Recently in Music Category

FretsOnFire has been around for a while and allows you to play GuitarHero on your own machine, but JamLegend is an online version. Using the 1-5 buttons for the frets and enter to strum you can play like Guitar Hero.
There is some pretty good music on there from bands you will have never heard of - I didn't see any music that I recognised, but I guess this will eventually come, but in the meantime this is a fun way of finding out new music. One of my favourite tracks so far is Go On by Blue Judy and the neat thing is they also provide links to other sites where you can get the music to download. In this case there is itunes, cdbaby, lastfm and others. The other good thing is they have good taste in tshirts - see the right most tshirt ;-)
There are showdowns and Duels where you can compete against other people in realtime. It also has social features where you can add friends and you need an invite to play - I currently have three invites for (regular) blog readers if anyone wants it leave a comment.
One down side that is really annoying is that my flash player stutters - normally when I get to around 50 notes which means it breaks my streak and I have to start again. Seeing as though continual play is the best way of advancing through the ranks this is REALLY annoying. I'm not sure if it's a problem with flash - I suspect it is as it also affects youtube and other flash video viewers :-(

Yesterday Kristen and I decided to go to the Ohio Music in Education Association Marching Band finals held at one of the local High Schools. We were there for a couple of hours and got to see several bands perform and march. As it was the State finals, the standard was really good. I had never been to one of these shows before but Kristen had participated in them so we both enjoyed the experience from different perspectives. At the awards presentation each of the drum majors would do a salute when their score was announced and I've included a quick video of one of them - it made me think of the characters in Camberwick Green

A couple of the bands had costumes, the last band we saw did a Pirates of the Caribbean theme and the flag bearers were dressed as pirates. Another theme was on insects with the band playing Incy Wincy Spider (among other tunes) - each of their tubas were decorated with a spider motif which was pretty cool. We had a great afternoon out, the weather was fantastic, really warm and lots of people were out wearing tshirts - in November!

I had a really good time yesterday at Grove City when Jonathan and I went to see Balloons Off Broadway. This is an annual event where hot air balloons are launched, tethered "rides" in a balloon are available, a band plays and then a night glow is performed. 

After a couple of quick geocaches, we settled in to watch the balloons being prepared. Eventually we decided to just start taking photos instead of just waiting from our spot so we had a good 30-40 minutes taking photos as the balloons were prepared and launched. After that we jumped in the car and caught up with the balloon chase vehicles and hoped to get some pictures of the balloons landing. Unfortunately we weren't able to get close enough but it was great fun joining in the convoy of people following the balloons and getting some photos on the way. Fortunately I had got my 2 way radio with me so we set it to scan and listened to the conversations between the balloonists and the trucks which was very funny. It was a bit disconcerting when one of them said the battery on his radio was about out and he would have to resort to hand signals - I would have been a bit concerned if I was a guest in the balloon and heard the operator say that!  There were also some pretty funny comments about the landing sites chosen and apparently someone's basement was really awesome.

We then headed back to the launch location for the glow - it wasn't as spectacular as I hoped but still fun to watch. I managed to get a couple of fairly decent photos - it was the first time I'd even done night shots like this so there was a lot of experimenting. In the meantime, the band The British Invasion were playing and they were pretty good. They play covers of various British bands such as the Beatles and play all over Ohio - well worth seeing them if they play near you.

Pictures of the event are at my Balloons Off Broadway gallery and a few highlights at my Flickr gallery. Finally a video of a balloon being inflated (along with the hissing of the air) and a backing track of "I get by with a little help from my friends" which I thought was quite appropriate uploaded to YouTube (below)

The remix (and original) mp3's for code monkey are available and stay in your head a lot longer than the couple of minutes you listen to them. I particularly like the Kristen mix.
The Laptop song is good too - especially with the bit about the keyboard making a line across the screen - I'm sure that comes from a Dell laptop. The rest of the Jonathan Coulton's songs are available too.

Relient K's new video for Must have done something right is up on Yahoo. I liked it even if it had a lot of football in it - I almost expected David Beckham to show up in it though.

We got tickets to go to the Dublin Irish Festival so went over this afternoon. Personally I didn't think there was much there apart from a lot of Irish shops but I wasn't interested in buying some Irish tat ;-), a lot of overpriced food and drink stands but the Funnel cake was delicious and the first time I'd had one. It was very hot so the soft iced lemon stand was doing very well and was nice and refreshing.
After wandering around the festival we headed back to the traditional stage and watched Gaelic Storm perform a set. They were very good with a lot of audience participation. I've uploaded my photos of Dublin Irish Festival to my zooomr profile (as it has more space than Flickr) and also set up a smartset in case other people also upload photo's.
I also managed to take some video of one of their drum solo's which I uploaded to YouTube.
Edit Updated the YouTube link as I uploaded the wrong video to start with!

