Archive for 02009-07

Google Voice Debacle Causes Arrington to Ditch the iPhone, and With Good Reason – Apple – Gizmodo
Normally, I’d say that TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington’s public quitting of the iPhone was a shrill, disingenuous ploy for attention and pageviews. It’s Michael Arrington, after all. But you know what? It’s totally legit, and Apple should pay attention.

The reason he’s quitting isn’t because of AT&Ts horrible network, which everyone with an iPhone has been begrudgingly putting up with for two years now. No, it’s the Google Voice debacle.

He really wants to use Google Voice, but in order to do so, he needs the app for it to really work. It’s not just an inconvenience; it’s seriously detracting from how he can use his cellphone. And with legit GV apps available for both BlackBerry and Android, he doesn’t have to. So he’s terminating his iPhone contract.

And really, power to him. If GV was important to me, I’d do the same. And I’m sure Arrington isn’t the only person furious enough to cancel their iPhone service over this, he’s just one of the most visible. So Apple, pay attention. Because lately your App Store nonsense has crossed from irritating to inexcusable, and that’s just not going to work in the long term. [TechCrunch]

I also hope Apple pays attention. They have handled this extremely badly, first approving several Goggle Voice apps four months ago (((I use GV Mobile, which is excellent))) and now suddenly janking them from the store. Naturally people are now demanding refunds. Problem is, refunds are not issued by Apple but by the app-makers, and from what I understand Apple gets to keep their commission, which means the app-developers are actually losing money!! In the meantime Skype, Truphone and other VOIP apps are still available! Is this specifically directed against Google? Why?

I am not updating to 3.0.1 until I know Apple won’t yank the GV Mobile app from my iPhone in the process. And, it goes without saying, I have zero loyalty to AT+T, who are probably behind this stunt.

This just in:

FCC questions Apple over Google Voice | Software | iPhone Central | Macworld
The U.S. Federal Communications Commission has written to Apple, AT&T and Google questioning the rejection of Google Voice and related applications from theApp Store.

In a letter sent Friday to Apple, the agency asked the company why Google Voice was rejected, which related applications have been rejected along with it, and what role AT&T may have played in the decision. It also asked what the difference is between Google Voice and other VoIP (voice over Internet Protocol) software that has been approved for the iPhone.

Banned From YouTube: Parody Guitar Videos | Underwire | Wired.com
Earlier this week, YouTube pulled the plug on funnyman and media artist Santeri Ojala, whose hilarious and popular “shredding” videos poke fun at the world’s great guitar players.

YouTube said it received three complaints of copyright infringement and automatically suspended Ojala’s account.

YouTube has a standing policy to suspend accounts after three complaints from copyright holders, whether the complaints are valid or not. YouTube declined to say who filed the complaints, but it was likely the guitar gods themselves — or their representatives.

Ojala, who overdubs rock concert footage with his own bad guitar playing, says he has no plans to fight YouTube’s decision, which would likely require him to hire a lawyer and file suit against the company.

Stephen and I shared a lot of laughs over those videos. They were so funny and well done. Sad to see them go. Hm, wonder which rockstar objected to them…

Here are a few images from the Lensic performance in June, captured by Colleen Hayes.



From left to right: Robby Rothschild, Stephen Duros, OL, Jon Gagan and Michael Chavez.

Great photos Colleen!

Digital music suffering from entrepreneur drain | Beyond Binary – CNET News
Pakman agreed that such influencers are a key factor. “Bloggers are the music critics (of today),” Pakman said.

Yeah, yeah, bloggers replace journalism, bloggers replace music critics, Flickr-members replace photographers, Facebook and Twitter networking replaces meeting friends for a pint…

There are critics who blog, but in general I would not consider bloggers the music critics of today. Bloggers have more in common with the guy in the local pub who tells everyone willing to listen about his musical preferences.

Our monsoon continues and we had another fine rain storm this afternoon.

