May 2010

NY Times Apple Plug

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In Mobile Age, Sound Quality Takes Step Back
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By JOSEPH PLAMBECK
With the ease of loading music onto an iPod, a generation of fans has been happily trading fidelity for portability.

Share your thoughts.

There are other compressed file players besides Apple's. Mr. Plambeck assumes everyone uses an iPod ("a generation," wow). Is this what Steve Jobs' advertising buys?
Tom Moody
May 9th, 2010
11:21 pm

(Not approved by comment moderator)

The editors are more to blame for this shameless plug than the writer. The subheading shortens (compresses) Plambeck's sentence: "In one way, the music business has been the victim of its own technological success: the ease of loading songs onto a computer or an iPod has meant that a generation of fans has happily traded fidelity for portability and convenience." The word "iPod" gets one of the Times' pseudo-links to a page with more info about the product. The word "computer" could have also gotten a link but no. People already know what a computer is but they may need to know more about the iPod.

Update: "iPod" gets a link; "Apple iPod" gets a link. Three mentions of the iTunes store (but no links). No link in the article (or mention of) Zune, the Walkman mp3 player, or other companies' mp3 players. RIAA gets a link. For balance, there are links to two audio nerd sites. One nerd is described as "a professed audiophile." Uh oh, that sounds bad. The iPod links take you to a Times "product page," which tells you the "top-rated" mp3 players: all made by Apple.

Update 2: Plambeck's article attracted 184 comments. Most commenters offered their opinion of whether compression hurt music or not. I only skimmed so am not sure if anyone else was offended by the advertorial nature of the story or if it was all dumb pseudo-controversy for suckers.

Surf Art Continuity

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wonder

GIF above originally posted by halgand_cc on 544x378webtv (archives, week of 07/13/2003 - 07/19/2003)

Back when we were debating the "internet surf clubs" on Rhizome.org (conclusion: the Rhizome regulars said it wasn't art and if it was, it was something they invented), a commenter traced the idea of group image/may-or-may-not-be-art blogs back to the earliest days of blogging, late '90s-early '00s, in France I think. I first noted the phenom with 544 x 378 (Web TV) (see above). Nasty Nets came three years later, and added the term "internet surfing club" (pissing off a generation of academic net artists).

Tumblr blogs are too many and diffuse to be pigeonholed but their communal features and broad participation make the '06-'09 surf clubs seem creaky (the latter have drastically slowed their posting pace, anyway).

Now dump.fm has taken the concept(s) and sped them up even more with the addition of a live chat feature. Putting images in chat has been around--Yahoo! had a feature where two chatters could work on the same drawing in real time, using paintbox controls--maybe it still does. Dump.fm allows image and GIF uploads to a single public chat screen (also webcam shots) and is simultaneously creating a tumblr-like blog archive for each chatter consisting of that uploaded content.

The changing speed of the discussion and image uploading is not for the old or weak of heart. Chat is hell for me due to an inability to express myself in thoughts under a paragraph. (Twitter is fine for one-liners but lousy for conversations.) With chat you have to mesh quickly with the "house vibe" and have no ego about losing your precious words and pictures quickly in a volatile stream.

"H.M.M.J. 1"

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"H.M.M.J. 1" [5.6 MB .mp3]

Collaboration with Travis Hallenbeck: he came to my studio and we played a "live MIDI" set.

A desktop computer plays MIDI files that we prepared in advance of the jam. One channel goes out to my gear: the Sidstation synth and Mutator analog filter. All the rest of the channels go to Travis's setup, which includes a midi mixer and Roland MT-32 sound module (see YouTube demo and this diagram).

So it is a live performance in the sense that the computer is dispensing a stream of MIDI on-off notes and we are changing settings on our gear in real time.

I was recording the performance, and did some minor post-production mixing, mostly for EQ and levels.

Power of the Press

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You probably read about the scanner humiliation beating.
Airport cops try out new full-body snooping apparatus; one sees that another's genitals are "tiny."
(Ostensible) big-package taunts (verified) little-package for weeks thereafter, day in, day out.
Tiny-package finally blows, beats crap out of big-package.
And guess who has a photo of his face plastered on Josh Marshall's Talking Points Memo magazine?
Day after day?
(Hint: it isn't the sexual harasser.)
Talking Points Memo used to be a blog. Mostly pretty good, except Josh Marshall supported Bush's Iraq invasion.*
Now it is an online "magazine" and it's bad. It covers all the same topics the mainstream media does, in almost exactly the same way.

*You can buy a copy very cheap now of Kenneth Pollack's book The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq (the tome that convinced Marshall and other liberal dupes).