The View from the Spaghetti Factory

Unhappy birthday Spam!

(But not the edible variety, which is much older)

In recent weeks, I’ve noticed that some fairly big-name websites are loading a lot more slowly than they used to. Looking at the status bar on my browser, the line “waiting for ssl.google-analytics.com” seems almost always to be the problem.

Amusingly, I just spent a good couple of minutes trying to access my Gmail account. The reason for the delay? Guess…

I’m sure every industry has its share of snake-oil and bad science; the music/audio industry is certainly no exception. This made me giggle…

Audiophiles can’t tell the difference between Monster Cable and coat hangers (engadget.com)

It doesn’t surprise me, to be honest. I remember Ben Goldacre issued a challenge in his Guardian column, offering to take part in a double-blind test of some IEC mains cables (kettle leads, in other words) that cost several hundred pounds. The manufacturers never rose to his challenge, as far as I’m aware. I’ve seen super-expensive guitar leads that were supposed to be connected between the guitar and amplifier in one direction only and I can clearly remember the discussions in Q Magazine about whether CDs sounded better after a few hours in the freezer. Yep, there’s a whole industry out there, dedicated to relieving the gullible of vast wodges of cash in return for complete bullshit.

And if it’s bullshit you want, Machina Dynamica must be the masters of the genre. I still can’t decide whether this site is the absolute pinnacle of snake oil or just a clever spoof…

Yep, stones. In a plastic bag. For anything from $39 to $159 each :-D

Are you familiar with Audioscrobbler? It’s a little tool that works with your computer’s media player (iTunes, Winamp, etc) and uploads your listening habits to a central website. That way, you can marvel at the number of times you’ve listened to “Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep”, while also browsing other people’s playlists and finding new things to listen to. I’ve been using it for years, and it’s lots of fun.

Anyway, the people who designed Audioscrobbler expanded their operation a couple of years ago, creating Last.FM, a cuddly Web 2.0 social networking site combining the Audioscrobbler technology with Facebook-style profile pages, messageboards, personalised streaming radio feeds and the potential to run your own little online record label.

Oh, and then music industry giants CBS bought the company.

Yep, another corporate takeover, and this one cost 280 million US dollars, to be precise. And while Flickr, Myspace and Youtube don’t seem to have been affected too badly by their corporate takeovers, I think I’ll be keeping Last.FM at arm’s length. Via Robert Fripp, here’s an extract from the contract you must agree to if you upload any of your music to Last.FM…

Now, I’d be naive to think that I was going to get rich by uploading any of my tracks to Last.FM, but that’s not the point. There’s an underground music revolution going on out there… or perhaps not.

Lacking any concrete musical ideas recently, I decided to try and resurrect my atrophied improvisation abilities. A recurrent trait in my playing is that, after periods of less-than-diligent practice, I tend to “burble”. The technique is there, but the mental sharpness disappears, so my fingers seek out the comfortable, well-trodden routes.

So, having recorded a bass/drums/chords backing, I set about improvising a few solos, with the aim of editing, harmonising and generally arranging them into a supposedly “written” piece of music. This is an approach I love… Frank Zappa used it on numerous occasions. However, having started all that, I then got sidetracked by a thread on uk.music.guitar where a few people were jamming over a backing track and posting the results on Youtube. This seemed an ideal opportunity to investigate using iMovie to combine high-quality audio (recorded in Logic) with video clips from my compact digicam.

The resulting solo is a bit messy, but the experiment worked well enough to convince me that it’s a useable working method for future projects. In particular, I found some tips for optimising iPhoto projects destined for Youtube… thanks to Martin Backschat for being more patient than I could ever be (tips in handy visual form on Flickr).

Video on Youtube… Slow Gilmourish Jam

In the long, speculative build-up to the announcement of the iPhone, my attitude varied between mild intrigue and real excitement. As the sort of mobile phone user for whom being able to talk to people is one of the least important functions, I knew that the right mix of features could easily put me in the market for yet another Apple toy.

In this particular case, though, they just haven’t hit the mark for me. First of all, the cut-down version of OSX used on the iPhone doesn’t allow for the use of third-party applications. That’s a bad limitation, and Steve Jobs’s explanation doesn’t really wash with me. I don’t recall hearing of Sony Ericsson’s being criticised because of their smartphones bringing down mobile networks.

There certainly quite a tasty selection of software already on the iPhone, but the internet features seem to be geared towards access to Wi-Fi or, at the very least, EDGE networks. Free public Wi-Fi is still a rarity here in the UK; the rip-off wireless services offered by cafés and certain rail companies are more common, but still not sufficient for widespread mobile phone use. As for EDGE, Orange’s UK network was only launched last year and still seems quite limited.

No, if I’m going to be making the best of the ridiculously expensive mobile internet facilities offered by UK service providers, I want to use WAP sites for the basic information services (train timetables, football scores) and a browser (such as Opera Mobile for cut-down, bandwidth-saving versions of regular websites. See? That’s why I want to use third-party apps, iSteve.

