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Behind the scenes at 89.3

Minnesota Public Radio’s music station, 89.3 The Current has launched a group blog called the Current Cue for their DJ’s.

One of the more interesting posts so far, their computer which houses all the music crashed. Apparently they rip all their CDs to PC to play on the air. Interesting story on what happened.

It makes me wonder though – if they’re playing music over the air digitally, what format are they using? It has to be a lossless codec, and there are only a few of those that would work. FLAC? SHN? Windows Media Lossless? Or do they just rip it straight to wav? I wonder what kind of RAID redundancy they have set up for something like that.

This Week in Music

A few new releases came out this week I just had to pickup:

I enjoyed Fiona’s first release, what, 10 years ago? Her second was good, but not as good. I’m looking forward to this after all the press about Fiona over the last two years. (Free Fiona!)

I’m a huge Liz Phair – have been since Exile in Guyville and have bought everything she’s done. 2003’s self-titled album was a bit of a shock as she transitioned to pop, and Somebody’s Miracle is in the same vein. Listened to the album almost twice now, and while her last album had 3 or 4 songs that popped at me right away, so far the new one only has one, which is her current release, Everything to Me, which is catchy as hell.

Public Enemy’s newest album in quite some time, New Whirl Order, was another must have. Other than the Beastie Boys, they’re the only rap group I’ve ever really, really gotten in to. I picked up their greatest hits disc a month or so back, and that was phenomenal. I’m looking forward to New Whirl Order.

The Minnewiki

Minnesota Public Radio has launched the Minnewiki, a Wiki page dedicated to the music scene past and present in Minnesota.

Users have the opportunity to add to the articles on the Minnewiki, discussing musical acts, venues and the various musical history of Minnesota.

As with any Wiki, some pages are more comprehensive, but it’s off to a nice start.

Last.fm Follow-Up

I signed up for an account at Last.fm and downloaded and installed the XMMS plug-in. (I manually downloaded the plugin from their site, and then thought to check Synaptic. Sure enough, it was in the Ubuntu repository!)

It’s pretty cool so far – after listening to only two or three different artists it already had Weezer at the top of the recommended list for me, and I’m a huge Weezer fan. It will be really interesting to see it when it really kicks in with other users in addition to just figuring out my listening habits.

If you’re really curious about my musical tastes, you can see my Last.fm user page here.

Last.fm

I’m very intrigued by Last.fm, formerly Audioscrobbler.

Download a plugin for your favorite music player (Linux players included!) and start listening to music. From there Last.fm will start recommending music to you based on what you and others listened to that’s similar.

I can’t do justice to explaining it, so go read the FAQ. I’m very intrigued in Last.fm as a way to get introduced to more music, but not sold on using XMMS as my music player as I love Muine and am starting to test Banshee.

But I love the concept of Last.fm. Social networking tools own me.

RIAA Uses More Power They Don't Have

Via BoingBoing:

The RIAA has ordered a take down notice to RPG Films. RPG films is a machinima site that takes animation made from video game / video game engines to make short movies and films. Some of them included music video’s – which is where the RIAA had a problem.

How is this not fair use? There is no MP3 to download . Only the most sophisticated computer user could figure out how to seperate the audio from the video, and even then the quality would be awful – with a video file you’re trying to compress it down as far as you can to save your users’ bandwidth.

If anything, this probably helps promote more music you’ve never heard, that will spark you to find out who to make it and go buy it.

The RIAA just doesn’t get it.

Everybody Loves Ludwig

Via Slashdot, comes a story at the Guardian that the BBC’s free downloads of Ludwig Van Beethoven’s symphonies have become the most popular songs ever legally downloaded.

Amazing:

Final figures from the BBC show that the complete Beethoven symphonies on its website were downloaded 1.4m times, with individual works downloaded between 89,000 and 220,000 times. The works were each available for a week, in two tranches, in June.

What does this teach? Free music works. And Classical has proved it – the music industry is amazed by it. And scared:

Not everyone was so positive. Some from the recording industry expressed concerns that the BBC was setting itself up as unfair competition in the recording market.