In the morning Jon and I compared AIFF, FLAC and 320kbps mp3 files in my studio, using Stax Earspeakers and a Stax tube amp. The FLAC files had been encoded and decoded using xAct, which is a fine FLAC app for Macintosh. The 320 mp3 was made with Peak Pro, which uses a LAME encoder – the same encoder we use for the ListeningLounge.

The result was what one would expect: AIFF, followed by FLAC and mp3. What we did not expect was how very close the quality between these formats was. Unless you have a great set of headphones or speakers – and the ears and experience to process what comes through them – you will not hear a difference. Another interesting point was that the treble side of the music was indistinguishable, it was the bass where one could detect shades of difference.

I uploaded the June slideshow, mostly images from Santa Fe and San Francisco.

We have a day off in Sparks, Nevada, before rolling into Santa Cruz tomorrow.

I received an email from a fan who did not like that the concert at Boulder Station was “only” 75 minutes long. (((BTW, we played very well and received a standing ovation)))

I get at least one or two emails like that after every show in Las Vegas. Most casinos, with the exception of the Nugget in Sparks/Reno who let us play for 90 minutes, limit performances to 75 minutes (((as do clubs where we do two shows a night))).

It’s pretty simple, really. Casinos want to lure people to gamble. They offer shows at a decent ticket-price and hope that some folks stay to play the slots after the concert. The longer the concert, the less likely it is that people stay in the casino afterward – I am sure this is based on research or experience.

Let’s look at the ticket-price-to-concert-length ratio:

Ticket prices at the Celebrity in Phoenix, where we played a full show, were $45 and $65. Tickets at Boulder Station in Vegas went from $24.50 to $45.50. 120 minutes for $45 = 2.67 minutes per dollar, versus 75 minutes for $24.50 = 3.06 minutes per dollar. Or, if you prefer, the Celebrity charged 37 cents per minute and Boulder Station charged 32 cents.

So, your dollar actually buys you more music at Boulder Station. That’s pretty much all there is to it. Also, if you want to see a band in a small venue, chances are that they will play two shows and the performances will be shorter. That goes more or less for the Blue Note in Manhattan, Anthology in San Diego, One World in Austin &c.

From Ottmar-Friends. Subscribers can download an HD version of the video or the fullsize 24bit/88.2kHz stereo recording. (24/88.2 is more than twice the resolution of a CD, but not every computer can handle it)

Another post from two years ago:

Even though we humans are 99.5% identical, that 0.5% makes all the difference in the world and no two people are alike, even if they are siblings. I wrote that none of the software predicting what I might like works for me… This morning I built a bridge between those two statements. The predicting software is assuming that taste is linear, but it is not. Taste is a cloud, just like the genetic mix that makes each person so different. It is personal and cultural and rooted in time… What I mean is that my reason for liking a particular sound or melody is predicated by a very complex and completely different set of parameters than exists for the next person.

Therefore I might love A but not at all like B, while the next person loves both or neither… In fact the painters or authors I like, which poems by Naruda I love, whether I prefer coffee or tea (actually I love both) might be more of a key to which music I like than asking me about musical genres!

Taste is a cloud, not a list. Taste is incredibly complex. It’s like that interview question, the one a journalist might ask when they haven’t listened to your music and don’t have a clue what you are about: what influences you? Hm, how about everything, every ray of light, every particle refracting and reflecting those rays of light, every sound and every surface reflecting that sound, every person I have touched and who have touched me, every story I read, every word I heard, every scent… all that has created my taste, my inspiration, my particular take on things, which is as complex as my personal DNA and which is fluidly changing constantly!

Oliver Sacks | The Daily Show | Comedy Central
Oliver Sacks believes musical training should be a part of early education because of music’s huge effect on the brain.

Here he is on the Daily Show:

Thanks for the link MMC.