Finally, although the interface looks absolutely beautiful (in true Apple style), I wonder how effective the touch-screen system will be when you want to start sending emails or writing documents. For that sort of task, I would have thought that handwriting recognition (with a stylus) or a physical QWERTY keyboard would be minimum requirements. With that in mind, I think I’ll be sticking with my P900 for a while yet…

I was just thinking about XML syndication (y’know… all the RSS feed stuff) and how I’ve come to rely upon it. Having initially been baffled as to the point of the whole thing, I then gave NetNewsWire a try, and was instantly amazed by the constant stream of automatically updated news stories and blogs.

After a couple of weeks of that, I realised I don’t need to read the same dreary drivel from multiple news sites, and continued to use NNW purely for blogs. When Apple included RSS functions in their Safari browser, I had no further need for NNW. All of my RSS feeds, neatly stored in a couple of drop-down menus in the bookmarks bar… I’d rather have that sort of thing in a web browser than a separate application.

However, the way RSS feeds worked within the Safari interface was never quite right, so it’s a big “WHOOHOO!” for the new, improved Google Reader. Safari doesn’t normally export RSS bookmarks in the required OPML format, but that was sorted with a little free utility. Initial use of the Google Reader was a little sluggish, but I guess a lot of people must have been migrating the same day; it’s been fine’n'dandy ever since.

Even better… while my phone (SE P900) doesn’t support the full range of Google user account features, it does give me a barebones version of the Reader, which allows me to browse RSS headers with only the *teensiest* amount of GPRS bandwidth. RSS blogs on the move… I like living in the future!

From Gizmodo… Apple Lossless on the Way to iTunes?

Having whined at length about the service offered by Apple’s iTunes Music Store, I certainly hope so. Tracks encoded at 128kbps are fine for quick’n'easy download purposes, but pretty pathetic when you’re paying for them, especially when you can often get actual CDs from Amazon for only a little more. I know the price issue is largely due to extreme money-grabbing by the record industry, but still… Apple knew all of that before they set up the store. Thanks to this unfavourable combination of quality and price, I’ve bought maybe nine or ten tracks from the iTMS, certainly no more.

I would have been happy with a two-tier mp3/AAC service (128kbps and 320kbps, for example) but lossless compression would be fantastic, bringing us one large step closer to the “music on demand” ideal. Of course, this could all be just another frothy internet rumour, but if not, the next question is: how much will the lossless downloads cost? If Apple don’t compete with Amazon’s prices, the whole thing could die a very early death, but if they can absorb the extra storage/bandwidth costs, I’ll be a very happy punter.

A letter to the Guardian…

As Patrick Collinson says, the legality of Russian download provider allofmp3.com is questionable, but his dogmatic insistence that “real music fans should choose legal services” is simplistic and reminiscent of music industry propaganda. While the allofmp3.com model is certainly not the way to develop a healthy online music industry (I speak both as a professional musician and a user of allofmp3.com) it’s not enough simply to condemn users without examining why they shun the alternatives.

The biggest supplier, Apple’s iTunes Music Store, is typical of legal download services in that its prices barely compete with the major online CD retailers. Plenty of top name CDs can be bought for £8 or £9, often less, from Amazon or Play.com, but what do you get for your £7.99 at the iTunes store? Low bandwidth digital files, crippled with copy protection. Meanwhile the Russians are offering mp3 files up to 384k bandwidth, with an option of lossless (CD quality) downloads on selected albums. Many consumers are clearly happy with the bog standard listening experience, but others demand quality, and if the official marketplace can’t satisfy their (technologically undemanding) needs, they’ll go “underground”.

As Bobbie Johnson reported in the Guardian (4 March) the fault for this situation lies not with Apple and other legal download services, but with the major record labels, who charge exorbitant wholesale rates for their digital product. The fact that so many people are paying to use allofmp3.com (rather than simply using free, illegal P2P networks) shows that there’s an increasing willingness to behave ethically online. However, unless the music industry is prepared to charge reasonable wholesale prices reflecting the vastly reduced overheads of digital distribution, disillusioned music fans will continue to seek other options.

Having spent $580m on the networking site (and ego boost for bored teenagers) MySpace last year, Rupert Murdoch is starting to make his presence felt. According to the Guardian, he’s removed 200,000 “objectionable” user profiles from the site. This is nothing new for the Dirty Digger; despite using topless teenage girls to sell newspapers, he’s not above a bit of censorship from time to time.

What exactly constitutes “objectionable” in this case? If the culprits were guilty of using MySpace as a platform for race hatred or other illegal activities, their removal would be perfectly justified, but I doubt this is the case. Murdoch wants to make easy money out of his millions of unwitting new customers, but can’t risk a backlash from those parents who won’t make the effort to supervise their kids properly (and fail to realise that the little darlings have heard/seen/said/done it all before).

It’s unlikely, given his track record, that Murdoch will want to leave MySpace open to the sort of creativity and free-thinking that certain liberals seem to think is appropriate to the Internet, so make the most of the networking opportunities while you can.