Comments on Several New Pieces of American Culture

I’ve digested two new movies and one new album recently, so I thought I would throw all of my comments into a post here. I suck at writing movie/music reviews, so I’ll keep it to a few sentences:

Music – Tool: 10,000 Days
This album definitely has a unique feel to it. I’d say that it sounds more like Ænima than any of their other albums…but it does have a bit of Opiate in it.

I am absolutely in love with Vicarious, the first song on the album. One thing that sets Tool apart from other bands, for me, is their excellent lyrics. Vicarious seems to be about people’s need to watch tragedy happen from afar. Great social commentary/observation.

The song Rosetta Stoned is quickly growing on me. It seems to be the insane ramblings of a man that is under the heavy influence of drugs.

I think that this album is going to go down as one of my all-time favorites after a few more months of listening to it.

Movie: United 93
I had no idea what to expect going into this movie, other than I heard it was good. This movie is action packed from start to finish. One thing I just realized is that there is no “main character.” I think this is a good thing for this movie.

It is definitely one of the scariest movies I have ever seen. I think the scariest part was the anticipation of waiting for the terrorists to make their move.

Also, I liked how this movie was not overly patriotic. The terrorists weren’t portrayed as stupid or as cowards. It seemed to portray the facts as plainly as possible.

Movie: Over the Hedge
A kid movie for sure. But this was definitely something adults could enjoy as well. I knew I would like this movie when I saw the previews, when they showed the “Hammy” character.

Not much I can say about this…just a fun movie with animated, talking animals. I’d definitely recommend it.

Aftermath of the First Live Mix

I had my first live mix show tonight, broadcast online on FourMajor Radio. As mentioned in a previous post, I will be doing live shows weekly on Wednesdays from 2200-0000 PST.

Tonight’s show went OK. I had three listeners (Thanks guys!). Most of the mixes between tracks were either bad or OK, with one “good” mix that I really think I nailed. There were a few hiccups. I had one record skip on me, and had to quickly and messily switch over to the other turntable. On another mix, I got caught rushing back to the beginning of the next track . . . and accidently started the next track at the wrong speed! Oops! Also, the program I was using to rip the stream (streamripper) didn’t work. It said I was capturing the stream, but at the end I was left with a 0 byte file. So, unfortunately there will be no podcast this week. And as I mentioned before, I need to get some more records. I simply run out of good tracks to play in the course of two hours.

I am really having a great time mixing records. I am looking forward to next week’s broadcast. I really hope you all tune in.

FourMajor Radio Weekly Shows

As I showed you all in a previous post, I have obtained some turntables, a mixer, and some records. Well, after a little bit of practice mixing, I am still not all that good, but I think I am getting better.

I am going to broadcast a live show weekly, starting tonight (2005-11-23) on my Internet radio station FourMajor radio. It will be held every Wednesday night from 2200 – 0000 PST. I will mostly be playing drum & bass and trance, but you might just hear some industrial and rap in there as well. I will broadcast at 160kbps, 128kbps, and 64kbps

I am also going to be recording all of the shows, and making them available via podcast.

To listen to the live broadcast you will need a mp3-capable audio player program for your computer and a broadband Internet connection. Please visit FourMajor radio for links to the streams.

To listen to the podcast, you will need to run a “podcast receiver” such as Juice and add my podcast feed (which I will link to later). You do not need a broadband Internet connection to listen in this way.

Anyway, I hope at least a couple of you tune in each week. I will be going record shopping soon to expand my collection. As for tonight, I will be running through most of my records to fill the two hours.

Yahoo! Unlimited reviewed

Yahoo! today launched their new Yahoo! Music Unlimited. For $4.99/month (when paying for a whole year), you can listen to their whole music library from your Windows PC. You also have the option to pay $0.79 to burn a track to a CD.

You access their service with the Yahoo! Music Engine (pictured below).


The interface is pretty nice. It is much more responsive than iTunes, which I have found to take a decent amount of time between page loads and music imports.

