The Bass Geek

A bunch of sources point to Apple releasing a cloud-based music service in conjunction with their established iTunes store. Not only would you get the streaming tracks, but you’d also get the ability to back up your music library to “the cloud” and listen from Internet-enabled devices.

This has been tried already, of course, by mp3.com. The results were brutal lawsuits and a shutdown of the “music locker” service. But times have changed, different companies have felt financial downturns that make this seem like a better option, and now the possibility is there to make it happen. Like Spotify and MOG have already made it happen. Although not as well as they could have – Spotify is Europe-only at this point, and I personally let my subscription to MOG lapse because I was a little frustrated by incomplete listing of albums (although the overall selection was pretty good).

So it’s not like Apple is breaking any ground here. It’s just that the ground has shifted under the music industry and the technology has finally caught up. If they’re going to back up my entire library and make it available to me, wonderful. How much is it going to cost, and what will you do with the tracks I ripped from CD? Otherwise, there’s Simplify. The task here isn’t breaking new ground – it’s making what’s available work easily.

I do like what’s available for indie artists now, though. Tunecore + iTunes streaming = trackable plays and maybe some royalties out of the whole thing. Very streamlined and effective. I wonder what the cut will be?

The new IMN podcast is live – download it or listen at the site or on WFYI HD2 Thursdays at 4pm.

IMN is also giving away tickets to a few Indy Jazz Fest events, so have at it and good luck!

My laptop is now current with Snow Leopard, and everything seems to be running okay, with the exception of some software I rarely use (and updates are on the way). It was just a matter of using Carbon Copy Cloner to make a backup of the old, then reimaging the laptop entirely and migrating the information and applications back from there. I also did away with my Vista partition, so I’m back out of the land of Windows (at least at home). My edition of Record arrives later today, so I’m looking forward to getting that back up and running and maybe making some music again.

Hadn’t heard much about it.

Seriously, though, the Rock Band deal is interesting if only for the fact that a video game with downloadable content has made it possible for unsigned bands to get their downloadable songs on the exact same platform as a legendary supergroup using the Rock Band network. Record the song, do a little rhythm programming with Reaper and a program called Magma, and send it off. It’s something to note because none of the other download services have yet made this feat possible, and it’s not like you can just rip your Beatles CDs into Rock Band or Guitar Hero.

And now that there are even more CDs to rip into your media player of choice, the lack of any Beatles songs on iTunes matters even less, really. You’ve got the remastered albums for the fans and purists, and you can tempt the kids into listening with the video game without having to repurchase the albums. So everybody wins – except for iTunes. And I’m writing this before the Apple announcement today, so who knows what will happen. I’ll be interested in any news on Cocktail or new iPod formats, but it probably won’t go much beyond that, from what I’m reading.

Any download news probably won’t matter much, though. The Beatles already have everything they need from the digital world.

Since I’m not in the market for a new iPod, today’s “big announcement” from Apple didn’t really mean much to me until it got to the iTunes 8 update. The Genius feature (a bit misleading, considering they already use this term for their in-house tech support – I’ve generally had good experiences, but I don’t want to tie in my music listening to the need for assistance) supposedly builds smart playlists based on a single song from your library. On my work computer (with no music library to speak of), it also gave helpful suggestions from the iTunes Store. Reminiscent of Amazon’s suggestions and usually well-related, it still wasn’t a huge leap. It also made me wonder why it was recommending German techno based off of the ill-received Roots/Patrick Stump collaboration “Birthday Girl.” There’s some inscrutable logic there I’m just not getting.

After installing iTunes 8 at home and letting it catalog my home library (a process that took just under an hour on an old PowerMac G4 – slow but a lot of storage capacity), I gave it a shot on the track I was practicing at the time. From Stevie Wonder’s “Isn’t She Lovely?”, I received a 25-song list featuring Sly and the Family Stone, Al Green, The Spinners, Isaac Hayes, Maxwell, D’Angelo, Parliament, Sam & Dave, Van Hunt, Nikka Costa, The Time, and more. Decent selection of new and old, and all were good songs. At this point, it’s looking like a more intelligent shuffle function – the tracks are random, but they’re stylistically similar.

Tackhead and Supergrub produced no results from Genius. Even though both are in the iTunes library. A little disappointing.

The Hold Steady pulled tracks from The Gutter Twins and The Twilight Singers (both well-loved rock acts in my library, no surprise), Art Brut (former tourmates and excellent match), TV On The Radio and Gnarls Barkley (okay, I suppose I can see these fitting in) and Genesis. Nope, I’m drawing the line at “The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway.”* That just doesn’t quite pull it.

I like the idea of Genius, and its results seem useful, if sometimes rather random. Most of it is still based on what’s in your library, so you’re limited there in a way that you’re not with Pandora and Last.fm. However, your tracks aren’t likely to disappear due to inscrutable royalty disputes either, so that’s a plus. The feature is also another way for iTunes to sneak advertising into your music experience, so take that as you will. Some will enjoy the suggestions for the possibly new and different, others will resent the intrusion. I’ve always wondered what Amazon thought about me, too. It’s a decent step forward, but it still does nothing to advance iTunes and the iPod to my ultimate wishlist – liner notes and info in the program AND on the mobile device WITHOUT DRM. I even set that up as a Boolean statement, for ease of programming.