Apparently wmp11 has leaked and apparently uses less resources and is more stable. That is good news as I was attempting to rip a cd tonight in wmp10 and it insisted on showing me the cd that I had ripped previously instead of the one that was in the player, it stopped responding once and I had to kill the process - something I have to do nearly everytime I use the thing (but it is still better at ripping than creative music organizer which is a piece of junk (apart from the Zen integration which is why I use *that* piece of software - it would be nice if the auto detect of mp3 files would occur AFTER the mp3 has been completed and not before, when the mp3 tags haven't been written to the disk yet.

I got Petra's Farewell album for my birthday this morning (Thanks Tim and Ruth)and it is awesome. It's taken me ages to actually listen to the whole album as I keep "rewinding" (that is such an outdated word nowadays) tracks to listen to them again and again.
It's Petra as I remember them - there are a couple of songs from their recent songs, but most of them are from the older albums which were much better than their last couple. They have a couple of the old members making an appearance - but Louie Weaver is missing which is a shame as he was a very talented and funny drummer.
Incidentally, this post has an enhanced amazon listing for the cd product - something I'm beta testing with amazon.

Mark's blog at sysinternals talks about Sony's latest DRM software that acts like a rootkit - resisting efforts to appear in active processes on the system and other really nasty software. Although Sony's aim is to stop you copying their music, when they start doing tricks like this (which is possibly illegal as it modifies your computer without you agreeing to let it do so but ianal) it is more likely to encourage piracy as people rely on getting mp3's off the internet as they are less likely to get copy protected additions at the same time.
The direct link to the article is this link which appears to be broken

There's a great sounding concert in Columbus next week when Audio Adrenaline, Superchik, Sanctus Real and Pillar are playing in one concert at Grove City, Columbus. Unfortunately we're on a spending freeze at the moment (and we also have a marriage course that starts on the same night) so I'm going to miss it - shame they are not televising or streaming audio as that would be good. Oh well, I guess that means I can go to Petra's farewell tour which would be the fourth time I've seen them (five if you include solo appearance by John Schlitt) with the other ones at London, Manchester and Leigh ( & Liverpool).

Tim from Switchfoot posts about getting around the copy protection on their latest album

From what Kate says about the Toronto gig, U2 played a good concert with lots of audience participation. I've never been to one of their concerts but would really like too, but tickets are so expensive and difficult to get. Incidentally Kate, your comments are not working with a "You need to define a comments pending" error message. Unfortunately this blog is also getting hit with trackback spam - not a good sign for a MT 3.15 installation which I thought was meant to make it harder for this thing to happen.

Adam was kind enough to send me an invite to Pandora, a new music radio site. First impressions are that it looks pretty good but I do not think it is as good as Launchcast with yahoo.
The first artist I added to the radio was Petra - It didn't have any Petra tracks so decided to add a track similar to Petra. Now Petra are a rock band and the track that was similar was some kind of latino string music - NOTHING like Petra's stuff at all. I deleted the station and created one for the Newsboys. It told me that it would play a track similar to the Newsboy's music...and proceeded to play Take Me To Your Leader by.....The Newsboys! The next three tracks were Sunfair by Creeper Lagoon and HumanKind by Grant-Lee Philips (who sounds VERY similar to Newsboys) followed by Radiation Vibe by Fountains of Wayne.
Without the possibility to pause, rewind, fastforward or add other artists to a station to influence the music I'm just not impressed. The only good thing is that it doesn't have the ads that Launchcast has - but then this is a paid for service (when it comes out of beta) and the paid version of launchcast also doesn't contain adverts (allegedly). It does live up to its promise of introducing you to new music as I had never heard of any of the three bands that it proceeded to play after the named track.

I was having a retro yearning the other day for some old music by the QuireBoys. A google search didn't find (m)any mp3's to download but I did stumble across the Rockcast podcast show. There is some really good music there from bands I've never heard of as well as well known (Dandy Worhols, Fleetwood Mac). Worth a download and subscribing too.

It's been a long time coming, but apparently Petra are splitting up at the end of the year. They have been going for 33 years so it probably is about time to retire. Personally I've not been as impressed with their recent music as I was in the early 90's but maybe I was getting older quicker than they were. (This will be good news to Kristen who doesn't like their music)

My Orb testing is going well and it doesn't seem too bad. I found out that if you use a server and client on the same network then the data stays within the lan (according to this forum post). After hard resetting the dell axim I was able to stream video (over the lan) with no perfomance issues. Whilst we were at easton on Wednesday I took the opportunity to use their free wifi and was able to access some of the pictures from home (although it was a bit slow but I think thats the wifi access rather than orb). (At this point mediaplayer was not working on the dell so I couldn't try accessing a film). Overall I'm pretty impressed. I've not yet got round to trying VLC so I'm not sure how the speed compares but it certainly compares favourably with slimserver which is my preferred streamer for audio as it has better indexing/searching facilities.

