Tag Archives: music

Yeah Yeah Yeah

If you’re looking for a comprehensive guide to pop music, from the 1950s to around 2010, Bob Stanley’s “Yeah Yeah Yeah” is it. It’s roughly chronological and covers everything from the introduction of vinyl (the “official” start of pop music) to downloads (the end).

Every page leaves you with a list of songs you want to listen to. The volume is such that you’ll never get around to finding all of them but I did end up listening to a bunch of stuff that I wouldn’t ordinarily have thought to. Ironically, by being published in 2014 it misses the mainstreaming of the very streaming services that allowed me to do that!

No genre is left uncovered and it’s all nicely pieced together, connecting the people and the styles. It’s enthusiastically, if not well, written and very thorough. You probably already know if you’ll like it.

iTunes Match — addendum

Since I wrote about iTunes Match nearly eighteen months ago I thought it was worth revisiting and seeing how things have changed in that time.

Oddly, the short answer is “not very much.”

The problems that I identified last year are still very much present. Indeed there are some new examples. This is my favourite: when listening to “Man Machine” by Kraftwerk, iTunes Match seems to have decided that track four, which should be “The Model,” is really “Wouldn’t it be nice” by the Beach Boys. I don’t even own a copy of “Wouldn’t it be nice.”

The biggest changes in those eighteen months have been on the client side. iTunes 11 (the lipstick on pig release), as far as I can tell, didn’t change very much. iOS 6 wasn’t nearly as fortunate. The point zero release removed the ability to delete individual tracks. Not exactly progress. (It’s back again in 6.1.)

Apple likes to talk about its magical products that Just Work. iTunes Match tries to be more magical than most but clearly missed a few visits from the faeries.

One bit of magic that I thought was supposed to happen was that when getting low on disk space, iTunes Match would delete less played tracks. In fact, what I think happens is that it removes older, cached tracks.

The distinction here is between cached and downloaded. If you press the download (cloud) icon it isn’t automatically removed; if you didn’t it is.

But how do you tell? Well, that’s the other major client flaw. There’s no easy way to see which tracks have been downloaded without opening each album, one by one. I have six hundred albums which makes this an exceedingly tedious task.

My guess is that you’re supposed to use it by just pressing the Play button and have iOS manage the space for you. But this would mean you live in a utopian universe where you have a data signal every time you want to play some music. That does not resemble my life.

What I want it to be able to download tracks that I think I’ll want to listen to and then allow playing from the cloud. When low on space it should remove tracks that have not been played recently regardless of how they got there.

So eighteen months on I find that many of the same problems remain and I’ve found some new ones, yet I still paid for another years subscription without much though. Why? Well, it’s still very useful. I like being able to play music using my Apple TV. I like being able to access any of my music when I have wifi or 3G. I just wish Apple would spend a little time and make it less like a 1.0 release ((You could argue that they added iTunes Radio, but that only comes with iOS 7 — nearly two years after iTunes Match came out — which isn’t out yet and even then that will only work in the US to start with.)).

My delicious.com bookmarks for July 5th through July 6th

  • Turnabout is fair play – "This is so wonderfully, evilly devious. Superficially, it seems to support creationist methods—but what it actually is is a grand reductio ad absurdam."
  • Google’s Business Model – Who is the customer and what is the product? (via @daringfireball)
  • Björk: ‘Manchester is the prototype’ – "Biophilia is the Icelandic singer's new project – the word means 'love of living things' – and promises to push the envelope so far you'll need the Hubble telescope to see it."

Nightlife


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When I think of “Nightlife,” this weeks PhotoFriday theme, I think of music and dancing. I have quite a few images of live music but perhaps the best I have that emphasises the “life” in “nightlife” is the above shot from our holiday in Canillas de Albaida, Spain.

Please also vote for my entry in last weeks challenge, “Cleanliness.” I’m entry number 158.

Blackroom


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Photographing concerts is hard. This one of Blackroom at the Water Rats in London was no exception.

It’s dark and with fast movement, which is a bad combination in itself. Low light implies longer shutter speeds; movement implies the exact opposite.

But just in case you managed to figure out how best to cope with low light and animated performers, there’s the added bonus of bright, flashing lights. This throws off the automatic metering that the camera performs, leading to a dark blur or a white blur, neither particularly appealing.

After some experimentation I settled on under-exposing by two stops, using AI focusing and rattling off a few frames at a time.

Back on my Mac, I decided against removing the purple cast seen in most of the images. It’s both a fairly faithful representation of the lighting on the night and quite fitting for a band with dark themes.

More images can be seen on Flickr.

My delicious.com bookmarks for April 28th through May 3rd