Chase Jarvis Blog: Priced To Sell: Gladwell vs. Anderson Considering Photography

“…And there’s plenty of other information out there that has chosen to run in the opposite direction from Free. The Times gives away its content on its Web site. But the Wall Street Journal has found that more than a million subscribers are quite happy to pay for the privilege of reading online. Broadcast television—the original practitioner of Free—is struggling. But premium cable, with its stiff monthly charges for specialty content, is doing just fine. Apple may soon make more money selling iPhone downloads (ideas) than it does from the iPhone itself (stuff). The company could one day give away the iPhone to boost downloads; it could give away the downloads to boost iPhone sales; or it could continue to do what it does now, and charge for both. Who knows? The only iron law here is the one too obvious to write a book about, which is that the digital age has so transformed the ways in which things are made and sold that there are no iron laws.”

Counter to some predictions, photography and video are are not bound to ‘Free’. I’m in agreement with Anderson that ‘Free’ is most certainly carving out its space–even reasonably so–in every digitally based industry, but I’m in complete alignment with Gladwell that the two markets ‘Free’ and ‘Not Free’ can and will continue to co-exist reasonably nicely. The trick is/will be in finding the balance.

Read the whole piece here. A lot of very good food for thought.

I wrote this two years ago:

This most likely will be a long rambling post about stuff that’s been on my mind. I have talked about it on separate occasions with Jon Gagan (over lunch), Andrew Gaskins (over tea), Keith Vizcarra (in his workshop when I dropped off my fav DeVoe for crack-patching) and Colin and other Integral-types (after the Boulder show last Friday)… There is really nothing new here, just a few lines connecting stuff – trying to make sense of how it fits together.

Television moved from 4 channels to cable/sattelite with 400 channels and now to YouTube. Less editing and more choice. I am told that one of the most viewed clips on YouTube is some guy lighting his fart, which I think says a lot about the medium. Parallel to that we have the music biz. Up until the mid-nineties recording was so expensive that only a few musicians would stay in the game if they didn’t receive record company support. A large number of musicians would simply drop out after a while and decide to play in cover bands or take other jobs. Out of the musos that stayed in the game and continued to find ways to pay for studio time with the money from lots of live-performances, a willing donor or day-jobs, the record companies would pick a very small number who received corporate support. So, two elements whittled down the number of acts, the cost of recording and the record company selection process.

Here is what I do in the face of too much choice:
After surfing lots of channels and not finding anything to watch I usually decided that it was a waste of my time and grabbed a book. Then I got rid of TV altogether. The same is true for music. I buy a lot less than I used to. I am overwhelmed by the choice and frankly am not willing to put in the time to find something I might enjoy. I mostly rely on my network of friends to make suggestions.

Jon thinks that the next step in this chain from 4 networks to cable/sattelite to YouTube might be some kind of subscription to an editor or curator who emails his selections to customers. Somebody who wades through gigabites of crap to find the good stuff. I have mentioned the curator concept a number of times as well. See this post from 1999 or this one. I am not sure how many people would be willing to pay money for such a curator subscription, but there are other revenue models out that might work…

What might really work is a great network of people… I use the word people instead of friends because friends can be too homogenous. If you want to throw a great party you don’t invite a bunch of similar thinking people! No, you select a couple of extreme thinkers and you buffer them with moderates. Very important is how/where you seat everyone. There is a real art to this and some people have a great knack for it. Nothing will ever replace meeting people in meatspace… Warning: here starts another tangent… Speaking of meatspace, humans are 99.5% genetically alike. The remaining .5% is what we have killed so many people for: the shape of an eye, the curve of a nose, the look of a forehead – small and subtle differences when we consider all humans… A Korean girlfriend told me in the late Eighties about arriving in the USA when she was seven years old. She could not tell any of the white folks apart… they all looked the same to her. Well, that’s because it takes training to tell us humans apart by the 0.5% in genetic differential! So to each race the other, unfamiliar races look homogenous. The same is true for music, by the way. If you play Bebop or trad Flamenco to the uninitiated, they will not be able to hear what is outstanding about this particular version or how terrible this other one is… We can differentiate that which we are familiar or intimate with, everything remains apart. Another tangent: wouldn’t it be great if these tangents were another layer, hyper-linked to the main post and I could have several layers for each post… hm, has any blooging software ever considered coding something like this? Can’t be that hard and it would go another step in creating a new medium. Yes, I could work around this and create a separate post and then link to it – but that’s just not the same!! I am talking about having, say 3 or more layers available when writing a post. One could use a different link-color to differentiate between an outside link and a layer-link…

