Posts about music

I got my microphone in the mail yesterday, now I can use it to record interviews or music. It did take some effort to set up, though, mostly because of the fact that I have a Mac and Windows setup. I have been syncing my ipod with my Mac machine, and now I want to be able to access my voice recordings from my windows laptop. This is a problem because my ipod was formated in the mac format, googling found that I can reformat it to fat32 and have it work for both mac and windows, so that's what I did. I also set enable-hard-disk-usage to true and start-itunes-when-ipod-plugged-in to false so that from windows I can get at the voice memo wav files without having to go through itunes. I still use the mac machine to sync my music, this works just like before.

We paid Ike Stubblefield's band a visit today at Pisces today. Dave Frackenpohl was there accompanying him, it was a classic hammond B3 - guitar trio, just like the Jimmy Smith and Wes Montgomery band, what a great sound! This is a nice location for us, and Sunday is a nice place too, so we'll definitely be caming back.

I got excited about last fm today and setup the scrobblers for both itunes and rhapsody, since, after all, I have impeccable musical taste;) So, if you would like to see what music I am listening to, click here. After that, I was still excited, and wanted to display my recently played tracks as a widget the one you can generate using widgitize. But my blog/wiki does not yet have the ability to embed widgets(it's coming, though, heh...). So I thought it'd be nice to put it on facebook. If first tried the last.fm app, but it didn't display my recently played tracks like I wanted to do. I got the Blog RSS Feed Reader instead(man, what a boring name). It did just what I wanted:


The above now shows up in my profile page. And since it supports multiple feeds, I added some feeds from this blog as well.

Update: It turns out that there's an app called What I'm Listening to for precisely what I wanted to do with last.fm, I've switched over to that. I still use blog rss feed reader to display my blog feeds.

I attended this jam session last night and it was really fun. Syl was there, whom I haven't spoke to in years. I had a lot of fun playing some straight-ahead jazz and met a lot of talented musicians as well. I'll definitely be back.

I learned today that e-music: the indie music online store is has some major label music and is getting more and more of it. I had subscribed to the rhapsody service for a couple on months now and have been liking it. The only drawback of course, is that the music is DRM'ed, and I can't put it on my ipod. With e-music, everything is DRM-free, which is a major plus for me, since, after all, I am an ipod user(we actually own 4 ipods, if you count shuffles).

e-music has 3 plans:

• Basic: 30 downloads for $9.99 per month
• Plus: 50 downloads for $14.99 per month
• Premium: $19.99 for 75 downloads per month

compared to rhapsody:

• Unlimited: unlimited downloads/listens for $12.99
• To Go: you can also download it to your non-ipod mp3 player for $14.99

But how do they compare in terms of their music collection? I search for some of my favorite artists:

Wes Montgomery

• e-music: 19 albums
• rhapsody: 50 albums

Lee Konitz

• e-music: 14 albums
• rhapsody: 38 albums

Bill Evans

• e-music: 37 albums
• rhapsody: estimated about 200 albums
  

Booker Little

• e-music: 1 album(under booker little and max roach)
  
• rhapsody: 3 albums

Warne Marsh

• e-music: 3 albums
• rhapsody: 8 albums

John Coltrane

• e-music: 27 albums
  
• rhapsody: estimated over 200 albums
  

Clearly rhapsody has the edge. But the situation isn't that bad for e-music, and if they are still working on expanding their collection they could always catch up, since I think all the major music labels have pretty much dropped their DRM requirements. I shall check back in a couple of months and see if any of these numbers change.