This page contains all entries posted to Manufactured Environments in February 2007.

now it’s time for Basement Jaxx

I recently linked to the awesome Palms Out Sounds for their extravaganza of Daft Punk samples. Two weeks later and they have another winner on Sample Wednesday. This week’s take is Sample Wednesday #29: Basement Jaxx.

They’ve posted 13 tracks in MP3 format that Basement Jaxx take samples from in various songs. The songs are labeled with the Basement Jaxx usage. It’s a pretty interesting look at where electronic artists are getting their source material.

So enjoy the tracks listed there and compare and contrast with your Basement Jaxx records. Pretty cool.

Tags: basement jaxx · mp3 · palms out sounds · sample wednesday · samples

No Comments Yet »

Freeform Faust’s playlist for February 24, 2007

Tune to KWLC on Saturdays from 2:00pm–4:00pm (CST) to hear Freeform Faust.

No Comments Yet »

Getting jolly with eMusic

If I haven’t already got this across, eMusic is quite awesome. So go check them out, now! I’ve been up to my ears in great new music from them. They have, exclusively, the new Bloc Party album called A Weekend in the City, and I must say I like it MUCH better than their debut. It’s a very cool album. Also of note on eMusic is the latest from Of Montreal, which is called Hissing Fauna, Are You The Destroyer? eMusic is great because the songs cost about $0.25 (you buy into a subscription plan), and they’re in MP3 format, which means you can use them on any MP3 device including iPods and the like or burn them to CD without restriction. This is the way music is meant to be, in my opinion. Buying songs with DRM for $1 each at iTunes or other music stores doesn’t make a lot of sense when eMusic is bursting at the seams with great music. I highly recommend it.

I also have to add for the Iowa City crowd that eMusic now has our own Grammy-nominated folk singer Greg Brown. They recently added four more albums, bringing to seven the number of Greg Brown albums that eMusic carries, including the excellent 2000 album Covenant. You can find him at eMusic here.

Update: I would be remiss if I didn’t make a couple of comments: 1) I won’t be truly happy with eMusic’s collection of Greg Brown until they have In The Dark With You, which is one of my favorite albums by him. And 2) Of Montreal seems to have sparked something with their recent Las Vegas performance (NSFW!). Explanation in relation to world peace here.

Tags: drm · emusic · greg brown · itunes · mp3 · music · of montreal

No Comments Yet »

Media Temple to release another update to Grid Server

We here at Manufactured Environments have been with (mt) Media Temple for over a year with our web hosting needs. Last fall, (mt) implemented a new grid-based hosting setup called (gs) Grid-Server. They developed the system in-house. Overall, we’ve been very pleased with the service, although there have been a few glitches. Media Temple has been very proactive in getting these eliminated and at the same time have been improving the performance of the grid.

On their blog today, they wrote about Grid Master Release v1.2 to be released next Friday, March 2. Looks like they’re greatly increasing the performance of the whole system. Of particular interest are MySQL GridContainers, which will pair an unshared copy of MySQL with each user. I was also interested to see the reports of email improvements because there had been a bit of weirdness with that.

We continue to be very impressed with (mt) Media Temple, and look forward to this new release of their hosting system.

Tags: (mt) · grid master release · grid server · media temple · mysql

No Comments Yet »

A new look

I’m always testing out new ideas for designs. This time though is the most significant redesign in a number of years. This redesign required some reworking of the underlying HTML templates that drive this site. Mostly just a reorganization of the metadata into a separate <div> from the blog content. I styled up the div’s and floated the metadata left and floated the content right. Add in a few touches of design and that was it. So, have a look at Manufactured Environments and let me know what you think of the redesign.

Another major design change this time was to switch from using Georgia as the default text font with line spacing set to 150%. This time the type is sans serif, smaller with reduced leading. All in all, it was a fun redesign to do. The design even works at 800x600 resolution, which I consider something of an achievement, although optimal viewing calls for a higher resolution, of course.

Tags: div · metadata · redesign

No Comments Yet »

SXSW does the mega-music download again

I went to the SXSW conference a few years ago in Austin, Texas, and had a great time. South By Southwest is actually three conferences — there’s film, there’s interactive (tech), and there’s the granddaddy music conference. It all happens each year in Austin during the month of March.

For the past three years, SXSW has been offering a download collection of songs by the bands who will be appearing at the conference that year. It’s a massive download of some 750 or so songs in MP3 format — and totally legal, natch. They offer it as a torrent, which is a shared download. You’ll need a BitTorrent client (here or here) in order to download this year’s 3.1 GB file, which contains 739 MP3 files. The torrent can be found on SXSW’s 2007 Toolbox page or directly here.

And let me just state for the record that these downloads are awesome! This is great music by some of the best up-and-coming and also established bands around. Fantastic stuff and free! If you want to find out about previous years’ downloads, check our entries from 2006 and 2005. If you’re a music fan, it doesn’t get any better than this.

Tags: bittorrent · mp3 · music · music conference · sxsw · torrent

No Comments Yet »

Curiosity cabinet

Here’s a site for your curiosity cabinet. It’s called NFCTD. The concept is simple, but the execution is especially nice. There’s audio on the site, if you like. It’s interactive and the imagery comes mostly from Dover Publishing, which seems to have a lock on that public domain Victorian drawings. At the end of the site are credits for the audiologist, Dallas Johnson, and the animator/programmer, Caleb Johnston.