Mr Cosgrove said: “I would be worried if the BBC repeated the experiment. We would take an extremely dim view if it happened repeatedly.” But, he added: “It’s caused quite a bit of controversy – but it has also provided us with an amazing piece of free market research. I don’t think anyone had any idea in their wildest dreams that there would be this level of response. Yes, the downloads were free – but if charged at a commercial rate that would have been a huge amount of revenue.”

You know what music industry? Screw you. This music is in the public domain, and you haven’t served your market for offering classical music downloads as the article says. Once again, your arrogance has failed you.

Kudo’s to the BBC – They put on the concert, broadcast, and distributed it. And consumers listened and downloaded and the BBC gained customers.

And I was one of them, I downlaoded it.

Star Tribune on The Current

Two Minneapolis Star Tribune writers have a back and forth discussionon what they like and don’t like about 89.3, The Current.

It’s an above average article, and while I agree with most of it, there are parts I disagree with, though it does give you a good feeling for the station as a whole.

JB: What I want from a radio station is a DJ I could talk music with. On the Current, I could definitely talk music with Mary Lucia and Bill DeVille — my two favorites. I loved the other day when Mary said, “I’m still loving this, and I’ll slap anyone who says otherwise. Here’s the Redwalls.” And I could talk with Mark Wheat and Jill Riley, who I think is really improving. But for Thorn [DJ Skroch], I think our conversation would have to be via e-mail.

CR: Ultimately, I don’t care what their personalities are; I care about what they play. Bill DeVille definitely gets my vote in that department. I did a road trip on July 4th and didn’t once put in a CD thanks to him. He played sets such as Boomtown Rats with Betty Serveert with Gram Parsons with one of those especially weird new White Stripes songs.

Bob Mould: Body of Song

Bob Mould recently did an interview on 89.3 The Currentand after listening to the interview on-line (I only caught part of it in the car) he mentioned he had a new album coming out.

Sure enough, Googling for Bob Mould turns up his weblog with a big link to pre-order his new CD. The album comes out July 26 unless you pre-orded from Yep Rock Records in time, which I did. It shipped last Tuesday, and I received it yesterday.

The album is great. Vintage Bob Mould, he returns to his 90’s sound with guitar driven sound, and hints of his recent foray into electronica with his last album Modulate. A good example of where the guitar + minor bits of electronica is (Shine Your) Light Love Hope, which mixes both sounds very well, as does I am Vision I am Sound. The next track on the album, Paralyzed is a great example of the power guitar that made Sugar and Bob Mould’s albums so well done. Best Thing, Underneath Days and Missing You are a fewyou have to check out for the signature Bob Mould guitar sound.

A few ballads are even thrown in to mix it up – High Fidelity slows it down, while Gauze of Friendship is well done on the acoustic guitar.

I purchased the 2 disc special edition, and am happy and sad at the same time. Happy that I got the 2nd (bonus) 9 track CD, with 2 remixes of (Shine Your) Light Love Hope and a remix of Paralyzed. The 2 disc set comes in a box, with extra artwork and the second disc (photo below).

I’m disappointed in that both discs are enclosed in a paper case, rather than a nicer jewel case. The artwork, while well done, as loose sheets that are jewel case sized, will probably never see the light of day outside the special edition box. I would have preferred a slightly larger box with both discs in a hard jewel case, which would make using in the car and treating right much easier.

The price for the pre-order was right – at first I thought $25 + $4 shipping was a bit high, but looking at Amazon’s pre-order price with a $29 retail and everyday price of $26 I actually got a deal. The music is vintage Bob Mould, well done, and well worth the money spent.

Bob Mould - Body of Song

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Misc. Stuff

I’m back from California, and getting caught up on misc. stuff.

I’ve updated the theme to K2 Alpha 3, added a new Flickr badge, and still don’t care that it doesn’t work in Internet Explorer. Go get Firefox already.

I mentioned the Burn It Club a while back. The summer Burn It session is now on if any of my three readers want to do it with me. I have to say I’m struggling with the theme, but I really want to participate.

I have a ton of stuff do this weekend, more as my muse wills later.