Another reprise - spiffyaudio presents "stuff"

Every so often somebody I've linked to gets back to me. Brandon at spiffyaudio did, and hooked me up with a link to a page of just all kinds of cool stuff. W00t.

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10 Hour Frankenstein

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the end and then what: more UBUWEB

Initially I thought to evade the question of legality entirely by not wandering outside the boundaries of artist-hosted downloads. Of course things got grey almost from the get go. Too many people playing it a bit fast and loose with the samples, too many people tugging hard on the loose ends of the clumsy stitches that sew up the mismatched bundle of concepts that make up "information ownership" - the ragged boundaries of territories like "fair use" and the "public domain." And what tends to be more interesting to me - things that are old and weird enough that it's hard to tell who, if anyone, would know whether any rights are retained, and if so by whom, and nobody seems particularly inclined to find out or do anything about people simply common-lawing it into practical, if not legal, public domains.

A common theme if you've been paying attention is just not looking at or acknowledging that there is an issue, or the closely related expression of the sentiment "it's just a hobby, please don't sue me." It's refreshing to come across something like the UBUWEB FAQ where a bracing, direct approach is taken: "We post many things without permission; we also post many with things with permission. We therefore give you permission to take what you like even though in many cases, we have no received permission to post it. We went ahead and did it anyway. You should too."

There's also a little bit of this: "UbuWeb has no need for funding. All work is done solely on a volunteer basis."

And: "Nothing is for sale on UbuWeb. It's all free. We know it's a hard idea to get used to, but there's no lush gift shop waiting for you at the end of this museum."

Mmmmm, post-capitalicious. More importantly, I figured out what UBUWEB was actually about, finally: avante garde. So awesome, so anachronistic. The 365 Days Project is a bit off that mission, maybe, but so deep, so rich. Just what it says, 365 days, 365 MP3s, the definition of odd and obscure. Faultless metadata, of course: plug and play with the music engine of your choice. We'll be back there many times, I'm sure.

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Major Tom by the Space Lady.

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Summer Hours

I'm going to be ridiculously busy this summer so I'm instituting summer hours, in other words no Phriday Phun until I stop having to mow grass. I'll continue to shoot for posts on Monday and Wednesday mornings.

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The 23rd Century

I'm just about out of links. What I mean is, I store these things up, as I cruise the infosphere, these links. I don't go out looking for them, you know? They just turn up. I bookmark them in the Phree Musique? folder and then later I review them. Many are rejected for many reasons. Some are not really music places and some don't have the sort of download I generally demand. Some vanish and some are just bad. I had a pretty big backlog when I started, because like every other underemployed bored wage slave in the modern world I abused the internet when I had a regular office job. I have more exacting responsibilities now and the links have not been growing back as fast as they accumulated. I have many rich fields of possibility to explore, but nevertheless, things are bound to slow down for a while while I refuel. More on that tomorrow.

For now, I give you the 23rd Century, which for all its aggressive lofi weirdness style is (so much as I've heard so far) pretty much straightforward rock. It's all right. And after twenty minutes of weeding out this and that rotten MySpace functionality, songs in stupid formats (WMA? Please. What is this, 1998?), duplicates, Angelfire sites that don't load (and again: welcome to the 21st century, it's time to abandon that slide rule) a straightforward domain with functional direct downloads is a real treat.

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The Future Is Then

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I'm pretty sure it demonstrates some kinda point... Mixtape by Mercedes Benz

I'm not what you'd call a fan of Mercedes Benz. Like BMW it is a brand that seems to attract asshole drivers and in my epistemology it falls firmly in the territory of clubs you have to wait in line to get into: stupid ego shit for rich people. Just remember, under the hood it's all Chrysler now.

So what am I to make of the Mercedes Benz Mixtape. Every ten weeks they are offering more or less a full length comp of, oh, you know, alternative music and stuff. Why? What does it all mean? I couldn't tell you. All I know is, if I can abuse Mercedes Benz bandwidth while not buying their product, I'm gonna. They say you have to disable popup blocking but you don't really, just keep bulling through.

No direct links, it's all kinda slick flash player interface but the download process is relatively simple, especially if you elect the download all function. So shiny.

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The future of... hmm... Underheard.org

Update: 10/10/06: The management over at Underheard.org dropped me a line recently and took exception with my characterization below of the likely legality of the operations over there. Briefly, it stated that they had sought legal counsel prior to putting up the site and believed that their operations were legal, and that this legality required that the shows they highlight be archived in full - challenging three of my points below.

I responded with a request for permission to post their response in full and the offer for them to give additional input but I have received no further response. I accept their word that I was wrong in my characterization that they had not seriously considered the legal situation in creating their site, and for this I apologize. I have no idea whether what they are doing is in fact legal. As they've elected not to respond I'll consider the subject closed.

I was dissing the podcast the other day, and Underheard.org kind of puts me in mind of my, let us say, doubts about the form. This is an aggregator, basically, they have collected links from a bunch of podcasting alternative radio shows and put them in one place. Obviously I'm in no position to badmouth aggregation. But there are some issues. This is yet another place (and I'd planned to be more circumspect about this to start with but it's just so prevalent) where the basic legal attitude is, hey, that's their stuff, we sure hope it's all basically legal, but. And what the hell, I link to it so no I must by necessity adopt the attitude as well... but I can't shake this feeling that this sort of laxness is going to bite the whole enterprise repeatedly on the ass as time goes on, and ultimately either choke it off via legislation/litigation or simply limit it to the DIY boho pomo yoyo brigade - not that that's the worst thing that could happen to it (the free software movement, by contrast, has at least in principle positioned copyright legality and intellectual property traceability as central concerns from the start... (Hmmm, who's running the Phree Sophtwhere Blog?)).

