Music

Ripping Music to OGG Files on Windows

I rip music CDs to OGG files, abandoning the MP3 format in favor of an open standard that's encouraged for adoption by the Free Software Foundation. Although OGG works in fewer places than MP3 today, it's completely free for developers to support and gets music listeners away from patent attorneys, which makes it the better long-term choice. After having some trouble finding a ripper that supports OGG, I discovered Audiograbber, a free Windows program that's unpolished but gets the job done. ... (read more)

2007/11/28

Steve Burns Goes From Blues to Rock

Question: Why did you shave your head? are you making a statement? Answer: Yes. the statement is, "we have male pattern baldness." This QNA comes from the web site of Steve Burns, the original Blue's Clues host and star of one of the greatest episodes of Homicide: Life on the Street. After leaving the green-striped shirt, salt and pepper shakers, and floppy-eared blue dog behind in 2002, Burns became an indie rocker who pals around with the Flaming Lips and does They Might Be Giants tribute ... (read more)

2007/11/02

Straight Outta Kentucky: Meet Ronald Jenkees

I bought the CD tonight of Ronald Jenkees, an unsigned hip-hop musician from Murray State University in Kentucky, after finding his videos on "the YouTubes." Go back through his videos and you'll find a bunch of great odd stuff coming from the most unlikely place imaginable (such as String Jams 2, a NFL Countdown remix and his Bill Simmons podcast theme). Jenkins also has filmed some non-musical videos, like one about trying to get his roommates to play Balderdash. By 2022, Jenkees has amassed ... (read more)

2007/09/05

Rob Lowe, Snow White and the Academy Awards

The infamous opening number to the 1989 Academy Awards, which featured Snow White and Rob Lowe and killed the career of show producer Allen Carr, turned up on YouTube: Seeing this for the first time, I thought the opening was campy, hokey and overdone, but that seemed like the point. You don't line up a dozen dancing tables with lampshade heads and a chorus line of male ushers belting out "whenever you're down in the dumps, try putting on Judy's red pumps" without knowing you're completely over ... (read more)

2006/10/24

Mr. Hasselhoff, Tear Down That Wall

ABC News: [David] Hasselhoff enjoys cult status across Europe. This is most marked in Germany, where his 1989 album, Looking for Freedom, topped the charts for three months. Two years ago, Hasselhoff expressed disappointment that he was not recognized as having helped end the Cold War through his music. ... (read more)

2006/07/06

Writer Tells Wikipedia He Got a Divorce

I fleshed out a placeholder entry on Wikipedia this morning, giving the Richardson, Texas, high school where "Jeremy spoke in class today" enough substance to inspire future editors to work on it. I've made around 150 edits to Wikipedia in the past year, most extensively on new bios and the unspeakably hideous "alcopop" drink Zima. Starting new subjects is a lot more fun than defending existing ones from vandalism. My Drudge Retort coconspirator Jonathan Bourne and I worked on the Zima entry as ... (read more)

2006/05/04

Jason Shellen, Jake Savin Join RSS Advisory Board

The RSS Advisory Board has two new members: Jason Shellen, the product manager of Google Reader and a former strategist for the company that created Blogger, and Jake Savin, the lead developer at UserLand Software. Jason Shellen has spent three years at Google since the company acquired Blogger developer Pyra Labs. First launched in October 2005, Google Reader is a free web-based aggregator that reads Really Simple Syndication and all of the other syndication formats, supporting item sharing, ... (read more)

2006/04/24

Adam Curry Caught in Sticky Wiki

Former MTV veejay and podcasting entrepreneur Adam Curry appears to have been caught anonymously editing the podcasting entry on Wikipedia to remove credit from other people and inflate his role in its creation. When someone edits Wikipedia without logging in to a user account, the IP address is recorded to guard against abuse. Four times this year, an IP address controlled by Curry, 82.108.78.107, has made revisions involving the early history of podcasting. On Feb. 5, someone at Curry's ... (read more)

2005/12/01

In a World Where People Watch Movies

The Guardian has a great piece on how all movie trailers look alike, sound alike, begin with the words "in a world" and have the same guy doing the voiceover: ... by far the oddest practices in the world of trailers concern the music that accompanies them. Film scores tend to be completed so late in the production process that most trailer editors can't use the correct music even if they want to; normally, however, they don't. Deploying the music from a successful older film to advertise a new ... (read more)

2005/06/13

Sixth Singer Joins Podcasting Choir

Mark Pursey has become the sixth member of the Creative Commons Choir, the asynchronous podcasting singing group that's now one-sixtieth as large as the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. I'm disappointed that the music press has yet to take note of our new genre, which takes MIDI orchestral accompaniment of Dixie to a place no one could have imagined. When our choir stops growing, I will go the Jandek route and self-release this song commercially, putting all choir members one step closer to membership ... (read more)

2005/05/29

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