assimilated
Damnit. I’ve been assimilated.
I’ve tried hard not to let this happen. I’m a proponent of whee wiz bang freedom, i never fall into the trends, or i try not to. Actually, to be more specific… I’m a mac user, i love the things, glad i made the switch, etc. I actually like my Ipod a lot. I don’t put it on an altar and worship it (in fact, i dont use those crappy white headphones that come with it, i like my Sony MDR-A34’s much better). I don’t care about the Ipod Shuffle - nice, but pointless for someone like me. I made jokes about the Apple Mini. I like itunes, and the Itunes music store is nice enough. i like the concept well enough (even if i’m still not convinced that DRM standards are quite to the point where its fair for both customers and digital rights owners) etc, etc, but not something i’d just use because of the ‘cool and new’ factor.
When the Itunes store first opened i poked at it here and there (pretty easy to do if you have a mac and use itunes - gotta give apple credit for integrating things nice and simple) but there was quite literally nothing i was interested in. Yay, more of the “crappy music that we are all supposed to like” bullshit. I tend to like things you can’t find in music stores. I bounce between Industrial, House, Downtempo, Ambient and certain kinds of Metal. Not really what the store focused on initially.
The only thing that would make the Itunes store work well for me would be if i could buy tunes and CDs of things i wanted that are hard to find elsewhere. It is frustrating to have to mail order almost everything i’d be interested in (most CD shops around here never have what i want) and as such, i almost never get anything. If the Itunes store had some of them, it’d be nice. The DRM is easy for me because i have macs and an Ipod anyway…
I just bought my first album from the Itunes music store. I fell so ashamed.
Damn them, but if their selection of Industrial tracks has increased dramatically. Damn them. I’ve actually found several CDs i’d want now. It was too easy. I picked up NamNamBulu - Distances. I can’t make a habit of this. That could be very dangerous.
and expensive ^^;;
- pirotunes: NamNamBulu - Memories from “Distances” -
February 25th, 2005 at 5:48 pm
Yeah, I’m kinda disappointed in the selection on Itunes also. Practically nothing from foreign countries, and I rarely ever listen to local American music. I typically use ITunes to find tracks of some piano music that I happen to have to do for private lessons so I can hear what sort of style and what it sounds like.
And fyi, Reason why I brought up Caesar last time you ranted? We were just reading it for English II. Pompeii… isn’t that the island that was covered in ash by Mt. Vesuvius???
February 25th, 2005 at 5:52 pm
Oh yeah, sorry for double posting, but the Sony MDR-NQ1 and MDR-J10SP are pretty good also. the NQ1 is what I usually use nowadays, but the J10SP is pretty comfy. Nice sound quality too.
February 25th, 2005 at 11:31 pm
Wee! I got a very happy email today! My MT flapdoozy is on its way =D
Speaking of, how many aussie customers do you get, Fred?
I walked into my local comic store yesterday and they had an MT shrine devoted to your books… it blew my mind…
February 25th, 2005 at 11:40 pm
I double yay with Duck!! my ninj4 hoodie came today! I’m wearing it now! yay! thanks fred! (i’m sure you personally folded it right^^?)
and don’t worry, assimilation isn’t so bad… look what it did for the Borg!
…no no on second thought never mind (^_^)
February 26th, 2005 at 1:11 am
Is this the recovering Itunes support group? I was a brief Itunes customer…. hiphop and Britney were mostly what I found and I was quickly gone. The Classical, Ethnic Folk, Electronica “space music”, and certain bits of classic rock, classic R&B were simply non-existant.
Call me when they *actually* have an archive of “the music I want to hear…”
I have a Rave Player (mp3, wma) with 2.5GB …. acts like a normal USB Hard drive, with voice recorder and fm tuner … works for me
$120 at Costco…
February 26th, 2005 at 2:10 am
Decent price, compared to the IPOD Mini.
I only have an IPOD and a back up *grandfather bought it cuz he didn’t know I had an IPOD*, and the back up has 128 mb, plays mp3 and wma, voice record, fm radio. Cost him about…HK$500 or so, so thats about a little over US$50?
One thing I can’t seem to get is how to put stuff from Itunes into anything other than the IPOD and playing it on Itunes. I typically use Winamp for my media player and it just can’t open the files. I probably need a plug in or somethin, cuz I think it was a mp4 extension or something, but the icon had a little lock on it. Oh well. I’ll just buy entire soundtracks instead. I guess that was the RIAA’s plan the entire time. Crack down on P2P networks, encourage downloaders to download from valid sites with little selection, leaving you with no choice but to live in the shadows of piracy or buy the actual CDs… which of course, brings us all back to the piracy problem :-p
Man, I can just ramble on and on… but this isn’t my rant page!
February 26th, 2005 at 2:11 am
I believe that one of the next major moves for Apple will be that they are sick of dealing with the major record labels, and are going to go into the music label business. They will likely fill a new nitch in that they will be nice and friendly like a small independent label (including entusiastically supporting eclectic music), but have the build of a large record company.
