Have you ever wondered how difficult it is to beatmix 2 records? Does one actually have to have skills to be a top-notch DJ like Roger Sanchez or Fat Boy Slim?
You don’t have to buy a couple of Technics SL-1200MK2s ($750/piece), but have a try with the neat freeware tool from MonoRAVEIK: the MR1200. A Windows program of only 152 KB(!!) that emulates a 1200 really nicely. Start up 2 of them, drop an MP3 on both, start the first and then try to beatsync the second while the first is playing (even more realistic: play the first song at 110dB and use headphones on one ear to monitor and beatsync the second song). The Nudge/Twist system is not a sensitive as your fingers holding back or speeding up the vinyl, but it will give you a pretty good idea. Give it a spin!
* Platter behaves exactly like a real record deck – grab it and it stops, pull it backwards and it plays backwards.
* Platter can also emulate the jog wheel on a CD deck.
* Vinyl groove simulation for a “picture” of the track – spot those quiet bits!
* Choice of +8 or +20 pitch control, with separate fine tuning.
* Nudging and twisting emulation.
* Real instant start.
* Cue points.
* Reverse play.
* Pitch control inversion.
* Quartz lock.
* BPM counter (manual)
(from mono211.com)
I’ve put my pictures in a www.pixagogo.com album, those who were there and also have some pictures they want to share, can upload them to the album with the “Upload” button after the last picture, or by sending them to me, peter.forret _at_ gmail.com.
Dave Winer seems to be very excited about something but he can’t say yet what it is:
Last night I got an email from someone I’ve been wanting to hear from for a long time. There’s a problem on the Internet, a big one, that only one entity can solve. The email outlined the solution and asked what I thought of it, and asked me not to say what it is publicly. I can live with that. I just want to mark this moment. A milestone. Real cooperation. I immediately implemented the feature on one of my sites. The same message was sent to a bunch of other people by the same person. I hope they did the same. When this is announced users everywhere will smile
(from archive.scripting.com)
and a day later:
Watch this space for an interesting announcement.
(from www.bloggercon.org)
First I thought it would be related to RSS. Maybe RSS and Atom are merging into 1 standard (but then what does he mean with ‘implemented the feature on one of my sites’?) or Blogger (Google) will now support RSS as well as Atom feeds (which would basically mean Atom dies)?
But speculation in the blogosphere tends to go in the direction of Google taking into account the rel="nofollow" attribute of a link, so bloggers can make a distinction between links that Google should follow (and transfer Pagerank to) or not. A promising solution for comment spam.
(via poorbuthappy.com / gorissen.info / phaedo.cx)
Comment spam is a problem I almost never encounter. Most of my sites are created with Blogger, and they use a redirector script for outgoing links in comments: http://www.blogger.com/r?http%3A%2F%2Fwww.example.com.
(cf help.blogger.com)
Neither WordPress nor SixApart (Movable Type) mention in their comment-spam combat guide. If every blog software used this trick, it would make the comment-spamming tactic less attractive!
I recently rediscovered Meshell Ndegeocello. I had been really disappointed by the concert I had seen of her last year on the Blue Note festival and hadn’t listened to any of her CDs for that time. Basically I was disappointed to see such a talent go to waste.
Who is Meshell? A small black woman with a deep groovy voice and by far one of the funkiest bass players around.
I’ve been a fan of hers since 1993, when her first album “Plantation Lullabies” came out. She was funky, gutsy and tongue-in-cheek (“If that’s your boyfriend, he wasn’t last night”). I saw her live and she rocked. When she laid down a bass groove, the place exploded. Man, she could play! In the follow-up album “Peace Beyond Passion” (1996), she used the Old Testament as inspiration. As unsexy as that may sound, it was also an excellent album, musically exploring the borders between jazz, funk and R&B and with strong lyrics. The 3rd album, “Bitter” (1999) was exactly what the title suggests: tales of grief, deception and lots of heart ache. Who ever broke her heart, did it really thoroughly. The music was also very slow, dramatic and, to be honest, depressing. I didn’t buy any of the later albums, Cookie (2002) or Comfort Woman(2003) after that.
I was however really looking forward to seeing her again live last year. But instead of steaming funk or intimate ballads, we got ‘free jazz’. She had brought a new band of “avant-garde” musicians. It was an endless cacaphony of jazz masturbation. The only moments the crowd actually enjoyed, were those when the Queen of Wicked Bass took the front stage and showed that she still had more skill in her right thumb that the rest of the band together. Unfortunately those moments were few and short.
While working with Jurriaan on a podcast for BeyondJazz.net (with their excellent sample spotters show), I finished a small project I had been working on a couple of months ago: a web-based streaming media player for MP3/RAM/WMA files. I actually stopped it when I saw the excellent work Lucas Gonze had done with Webjay. Didn’t feel like re-inventing the hot water.
But now I have added a visual part: I wanted to have a one-click “play this in my media player and show me the playlist at the same time”. So I worked further on the formats that support playing audio while showing a web page at the same time: SMIL (works with RealPlayer and QuickTime) and ASX (Windows Media Player). Since the BeyondJazz blog is not yet public, I also used this system on the Traxsource Cyberjamz Radio Show (another one of my music podcast experiments, together with Traxsource/Brian Tappert).
