Radio reprieve

Webcasters and internet radio listeners are breathing a sigh of relief today after it was announced that SoundExchange executive director John Simson had agreed to allow small and non-commercial internet radio operators to continue streaming past the July 15 deadline imposed by the Copyright Royalty Board.
The CRB had decided to foist new royalty fees on webcasters that would have likely put most of them out of business despite objections by legions of listeners, artists (who would not likely ever be heard by many people) and a handful of members of Congress.
Webcasters got a 60-day postponement of the implementation of the CRB decision while parties attempt to come up with a compromise.
Read tons more about this issue at Kurt Hanson’s RAIN newsletter and at SaveNetRadio.
Thanks to Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA).
I don’t know what I would do without my RadioParadise.

iPod shock

At least two people have been seriously injured when hit by lightning while listening to the iPod.

The first, a Canadian jogger who was wearing his iPod while exercising in the rain, suffered a broken jaw, ruptured ear drums, dislocated ear bones and minor burns when lightning hit a nearby tree and then him.

The second is the case of Jason Bunch, a Colorado teen who was listening to Metallica on his iPod while mowing the grass at his home. According to Bunch, it wasn’t even raining when he got struck, but there was a storm brewing in the distance which resulted in him Riding the Lightning (pun shamelessly intended for all of you Metallica fans out there.)

A spokesman for Apple Inc. declined to comment, but the iPod packaging warns against using it in the rain.

Is a cheaper, smaller iPhone in the works?

Rumour has it that Apple Inc. is planning on introducing a cheaper, smaller version of the iPhone later this year. The rumour gained momentum last Thursday when it was made public that Apple Inc. filed a patent application last November describing “a multifunctional handheld device with a circular touch pad displaying illuminated symbols that could change depending on the mode in use,” which Apple enthusiasts are interpreting as an “iPhone Nano.”

New RealPlayer lets users download, record videos

The beta version of RealPlayer 11 is out and it’s free.

Among the new features, RealPlayer 11 allows users to burn videos
to CDs in the VCD format. (You will need to buy the $29.99 RealPlayer Plus to burn to DVDs).

RealPlayer 11 is also capable of recognizing video content protected by DRM (digital rights management) and blocking it from being recorded.

RealNetworks is also planning additional features – such as allowing video content to be downloaded to iPods and other portable devices.

How Microsoft and Apple are screwing users on multimedia, how to avoid getting screwed … and what Ogg files are and how to play them on your system

Sorry about the long title, but some things just piss me off so much. In this case, I want to make it clear that Microsoft isn’t 100 percent to blame — maybe 80 percent, since half the times that Microsoft tries to add value to their operating system, software companies that make money downstream by selling you stuff that would be made obsolete by that added value start bitching about it — and the feds tell MS to back off.

And while I’m no Microsoft apologist, the consumer often gets screwed in the process. But that doesn’t have to happen. There are some excellent free antivirus programs out there (I prefer Avast), and just about everybody knows that Open Office can replace MS Office, GIMP can replace Photoshop, Firefox subs for Internet Explorer, Thunderbird and Evolution (not to mention Yahoo! Mail, Gmail and the like) replace Outlook … (and, of course, Linux can replace Windows, if you’re so inclined).

So now on to my point — and I do have one. The state of multimedia — audio and video — on the Internet is a big hot mess. Microsoft controls the Windows Media format. The MP3 format, which can get you a swift summons from the Recording Industry Association of America, has recently led to lawsuits over royalties for use of the format itself — and besides that it’s lossy and sounds compressed. Apple’s AAC is somewhat more accessible, but there still is licensing and proprietary technology involved, and Apple Lossless is another proprietary format.

But there is an alternative: the Ogg Vorbis standard for audio and Theora for video are free, open-source alternatives, and Ogg is the primary multimedia format being used by Wikipedia. For true audiophiles, Ogg’s FLAC codec — used by the Philadelphia Orchestra for its online muslc offerings — allows for compression but is lossless, unlike MP3 and AAC.

But can your computer play them. (Go to the Ogg Vorbis site for setup info, or keep reading). If you have a Linux box, you’re in luck — just about all the players on that platform can handle the audio Oggs, and many (including mplayer, xine, helix and VideoLAN) support the Theora video format as well.

But what if you have a Windows box? Windows Media Player handles MS’s own audio/video format and will play MP3s, but it won’t play Ogg files without a helper app. Luckily you can play OGGs on a Web page (as Wikipedia does on this C.P.E. Bach excerpt) if your browser uses Java.

