A few weeks ago, I mentioned Eric was waiting for his new CDs to arrive, and how long I had watched Eric work on this album. Well, last night I went over to Eric's place to help him set up some things for getting his new album, "as an ex-anorexic's six sicks exit,..." out there and more accessible to people.


I must say, I love that the back of the CD says "don't care if you burn/rip/share". So we made a zip' file that has all 10 songs, the album artwork and the liner notes, you can download that here, if you'd like to pass the link on, just copy & paste this: http://urltea.com/2ep0


If you'd like to buy an actual CD, maybe as a gift for someone, hint hint :) you can do through their myspace page, and really you can pay whatever you'd like for it.

We also put some finishing touches on a rather-hilarious music video for Jackie O, the 4th song on the album. And that will be up as soon as possible.


I'd like to get their songs indexed by search engines, so I'm going to link to them individually - hopefully they'll show up Project Playlist in the next few days (again, if you'd like all these songs, it will be much faster for you to just download the zip file above):

01) them pleasures of the flesh 4:49

02) anomie's the enemy 4:46

03) what? 4:28

04) jackie o 2:42

05) a frozen lake 4:51

06) bad thing 2:46

07) this is far from a belle epoque 4:01

08) eyes, foreign eyes 4:20

09) the lonliness of the short distance walker 4:18

10) i'll stop swimming when i drown 8:52

Hope you enjoy the CD :) Here's to indie music!

Labels: A Faulty Chromosome, Indie, music

I love iTunes. And although I realize my library isn't *that* impressive (compared to some) at 5,382 songs - it's still always on and playing music, movies, and podcast for me.

There are a few tiny changes though that I would love to see, mostly things I'm surprised don't already exist. Let's go with the visual stuff first:

1) Movie Artwork: I think it's strange (and maybe I've just been doing something wrong all this time) that for movies, you can right-click and get the info, and even go to a tab titled "artwork", from there, it let's you choose a file to represent the movie in coverflow, *but* when you click "done"; it doesn't change. And the file you just picked isn't under the "artwork" tab the next time you open the info again. Now even if there is a work around for picking your own artwork for movies - I shouldn't have to do any of this in an application from Apple.



Above I have a screen-capture of some of the movies I have in iTunes (with album view), I think the artwork for the Bunny Love pilot is fine the way it is, and I like the frame iTunes automatically choose for Steven Colbert's 'Charlene' music video, but both 'Days of Heaven' and 'Dick in a Box' are bad frames. Why can't I simply, click on "get info" for 'Days of Heaven', and under the "artwork" tab, slide a scrubber that previews the file, find a frame I like, and hit "done"?

2) Making Artwork Look More Uniform: On a side note, with movie files in coverflow, am I the only one anal enough to wish that the height of the movie picture was the same height as a song's album artwork?



I have all this nicely organized artwork for my music, all generally the same size, it looks great when I scroll through it... and then randomly, I have movie artwork that is a) awkwardly short next to everything else, and b) a picture that I can't change in the first place.

3) Built-In Artwork Tools: A lot of the artwork that comes with music I download looks great as-is, but every once in a while, there's a strange edge of white on the picture, or it's an odd shape and would look great if it was cropped just a bit. 80% of the time, I'm too lazy to do anything about it. Just because I don't feel like copying the artwork to my clipboard, opening up Photoshop or Imagewell, and fixing the picture, then pasting it back into iTunes and then erasing the bad artwork.



Almost every other Mac app', for example: Address Book, let's you make small changes to photos, such as cropping, right in the app' itself - quick and easy. But iTunes has nothing like this for their coverflow.

4) Taking Advantage of Lyrics: I have a widget in my dashboard called 'PearLyrics', whenever I play a song in iTunes, in the background it goes out and does a Google search for the lyrics to that song, if it can find them, it puts them in the info of the song file for me. Not to mention, most of the music you buy from the iTunes Store comes with lyrics already. I can look at these lyrics in iTunes, on my iPod... wherever. But, and this seems very strange to me, you can't search this information.



As you can see, I can search: All, Artist, Album, Composer, and Song name... but if I can just barely remember the lines to a song I want to hear, I have no way of searching for it based on the words in the song. Even though I have all the lyrics for the song I'm looking for in it's file info. Seems a waste to me. This info should be searchable in spotlight and especially iTunes.

5) Don't Make Me Pick & Choose: I have hundreds of songs where one song has multiple artist or bands involved. I've always had to pick which artist I wanted to be the "main" artist, and which artist I would just list after the song title.



When I'm out listening to music, sometimes it makes it tricky to find the song I'm looking for by artist if I can't remember which one I choose as the "main" artist - and I just end up doing a search.

So, I think you should be able to assign multiple artist to one song. Something like so:



Now I realize that might make listening the music alphabetically by artist tricky, but I'm sure Apple could figure it out.


I guess that's it off the top of my head. Do you have any ideas?

Labels: Apple, DIgg, music

The other day, on Tim Shey's site, I read that Radiohead was self-releasing their new album... and on top of this, they were implementing a "pay what you want" for people to download their album. Two ideas that record labels should be pooping their pants over :)

Sorry, I couldn't resist.

Then today, on Shouting Mat.ch, I read this:

"If two of the biggest acts in the industry can see the digital writing on the wall and totally embrace it—that the old way of doing business is broken—why can't the labels? What Radiohead and NIN are showing is that the business model 'of the future' feared by entrenched interests isn't arriving some time in the horizon. It's touching down now."

This puts a smile on my face - there is a sea change in the music industry... it is saying: we don't need you anymore.

Labels: music, technology