From a purely technical sense downloading a whole show just seems like a waste to me, you probably aren't going to keep the thing, so it's work, it's clutter to maintain it. The 'Pods maybe need to get a little Tivo going on, gain the ability to sort of choose and archive from the stream, make suggestions and help you manage the housekeeping of more ephemeral species of content like a podcast show. I downloaded an hour long show, about 53 MB. With good broadband and say a 20 gig HD player, this is a pretty manageable wodge of data. That's a hefty barrier to entry there, though. On accelerated dialup, with a 1 gig flash player, if you're off to work the next morning and you decide the whole thing sucks, you might just feel resentful about your time. Right now, for example, I'm enjoying this podcast I downloaded okay. But it's a total craps shoot, beyond a paragraph or two of description you just control click and see what happens. It would not take too many misses for me to give up on the whole enterprise. (And I'm pretty damn certain, now, that it's in no way legal. But sorting that out is Prodigy's problem, I think. But I won't be keeping a copy, the first Phree Musique download I won't have held on to).

What I really feel like is that this simulation of a broadcast is inherently regressive. What's really interesting to me is what comes after. A package as portable, useful, intuitive as radio is yet to come. Yes, radio is totally limited - a choice of streams, essentially. But how much different is a podcast aggregator, really? A lot more channels, theoretically infinite channels. That, of course is both the danger and the opportunity of the new form.

Scrivener downloaded...(as noted above the download link is now defunct).

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Regionality gets interesting: Podbop

I should really make a note of where I pick these links up. I have no idea of whether I'm just rehashing slashdot or metafilter N weeks after the fact or what. Nevertheless: podbob is cool.

Now, I've got a problem with the term "podcast." I don't think that combining an MP3 download with an RSS feed is such a paradigm shaker as to merit its own fresh minted snappy neologism, particularly one that has to mine a commercial trademark for its punch, and for a product that isn't even as old as this crummy century.

And may I say: the 21st? So far? Worst century ever. Seriously. I know, it's not even a decade old, but hey, we're on the flipside of the first one and you only get ten per. More than halfway through the first decade and not one great thing has happened. No, seriously, name one. No moonwalks, no Berlin walls falling, shit, not a Revolver or hell, even a Thriller released. Anyone mentions artic monkeys I will kick your ass. It sucks.

Consider: does anybody remember that the iPod was released just over a month after 9/11? October 2001, damn, remember October 2001? That first case of post-office anthrax. Meet Tom Ridge. Hey, Tom Ridge, you never know, he could be a reader, if so, you're doing a heck of a job, T-bone. But wasn't I supposed to get some kind of preparedness kit in the mail? Duct tape and stuff? The concert for New York City, Windows XP, and the iPod. Progress marches on, huh?

But, uh, this isn't the blog about web metaphysics or what's popularly referred to as culture. No, heh, heh, this jest bes the phree musique blog, aw, wes jest sing and dance here, we shore nuff loves to sing. So check it out: Podbop. Couldn't be simpler: enter your city and state (in the format New York, NY works), get a list of upcoming shows in your city, with Sample MP3s of the bands. See, now that makes sense. I dialed up Minneapolis and got me some phree tunes no problem. A couple things to watch out for:

Formats: mostly MP3 but the odd RAM stuck in there

"Samples": of course, who's product is too valuable and important to merit giving away a whole song? The Strokes. No, I but jest, it's cheesy but I suppose a thing like the market dynamics of a single is beyond my ken, and there is a full free song, which I'm in fact linking to, the closest thing to a popular download as I've featured, or am likely to.

Metadata. Or the lack thereof. Again, The Strokes? You better clean up your act, this popped out in iTunes as "Track 1," no other information. You think I want to spend all day typing out information about the free things you give me? That's no way to build a fan.

Download speeds: by the way, you can't blame this shit on Podbop, they're just linking to content hosted by the creators or their agencies. It looked like some of the sites were getting hammered, though nothing took more than a few minutes.

All in all a fine idea, and well executed. Of course the devil in the details is, how much, and how well, how close does it see? And more importantly, will it get people into shows? Of course, listing is at the discretion of the artists, and going to shows is the responsibility of the end-user, so I guess Podbop could say it's up to you. What's in it for them is an interesting question to investigate as well.

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12:51 by The Strokes

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Here's a new concept: make your own, uh, noise

The great thing about having a phree and "legal" MP3 blog is that you don't have to stick to any contextual guidelines. Boodler is not really an MP3 site at all, though I did download the four sample clips because I like having these weird brief interlude files cluttering up my music folders, to add color to random shuffles in iTunes. Boodler is in fact a "soundscape" generation software device, and I couldn't tell you much about it because while I've downloaded it I haven't yet tried to get it to run on my iMac. I think I need the developer kit installed, and I think I don't have it installed, anymore, so it might not work. Anyway.

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blopping!

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