The idea is the following: instead of having the title of the post as a link to the MP3 (in some cases, when you click it, your browser starts downloading all those megabytes before the audio starts playing), I now have 3 icons: one for playing it in RealPlayer, one for Windows Media Player and one for direct downloading. To do this, I actually just edited the Blogger template as follows: <h3 class="post-title"><$BlogItemTitle$>
<BlogItemUrl>
<a href="http://www.smoothouse.org/projects/media/player.asp? type=smil&url=<$BlogItemUrl$>&page=<$BlogItemPermalinkUrl$>"
title="Click to open in your RealAudio player">
<img border=0 width="20" height="20" alt="Click to open in your RealAudio player" src="http://www.smoothouse.org/projects/podcast/icon_ram.gif">
</a>
<a href="http://www.smoothouse.org/projects/media/player.asp? type=asx&url=<$BlogItemUrl$>&page=<$BlogItemPermalinkUrl$>"
title="Click to open in your Windows Media player">
<img border=0 width="20" height="20" alt="Click to open in your Windows Media player" src="http://www.smoothouse.org/projects/podcast/icon_wma.gif">
</a>
<a href="<$BlogItemUrl$>"
title="Right-click to download">
<img border=0 width="20" height="20" alt="Right-click to download" src="http://www.smoothouse.org/projects/podcast/icon_download.gif">
</a>
</BlogItemUrl>
</h3>
(if you’re familiar with HTML and/or Blogger templates, try this at home. If you’re not, wear protection.)
I still have to work out some quirks with the Real/SMIL format (on some machines the HTML page does not show), but apart from that, it works like a charm: you click the icon, your player opens, the music starts playing and you see the associated post page in your player.
Remark: this trick does not affect the core podcast as such: the MP3 files, the RSS feed, … stay the same. It’s just a user interface enhancement for the associated blog, with a detailed description for Blogger users. The principle as such will work on any Movable Type, WordPress, or other Pivot.
Brian McWilliams, author of Spam Kings has published an article “Remove me” on salon.com on his recent under-cover job within the spammers community to check whether these people really take “Unsubscribe me” requests into account. He poses as an affiliate (someone who sends spam on behalf of some company and gets commissions for each sale) to a company selling fake Rolexes.
When I signed on to BlackMarketMoney.com for the first time, I saw a page where my sales stats would be displayed. A preferences section included a form where I could specify account numbers for my commission payments. There were also pages with suggested ad copy and graphics files, as well as an updated list of the various domains we affiliates were supposed to advertise in our spams.
But what really caught my eye was a note at the site that insisted all affiliate spams include an “unsubscribe link.” Two huge archives were also available for download, containing lists of “remove” addresses. The October list held around 202,000 e-mails, while the November list had over 282,000 addresses. Sales affiliates were instructed to scrub their mailing lists to remove these names.
(from salon.com)
Eventhough the affiliates are given all the information necessary to remove the addresses of people, reality turns out to work differently. I let you read the story – and his conversations with the people who unsubscribed – on the site, but his conclusion remains unchanged: Do NOT use the “unsubscribe/remove” option in spam mails!
While he was still a sceptic in October 2004, Russell Beattie has taken the Pepsi Challenge and tried out listening to podcasts in the car:
I am officially hooked on Podcasting!
I drove down to work this morning and listened to Adam Curry on my new MuVo and was quite entertained for most of the ride down (he’s actually a great morning DJ) and then coming back I listened to most of Jerry Fiddler’s talk over at IT Conversations. WOW! What a difference it made to my hour long commute! I almost didn’t want to get out of the car tonight. No searching for a station, no frustration in the topics that NPR is talking about tonight and though I love her dearly, no Terri Gross. Awesome!
(via russellbeattie.com)
This is something I experienced myself and have seen in others too: while it is possible to listen to podcasts at your PC, it’s not ideal. You start reading your email, dive into the fridge, switch on the television and get terribly distracted. For me it was also a 2-hour morning commute listening to IT Conversations Pop!Tech series that made me realise to how much use my previously ‘lost’ time in the car could be put.
So if you’ve never done it in the car, don’t make a judgement about the values of podcasting. It’s like comparing a car seat with your cosy couch at home: it might not be as comfortable to sit in, but this is more than compensated for by the fact that your car can drive you around, and your sofa most probably not.
I have an extensive collection DJ mixes on my hard disk, and a while ago I discovered in one of them a catchy tune. It starts as a laidback (112 BPM) love song, a crooner voice singing “Just a little lovin’, early in the morning, just a little lovin’, early in the day …“. It then turns into a groovy re-edit of the same song, with the voice nicely cut up to match the new tempo (124 BPM). There are some added vocals that are a bit silly (clearly a non-native English speaker), but the chorus is really addictive. For some reason it stayed glued to the back of my head, I caught myself whistling it several times a day. But what was it?
I had no idea in which show/mix tape I heard it, and didn’t see myself browsing through over 100 hours of MP3 and RM files just to find it. Thanks to Google, I quickly found out the new version was created by Irfane (a French DJ and part of Outlines), back in 2003. The original seems to be a Barry ManilowBarry Mann/Cynthia Weill song, performed by great singers like Dusty Springfield and Sarah Vaughan. Apparently clearing the rights on the Springfield performance has proven so difficult that the song is only coming out in March 2005, on Sonar Kollektiv, the Jazzanova record label.
A totally weird mix of posts on technology, advertising, social software, society, tango and women. Not necessarily in that order.
If you want to, you could even subscribe.
This is something I experienced myself and have seen in others too: while it is possible to listen to podcasts at your PC, it’s not ideal. You start reading your email, dive into the fridge, switch on the television and get terribly distracted. For me it was also a 2-hour morning commute listening to 
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