Mon, 31 Jan 2005
How to buy music in the post-CD era
I've recently started buying music again after a very long hiatus. This is
what inspired this writing. I found it took a while to understand just what
the hell is going on and how to make something work without falling into some
hype.
Buying music gets harder and harder. With more formats than you can count on
both hands and feet, greedy music industry gatekeepers going out of their
way to insult their own customers, it's amazing anyone buys music at all
anymore.
First, I'd like to outline some of the challenges to the poor music
consumer faces:
- CD copy protection which actually damages the disk to prevent you from
playing it in an unknown percentage of CD players and CD/DVD-ROM drives. It
also prevents you from ripping it to a portable.
- A greedy music industry that is suing it's own customers as well as innocent bystanders.
- A once progressive computer company
that took a desperate risk and made a fortune by limiting the rights of it's
users, requiring them to go out of their way to use the music they have bought.
- The same once progressive computer company selling music online that is encumbered with restrictive digital right's
management that makes it harder to make a mixtape from than a bunch of vinyl LPs. Unfortunately it appears all their effort was in vain but it inconviences their users once again because they need to use a different player application to bypass the DRM.
Whew! That was exhausting. So how the hell can anyone buy music anymore?
Y'know, like the good old days of CD mixes on cassette tapes?
- Search for the record you are looking for on Amazon.
- Then use the RIAA Radar to determine if that
artist's distributor is a mamber. They have a neato little popup utility that makes it quick and easy to get results from Amazon's item page.
- If the title failed, open an account on All of mp3 and download the title from the
Russians. It's currently 2 cents per megabyte downloaded. They are borderline
legal, using legal loopholes to offer cheap music from major lables.
- If your RIAA Radar search passed, the artist you are looking for is cool
and has a cool distributor who respects musicians. First try and go to your
local music store and pick up the CD. It's good to support your local music
store.
- If you don't happen to live in a fancy urban area with a good local
record store, go directly to the distributor's web site. Most have a way to
order the CD/LP online.
- If that fails, buy the CD from Amazon if it's available.
So there you have it, buying music the modern way while sticking it to the
man. In addition to finding a RIAA-free artist from the distributor's web
site, there are some online retailers that sell CDs directly.
In Sound is a good one. Sometimes even
Ebay is better.
Of course the absolute best way to get music is to go see it live and buy a
recording from the band. Obviously this is near impossible for those who
aren't graced by a wonderful city like New York or LA. But hey, start your own
venue. Play some punk rock, trade some music, do it yourself and make these
corporations irrelevant and obsolete.
posted at: 17:12 | path:
/music |
permanent link to this entry
Fri, 28 Jan 2005
Building the studio
Tomorrow I'm going to pay my first month's rent for the
studio.
It is a total shit hole that only recently got electricity, which was a big
step forward. Before it even begins to be functional I will have to take a
shop vaccuum to the entire space and put blankest on the windows to keep the
cold air out. It has been consistantly about 20 degrees F out side and it's
not much different inside the space.
Other than that it's a perfectly wonderful place. It really shines in the
summer. 800 square feet of wide open space in the middle of nowhere with no
neighbors. Perfect. I've been telling all my friends about it and they all
want to use it once it's running.
The catch about this particular studio is that it will be a hybrid analog and
digital studio. While this isn't a very novel idea, using only
Free Software
for the production is a novel idea. The primary hard disk recorder will be
Ardour
and the MIDI sequencer will be
Rosegarden.
posted at: 20:05 | path:
/music |
permanent link to this entry
Thu, 27 Jan 2005
My day job is at a company that occationally has meetings with Big Clients™.
Yesterday there was one such meeting and I had the privledge of
overhearing one of the most illustrative conversations I have heard in
my life. It went like this:
Man in Suit #1: "So I just switched from PC to Mac and
I'm really liking it."
Man in Suit #2: "Really? I've been PC for ever. I hear
that email isn't as good on Mac. Is that true?"
/me trys with herculean fortitude to prevent spontanious
combustion.
But seriously, there is nothing anyone can really say to that so I just
quietly walked away. These are people who make loads of money, have
fancy conservative clothes, actually believe advertisements and are
predominantly white men. This is what we are up against.
posted at: 09:27 | path:
/power |
permanent link to this entry
Sun, 23 Jan 2005
Steps to help free software use
Depend on Free Software for daily computer use
The only way you are going to walk the walk is if you become a user.
Gradually began replacing your warez'd copies of commercial software
with Free Software. The next step is crucial to this.
Stop complaining about differences
Linux is not Windows, GNU is not UNIX, The Gimp is not Photoshop,
Macromedia will never be interested in Free Software! Get over it. If
you feel strongly enough about some special feature of a commercial
package, write to the company and ask them to consider releasing their
source code so the community can improve it.
Become part of the community
Accept that you are joining a worldwide community and include yourself
in it. Some examples:
- Join the mailing lists of certian software you like
- Spend time on IRC. irc.freenode.net is a server with thousands of
channels all dedicated to various Open Source and Free Software
projects.
- Learn to identify bugs and learn how to use your distribution's
bug reporting system. If your distribution doesn't have a bug
reporting system, find another distribution.
Remember, you are part of a community. You are not recieving a
commercial package with technical support. You are not allowed to act
like an asshole customer. For example, something like
"Linux sucks,
mine doesn't work!" is very unproductive and will just anger
people who could otherwise help you. Something like
"I'm running
Debian Testing and I'm having trouble with my sound card using the OSS
drivers." is a much better question.
