Archives Posts
February 19th, 2007 by musicinterfaces
Bone conduction headphones - now there’s a concept to make the uninitiated dive for the exit. Count me in as a member of that crowd. Apparently they’ve been available in Japan for some time. The chap in the image above doesn’t look unhappy, but maybe those headphones aren’t plugged in yet. Okay, I’ll stop being a Luddite and confess that I’d love to try these out. The headphones don’t rest on the ear, but in front of them, using contact with the jaw to ‘conduct’ sound to the listener. In this way they simulate auditory nerves directly without damaging ear drums. Or so I’m told. The Thanko Vonia EZ-4200Ps can be bought in Japan for a mere 9800 Yen (just over £40). Gizmodo also refer to a more expensive competitor from Pegasus.
Via: Newlaunches.com
In other headphone news, the Motorola S9 are Bluetooth headphones that allow the user to switch seamlessly between phone calls and music. A 6 hour battery life makes these sound fairly unattractive.
Full details: Gizmodiva
And finally, talking of attractive design, who could refuse these floral delights?
Link: Newlaunches.com
No mention in any of these announcements of the products’ sound quality…
Archives Posts
February 19th, 2007 by musicinterfaces
- Sound of Traffic - Java "application" which converts TCP/IP header information into midi notes via the Java Synthesizer. The purpose is to listen in on network traffic
- Lets Talk Music :: Your online musicians community - "Dedicated to serving independent musicians, songwriters and producers… Upload your music for review, find opportunities, join the community, read music news, get a whole pile of advice, and loads more.
- MusicStation…the future of mobile music! - Omnifone launches MusicStation, a music industry backed next generation music service coming to a mobile phone near you in partnership with 23 mobile network operators
- Impact of digital downloads on the charts | The Guardian - Now the net can get old tunes to the top of the charts, be careful how you vote, says Chris Salmon
- ClickCaster - "Clickcaster is the simplest way for you to share your audio and video all over the web."
Archives Posts
February 18th, 2007 by musicinterfaces
- MP3tunes offers unlimited free online music storage (Playlist) - "MP3tunes announced Monday the availability of unlimited, free online music storage using its Oboe music locker technology." I’ve signed up, will see what the service is like and report back.
- MusicStation Delivers The Wow - What’s better than taking all the tunes you want with you on your mobile phone? Letting someone else store the tracks for you!
- Spinning Disc CD Player Cuts Like a Saw - Gizmodo - If you’re still not quite enamored with online music stores like iTunes and prefer to get your music in hard copy format, here’s a great/ridiculous CD player design.
- Kits and Casemods - Make: Video Podcast - In this weekend project video, Bre Pettis makes the Minty Boost kit and the Make: Daisy open source mp3 player and then makes casemods for them!
- Cool Hunting: BestWorkOutMusic.com - Listening to music during workouts is essential, but sometimes it can do more harm than good. The problem is, I can’t help but run to the beat of the music. Finding a song with a tempo that matches your exercise pace does the trick.
Archives Posts
February 17th, 2007 by musicinterfaces
It’s been a while since I last listened to Ornithology by Charlie Parker, but that’s what I’m doing as I write this post. I don’t own a copy, but on impulse I typed the artist’s name into Seeqpod’s search box, hit the button and the search engine came up with it along with 11 other songs. As it finds relevant songs, it displays them in a list on the left of the page (see screenshot above), clicking the green arrow adds it to your playlist. Registering allows you to save your list to play again another time, provided you register.
A search for Ornette Coleman turned up only five results, two of which provided no track details apart from the artist’s name (these two came from the otherwise brilliantly written free jazz blog Destination Out). Searching for Madonna turned up 95 results although a significant proportion of them were for Madonna Over Yorkshire which is either a t-shirt manufacturer or/and some kind of music act… such uncertainties might be cleared up by clicking the Artist Info link beside the artist’s name on the playlist. This takes you to a Seeqpod page that aggregates links under categories for Videos, Blogs, MySpace, Wikipedia, Lyrics, Buy, Tour Dates and Ringtones.
Perhaps more interestingly, The Pod Crawler tab provides a scrolling, continually updated, list of whatever music the search engine finds as it grazes the web. As with the specified artist search, artists can be added to the playlist to save/play later. As an indication of the variety of material Seeqpod turns up, within the space of a couple of minutes I’d assembled a playlist containing Love, Solex, Derek Bailey, Public Enemy, Don Quixote (from the Gutenberg archive), Incredible Bongo Band, Frank Zappa, Fu Schnickens, Joanna Newsom, Rimsky Korsakov and Craig David…
As a front end to a search engine with a specific focus, Seeqpod is impressively intuitive to use. It could do with some spit and polish on its graphic design to improve its credibility, but it’s a great way to try out an artist before buying, rediscover old favourites or simply discover new music.
Link: Seeqpod
Archives Posts
February 13th, 2007 by musicinterfaces
I recently posted about iConcertCal, a free iTunes plug-in that sought to provide notification of concerts based upon the iTunes library. Last night, I was clicking around my Last.fm account and stumbled upon its own concert notification system. Very nice it is too.
