Categories
Culture

The Story of Alkaline Trio’s Goddamnit

Chicago’s Alkaline Trio is one of the most influential bands from the turn of the century “emo” era.

I came across the Original Sin documentary from 2008, about their first full-length release Goddamnit. It’s a great watch! Check it out.

Part 1

Part 2

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pm1LhObR3F4

Part 3

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AzjLoPEeMyU

Part 4

Is missing 🙁

Categories
Apps Review

48 hours with Apple Music

I’ve been a subscriber to rdio for a couple of years, streaming music isn’t anything new to me. So I was very interested to check out Apple’s implementation.

Here’s my take after using it for the last couple of days.

The Good

Playlists:
The curated playlists are feature I didn’t expect to use much, but I’ve spent more time listening to these than anything else. Apple is doing a great job of both selecting playlists I’d be interested in based on my music preferences and selecting tracks.

The only weird thing is that the playlist seem to skew heavily towards older music. I’m not sure why this might be, I don’t typically listen to a lot of old music.

Library:
The selection of available artist and albums is comparable to rdio. I have yet to look for something I couldn’t find.

Streaming Tech:
Apple is doing a much better job of varying the stream based on available bandwidth. We have a few mobile internet dead zones near our place that always trip up rdio, Apple Music has not had any problems in these zones.

Apple Music also seems to be doing a good job of buffering. There is no delay in switching to the next track.

The Bad

Desktop Client Does Not Work: 
I can’t get Apple Music to work in iTunes, period.

App UI:
Rdio has a really great mobile app. Apple, not so much. I find it really confusing and hard to use. More on this in a future post (maybe).

Beats 1:
Beats1 plays the ultra poppy music you’d expect a beats wearing teenager to eat up. It’s not for me.

Categories
Review

Band of the day: Purity Ring

They sort of remind me of a gentler Crystal Castles.

[soundcloud url=”http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/9125440″ iframe=”true” /]

A bunch more tracks on Hype Machine.

Categories
Culture

Double Dagger. Not Double Dragon.

Been listening to this band a lot in the past week. Check out the video. (I hate to do this but…) more on myspace.

Double Dagger – No Allies from Thrill Jockey Records on Vimeo.

Categories
From The Archives Review

Pandora and The Music Genome Project

Pandora.com is amazing. If you’ve never checked out it i suggest visiting immediately. Pandora is a streaming music site similar to Yahoo! Music, Last.fm and the like. It a services that creates a customized playlist for you based on your musical tastes, with one twist, it actually works really well!

The difference is in the way it selects songs for you. Services like yahoo! typically use an amazon style popularity system. “People who like X also like Y.” The problem with this type of system is the assumption that all good music is popular. Not to mention that it’s also completely unscientific, it doesn’t actually compare the content of music.

Pandora is different. Pandora is based on the Music Genome Project. The project was started 6 years ago to “capture the essence of music at the fundamental level.” They use 400 attributes to describe each song, from the vocal qualities to musical make up to recording style and probably a bunch of other esoteric musician crap. For instance, some of the attributes describing IOU by Metric include “basic rock song structure, electronic influences, a subtle use of vocal harmony acoustic rhythm piano and extensive vamping.”

After about 8 – 10 hours I’ve tuned one of my channel very well. I’ve found myself listening to a lot of bands I’ve heard of, but never gotten around to listening to. I’ve also stumbled across few new bands I’m really digging.

The service is 100% legal – they pay royalties – and more or less ad free – there are a few amazon ads on the main page.

The only downside is the 10 song skip limit. Due to some retarded DMCA stipulation you are not allowed to skip more than 10 songs per hour, this apparently would be considered music on demand, which is illegal.

A message on the “subscribe” page threatens that they’ll soon start to advertise. If and when that happens I’ll probably pay the $4/mo.

Pandora is arguably the future of the radio. I’d love to be able to download 10 or 15 songs from my playlist, I wouldn’t even mind paying a few buck for them.

Check it out yoz.

References:
Inside the Net 6: Tim Westergren of Pandora Media
Wikipedia
Official Site