In case you haven't heard, MCA of the Beastie Boys has cancer.  I'm wishing him well.

The title says it all.  No matter what you think about his (admittedly bizarre) personal life, he was an absolute entertainment phenomenon.  There will never be another entertainer like him.  Thriller will always be one of my most prized albums in my collection of vinyl.

With this and the death of Ed McMahon and Farrah Fawcett, this has turned out to be a hell of a depressing week.  It can't end soon enough.

A woman steals something from someone.  Actually, she stole 24 things.  And they were from a company, not a person.  Actually, they are illegal music downloads and she didn't really steal from the copyright holder as much as she obtained copyrighted material from a third party without the copyright holder's permission.  It's still theft.  And you won't hear me argue otherwise because I do believe copyright infringement is a serious crime.

So did she perform an illegal act?  Yes, absolutely.  Should she be forced to pay a civil penalty beyond simply the market value of the product she stole?  Yes, sure.  That's part of the punishment for committing a crime and its also a deterrent for others thinking about committing the same crime.   Should she have to pay a penalty that is 80,000 times the market value of the product?  pfffbbbtbttttttt!  WTF?!  HELL NO!

http://www.cnn.com/2009/CRIME/06/18/minnesota.music.download.fine/

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Well, at least I have one fan out there in the blogosphere!  Apparently Ron Britton, in-between battling religious extremism with his mighty keyboard, has decided to meme-slap me and my lowly mostly-tech blog.  Cool.  I've never felt so included in the blogosphere before.  So, without further ado, I now present you with the rules of this particular meme, my responses, and the frighteningly chain-letter-like conclusion of my slapping others.  :-)

Rules:

1. Link to the person who tagged you.
2. Post the rules.
3. Write six random things about yourself.
4. Tag six people.
5. Inform the tagees and the person who tagged you.

Six Random Things About Me:

1. I am a college drop-out.  Yes, kids, you too can grow up to be an aspiring musician in a tech career, and no degree is required!  Well, that's not entirely true.  I have an Associate of Arts degree -- I just never finished college.  I do hold a few certifications, and in my position as a systems/network administrator/engineer (whatever my position title of the day is), that seems to make up for it.  Now, I don't encourage anybody to not finish college (especially in this age of the Bush Economy Legacy), but at least for those of us that grew up in the care-free days of the tech bubble, no degree is required!
   
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Quietly, and without much fanfare, nerds.de released an updated version of LoopBe30, a virtual MIDI patchcable driver, which now supports 64-bit operating systems, such as Vista 64 and XP 64.

Users of 64-bit operating systems have been getting the middle finger from many audio companies (such as these guys, although recently they have taken a slightly softer approach). It is/was really short-sighted, because 64-bit operating systems are, in general, higher performance and can address more RAM, which are both monumentally important to audio production. It doesn't matter that audio width greater than 32-bits provides little more (no perceptible) clarity than 32-bit. That is not the issue. If the OS has less overhead and greater bandwidth, more registers, and more RAM, the entire system will be faster, releasing resource pressure for the audio application, leading to overall higher performance. These guys understood and were the first to fully embrace 64-bit computing. Good for them.

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CD Baby has finished setting up my CD for sale. You can now buy it at the following link for the low, low price of $10.95: http://cdbaby.com/cd/avianwaves.

Unbelievably, I've already sold a copy, before any promotion. I think I like this CD Baby thing...

The SNOCAP store on the front page and the MySpace page is currently offline as new MP3s are validated by SNOCAP and come online. In support of the new album release, I've re-encoded ALL singles from the self-titled album using LAME. I used the original 96Khz/24bit masters as the input files and used LAME's "extreme" quality option, which uses variable bitrate compression for maximum quality. The files are a little bit bigger, but none exceed 16 MB (and that's two songs in one file: Out of Darkness + Toward the Light). Price is 99 cents per song (the usual cost).

Note for DJs: The SNOCAP singles are not cross-faded together (except for Out of Darkness + Toward the Light, which were recorded together and so are not easy to break apart), like on the retail CD. I have my artistic vision and all that for the album, but the SNOCAP singles can be arranged however you want. That makes these singles ideal for radio/club play.

Coming soon: Ring tones!

I decided having multiple blogs (Music and Tech) was pretty confusing, so I introduced topics (a.k.a. "tags") to my blog. The two previous blogs were unified and then the topics were applied (among others) so that they are actually still sorted basically the same. You can see in the upper left hand corner the various topics you can filter by, in case you aren't interested in all the wonderful things I have to say. Any old links to previous music/tech blog entries should still work. Please let me know if they don't!

CDs are finally in the process of getting pressed. Late 2007, I think I said, right? So late that it's 2008 now, apparently. ;-) All singles will be for sale shortly after I get the CDs in retail outlets (like CD Baby).

Next step... I need to start writing new tracks and get back to work on RD Tabs and XS BAP.

Cool article here on how to use a bunch of freeware to record internet radio for those wonderful shows you can't listen to live and don't offer a downloadable form.  Think of it as a "DVR" for your internet radio!

http://www.minezone.org/blog/2006/08/17/record-streaming-radio-using-free-software/

Few notes: 

- The tool "close" isn't really necessary because Windows' built-in taskkill.exe should signal a normal close unless you specify the /F flag which forcefullly terminates.

- If you have RD Tabs installed, you don't need "wait.exe" either.  The "sleep.exe" included in the RD Tabs installation for scripting purposes does the same thing, only it sleeps for miliseconds, not seconds, so note that in your calculations in the script.

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So with new technology regularly comes speculations of grand new utopic worlds and the death of old ways.  iTunes has basically made the industry (or those at least who claim to be "in" the industry) to speculate on if selling albums is worth it anymore.  Afterall, you can just jot on over to iTunes (or whatever), download only the songs you like from every artist you like and be done with it!

Of course there are people like that.  But they could (and did) buy 45's, cassette singles, and CD singles back in the "old" days.  Some people just like buying albums (like me) because they want the full experience.  Yes, some bands just produce collections of songs with no real forethought on the "experience" an album will take you on, and that's fine.  But longer multi-part experiences are an important part of music and have been for some time.  I'm not sure that's going to change!  Symphonies were written in movements.  Each movement you could say was a "song" and the whole symphony was an "album."  It was the same concept.  Teevee analogy: singles are the "episodes" and albums are the "season" (or "series" if you are from across the pond).

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