Subdued in a disturbing kind of way.

Tags: caleb johnston · dallas johnson · nfctd

No Comments Yet »

A daft punk freakout

This one is for the Daft Punk fans out there. Well, okay, this is a bunch of free music so it’s for all the music fans out there, but it has special connotations for the Daft Punkers. Daft Punk, as you know, are a French electro outfit. You may enjoy their music. Palms Out Sounds has a great Sample Wednesday. They went in and sourced out a whole bunch of places that samples/sounds from Daft Punk songs come from. They’ve put together 13 songs that Daft Punk used as source material. This is pretty amazing. If you’ve only heard the Daft Punk songs, you’ll be surprised to hear some of this. Which begs the question: is Daft Punk less original than thought or are they simply geniuses for having sourced all this stuff? Anyway, some good music to be had for your downloading pleasure. Enjoy!

Tags: daft punk · mp3 · palms out sounds · samples

No Comments Yet »

Thoughts on Music

A lot has been written about Steve Jobs’ shot across the bow of the music industry. If you haven’t read them, Mr. Jobs’ Thoughts on Music are on the Apple website. He envisions a world where DRM is no more. Apple’s iTunes has had some of the most lenient restrictions among online music stores, but even that is too restrictive.

DRM is the way that digital media is locked down. It can mean that you can’t copy a song to another computer or it might mean that you can’t burn it to a CD. Each music store online has a different scheme. Some charge for burning rights. Others limit whether you can place it on a portable device. Basically, it’s interference with what you do with your music.

The precedent is there. As Mr. Jobs rightly points out, CDs have no copy-protection, well, most of the them. So a person can simply buy a CD and rip it. Simple as that.

If you haven’t been to the eMusic store at emusic.com, you might want to check it out. eMusic has two million songs from mostly independent labels. Tons of great music on eMusic, and best of all, it is all in MP3 format so there’s no DRM to worry about.

Hopefully iTunes also, will eliminate DRM, if the music companies are willing. If and when that happens, I hope Apple will provide a utility that will free people’s music. So that the songs they downloaded with DRM can become unprotected. Otherwise that music is essentially a loss. It will be stuck in a doomed format. There are utilities out there for doing just that, but it would be nice to have something that was officially endorsed by Apple. That is, something not ostensibly illegal for having broken the DMCA.

All in all, there have been rumblings that the music industry was already headed in this direction, and Steve Jobs is simply making himself visible. He can take the credit for getting rid of DRM on music. An important distinction should be made though between music and video. He is distinctly not talking about video here. Video has always been produced with some copy protections. Unlike rippable CDs, DVDs carry copy protection. While that protection has been cracked, it is illegal under the DMCA law to break that protection. So to be sure, Jobs is not saying video should be open. Just music. And I must admit, that’s okay with me. Music is my first love, and video be damned.

Tags: apple · cd · dmca · drm · dvd · steve jobs

No Comments Yet »

Freeform Faust’s playlist for February 10, 2007

Tune to KWLC on Saturdays from 2:00pm–3:30pm (CST) to hear Freeform Faust.

Tags: charlemagne palestine · clap your hands say yeah · deerhoof · deerhunter · freeform faust · frog eyes · kwlc · of montreal · playlist · tony conrad

No Comments Yet »

The Machine is Us/ing Us

Seth Godin links to an interesting, entertaining video on texts and connectivity in a Web 2.0 environment put together by Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthopology Michael Wesch of KSU. View here. The piece starts in the world of the written word, moves into digital text, and eventually represents the connections possible using relatively recent phenomena such as XML for moving texts (and other media) around. Perhaps a good example of this is the new Yahoo! Pipes, which is currently down at the moment due to demand. Tim O’Reilly (yeah, that O’Reilly) wrote about Y! Pipes over here, calling it “a milestone in the history of the internet.”

Wesch’s piece is responding to a piece on Web 2.0, also on YouTube, here. Wesch correctly is pointing us in the direction that the web is flowing but abstains from attempting an answer from the questions he poses. The re-thinking of copyright and authorship is already happening — and perhaps something akin to what has happened to the music industry will also befall publishing. As books become less the vehicle for ideas, what replaces them? Texts, in my opinion, are vastly superior to audio and video for conveying ideas, but what happens to ideas when they’re condensed down to internet size. With the emergence of online, do ideas necessarily become simpler and more easily digestible? What form does the book take online? Or is it possible that there is no replacement for a book?

Tags: authorship · copyright · hypertexts · texts · web 2.0 · xml

No Comments Yet »

Freeform Faust’s playlist for February 3, 2007

Tune to KWLC on Saturdays from 2:00pm–3:30pm (CST) to hear Freeform Faust.

No Comments Yet »

Doing the laundry … via email

The university here made a jump into the online connected world by offering students email alerts when their laundry is done. It’s all courtesy of a system called LaundryView. Students can go online and look for washers and dryers in their dorms that are currently not being used. They still have to load their laundry themselves, poor bastards. But they can walk away, and they’ll get an email update when the load is done. Slick. The Press-Citizen has the full story here.

The downside to the new service is that the price of doing a load of laundry went up 50 cents to pay for the software, which costs $13,000 a year apparently.

Tags: laundry · laundryview · press-citizen · university of iowa

Comments (1) »