It's a miracle!

Look! It's Michael Jackson risen from the dead!

Where's the beef?

Apple released a new version of iTunes today. One of it's "features" is to disable syncing between iTunes and the Palm Pre. As usual, there were immediate cries of "foul" from the haters over this perceived anti-trust violation.

Back when iTunes music was locked up with DRM, I would probably have agreed. But all of the music in the iTunes Music Store is now unencrypted AAC. There's no real tie-in between the store and the iPod, at least when it comes to music (we can continue to argue over the DRM encrusted movies and TV shows). But Apple doesn't really have anything like a monopoly in video content - certainly nothing like the market leadership they have in the music arena.

Put a bit more overtly, there's nothing at all preventing anyone from buying any track they want from the store and importing it into their Pre. Even if the Pre doesn't play AAC audio files (which I can't imagine it wouldn't be able to do), iTunes can happily convert them to MP3.

It says something about the Pre folks that they would rather try and make their device work with iTunes than design their own music management interface. Heck, their device manager could just read the iTunes music directory structure and suck the music out of it if they wanted to. But writing sync software is hard, gosh darn it, and emulating an iPod to leverage the hard work your competitor has done for nearly a decade, well, that's a lot easier. Or, at least, it was.

XM alarm clock

So I thought I'd share how I set up an XM alarm clock on the mac.

What you need to do, in the end, is somehow bring up their little plugin iframe content in a page. But in order to do that, you need to tickle the login page first. Fortunately, it's relatively easy to do with JQuery. What you do is make an AJAX call to the login page, and have the success function add an iframe to the page with the URL of the player.

You can download the html file here. You need to edit the HTML page to put in your credentials and the channel number that you want. If you save the resulting page somewhere on your machine and then double-click it in the finder, the resulting browser window should start playing the channel of your choice (assuming your machine has Internet connectivity).

To this point, this solution is platform independent, so long as your browser has the plugin support to play the audio stream. The next thing you need to do is somehow cause your machine to open the file at the time desired. I'm confident there's a way to do this on Windows, but I don't really care. So sorry.

On the mac, you use cron to schedule things. The thing you need to schedule is:

osascript -e 'open location "file:///path/to/html_file"'

And that's all there is to it.

Michael Jackson, RIP

The only thing I really want to say about Michael Jackson is that I'll bet anyone who cares a dollar that within 10 years the same stupid rumors and stories about his death will circulate as they did about Elvis.

The Derek Trucks Band in concert

Last night Scarlet and I went to San Francisco to see The Derek Trucks Band in concert. We took CalTrain and Muni to get to the venue, the Regency Center Grand Ballroom. Despite the pictures of the venue I found on the Internet, once you get inside, the place is a bit of a shithole, and the atmosphere of the concert had a lot more in common with the Primus concert I went to a few years ago than I would have expected. The air inside the hall was thick with smoke, likely none of which was made of anything legal. But all that was forgotten once the show started. The band led with the big single off their latest album, a cover of Bob Dylan's "Down In The Flood." It was a performance by the band of this song on Conan's show that got me interested in them.

The Derek Trucks Band is a bit like Van Halen, in that the leader of the band is not the lead singer. Derek Trucks is a guitar virtuoso of the first order. Many authorities, first among them Rolling Stone magazine, argue that he may be the best guitar player alive today. Tiger plays golf. Derek plays the guitar. What the two of them have in common is a mastery of their instrument that transcends the separation of the tool from its owner. Tiger shot a Nike commercial a few years ago that showed the level of virtuosity I'm talking about. The story of that ad was that they intended to shoot something entirely different, and while waiting around for the shooting to start, Tiger started noodling away with a ball, just for fun, doing exactly the sort of thing shown in the ad. He's so good that he just does things for amusement that are damn near impossible for anyone else. That's how good he is. If you get a chance to see Derek Trucks play the guitar, it becomes obvious in an instant that he has as close a connection to his instrument as Tiger has to his golf clubs.