It’s very Web 2.0 as all of the concert listings are user-generated. Users can enter concert details and indicate whether they’re attending or on visiting other users’ pages and spotting an already listed gig can join to be displayed as attending. Gigs are displayed in the left sidebar under ‘Events’ of users’ chart pages. Last.fm makes concert recommendations based upon your - and your musical neighbours’ - listening habits. Tick boxes allow users to choose from one or more of the following choices: ‘Events I’m attending’, ‘Friends’ Events’, ‘Recommended Events (based on my profile + location)’ and ‘All Events Near Me’. With all but the last criteria selected, I’m shown an impressive selection of concerts, many of which I wasn’t aware of, but would consider attending (John Cale, Lee Scratch Perry, 4hero, Theatre of Hate, Adrian Sherwood and Manu Dibango to name but a few). There are a few misses - the prospect of seeing The Killers or The Arcade Fire doesn’t interest me at all, but I suspect would a few of my Last.fm registered friends.
I’m also glad to see that since this functionality was first iterated in a very limited fashion, it’s now possible to see past events that you’ve attended and if they’ve been covered in users’ blogs, links are dynamically generated to those reviews.
I’m very happy to note that all of this information is available via RSS feed so I don’t have to keep checking back on the Events page, but can instead see it in my preferred newsreader. Unfortunately, I can’t link to my page for you to look at as you have to be logged in to see it, otherwise the URL defaults to the Last.fm homepage. I do think this is a brilliant addition to Last.fm and really deserves to be promoted much more widely than it currently appears to be. It could really drive traffic to the service. If you don’t already have a Last.fm account - now’s the time!
Link: Last.fm
Archives Posts
February 9th, 2007 by musicinterfaces
As well as regular posts, I’ve been working on some overview pages, two of which are now visible below the image header: Overview: mp3 players and Overview: music recommendations. These pages aren’t finished, but I wanted to publish them to get going on on them. I’ll be updating and extending them as I go. I hope they prove useful. Any advice gratefully received. I will be adding one or two more of these overviews in the future.
Archives Posts
February 8th, 2007 by musicinterfaces
Reaction has been mixed: The Economist thinks Jobs is dead right, but PC Mag quotes an unimpressed Norwegian Consumer Rights Group spokesperson as follows:
“ITunes Music Store and others are unfair to consumers no matter how many download services follow the proprietary approach,” wrote Torgeir Waterhouse, a senior advisor at The Norwegian Consumer Council, in response to a letter written by Apple CEO Steve Jobs and posted on the Apple Web site on Tuesday.
More: NYT: Europe Cool to Apple’s Suggestions on Music, Digg listing on ‘Steve Jobs DRM’
Archives Posts
February 7th, 2007 by musicinterfaces
In an unprecedented move, Steve Jobs has published a statement entitled Thoughts On Music in which he details his views on DRM. Unsurprisingly, he states that iPods can freely play music ripped from CDs and other media before laying responsibility for the increasingly unpopular rights management applied to music sold via the iTunes Music Store fairly and squarely at the feet of the big record companies:
Since Apple does not own or control any music itself, it must license the rights to distribute music from others, primarily the “big four” music companies: Universal, Sony BMG, Warner and EMI. These four companies control the distribution of over 70% of the world’s music. When Apple approached these companies to license their music to distribute legally over the Internet, they were extremely cautious and required Apple to protect their music from being illegally copied. The solution was to create a DRM system, which envelopes each song purchased from the iTunes store in special and secret software so that it cannot be played on unauthorized devices.
He then goes on to suggest three future scenarios: continuing on the current course with incompatible players and systems (not at all desirable for users), licensing Apple’s Fairplay DRM to third parties (deemed highly problematic because difficult to control) and thirdly to abolish DRM (is that cheering I hear in the distance?) with the following argument:
In 2006, under 2 billion DRM-protected songs were sold worldwide by online stores, while over 20 billion songs were sold completely DRM-free and unprotected on CDs by the music companies themselves. The music companies sell the vast majority of their music DRM-free, and show no signs of changing this behavior, since the overwhelming majority of their revenues depend on selling CDs which must play in CD players that support no DRM system.
Given the growing number of European countries threatening to pursue Apple in the courts, Jobs’ statement is timely. Needless to say, the web is awash with the news, it’s excellent PR and it puts Jobs firmly on the side of the consumer.
Link: Jobs’ statement on the Apple site
Further comment: Macworld , Playlist, TechCrunch
Archives Posts
February 5th, 2007 by musicinterfaces
Sacrilegious to some, fascinating to others I guess. CDRs could certainly do with being made a little more interesting.
Link: product page
Via: Tokyomango
Archives Posts
February 4th, 2007 by musicinterfaces
As more and more people own iPods, Zens, and Zunes, and use those players in noisy environments, in-ear-canal headphones—commonly known as “canalphones” or “in-ear monitors”—have become increasingly popular. As a high-quality option for replacing the cheap headphones included with portable music and media players, the selection of canalphones has, over the past decade, evolved from a few expensive models to a wide-open market with dozens of choices across a wide price range.
I bought my first pair of ear-canal headphones a couple of years ago - Shure E3Cs. Once I’d got the hang of how best to wear them (over the ear, but with the cord hanging down under my chin), I’ve found them to be really comfortable to the point of not being aware that I’m wearing them. The sound is generally excellent - though the sub-bass of Dubstep and Jungle does get rather lost, however I suspect the same would happen to other types of headphone as well. Needless to say, I’d love to hear what the top end ear-canal versions sound like. Even before buying my Shures I used what the article refers to as canalbuds, but the difference in the general richness of the sound is really noticeable. I did notice when getting friends to try out the canalbuds that the sound took a little while to get used to - particularly when swapping from the iPod default headphones which although woolly and undistinguished sound initially a little fuller. Once acclimatised there was no way of going back though.
Link: Playlist article
There’s another shorted and less detailed introduction just been published at MacWorld.