Orb looks like a good multimedia server package that lets you stream audio and video to any internet connected pda,phone or pc. It will also let you look at your webcam and setup tv recordings (assuming you have a compatible tv card) from a remote machine as well as allow you to view previously saved recordings - beats a vcr anyday. I've not actually tried this yet as I don't have a tv capture card although I am sorely tempted to get one - It would be much more convenient to store tv shows on the hard disk than it would be to remember to rewind the video tape, program it and hope it worked correctly.

Kelly passed on a music meme and so here are my answers...

• Amount of Music on my computer 14.6gb although 3.6 of that are talking books


• The last CD I bought Keane's hopes and fears. Some great songs although they do tend to sound very samey if you listen to them a lot.


• Item playing right nowThe Call's Let The Day begin - mainly because it was the last tape that I recorded to mp3 before the clearout before moving to the states. I first heard this whilst at Greenbelt in 1988 and loved it. Shame they didn't go onto do anything else that got popular.


• 5 songs I listen to a lot
  1. Dirty by Audio Adrenaline - in particular the Stoke On Trent remix where the local town was used over the normal lyrics when they were interviewed by Cross Rhythms radio. This new mix got played until the boss found out and pulled it for the official link.
  2. Something by the Newsboys - too many good tracks to mention and is often on my playlist.
  3. Bohemian Rhapsody by Queen - keeps popping up on my Yahoo launchcast (which is how I tend to listen to music most of the time when at the computer)
  4. Honestly by Stryper - can you tell I like the oldies?
  5. Manic Monday by Relient K although I'm reluctant to post that as I might get fan mail again from all the females who think that I am somehow in the band because I posted I got to see them in concert. Relient K topped Yahoo's Who's Next poll recently so they are starting to go places. (yep thats another 80's hit)
  


• Five people to whom I’m passing the baton
  Danny (good excuse to get blogging again!)
  Mike
  Angela
  Dave
  Jon

Slim Server V6 is out and with the purple skin looks nice and seems to perform ok.

I was listening to Radio2 in the afternoon on thursday whilst working from home and heard a bluegrass version of run dmc's "Walk This Way" which was really funny. Unfortunately I didn't catch the bands name. This morning I mentioned it to Kristen and she said they were called Hayseed Dixie. A quick search on google didn't initially come up with any downloads for the song, but I did come across a (couple of) live recordings of their concerts so I'm downloading Hayseed Dixie in concert at Columbus, OH, recorded in April '04
Update - it definitely was Hayseed Dixie

Whilst looking for an archived copy of a webpage I went to archive.org and saw that there was a String Cheese Incident live concert on the homepage. I've never heard of the band but the name intrigued me so I downloaded the 72mb mp3 file and I'm listening to it now and its really cool. I'm not sure how to describe the music so a quote from Friends of Cheese says The String Cheese Incident crafts undeniable masterpieces from an astonishing mix of roots musics, with intricate mountain bluegrass, transcendent Afro-pop rhythms, sensuous Latin melodies and breezy Calypso grooves that branch from a trunk of traditional American rock. It sounds fairly country when they start singing, but the instrumental sets sound jazz/blues/funk. Theres more to download at the official homepage, StringCheeseIncident or if you are REALLY keen to get the music, then there are probably about 400 shows to download from archive.org - that should keep the bandwidth hoggers happy.

Mycokemusic is doing free streaming until the 16th September so its great to preview an album IF the artist you want is on their database. So far only 1 artist i've searched for is on the list, but then I listen to a lot of american christian artists so they don't appear. Petra have their latest album which i've not heard yet and their is also one track on there from switchfoot (as they did a song for spiderman2)

The AB radio from Daewoo arrived today (would have turned up on Friday except I wasn't in so I had to get them to deliver it to work. It's a Grundig Opus and unfortunately mains powered only - still it will be a nice addition to the house somewhere.

Managed to finally get a winning token with the Cokes, myCokemusic.com service which meant that I was able to download a song (which Kristen decided she wanted.) Why the process had to open 4 seperate windows I don't know. What I didn't know was that you can use the service to actually stream in real time the songs aka your personal radio service, but you wouldn't (or shouldn't!) be able to record it to listen to again. These one off listens cost 1 credit, with a download or a free win being 99 credits.

A friend was getting a problem with Windows Media Player with a "GetIUMS could not be located in Dynamic LInk Library MSDART.DLL". There is a good mini-faq which covers this problem and lots of other questions on Windows Media Player - well worth reading for future use.

Have some Toast courtesy of Paul Young when he was in Streetband. I remember listening to this on a mix tape when I was at school, and loved it.