*Incidentally, the track in question was “The Grand Parade Of Lifeless Packaging.” You’re going to read into that what you will, so have at it.

I’m still recovering from both the schadenfreude of watching the Patriots lose yesterday and the chili contest that accompanied said viewing – an excellent cap for the weekend. All is right with the football world (minus a Steelers Super Bowl win), and life can continue on a positive course. Since the Pro Bowl means nothing, that’ll be the end of football talk for a bit.

The new hard drive is in my system, and I’ve got both an OS X and a Vista partition running without incident. The only hassle so far has been reloading data (not major, as I could just copy data over from the old drive) and programs (slightly more, ’cause I have to hunt down old serial numbers from upgrades). The upshot of it is that I now have more space on the Mac side for music projects, and the Vista side is ready for work on my upcoming laptop book.

I saw the U2 3-D movie over the weekend, and it was an interesting experience. The music was overall decent to this casual listener (aside from a seemingly flat section in “Beautiful Day”), and there were no overwhelming “COMING RIGHT AT YOU!” moments (again, aside from an obligatory Bono reaching out towards the camera – what did you expect?). The drum set stood out particularly well, as did some of the crowd shots, and there were some drawn-in and composited special effects that were interesting as well. It did carry a “layered” look to it – the effects at times appeared on very flat panes that seemed stacked on each other. Still, a decent spectacle.

Alright, so I refreshed my browser a couple of times during the MacWorld keynote speech to see what Apple was coming out with.  I’m not concerned so much with the new laptop or iPhone stuff – it was the improvements to the AppleTV unit and iTunes that interested me.  Apple getting into video-on-demand is interesting, as are the capabilities of the new AppleTV unit (for those of you with digital cable boxes, it’s pretty much like the on-demand services you have right now – one step forward towards a la carte cable viewing as opposed to subscription?).  It’s also cool that some hi-def DVDs are going to include iTunes-ready digital files on the disc.  This fulfills a pet peeve of mine – being able to get a digital backup of your media.  With this, you can have a copy on your computer and your disc at the same time without technically violating the DMCA (even though I’d regard copying that media as well within your rights).  The only drawback is the DRM on the iTunes files.  Even if it’s less restrictive than other DRM, it’s still there.  Baby steps?

It’s also telling to me that iTunes skipped right over music this time around.  Except for mentioning that it’s offered wirelessly through AppleTV and such, there were no new announcements.  Given that record companies are making the move towards Amazon (at least the majors), I’m curious to see if more music offerings at better bitrates and without DRM are in the cards.  And don’t forget, there’s always Tunecore and CD Baby to get your music on these services.

In mentioning the Playboy Psychonauts show last night, I forgot to note that this was the first show where I used the laptop that had been upgraded to Reason 4 AND Leopard. I pleasantly experienced no issues live, although I had to recreate the files I used – for some Reason (sorry), I couldn’t get the keyboard in the Sequencer view, and the audio wasn’t coming across properly. It was no big deal, as the files were just one synth and a loop. I noticed it occuring before the OS upgrade, too, so I’m assuming it’s a Reason problem. It does mean that I’ll have to go digging through my other old files and see if that’s a problem for everything. The physical setup went smoothly – since I tossed the audio and MIDI interfaces in a rack with a direct box and the appropriate cords, it’s been no problem. It also means I don’t have to travel with an amp.

At this time, the next Psychonauts show comes up in February, so I’m looking forward to getting some new songs and sounds ready.

You can download the latest IMN Podcast from this link right here, or you can get it from the Flash player on the main site.

With Expert Podcasting Practices For Dummies on the shelves right now, and since I already brought up podcasts, I thought I’d shed a little light on the dark, troubled way the IMN podcast comes together. In this post, I’ll detail the tools we use and have used in the past, and I’ll look at the actual process next Monday.

In the two years, we’ve tried a variety of methods in hopes of finding one that produced the best quality of audio in the shortest amount of time (co-host Steve Hayes and I have lives to get back to, after all). We’ve tried recording directly to a PC using Sonar Home Studio, recording directly to my Mac laptop using Garageband 4, recording to a hard-drive-based music workstation, and a flash memory recorder. We alternate at this point between recording to my laptop or the flash recorder, depending on which one is easier to grab at the time. Both have proven to be fairly stable solutions, barring user error (yes, that user would be me).

Post-production stuff like editing and file conversion is done on the Mac using Soundtrack Pro and a couple of freeware programs: Switch converts the AIFF file to a 128kbps mp3 file, and Musorg helps me edit the ID3 tag for each file. I used to use iTunes for both purposes, but I didn’t care for the fact that I had to clear out the library each time I edited an episode. From there, I just SFTP the episode and the XML file for our RSS feed to the server, where it lies in wait for unsuspecting listeners.

In a perfect world, I’d have already upgraded to Logic Studio and use the new version of Soundtrack Pro 2 (my current version comes from the Final Cut Pro bundle), but that’s dependent on the budget. And the budget is slowly shaking its head at new carpet and an upcoming trip to New Orleans, so I don’t think I’ll slide this by for awhile.

So that’s the techie side. The planning and scripting part comes next week.

EDIT: Forgot to mention that we’ve used Shure, AKG and Blue Snowball mics. We’ve achieved great results with all three, although getting two Snowballs working at the same time required a little tweating in the Audio/MIDI section of the Mac OS – I had to create an aggregate device out of both mic and route the audio through there.