Muppets, go musical
24 Friday Oct 2008
Posted in General
Beautiful Beatles collector’s box
22 Wednesday Oct 2008
Posted in Music
Engadget have picked up on this lovely limited edition box set of Beatles music. which comes with specially logo’d iPod. The irony is that the Beatles catalog isn’t available on iTunes so you’ll probably have to rip all the CDs in the set yourself.
The disappearing single
21 Tuesday Oct 2008
Posted in Music
Popjustice have a neat little article about the fact that most high street retailers have now abandoned stocking singles (that is of the CD variety for old readers). This situation has been brought on my both technological progress i.e. web, downloads, MP3 etc but as I’ve said the the past also the likes of the BMI who limited the number of tracks for it to qualify in the charts, the cheap option of getting remixes or simply instrumental versions to fill the space and son on. All very sad, although such a thought according to Popjustice now puts me in the category as vinyl elitists – I suppose my musical snobbery was going to get called out eventually.
So what constitutes a single now? As popjustice asks, can it be any track on any official download site, how about songs released virally? Should illegal downloads count,?
Will we see seens like this in another 5 years?
Free Eels Live EP
21 Tuesday Oct 2008
Posted in Music
The Eels are making a live EP freely available for a limited period through their website (http://www.eelstheband.com/), direct link here. The EP is only available until 28th October 2008. The EP with four tracks includes:
- Fresh Feeling
- Packng Blankets
- Jeannie’s Diary
- Climbing To The Moon
The site is also promoting special limited edition copies of the Eels’ last studio album Blinking Lights and Other Revelations.
Sound Blog – Cool little entry here on Audiophiles
16 Thursday Oct 2008
Posted in Music
Sound Blog has got a great little blog entry which also links to an article on CNET here. Essentially it argues that being an Audiophile is not about having the biggest and best HiFi, but a state of mind.
Kaiser Chiefs – Southampton Guildhall
16 Thursday Oct 2008
Posted in Music, Music Reviews, Technology
We managed to catch the Kaiser Chiefs on the small venue part of their European tour to promote the new Album Of With Their Heads. Initial impressions of the new songs is that good ones are very good, the others are only so-so, B side material, and leaves a me with the feeling that the album was rushed so that the pre-Christmas sales season could be exploited which is a shame.
I took some pictures at the gig with a new Samsung Soul mobile phone with what seemed to be a nice 5mb camera. Although its ability to focus in the conditions of a concert appears to be disappointing. To help with that I started using the multi-frame mode and discovered that when you do that it reduces the image resolution notably without any warning. I think I need to experiment some more with poor light conditions but at the moment I’d would say that the lower resolution Sony Ericcson K800i coped better at gigs.
Photoset at filckr here.
How profitable was Radiohead’s experiment with In Rainbows?
15 Wednesday Oct 2008
Posted in Music
According to the NME, the figures for last years sales experiment with In Rainbows. Despite all the criticism from the likes of Paul McGuinness (U2’s manager) it turns out that the download approach generated more income than Radiohead’s previous album Hail To The Thief. The report indicates that a large proportion of people didn’t pay anything for the album, but enough did to make a difference. I’m sure that critics will attribute to issues such as the effort made to promote the album (Radiohead’s last for EMI), how good or bad the Hail to The Thief was and so forth.
It will be interesting to see if the model is picked up by more artists (other than Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails) given these new figures.
Tracking multiple email accounts
15 Wednesday Oct 2008
Posted in Technology
In this day and age, email addresses are like bank accounts – we’ve got more than one, and we need to keep an eye on them with varying degrees of regularity. As a sideline of webmaster and Hotmail (Live mail) email client getting heavier on resource needs all the time. Having a small tool to monitor my many email addresses without resorting to using my work Outlook being muddied by non work stuff and visa versa for my home mail client.
To help with this I’ve started using a brilliant little application called POP Peeper, it can watch webmail like Hotmail, GMail account as well as good old fashioned POP3, SMTP etc. Its easy to setup and then let it sit out of the way on the toolbar and flag up when something arrives in the mail box. You can then look at the email in this little lightweight tool.
September Fuel Prices
14 Tuesday Oct 2008
Posted in economy
With the latest fuel prices update we can see a small downward trend, which reflects the slowing economies.
Some stats for the month:
|
Fuel Type Difference |
11.4 |
|
increase from previous month (unleaded) |
-0.3 |
|
increase from previous month (diesel) |
-1.3 |
|
%inflation (unleaded) |
-0.34 |
|
%inflation (diesel) |
-1.6 |
7Digital power new Lost Tunes Site
11 Saturday Oct 2008
Posted in Music
It would appear that 7Digital are launching a new site called Lost Tunes that appears to concentrate on old releases, covers of older songs, and radio sessions such as those recorded by John Peel. The site offers the recordings in high quality MP3s.
Lost Tunes came to my attention as a result of an email from The Delays who have produced a covers EP which is being made exclusively available through Lost Tunes.
Phil (aka MP3Monster)'s Blog 