The band played about 45 minutes worth of selections from their current album, as well as a few tunes I didn't recognize, but were still great.

Then the drummer announced, "We have a special guest joining us now. Please welcome, Mr. Carlos Santana!"

Oh my.

Carlos joined the band on stage and the drummer launched into a heavy latin rhythm while Carlos and Derek started a freestyle jam session, echoing each other's riffs back and forth. It was an awesome spectacle.

The pity was that at about 11:15 PM, we had to leave to go catch the last train home. I don't know how much longer it went on. All I can hope is that we didn't miss much of it.

We're going to bed now. It's about 2 AM. But it was worth it.

The White Stripes tank on Conan's last show

I just watched the last episode of Late Night with Conan O'Brien. I'm really looking forward to Conan taking over the Tonight Show, but that won't happen for a few weeks. So Friday night's show is the last we'll see of Conan for a while. It also puts the cap on 16 years and more than 2000 shows (Conan jokes that 41 of them were actually good).

Musical guests on the show were The White Stripes, which really means Jack White (he was born Jack Gillis and, unusually, took Meg's last name when they wed) and his former wife Meg.

Now, Jack is a fairly talented writer and musician. His most recent claim to fame is as part of the duet that performed the most recent James Bond movie theme.

So why the hell did they phone it in the other night? They've had some really great hits over the years, and that's the song they chose to play? Does anyone even know what piece of shit song was? Even if you were more familiar with their catalog than I am, I'm not sure you'd recognize it anyway given how off-key the singing and off-tempo the playing was.

iLife '09: Garage band artist music lessons are awesome

Scarlet expressed an interest last year in learning to read sheet music again. To that end, we asked for an M-Audio KeyRig 49 for Christmas.

Since I was a teenager, I've had a sort of background interest in music. I used to sing in choirs, and have been in operas and operettas on and off. I can read music well enough to plunk out vocal parts on the piano and can hack out chords and the like, so I thought I'd be able to teach Scarlet a little bit about how to play the piano as a way to help her read music better.

I still have my old synthesizer keyboard from 1984. It doesn't have velocity support, but it can act as a MIDI source, and I have a MIDI to USB adapter that has been demonstrated to work correctly with GarageBand in the past, but the newer USB music keyboards are lighter and more portable, so they make a lot more sense for our office space. Besides, GarageBand running on a mac is far and away a better synthesizer than that old Seiko keyboard could have ever hoped to be.

So that was the plan, and that's fine. But when the MacWorld keynote in January demonstrated the Learn To Play features of iLife '09, I was intrigued. Well, we finally got our hands on a copy of iLife '09, and I was so impressed with the free lessons (they really got Scarlet started on the right foot), that I bought an artist lesson for myself: Sara Bareilles' Love Song.

It's not really my genre of choice - I'm more of an alternative rock fan than a pop fan - but in the limited selection available, it was the lowest difficulty piano choice available.

Sara is an excellent teacher, and the song is certainly both playable, interesting, and reasonably approachable. I don't play it exactly the way the sheet music says I should. I play the chords and I simplify the rhythm a little bit to suit me (I'm not sure she would really approve, but I don't have enough left-hand / right-hand disconnect to do it her way).

There are a few improvements I would make, and they're minor:

1. While you can choose to replace the sheet music with the chords, it would be really nice to display the chord names above the staff the way you often see in real print music. I'd be able to see the chords more easily, while still pulling rhythmical cues and the vocal lead off the page. As it is now, the only prayer I have of keeping up with the full speed track is just with the chord track and winging it.

2. They really, really need to not let the time pointer get so far to the right before they scroll the music. I need to read ahead a little bit, and I pretty often get to the end of the screen and wind up getting surprised by what comes next when the next measure finally scrolls in.

3. The selection in the artist store is obviously too limited to be realistic. Not only is it obvious that this will change as more artists get on board, I'd be stunned if artists don't start tripping over themselves to get into the store.

But apart from those minor complaints, I have to say, the whole concept is really a blast. It's the best $5 I've spent on computer software of any kind in at least a year.