Be humble.
The Free Software community has an incredibly deep history. If you
realize you probably don't know everything about it and that you will be
learning new things at a very fast pace things will go easier.
posted at: 20:40 | path:
/theory |
permanent link to this entry
Thu, 20 Jan 2005
I thought of this after a rather emotional conflict with a radio group I'm involved with.
When obsolete technology is elevated to the highest priority, it is too
common to regard ignorance as a virtue and not a limitation.
Nostolgia is a very common thing. And nostolgia is quite a good thing to
keep close to your heart. But nostolgia is a particularly human and
emotional charactaristic. When it is attached to machines everything
goes wrong. I recently had to explain to a friend who is installing
Debian GNU/Linux for the first time. He
asked me what is better,
Gnome or
KDE. I couldn't come up with an answer. I
prefer Gnome but I also use Knoppix for a
project of mine and I'm pretty
familliar with KDE because of it. In the end I could only say "know
thyself". Then that kicked off way too many things to think about.
Computers aren't just machines. They are so generic and can perform so
much utility in our lives they have become personal. The complexity of
breaking anything that involves a personal computer down to "is
better than
" is so large it's futile. You can't
possible come to any meaningful conclusions. This argument takes many
forms. I call it a
Sucks vs Rules
argument but the folks on #debian at irc.freenode.net might call it a
poll and thusly a useless question which they deride. So there is no
right answer to our personal computer question because it's so
very personal.
I can make my own conclusions from this. Using information is hard.
Personal computers make that easier but your personal amount of
willingness to deal with certian external factors and the time you are
willing to spend influence it greatly. If you are looking for the answer
to a sucks vs rules question you probably will never find it and you
will have to investigate further or just forget it and stick with
what's cool. Coolness
looks a lot different when it's
obsolete.
posted at: 02:28 | path:
/theory |
permanent link to this entry
Wed, 12 Jan 2005
Installing, Xfree86, Gnome and nvidia drivers with Debian testing
This is an account of my current foray into Linux desktop fun with my
latest distro
du jour Debian. I'm running it at work, which
is a 99% Windows network so the stakes are kind of high and if I'm able
to maintain everything I do already, I'm already ahead. So far I have
almost reached that goal and here I'm documenting the big hurdle of
getting the desktop system installed and configured.
Xfree86
$ apt-get install x-window-system
When configuring
do not choose the kernel's framebuffer
driver. We'll be installing our video driver later. Make sure you know
your monitor's limits. Two ways to do this are to write down your
settings from Windows or boot from a
Knoppix CD-R and look at
/etc/X11/XF86Config-4.
Follow the configuration questions and cross your fingers. If you got it
right, you should be able to type
startx and get a mouse
pointer and grey background. Press
crtl + alt + backspace to
exit it and proceed to the next step. If you get errors,
read
them! and try again. Repeat to yourself, "if at first I don't
succeed, try, try again."
The Gnome Desktop
$ apt-get install gnome gdm
Install the Gnome meta package and the display manager. Gdm, the
display manager, gives you a really pretty graphical login manager on
par with M$ and Apple's. Gdm might start automatically. If it doesn't
you can start it with a
/etc/init.d/gdm start. Play around with
Gnome a bit and configure it to your liking. I happen to be partial to
the theme named Amaranth and the simple graphical display manager login
screen.
Nvidia hardware accellerated drivers
This one takes a few more steps. If you do them all right it should take
about 20 minutes total. Be sure to add the contrib and non-free sections
to
/etc/apt/sources.list
- Update your kernel if you already haven't. Debian has lots of
kernels for lots of different CPUs. Use one. If you don't know how many
are available, search through the list with the Synaptic Package Manager in the System Tools
menu. Use kernel as the keyword.
- Install the kernel headers with apt-get install
kernel-headers-version where version is the same as above.
- Reboot into the new kernel
- Install the nvidia kernel source package with apt-get install
nvidia-kernel-source
- set these variables by typing
export KSRC=/usr/src/kernel-headers-version
export KSRC=/usr/src/kernel-headers-version
Again, replacing "version" with your kernel version
- Unzip the Nvidia source with cd /usr/src
tar -zxvf nvidia-source. That's not the exact name but it'll
be obvious.
- Make the kernel package with
/usr/src/modules/nvidia-kernel/debian/rules binary_modules
- Install nvidia-kernel-common with apt-get install
nvidia-kernel-common
- Install the nvidia kernel module debian package with
dpkg -i /usr/src/modules/nvidia-kernel-some-big-version.deb or
something like that
- Install the Xfree GLX driver with apt-get install
nvidia-glx
- Edit /etc/X11/XF86Config-4 be removing Load "GLcore" and
Load "dri". Double check Load "glx" is included.
Search for Driver "nv" and change it to Driver
"nvidia". Restart Gdm by typing ctrl + alt + F1, log in as
root then /etc/init.d/gdm restart and you should now have fat
3D accelleration. When you log back into X, type glxgears and
if the FPS value is in the thousands you should be good to go.
- Finally, add the word nvidia to the bottom of
/etc/modules to force the nvidia driver to load at boot
time.
posted at: 01:48 | path:
/hacking |
permanent link to this entry
