http://music.ryux.net/ Rants and reviews... en-us Nucleus CMS v3.24 © Weblog http://backend.userland.com/rss http://music.ryux.net//nucleus/nucleus2.gif http://music.ryux.net/ http://music.ryux.net/index.php?itemid=5 life bandwidth. Moved over to my Last.fm journal: http://www.last.fm/user/Jedi_Amara/]]> General http://music.ryux.net/index.php?itemid=5 Thu, 30 Aug 2007 18:45:12 +1200 http://music.ryux.net/index.php?itemid=4 these reports about Sony's DRM measures, and it got me annoyed. Again. I'm ridiculously anti-DRM, firstly because it makes it so much harder to work with the CDs, and secondly because any artist who's big enough to be on a label (i.e. Sony BMG or EMI) that resorts to copy protection is going to be selling enough CDs to not have to worry, anyway. I got Good Charlotte's latest album at the end of last year - a Sony BMG release using the OpenMagicGate copy protection scheme - and tried to encode it to MP3, because I don't carry original CDs around anymore, only MP3 CDs for use in my MP3 Discman. After all, that is the point of having one, yes? However, anything it encoded was... unlistenable. Because OMG protection scrambles the music on a computer unless you use its special player. And of course, my computer, being slow, couldn't handle the memory-intensive player, so it skipped. Result? I ended up encoding it by recording from the wave output, and since then I've been listening to the CD with skips. Lots of skips. I bet I could tell you where every skip on that CD is.

My EMI CDs are slightly better, except that ripping off them lowers the quality for some reason, so I've been listening to The Living End and Bodyjar complete with clicks and pops. I thought static went out with vinyl?

With Sony's XCP protection coming that close to spyware, I'm going to be wary of anything from that company from now on... CDs being common as they are, it's almost as bad as Microsoft's planned hardware DRM. *winces*

Talking of my iRiver, it's been over a year since the last firmware upgrade was released, which is annoying, since the current version doesn't work properly. Several months ago, I emailed their customer support, asking them to implement a fix for the bug which means that MP3s with ID3v2 tags (a lot of them nowadays) either skip horribly or can't be played at all. The response? They'd put it in if enough people asked for it. Now that's customer service for you.]]> JA's Rants http://music.ryux.net/index.php?itemid=4 Wed, 16 Nov 2005 17:35:55 +1100 http://music.ryux.net/index.php?itemid=3
Also, I'll be reviewing my CD collection over summer. :P No, I won't take requests, 'cause I can't review stuff I don't have.

So. The first rant. What will it be about? Let's start with Kisschasy. Daz and Sean played "Face Without A Name" on the Sunrise breakfast program this morning. Having had only five hours of sleep, I was a bit twitchy, but dragged myself out of bed to watch them. Acoustic, of course, and it wasn't bad. Daz was on-key, although his headband left much to be desired - today's was navy and too wide, so it made his head look strange. Amused when Kochie (Sunrise co-host) asked Daz about "Black Dress", though. Verdict? Decent performance from my favourite band, but they're better live, and not so early in the morning.

Harley put me onto alt-rock band The New Pornographers last night (Porno Graffiti is still a better band name, though), so I had a listen to their song "Twin Cinema". It's not bad, although they use some strange harmonies and too much falsetto for my liking - it's too close to that glam-rock stuff for me. The song's also a bit repetitive, and not groundbreaking enough for me to pursue them further, although it's listenable. My computer's speakers probably don't help much, they're the really cheap kind that have an annoyingly muddy sound, even at midrange.

David tells me I should download the demo from Death Is Not Glamorous, so I suppose I'll do that now. Signing out~*]]> JA's Rants http://music.ryux.net/index.php?itemid=3 Mon, 14 Nov 2005 23:47:00 +1100