The Producers DVD & The Digital Home

20 Thursday Jul 2006

If you haven’t seen it yet – then the new take of Mel Brook’s The Producers with Matthew Broderick & Nathan Lane is very much worthy of a viewing, so much so in my opinion that we’ve purchased the DVD. Bully for you, I hear you cry. Well, being a techie I’ve got the house setup to handle streamed media – including video, so now rather than trawling through our DVDs to choose something to watch; we simply flick the TV over to the media device and then navigate through our online collection. The DVDs themselves get stored away, keeping the place nice and clutter free. To store the DVDs, I convert the film to the popular DIVX format which gives me a nice compression of 50%-75% without seriously compromising quality.

Now the point is, the studio has so kindly put some form of copy protection on the disk so I can not do the conversion, so much for the networked home media solution if they keep that up. So what can I do? Well ironically, I can either keep the DVD laying around – not desirable got too many to easily store anyway; or I can turn to the one thing the media moguls love to tell us is both illegal and the source of inferior versions – P2P, and hey thirty seconds and I’ve found someone who is sharing a DIVX conversion of the DVD film. So what has been gained by the effort in figuring out how to stop me converting a DVD to meet my home media requirements, aside from from really annoying me?

The silly thing is, if I download the converted form of the DVD then the studio will scream thats another lost sale. I was going to say that of course this is rubbish in this case, but it occured to me that if you’re looking to do the same thing you may well not bother buying the DVD – not because I’ve said you can find downloads available on the net, but because you like me want to show the film within in your streaming media environment and wont bother buying it now given that you can’t load it into your media system! Not the intention that the film studio or distributors wanted to achieve.

Incidentally, Sony who have a huge investment in both music and film have announced such a home media streaming device – and I bet you that it wont help you transition from their DRM/protected content to their media network.

Faithless – Forever Faithless (aka Greatest Hits)

20 Thursday Jul 2006

Posted by mp3monster in Music Reviews

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Well,

The greatest hits album has found its way into the record shops – the album contains:

1. Insomnia
2. Mass Destruction
3. God Is A DJ
4. Don’t Leave
5. Muhammed Ali
6. We Come On
7. Reverence
8. Salva Mea
9. One Step Too Far
10. Bring My Family Back
11. Miss You Less, See You More
12. Tarantula
13. Fatty Boo
14. I Want More

So it would appear that we have one new track in the form of Fatty Boo, and the rest are album cuts that have been released as singles. The tragic thing is Faithless have been innovative (although annoying) by re-releasing the albums with remix disks with some wonderful versions of their songs – non of which appear here. And what of their additional songs contributed to soundtracks such as Woozy for The Beach (it was a toss up between Woozy and Unkle’s contribution for the best track on the album). Then there is the Late Night Sessions and several other mixes.

This is not to say that this isn’t a great set of songs, it simply an unoriginal choice, if you have all the albums so far, then I’d suggest thinking hard before buying, you’d be better off paying for a ticket and seeing them live – great gigs despite Maxi Jazz’ voice suffers a bit on the road; that or a live bootleg if you can find one. But for those who just like the hits, or want to get to know Faithless better, then this is a great starting point.

The question is, come the autumn will we be seeing a double album version with the second disc containing remixes? Something that may well be a lot more interesting, particularly if Sister Bliss and Rollo decide to do some new ones!

Joseph Arthur – Our Shadows Will Remain – 10 minute Review

20 Thursday Jul 2006

Posted by mp3monster in Music Reviews

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The first and most striking thing about Josepth Arthur’s work is his vocal delivery. This singular thing is most likely to turn people off his work in many ways like the average reaction to Bob Dylan’s vocal performance. This is not to say that his vocals are as demanding as Dylan’s (well atleast in my opnion). His delivery at the at its loudest can come across as a blues shouter as much as anything else, but much of his delivery is a lot slower and quieter, the only point of reference that comes to mind is taking Leonard Cohen and speeding his delivery up slightly, raising it an octave and making it slightly nasal. But what adds the unusual nature of the vocal is Joseph’s tendency to adding a choral/reverb effect to his voice, making things a lot easier to listen to.

If you are comfortable with this vocal sound then you’re in for a treat, as Joseph’s strength isn’t his vocals (and he recognises this – hence the processing) but the music and song writing which have improved with every release, and his debut Big City Secrets was no light weight to start with.

The album’s musical range is very broad from acoustic based tracks like Echo park through to more rocky stuff like Stumble And Pain. The later even incorporates string sections which feel perfectly natural.

This is probably his most accessable album to date, some might say the most mainstream. But I’d recommend any self respecting music fan to give this album a chance.