Or you can download an application that will make your Windows Media Player (or other player) able to handle Ogg files. So if you are running Windows Media Player (which I do — I happen to like it), download and run the program, and then download an Ogg file (like this version of “Giant Steps” by John Coltrate from Wikipedia), right-click on the file, then left-click on Open With and then navigate to Choose Program and choose Windows Media Player as the default app for Ogg files. Then when you click on an Ogg link on Wikipedia or elsewhere, the file will download and play in your Windows Media Player

For Mac OS X users, there are some players available that will handle Oggs (again, check the Ogg Vorbis page), but if you use iTunes (and what Mac user doesn’t?), there’s a plug-in to enable it to play Oggs.

And for all of these platforms, the Democracy Player is open source and handles just about every video format on the Web, including Theora.

Bottom line: In this case, Microsoft and Apple should add Ogg support to their players straight out of the box. Nobody would complain, sue or petition the government if they did. Users should not be steered toward and forced to use restricted file formats when free, quality open-source alternatives are available. Luckily there are work-arounds for this problem, as I have described above, and I encourage all of you to implement them on your own boxes, tell others about them and help your fellow users do the same.

All you need is love between Beatles and iTunes

Rumors are afoot that Apple (as in formerly Computer, now Inc.) and Apple (as in Corps) will put their differences over corporate naming aside for the true glory that is raking in the cash, and the music of the Beatles will finally make it to the digital world of iTunes.

According to the Toronto Sun, it could happen in June to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the “Sgt. Pepper” album.

Ars Technica Jacqui Cheng offers the following:

Apple is expected to make some sort of “special announcement” on February 4, which falls squarely on the US Super Bowl. What could it be? Everyone seems to think that it will at least somehow reference the rumored Beatles deal. I say it’s a good possibility, but I’m not necessarily putting money on it. …

The best damn ukulele player ever

I have a review of Jake Shimabukuro‘s CD coming up in the Daily News … but here’s a taste of him playing “While My Guitar Gently Weeps,” on solo ukulele. It’s on YouTube … you know, that now-Google-owned Web site all the kids are using to upload videos of them stuffing raisins in their noses … or whatever it is they do for kicks these days.

Seriously … the coolest thing about YouTube is that it makes the viral part of “viral videos” work so easily — you can e-mail a simple piece of code, or paste it into a blog post, and you needn’t be a super genius to get video on your page. Seriously, if I can do it, your grandpappy can do it.

That said, GET THIS CD … because it totally, completely rocks, in an acoustic-ukulele kind of way. It’s only $15. Throw the kid a bone, know what I mean?

Tons of music — all free and legal

Hey kids, have you heard about this thing called the “iPod”? Did you know that you can pull songs through the tubes of the Internets and cram your little digital music player with all kinds of stuff?

Well, Mark Swed, the L.A. Times classical music critic revels in the possibilities of his very own iPod in this longish piece, which did serve to clue me into a very cool site: Archive.org.

Funny, I couldn’t find much in the way of classical music, or even jazz, but if you’re into the Grateful Dead, they’ve got 2,842 full concerts for you to peruse.

OK, I’ll admit it, I did listen to a 24-minute “Playin’ in the Band” with enough noodling to keep a Japanese restaurant in udon for a decade, not to mention the tell-tale caterwauling of the still-living Donna Godchaux. (I had her pegged as dead until my good friend, Mr. Bradley Hotzman, Deadhead extraordinare, clued me in to her “alive and kicking” status.)

Hey, I went to school at UC Santa Cruz, whaddaya want from me? Also Santa Cruz-friendly — 119 concerts from the great Camper Van Beethoven.

Back to the Dead. Brad tells me that Archive.org is the site that used to have all the Grateful Dead “mixing board” recordings, which had to be taken down (or at least made stream-only) when members of the band protested. It was Bob Weir who had a beef, not Jerry Garcia, he being dead and all. Bet they buried him in a faded black T-shirt. But I digress.

Archive.org is pretty ungainly. Start here for an artist listing. So far, I’ve been pleased to discover a bunch of Tenacious D — who doesn’t love Jack Black, am I right?

And in case you didn’t thing archive.org was anything more than a front for jam-band enthusiasts, there are a whopping 1,044 Moe. shows on there. (But no Phish, points out Brad — guess they don’t what their junk out there for free.)

And what about the best L.A. band of the 1980s? Three Dream Syndicate shows.

There are tons — TONS — of stuff I’ve never heard of here, 38,516 total concerts at last count, and that makes it hard to find the “good” stuff. Hey, maybe some of this obscure junk is good?

But it’s all free and legal, and that counts for a whole lot.

Going beyond music, the main Archive.org page offers more than 41,000 videos, 95,000 miscellaneous audio recordings and almost 31,000 texts.