Piracy boosts popularity, film at 11.

According to this /. article, the music industries own studies have affirmed the idea that it is better for bands and for the music industry to just give away MP3s and let the resulting increase in popularity drive concert ticket sales.

Gee, you think?

Isn't this the exact same concept as allowing music to be played, more or less, for free on the radio (yes, radio stations pay for music rights, but the amount that they pay is virtually negligible - it certainly pales in comparison to the amount of money spent in promotion) spurs concert ticket sales? According to everything I've ever read about the music industry, bands pretty much just make records for free in the hope that album sales drives concert ticket sales, which is where the average band actually makes their money. What they get out of the "big record deal" isn't money from album sales, it's promotion from the record company that, yes, drives album sales for the record company, but also drives concert revenue for the band.

As for me, the last CD I bought was National Lampoon's "That's not funny, that's sick," which was actually a record first released in 1977. I bought it about 3 years ago, promptly ripped it into iTunes and filed the plastic in the garage. Apart from that, for about the last 5 years or so all the music I've bought has been either DRM-free iTunes plus AACs from iTunes, MP3s from Amazon, or when absolutely necessary iTunes DRMed tracks (but only when there is software available to easily strip the DRM. And, no, burning a CD and ripping that doesn't count).

Desecration of a classic

They could light up a small town with the energy created by Keith Moon spinning in his grave tonight. The only reason we can't all live a carbon-free existence is that the same cannot be said about Roger Daltry and Pete Townsend.

What am I talking about?

The theme song to CSI:NY has, since its inception, been a slightly edited (for time) version of Baba O'Riley, by The Who.

This year, for whatever reason, they have decided to totally ruin it.

Though the Roger Daltry vocal track is still there, the music bears little resemblance to the original. It's a bizarre mishmash of synth instruments and way, way, way too much drum solo. While they were at it, they totally redid the actual opening credit video as well. That didn't offend me so much. But farming out the audio to some low-rent MIDI programmer? I call that a bargain. The worst I've ever had.

Syndrome of a down

Serj, the lead singer of System of a Down has a solo album that's starting to get air-play on SquiZZ. I have a message for Serj:

Gilbert & Sullivan called. They said you should stop biting their style.

Metallica IS Spinal Tap

I've always thought metallica sucked. But I never really cared so much. I sort of ignored them when they were on the radio. But ever since Metallica came out as the sock puppets for the RIAA against Napster, I've actively disliked them. Not that I'm really in favor of illegal music swapping, but the RIAA was (and is) more a part of the problem than not. It's just extra fitting that Metallica, out of everyone, would be the tools that would step up and spout the party line for them.

But this isn't about that, really.

Lately, a new Metallica track has been playing on SquiZZ. It's Metallica's take on "The Ecstasy of Gold." Now, you may not recognize that song title. It's part of the soundtrack of the movie "The Good, The Bad and The Ugly." Remember the scene where Tuco, Blondie and Angel Eyes had a 3-way shoot out in the graveyard near the end of the movie? It's that music. It's one of Ennio Morricone's finest works. And, like John Williams, Morricone is truly representative of what classical music composers historically have been. The fact that the music is the background to a movie isn't really that different from the times when the music was the background to an opera. So I give much props to Morricone's talent. His work will live as long as Mozart's.

So, again, where does Metallica come in? Remember the scene from "This Is Spinal Tap" where Nigel and Marty discuss the minor key and its relationship to classical music... only to then reveal that the complex classical-based composition they've been noodling around is called, "Lick My Love Pump." That's really the only thing missing from the Metallica to Spinal Tap connection with Morricone's tune - they didn't rename it "The Ecstasy of Taking My Meat Hammer Up Your Poop-chute."

Feh. Take that to eleven, beyotch.

P.s. Before anyone jumps down my throat, yes, I am aware that the band has used "Ecstasy" as their warm up music for years. That just drives the point home, as far as I'm concerned. I wasn't aware of it before now because you'd never catch me dead at one of their concerts.