When I first started the Yahoo! Music Engine, I was prompted to import the music that I already had. I directed it to the C:\Music folder, and it imported all subdirectories, including files encoded in ogg, flac, and mp3 formats. I was able to go about my business exploring the program while it was busy importing my music.

I decided to put Yahoo! Unlimited to the test right from the start. One of my favorite artists is Dieselboy. I attempted to type “Dieselboy” into the search box on the Y! Unlimited page, but my text would not take. Instead, I used the “Browse By Genre” dropdown box to the right to select “Electronic / Dance” and from there choose “Jungle / Drum & Bass”. I saw several tracks listed, and I wanted to see how quickly their music would start streaming after I clicked play next to one of the tracks. When I clicked the play button, I was informed that I had to download a security update to play the music. The download seemed to go pretty quickly (I am on a fat connection at work). When I next clicked on the play button, the album art simply greyed out. This seemed to be a deal breaker, but having the classic computer mentality, I restarted the program.

And, I am now successfully listening to an artist I have never heard before “MJ Cole”. Clicking “play” on the album started playing the first song within a second. Again, I am on a fat Internet connection, but this is still impressive. I had been wondering for a while where I could find good Drum & Bass. I have now found that place.

I have not used any of the other subscription-based music services to be able to compare, but Yahoo! Unlimited does seem to be lacking in one very important area: completeness. As mentioned before, one of my favorite artists is Dieselboy. My all-time favorite is Tool. Searches on both of these artists turn up a grand total of 0 albums. This isn’t a big deal for these two artists, since I have all of their albums stored locally on my hard drive, but it does not sound good for future searches. Other artists that I have searched have missing albums. I understand that this may be very hard to acheive, but what is really needed is for this service to have very close to all the music I would ever be looking for. Then it would really be of full value to me.

A great part about this program is that it integrates countless radio stations into the interface. You can pick from a standard Launchcast station on the left, or you can choose to “Play Artist Fan Station”, which is supposedly a mix of what fans of that artist will like. In the limited time that I have listened to the Tool and Dieselboy Artist Fan Stations, I have noticed a nice correlation to the artist, and the type of music that is played on the station. I have also noticed something very peculiar. For both artists there are no albums available for download/streaming, but their songs are included in the station mix. I am sure it is some sort of licensing crap, but still annoying that they can play it on the station but you can’t stream the album as a whole.

Another note about the stations is that it can be rather awkward on some stations to not have the tracks mix together, like in almost any electronic station. The tracks were meant to be played back-to-back, so you are left with an abrupt start and ending to each track. There may be a feature to do this, but I haven’t found it yet.

Even on the first day that this program has been out, there are plugins for it. One of them is “1337 m1n1 m0d3” (pictured below) which replaces the current inadequate mini mode.

Overall, this program and service seems to have some growing to do, but being the first day that it is out, I am very impressed. $4.99/month is a bargain, and I think they realize that. This seems to be a limited-time offer. I went ahead and signed up for a year, but my card won’t be charged for another week, so I can cancel if I don’t like it!

Holy Crap

I have 3 listeners on my Internet radio station (FourMajor Radio), none of whom are me or my cousin. In fact, I don’t think I know any of them, just by looking at the IP addresses. I am playing some Yo-Yo Ma right now – maybe that was the secret.

Numa Numa

It is amazing what a little Numa Numa can do to cheer a guy up.

Another night at work

Well at least it is slow here at work tonight, as it should be. I don’t think most people are busy fucking with their servers on a Friday night. And life is good at least at this moment. I’ve got my favorite DJ playing on my new headphones, and I’ve got it broadcasting on my radio station, which no one besides my cousin Mark listens to. But that is fine by me. It is fun even having only one person besides myself enjoy my music.

That brings me to the next subject. I have recently found a program called psycle that lets you create electronic music. I guess one might call it a synthesizer. (Sorry for my lack of music knowledge, I have almost no real educational experience in music.) It seems complex to get good at, but easy to at least get started with.

So the night begins . . .