, since WMA files are not supported. And the players that do play WMA files can't play the files that the iTunes store sells. This can mean that you have to switch between two different mp3 players (I wonder if this just supports the supremacy of the mp3 file itself, without the copy protection and all the junk that the major labels throw on top of it.) Now obviously there are ways to convert between the two, such as if you have one of those highly protected WMA files, you can just play the file and record it with another program such as AudioTunes and then just convert it to mp3 and voila, there you are. It's burdensome, but it can be done. I think that most of these protections are set up to keep those who aren't too clued in from being able to do certain things. Obviously the uber-technical (of which I am not one) will always be able to circumvent such safeguards.

I understand that the next version of Windows is supposedly going to have such stringent copy protection measures that recording of any type of audio will be difficult to impossible. Lovely. One of my favorite things to do is to use the a recording program to tape online radio from KFI in Los Angeles and other radio stations. I don't see much difference in doing that and taping a program over the air, I think it's similar to the time-shifting argument that was floated during previous court cases over the VCR, yet the industry wants such a stranglehold over everything that they are insisting on this. If I can't record KFI, I just won't listen. First of all, I don't live in an area where KFI can be picked up over the air, and secondly, I am usually working when the shows are originally broadcast. I think I have strayed quite far from the original intent of this piece.

Anyway, back to the iPod. I love the concept. Even with my iPod mini and its 4 GB hard drive I was able to drive all the way to Los Angeles (about 8 hours) and put it on shuffle, play it through my radio, and never hear a song twice. It's like listening to a REALLY good radio station. (Since you program it yourself, you should always enjoy it, theoretically.) Is there a point to this? Probably not.
I was searching around for no particular information at all and I thought I would set up this blog for no particular reason. (No particular interesting reason, at least.) I figured if a bunch of hefty gals eating their way up the coast http://laineytitus.blogspot.com/ was interesting to someone (I have heard of this particular fetish) then I might as well write something for no particular reason. This might be the last time I make an entry, if we're all lucky. The blog I just linked to hasn't been updated in a while, I think they got lost at a Snicker's convention.