This will be the start of what I call the death of the major record labels. I suspect after this other groups will get involved and that labels will either die or get gobbled by other companies (mostly because they are unwilling or unable to adjust to the new way of doing business). The big threats afterwards to the labels will be the other big players that will want to get into the game; Realplayer company, google, Micro$oft, yahoo, and a few of the other modern tech minded companies. This would be the start of a new business model in the music industry, which will take place at the same time of what will be called a video revolution.
The video revolution on the horizion will be spurred by a few things. One they need to be able to compete with DVD’s. The second thing is that as the little portable video devices (that are like our current mp3 players) become more popular, people will want content for them. People will ask, “Why do I want a song when I could have a video?”. This added to the fact that someone in a few hours can cheaply create a video with something like Flash will provide a driving point. Either the companies will support video vs. song, or they will lose business to people doing it themselfs and bittorrenting the videos. I could see Apple being progressive and saying “All our songs will have a video. Even if it is a simple animated computer graphic such as a pulse beat of the song (for example)”. Then most likely there will be a push to get rid of the CD format and go to DVD for everything. That way the new music companies would compete with DVD movies and shows. Just my thoughts anyway.
P.S. Sorry to rant on your rant. Hmmm… I think I will repost on my rant as well.
February 26th, 2005 at 10:43 am
Well, I don’t really listen to music aside from game soundtracks, so I can’t really relateto any of this.
February 26th, 2005 at 4:57 pm
Hmmm…I agree with the valid points about the ‘limited’ selection available on the iTMS (aka, ‘what we like to listen to’)…personally, I use iTunes because it is (IMnotsoHO) a fairly well-designed music player. I don’t buy music from the iTMS very often; usually, the only stuff I’ll buy is a soundtrack that I’m too lazy to go buy the CD for; the other reason I use it is because I own a 40GB 4G iPod (may they rest in peace), and it’s the only program that’ll sync all of my music onto the ‘Pod.
As a ‘bonus’ of sorts, it’s also the only program that’ll play my entire music library on my Powerbook, desktop PC, and Toshiba TabletPC — including the DRM’d stuff.
On a side note, I wonder if Apple has made any progress on a version of the iTMS for Japan…
February 26th, 2005 at 6:34 pm
Strange… I actually recognize some of those tracks without knowing that they were from NamNamBulu. Piro, as a tonic against further assimilation you might want to check out RantRadio - Industrial ( http://www.rantradio.com/ ), and some of their DJ’s shows like Distorted Circuitry ( http://www.distortedcircuitry.com/frameset.html ) which seem to run this kind of music on a regular basis. Also, Distorted Circuitry has full shows available for download as mp3….
February 26th, 2005 at 7:37 pm
Umm… This is off topic… But, here goes…
On that Pangya site Fred mentioned on MT… The English site… I cannot find member signup… And I don’t understand either Korean or Japanese… (though, I am trying to learn Japanese, I still know verry little..)
I also can’t find the actuall download either… Is it just not available in English yet, and the site’s just there for show till it is, or am I missing something…
Thanks in advance…
Oh, and regarding the topic… I don’t think there’s an iTunes store anywhere near me, so I wont know…
February 26th, 2005 at 8:07 pm
I’ve had to use i-tunes forever, because no one ever takes me shopping, i can’t take myself, and my parents are too lazy to take me too the store >_< right now I have 113 songs in my playlist, which I mostly bought one by one. Consequentially, the money i actually keep long term from my allowance has gone way done. i think I’ll have to do something about that…
I think it was guardian angel or something like that.
With NamNamBulu, I was listening to the previews of their stuff on itunes, and it all sounded pretty good. Of course their was one piece that kept disconcerting me, because their was a voice set to sound like its coming from the right in the headphones, coincedentally where my Dad was standing, and i I was listening to it, i kept thinking he was singing along. And he hates techno
February 26th, 2005 at 8:24 pm
^_^ *has no clue what’s going on* Hmm I told myself I wouldn’t ever listen to pop ever again and I like Gavin Mc-something’s new song. ^^ I broke my mom’s Sony headphones. X.x she was mad..I own a Panasonic walkman. Don’t diss those things. I’ve dropped it many times and it still plays. ^^U
February 26th, 2005 at 9:48 pm
Drango: I was messing with Pangya’s site… it appears you have to sign up via the Korean registration site … its not too hard to guess what field is for what (mouseovers help to some degree).
I think the download button is only available after you register…
I’ll be trying it sometime this weekend - if I figure the path out I’ll post it here.
February 26th, 2005 at 11:55 pm
@Mackey,
Oh, i’ve been listening to Rantradio for years (i miss Shawn Kennedy’s rants, back when it really WAS rant radio :P)
I also listen to razorgurl and djmorgana’s Digital Curctuitry releases from time to time, good stuff, of course.