It's A Binary World 2.0

Category: Music

  • Taking another look at Songbird

    It’s been a really long time since I last looked at Songbird. In fact, according to my blog, the last time I checked it out was version 0.2 back in October of 2006. The UI certainly has a bit more polish. I submitted some bug reports on their Bugzilla about Metadata problems with WMAs and…

  • Twitter-like Post: Da Hui

    Back in High School I got The W’s Fourth from the Last album and one of my favorite tracks was titled “Hui”.  I thought that, like some of the other songs on the album, it was just a nonsensical song and that calling the thugs on the beach “The Hui” was just because it sounded…

  • Gnome Music Player Showdown

    I’ve been reading a lot of reviews recently about the upcoming Banshee 1.0.  (Arstechnica and Linux Magazine, for example)  It looks like it’s going to be an awesome release, but I wanted to see where it is now and compare that to Rhythmbox.  As I mentioned here, I switched to Rhythmbox in May 2007 (a…

  • Code Monkey

    This song is awesome and, best of all, it’s been released under a Creative Commons license, so I can share it with you all without fear of the RIAA breathing down my neck! I first heard Code Monkey on a recent episode of Linux Outlaws. It’s a song about a code monkey who is having…

  • Microsoft DRM Metldown Redux

    As I mentioned here, Micro$oft has provided yet another example of why digital restrictions management does nothing but hurt legitimate consumers.  To remind you, this is when Microsoft turned off the servers for its ironically named “playsforsure” DRM system.  These songs, which consumers would told, would play for sure on any digital media player containing…

  • A Novel iTunes Exploit

    Brought to us by Randal Monroe of xkcd: Also, you much check this one out both for its mention of Python and the Asus EEE PC.

  • iPod Shuffle

    For years I had been saying that I would not buy an iPod product.  After all, they sell music in the iTunes music store with DRM on it.  All of my music on my Linux computer is in the OGG format and it can’t be played with iPods.  However, when it came time to buy…

  • Crank That is the new Mashup Sensation

    This annoyingly catchy rap song with crazy dance moves (there’s even a video online by the rapper to show you how to do the dance) is being put into all kinds of mashups. For some reason, these all seem to involve kiddie movies and Tv shows. Anyway, this gave me a pretty good laugh for…

  • HEY RIAA, all you needed to do was offer DRM-free music!

    I’ve already spent around $11 on Amazon.com’s MP3 download store. Why? Because they are selling MP3s of my favorite artists without any digital restrictions management (DRM). This is what has been keeping both my wife and I away from iTunes. Oh yeah, and the songs are cheaper than iTunes! It appears that all of the…

  • Infinity on High is Worth the Money

    Often the biggest gripe people have about CDs is that they are two or three hit singles packaged with a bunch of crap to justify selling it to you for $12 or more. I’ve felt that way many, many times. The phenomenon is a large part of the reason behind models like iTunes. In fact,…

  • Rhythmbox Revisited

    A while back (6 mo to a year ago), I tried Rhythmbox and found it too buggy for me. I absolutely hated it. I loved Amarok so I used that within KDE, but it took forever to load within Gnome. So what was I to do? Ever since Fedora started packaging Mono, I’ve been using…

  • Relient K Concert

    (all of these are pictures of Relient K, even in the sections when I’m talking about other bands) My wife and I went to the Relient K concert yesterday in Baltimore. We were the oldest people there as I’ve been following them since their first album (which came out around 8-10 years ago), while many…

  • Blender used for music video!

    A pretty neat music video was made using Blender and it can be found here. It’s for the song “Machines” by KissKiss

  • Why buy digital music??

    While thinking about digital music recently, and how great it was the BMI decided to sell some of its music on iTunes without Digital Restrictions Management (DRM). However, these tracks will cost $2 while the DRM’d tracks will cost $1. First of all, this seems to be a scheme to prove that the public doesn’t…

  • We won the first battle!

    The first battle in our war against those who would wield DRM to prevent us from having fair use over our movies and music has been won. EMI, a Bristih Music label with bands like The Rolling Stones, has agreed to release songs on iTunes without DRM. Please, try and support them and show them…