Anyway, what about the internet? Isn’t that a great space for networking? Not really. I think one really needs that person with a knack to bring the right people together. Zaadz does not do it for me, MySpace is plain ugly… So how would one go about it? One would have to have a beautiful and intuitive interface first of all. (What did you say on Friday, Colin? The most direct way between points A and B is the aesthetic solution? Something like that. Colin also mentioned that Ken Wilber and the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas are contributing new thoughts on the subject of editing or quality.) And no, a computer cannot create that network – I have not once liked a suggestion amazon.com has offered me. You might answer that the system is just not complex enough and does not have enough data yet. Maybe that’s true and maybe it’s just not something a computer can do well. If you like this you are NOT necessarily going to like that…

The Good, the True and the Beautiful. Not a new concept. Plato came up with that a long time ago and Ken Wilber has written a lot of great stuff about it. My question is this: Is a life worth living if you are only offered clean water and clean air, but no elegance or beauty? And what happens when Beauty is eliminated from our schools because politicians and parents don’t want to “waste” resources on art-education and music?

And one last thought: in the past it was easy, even convenient, to literally forget about the masses… the plebs, the “great unwashed“. They were fodder for wars and industry. The less education was offered to people, the easier it was to manipulate them. Well, now they will be the ones deciding whether this planet will live. We can no longer afford to solve a manufacturing problem (read: design problem) by shipping the poisonous waste to Africa or Asia and we can no longer afford to ignore education (and that includes art and music education) if we want to create a bright future. As Ken has pointed out many times, nobody can skip stages, but we can sure try to help the development along, maximize the speed and opportunity at which people can move upwards. Now everywhere is our backyard and everyone is our brother/sister.

Pirate Bay’s purchase proves they’re not altruistic | Behind the Music | Helienne Lindvall | Music | guardian.co.uk
The Pirate Bay is not the first company (and, yes, whatever image they tried to portray, it was always a business) to have built their entire existence on making copyrighted material available for free, without asking, or compensating, the people who created the material. As far back as 2000, Napster was in the dock for copyright infringement; in 2008, the brand was bought by the American electronics retailer Best Buy for $121m (£74m). As I’ve previously reported, LastFM built their business on unlicensed music only to sell it to CBS for $280m (£171m). And let’s not forget Google’s purchase of YouTube for $1.65bn (£1bn). For supposedly “altruistic” ventures, these companies sure made a lot of money. Some would argue the artists whose music built these businesses should have received some of that money.

Read the whole article. Couldn’t agree more. I didn’t know all of this background stuff about the Pirate Bay.

Echo Location: Matthew Schoening’s Looped Cellos « The Echoes Blog
Echoes finds a lapsed classical cellist who is looped.

You can hear the Echoes program here.

You can buy and download The Art of Live Looping in our Listening Lounge.

Make it happen!!

BBC NEWS | Americas | US musicians demand radio royalties
I bet you cannot guess the answer to this one.

In which countries – apart from the United States – do terrestrial radio stations NOT pay performers for their songs?

Iran, China, North Korea and Rwanda.

Artists and their record labels are calling on members of Congress to bring the US into line with the rest of the world – and with satellite, internet and cable radio stations – by passing the Performance Rights Act.

This doesn’t affect me much, since this regards payment for performers – composers have been getting paid all along. But it seems wrong to me that cable and web radio have been paying performers and old radio has not.

Best architecture critique ever? At least the funniest one. Me, I don’t like any of Mr. Graves’ designs. Like the worst of the Eighties fashion…

Masonry "Masterpiece" or Mistake?
Over at David Byrne’s blog I came across this monstrosity by none other than Michael Graves, the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas in Houston, Texas. The former Talking Head memorably says, “This very out of place structure somehow lingers, like a fart left by someone no longer in an elevator.”
(Via Clippings)

(((I added the color for emphasis)))