Read the wikipedia article on the Fast Tracker synthetic music sequencer/composer and consider:

1. People composed music by hand in hexidecimal.
2. People developed their own intricate and sophisticated software for doing so. In DOS.
3. When DOS became just too obsolete to be usable on contemporary machines, multiple projects arose to recreate the functionality and interface of the old software for newer operating systems.
4. Other people persisted in using the old software by using DOS emulators.
5. There are such things as DOS emulators, in active development to increase efficiency and speed. Because people need them and want to make them.
6. Other people who didn’t want to use emulators, made themselves computers to run obsolete operating systems so they could run their obsolete (if that is the right word) music sequencers.
7. Those people built and maintained those computers out of obsolete hardware, because their obsolete operating systems and software didn’t support new hardware. So they could run hand-built software to hand-write synth music in hexidecimal.
8. They’re still at it.

You can download and play with stuff too if you like. Lots of people want you to. Here’s some software to play some files from this composer. Watch the numbers flow up the screen. Listen to the lush 8-track arcade-game burbling the numbers make. Ponder, who are these people? Why did I ever think I was weird? Should I maybe aspire to be more weird?

(If you enjoy thinking about that, you might also want to watch Jason Scott’s movie and look at his files.)

Your talk show is weak, but you’re still kinda cool. Henry, how do you explain the difference?

(full disclosure: during last exam season I got a hold of like 2 gigabytes of Rollins’ old spoken word material and it kept my fighting spirit alive through the slog, hence I can never again be an unbiased observer of Him or his Work.)

After damning Songbird with some markedly faint praise back there, I started to feel guilty. I should at least point out that Songbird’s stated central mission has always been “playing the internet”. Thats a cool idea, and one at which even the current preview-grade software is very successful. Loading a music blog webpage into your music player and playing it like an album or a playlist is actually a bit of a head-bender. Do it once and you might start convincing yourself that the songbird folks are on to something big.

For me it’s almost the ideal music exploration model. Music blogs are awesome, but they require your focused attention, whether each track is interesting to you or not. You have to download the songs one by one, and either download them all and queue them all up into your player, or else read over the musicblogger’s post about each of the them to choose which you’ll download. Then choose which you’ll delete. It’s a more natural experience to load the site into Songbird’s hybrid browser/player and leave it playing in the background, then read the report for just those songs that catch your attention. Songbird turns a static music blog into a dynamic experience that combines the best of music blogs with the best of radio… high quality music, chosen to a purpose and theme, with skipping and replaying and pausing, and commentary that is both comprehensive–every song is contextualized–and also optional if you aren’t interested in reading it for that song. I’m in in in.

There are also features for integration with online music stores and I believe streaming and network music sites, which is probably cool too. So let’s get this thing out of alpha and into beta or something.

On my list of “quality blog posts I may someday get around to writing”, is a comparison of music playing software. I stormed out of iTunes a while ago and I’ve gone through a lot of possible alternatives in a search for a replacement (reasons for ditching iTunes and replacement I’ve settled on will be all be told in that much better post in the putative future).

One tantalizing possibility is Songbird. Songbird is mostly from Rob Lord, a guy who is famous for building music players. (Remeber winamp? That guy. Well, the other that guy.) And man does the music-software-developing wisdom show. Never was a software treated to a more practically perfect in every way mandate and development process. In addition to being an aggressively open-source project spearheaded by a comfortably-funded team in a loft space, it’s built on the same platform as firefox, designed explicitly to interoperate with web2.0 stuff and is documented drip by drip in a voluminous and articulate blog.

The results so far are well… it’s a great development process. Trying to actually run the thing is an exercise in patience more than music listening, especially if you’re packing a big music library. The code needs some tweaking, shall we say. And the features, they’re in planning.

But oh boy are they getting the UI down. And here’s the thing, despite still being at way-early-development stage 17 months after their first preview release, there is a super active user community. Users of what, I wonder? The thing’s practically vaporware. But people still flood them with thoughtful responses to every blog-request for comment on every nitpicking detail of UI polishing. I guess they feel engaged. Open-source truly is a wonder.

We’re coming up on 2 years since they announced this thing. A distributed team of programmers has spent 2 years cranking on it. And it still won’t connect to an ipod without a 3rd party extension, burn a cd, or efficiently navigate a medium sized catalog of music. But nobody beats them at development process.

So since Charlie Slick signed with big-deal megalabel Cerberus his myspace page stopped letting you download his songs. See if I care.

Let’s get something straight here slick, I’m not going to pay money for your album. I dunno, I guess I’d think about but I wouldn’t actually do it. I will go to every show you play in Ann Arbor or Ypsi that isn’t at the damn Nuetral Zone, same as I ever have (that’s once). I will keep playing up your songs on the radio every time I host a show (yeah that’s once).

In the meantime, here’s a link to a page that explains how to rip songs from myspace pages. I have never been reduced to ripping songs from myspace pages and I don’t think I’m there yet.

So I guess I’m stuck with Charlie Slick’s back catalog. I don’t care.

In other news, does anybody have a copy of Dan Kahn‘s stuff? Because I can’t find it in the WCBN record collection, and he’s probably off touring in Germany or some damn thing. Why is it so hard to listen to local acts?

I can’t remember even seeing this one in the Google Labs selection. But there it is, Google has a music search.

For example.

I’m not sure how to explicity access it, except to search for an artist (or presumably an album or track) and click on the very special search result that will hopefully show up as the first option.

Holy crap.

Personally I think Wired got it wrong. I think the really interesting ungoogleables are the ones who aren’t making an active effort to stay out of the search engines’ grand indexes but who nonetheless live their lives in some way such that their names just don’t get typed out and uploaded to the internets. I have a couple of friends like that, or more specifically I had a couple of friends who I’ve since lost touch with and who I have been googleing every few months for years with no results. Where are you and what are you doing? Google shall not tell me.