Managed to find a solution to convert my 3 hour long real audio file into lots of smaller mp3 files. I originally downloaded Streambox VCR suite which enabled me to record the realaudio stream as one big file. I then used CD Wave from Etree, Etree being one of the sites that I had downloaded concerts from in the past. This enabled me to mark my split points and then save the file into smaller chunks (43 of them!). Then I used my registered copy of Musicmatch to convert from the wav file to mp3 ready to burn onto cd and listen in my Rio mp3 player. It sounds a complicated process but it was actually fairly straightforward.

Anyone got any tips on how to convert a 3 hour long real audio file into chunks of mp3 files *quickly*? I've streamed a broadcast of the radio into one big 60MB Real Audio and left the computer converting it into a 1.3GB wav file. I can then burn this onto mp3 but it would be better if I could split it into sizeable chunks, say every 5 or 10 minutes so it makes it easy to stop. start and "rewind" on a mp3 player. So far I've looked at lpripper (but that splits it into 36 chunks, 2 of which are 1.5 hours long and the rest fractions of a minute long!.

Finally got round to installing the pants Sony Sonicstage software on the pc after the rebuild over Christmas. Reading the readme files, which looks like it was randomly translated in several languages and back into english via babelfish, I can't believe the number of restrictions (ie only w2kpro is supported, no other w2k platforms. xp ONLY if you are logged on as THE administrator, etc). I finally got through the maze of website navigations to see if there were any software updates for the system. I eventually ended up at the Sony Musiclub page which is the best portal homepage. From there you can download two updates to the main software, one 45MB the other 4MB (and you need to download and install the 45mb one before you can install the 4mb one.) There are also two player addon's, one which determines your mood by analyzing the music you are playing (I think) and a Realone player for the software.

I put the above CD into the computer to rip to mp3 so I can listen to them wherever and a flash box popped up redirecting me to exclusive content at the Relient K website. The actual material is quite funny, with 8 (so far) 5-10 minute documentarys of life on the road with the band. So far I've watched Chair High Jumps and Landmine Larry get shot at with grapes from a slingshot. All in all, this has been one good value album as I got their Christmas CD, Deck the Halls, Bruise your hand with it too.

I blogged about slimserver and how I had it working on my local lan, and then the main computer blew up. Well part of the re-install and rebuild included slimserver and this morning is the first day back in work after the holidays....and the launchtest of my streaming audio from home - it works great!

I said I would get Kristen a mp3 player for her birthday but we've been waiting until we're in the states before we get it as they are about 33% cheaper. Looking at the players, there didn't seem to be many that would use compact flash cards, which is a shame as our camera and pda uses this format. Whilst we were in compusa we looked at the Sony NetMD minidisk players which for $100 (same price in pounds in the uk) gives you a lot more playing time on a single disk and the advantage is that you can have multiple disks with music on instead of having to format the drive and reload all your music each time you want a new playlist....thats the goodnews. The bad news is that the software that enables you to load the music onto the netMD does not work with Windows98 first edition (guess what we are running here!) - that is one major disadvantage (along with the fact that you need to load any software in the first place - thumbdrive mp3 players just appear as another disk). So we have to wait a couple of weeks before we can use it :-(

Finally got DigiAny working on a machine at home, no thanks to the publishers though! It seems that when I installed the trial version of 3.4 and wondered what would happen if I put rubbish into the serial number prompt, not only did the 15 day trial period expire immediately, it also stopped re-installs working despite the 15 day limit coming back again. However .net magazine had an older version on a coverdisk recently (which is what tipped me off to the software in the first place). I removed the newer version, installed the old version and my mp3's are now streaming very nicely on my wireless lan and I think it also works from the office too!
UpdateDigiAny is *not* working afterall. It works to send the web page and stuff to the remote pc in the office, but it fails when it gets to download the playlist ready to stream to the pc.....a bit more digging later and I'm wondering if the playlist it is sending is not correct as if I download the playlist, open it up and then play the mp3 listed everything works ok.

The bloke of Netbloke, mentioned the band Guster with a link to their site. Their site is pretty interactive with a lot of flash bits but using flash well rather than just because. The diary is annoying in that it opens each day in a new page, but the audio player is pretty good. You can listen to full tracks via the flash interface with a neat "birds eye" way of playing the tracks. The bird is also used for navigation a lot and just try clicking it on the main page. AND the best bit is for the short-of-cash people you can download live shows from Archive.org and live shows always make the best recordings of an album.

I downloaded and installed DigiAny this afternoon which lets you stream your audio files to any pc connected via a web browser. So far I've seen two problems, the main one actually blew the software up!

Thanks to Joy's post about 1988 I've found out that Stryper are reforming which should be *interesting*. I liked their music even though I discovered them a few years after their prime. Thanks to Grabbing Sand for the original news post.