Archive for June 2007


Amy Waltz

June 28th, 2007 — 3:43pm

Amy Waltz

This post is a short, jittery, very loose, and slightly overdriven acoustic guitar version of a tune called “Anna Waltz” which was composed by a guy named D.E. Jannon and published in 1854. I learned it from sheet music at the Library of Congress web site.

MP3: Lucas Gonze — Amy Waltz (1:36)

This recording is under a Creative Commons BY-SA license per my standard license statement.

See also Carrie Waltz.

5 comments » | Creative Commons BY-SA, acoustic guitar, historical music, lightnet, mymusic, public domain compositions

digital lockers not totally useless

June 26th, 2007 — 12:40am
I’m at work listening to some music I loaded into an MP3tunes locker from home. This does not suck completely.  On the whole it’s a comfortable and natural extension of the offline experience, even if there are aspects of the experience – like the painfully slow process of uploading your music files – which are awkward.

1 comment » | Uncategorized

Carrie Waltz

June 24th, 2007 — 10:42pm

This post is one of my acoustic guitar recordings. It is a tune called “Carrie Waltz” which was composed by a guy named D.E. Jannon and published in 1854. I learned it from sheet music at the Library of Congress web site.

Lucas Gonze — Carrie Waltz

I’m only publishing an MP3, not an Ogg anything or a lossless version or the Audacity original. And I didn’t pay any attention to the tagging process, so it might or might not have reasonable metadata and proper Creative Commons licensing in the ID3 tags. It takes forever to get all these details right and I want to see how it feels to focus on the tunes and not worry about the computer maintenance.

This recording is under a Creative Commons BY-SA license per my standard license statement.

Here’s the sheet music original that I worked from:

Carrie Waltz sheet music

5 comments » | Creative Commons BY-SA, acoustic guitar, historical music, legal, lightnet, mymusic, public domain compositions

Another one bites the dust

June 19th, 2007 — 5:21am
(Photo by Aram Sinnreich) So long record stores, it’s been good to know you. People born after 2000 or so will have no memory of how record stores once anchored pop culture.

9 comments » | Uncategorized

House of Records

June 15th, 2007 — 4:25pm
House of Records

“Los Angeles’ oldest record store – established 1952″

The little used CD store on Pico by the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences building just closed its doors. Irony is futile.

5 comments » | Uncategorized

once you’ve made the sale, you take the money

June 6th, 2007 — 3:55pm
I’ll tell you how I know that the magnificently insane yet ballsy new download store at Lala.com is not going to make it. I fell in love with an album (“album”? “compilation”? what do we call these things in their online iteration?) via their wonderful free sample site, and I would gladly fork over the stupidly expensive $13.78 they are asking, but they won’t sell me anything I can play, because their downloads will only work on an iPod. They won’t work in iTunes, they definitely won’t work in a Unix shell window, and they would fucking come alive and laugh at me if I tried to get them to play on my cell phone. “hahahahahahahahahah” say the little downloads. “You’re going out of business,” says the grumpy blogger. It’s like selling bread which only toasts in one brand of toaster. Or butter which can only be spread with a Land O’ Lakes ® brand knife. You can call these B Read and spUtter or whatever else strikes your fancy, but they aren’t bread and butter. The album, by the way, is Mambo Sinuendo by Ry Cooder and Manuel Galban. Check it out — Lala makes it easy to *play*, but good luck *paying*.

6 comments » | Uncategorized

music sharing as core functionality for social networking

June 3rd, 2007 — 5:50pm
Ning, the social networking web app for making social networking web apps, has released a module for adding music sharing to your social networking app. It’s very nicely done, and the care they took with it is instructive. Here’s the feature list from their announcement:

Music Player Features

Your social network now comes standard with:
  • One very sweet music player for your network’s Main page and each of your Members’ profile pages. It’s added automatically when you choose Music from the Features page
  • MP3 playback (we’ll be adding support for other file types soon)
  • Upload, edit, and order your tracks right in the player
  • Embed your music player and playlist on any blog or MySpace page.
  • Decide if you want songs to autoplay or not. (It defaults to no autoplay)
  • Upload music and podcasts directly to your network or import them from an URL off your network
  • Share and rate tracks
  • Add tracks from other members’ music players with one click (the Add to Mine button that you’ll see when the person enables it)
  • Display highest rated or most recent tracks from across the network on the Main page. (Feature specific tracks coming soon)
  • Edit track information: track title, artist, artwork (displayed on the player), album name, genre, year, label, artist website, host website (for external tracks), label site, license (including copyright or any of the most popular creative commons options), explicit lyrics flag
  • Choose the option to display MP3 download links to other members
  • Add external hosted playlists via RSS (podcast), XSPF, and M3U.
What is significant about this from my perspective is that it makes music sharing a core feature of any social network. This makes so much sense that I wonder why it took so long to happen — of course groups like a beer can collectors guild would want to be able to share relevant music (like singalongs about cone tops) and talk (like interviews with beverage historians). (I would paste in their Flash screencast here, but my blog host (wordpress.com) blocks out most third party widgets. So go check out the screencast on Ning.com). (Full disclosure: I consulted for Ning a couple years ago).

16 comments » | Uncategorized

     

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