And unless the boffins at our favourite search engine decide to make a change, Google will never be able to tell you about the band !!!, as I learned tonight trying to do a search for them. Try googling them, it’s kind of an interesting result. While you’re at it, try a search for their song “Me And Guiliani Down By The Schoolyard (A True Story)”, 9 minutes well spent. Kind of ballsy, making your band structurally ungoogleable.

The LA Times is reporting that Apple is planning to buy, if it can, Universal Music Group from Vivendi. That’s Apple Computer Inc. For, oh, say 5 or 6 beeellion dollars.

For anyone living in a cave for the last couple of decades, or living outside of a cave but not really caring for music, or living outside of a cave and caring for music but not cognizant of the utterly shitey state of the music available in the mainstream and wondering why that would be, the music industry has for 10 or 20 years been undergoing a series of incestuous buy-outs which heated up into a giant orgasm of incestuous buy-outs over the last 5 years which have left us with, oh, say 4 actual big music companies controlling all the music available to you or me through conventional channels. And yes, the length of that sentence was justified. If you like art, passion, and music, the behaviour of the music industry is important to you. The people who run these companies have ridiculous amounts of control over what you listen to all the bloody time in stores and on the street and from other people’s stereos and even from your own radio if, god help you, you turn it on. The music industry is a big flaming heap of crap stoked by so much money and consumption that it generates temperatures near the sun’s and fortunes almost as big as the sun. Big. Big. Flaming heap of crap. The music that gets selected to play to you is carefully designed to appeal to the widest range of ADD suffering listeners due to it’s lowest-common denominator status and the generation of a rigid radio-freindly format to which all songs must comply. Once that music has been generated, the artists responsible lose all their rights to it thanks to, in the past, slimy small print and nowadays, official US legislation describing any and all music industry contracts as determing the art as a “work for hire” and thus allowing the industry to screw artists up front and in the daylight and in big, normal 12 point font. The companies then engage in a mutually parasitic relationship with the big radio companies (1 of which, clear channel, own fully half of all the radio stations in the US), a relationship in which play time is bribed and bought off without regard for what may pass for “better” or “worse” music given the state of music generation. Then you have to listen to the goddawful results of all this bullshit.

Except, maybe you don’t. In fact, increasingly you don’t. New information technology has allowed indie labels to, if not thrive, at least survive, and even newer developments in information technology can allow bands and artists to bypass music labels completley. Result: artists and music-listeners who are willing to do some extra work both have extra options for making that all important artist-listener link. Except, of course, that the music industry hates that with a blacker passion than you can possibly imagine, and has launched a vast and rancourous campaign to fight this cancer, spearheaded by the RIAA. The battle rages on around you, I promise.

So. The stage is set. Enter the Apple.

Just last night, I was having a friendly chat with my IT support guy about the culture of Apple. We both agreed that we like their computers for our own reasons, but given a little thought, that we don’t trust them. Apple has demonstrated as strongly as it was capable of given it’s crippled market share, a tendency towards control-freakism that would give Bill Gates a shiver of envy if he could work up a damn. Just this morning, I was lieing in bed thinking that it would be best if Apple could grab about 30% market share in the (small p, small c) personal computer market , meaning that sofware developers would all be obliged to create versions of their products which run on superior apple hardware, without being large enough to allow Apple to run wild in flexing it’s hegemonic tendencies.

Leonard Cohen on Apple:

“Yes you who must leave everything that you cannot control.
It begins with your family, but soon it comes around to your soul.
Well I’ve been where you’re hanging, I think I can see how you’re pinned:
When you’re not feeling holy, your loneliness says that you’ve sinned.”

Steve Jobs has some massive original sin complex or something, which manifests itself in a desire to micromanage every part of personal computing, from the GUI to the apps to the hardware to the marketing to the distribution to the colour of the shoes the guy who sells you the shiny white box is wearing. So that’s point 1.

Point 2: Jobs also seems to like art. He also runs Pixar, the animation movie studio that brought you, um Toy Story I think and definitley some other films that excel in the “managing to be solid entertainment without actual doing anything challenging” department that hollywood attains to. So he likes art, but maybe not art as change or force. Which means of course, that he is an enemy of art.

Point 3: Apple to date has had an ambivalent relationship with new forms of music distribution. Their “rip, mix, burn” slogan is a practical rallying cry to music piracy, but at every chance they carefully demonstrate that they really mean rip mix and burn music that you already bought from legitimate conventional sources. Also they manufacture the Ipod. Same story. They ease the convenience and enhance the cool factor of music piracy, but literally wrap it in a plastic label that says “don’t steal music”.

Point 4: It was widely reported a month or so ago that it looks like Apple will be the first company to successfully negotiate deals with the music industry big 4 to start a direct-download-for-pay music service. So they obviously think there is a profit to be made in music distribution.

Point 5: Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Conclusion: Apple as a music industry player frightens me.

I’m all for developing a for-pay connection between artists and listeners. File sharing is fantastic as a medium-term tool for destroying the rancid stagnant music industry status quo, but it doesn’t pay the artists and that should be fixed. And there is inevitably going to be some techy intermediary who facilitates the movement of music from artists to listener, even if it’s a miniscule scale compared to the huge capital resources of the the cd-duping, 18 wheeler full of cds and poster wielding, record store owning traditional industry. I just don’t want that connection to be made by Apple Computer Inc, maker of the one button mouse and potential fresh dictator of crappy musical style.

Whew.

Link: http://www.electricnews.net/news.html?code=9355168