Sunday, September 8, 2002

"La bele Marie - Songs to the Virgin from 13th century France" is currently playing in the iPod. Yet another of many from Anonymous 4 (Harmonia Mundi 907312 ). The Catholic Church has found it necessary to suppress the influence of the Cult of the Virgin Mary over the years. Mary worship has overshadowed worship of the deity at certain times and the Gothic era in Western Europe seems to be a good example (Notre-Dame is a good example of a non-trivial offering. This is absolutely wonderful stuff! WNYC had an interview with the group recently and noted the upcoming release of some traditional Celtic Yule and British Christmas music. They performed a few samples and it appears that this will be a very desirable album. Classical music now occupies a tiny fraction of total US music sales (well under one percent). There was a burst to a few percent when CDs were still novel and people were building their collections, but only a few niches of the genre are doing well (Anonymous 4 are considered classical superstars). One can construct several scenarios that might increase the probability of survival, but the details are in implementation. It is sobering to note that a single semi-talented singer/stripper is more important to the market than all of classical music. 12:16:43 AM     Going back to iPods ... Several readers (at least four) are iPod users, so a link to a good iPod page seems appropriate. http://www.ipodlounge.com/ Last night the checkout clerk at our local A&P noticed that I was wearing my iPod. I was the only person in line and he really wanted to play with it. As I was showing him the interface, two other teenagers came over for a look. The product recognition of iPods seems to be extremely high in this group, but few of them had actually touched the hardware. The misinformation is also high. One of the teenagers had heard folklore that these only work on Macs (not true, but the experience on a Mac is much more transparent) and that they were "about a thousand dollars" (again not true - $300 and units can be had for about $240 these days for a refurbished 5 GB iPod ... Small Dog Electronics if you have a pressing need). All of them were covetous of the little white music box. 12:16:27 AM     Norm notes a very cute attempt to rip vinyl records via a scanner (from /.) http://www.cs.huji.ac.il/~springer/ There are several reasons why this guy's attempt has problems, but the idea is very cute. This prompted a discussion about storage life as a function of media (vinyl is probably better than early CDs). Compiling a list is great sport, although it is difficult to come by hard data. Good low acid paper will easily go a millennium given good storage conditions, but magnetic tape can have serious problems in as little as a decade or two. Compact discs are better than those that were made in the 80s, but squeezing 100 years out of them may be difficult. CD-Rs and CD-RW seem to be much worse. There is some evidence that ten years may see serious corruption. When people are interviewed after disasters they usually mention their relief to save three things - family, pets and photos. Photos can certainly last on the order of a few hundred years given good conditions (and the right choice of film), but some of the paper/ink combination used in inkjet printers are awful after a couple of years (I speak from experience). How should one store documents and photos for a few generations? How about ten or twenty generations? If the documents are digital files, how should they be moved, backed up and converted? These are very interesting and non-trivial problems. 12:16:12 AM     Greg points out the very unusual site tint.de. Every now and again one runs into places with quite a bit of art content - content so brimming that it spills over into the user interface making life interesting (California lomo is an example on this page). The recommended to is e .. loads of amusement. For what its worth the Mac version does not work in OS X, but comes up fine in Classic. http://www.tint.de/ 12:15:54 AM     Continuing the strangely cool theme we note that IBM created an interesting interface for Phillip Glass music. The quantization of the pieces leaves much to be desired, but it is good fun. http://www.philipglass.com/glassengine/ 12:15:36 AM     So let's say you have a few hundred CDs you want to get rid of - rather than have them languish in some corner why not turn them into a bit of cash. The cash can be used to get someone else's used CDs. Of course the RIAA doesn't want you doing this as RIAA-fearing folks are supposed to buy new plastic to keep the money flowing in the right direction. If you don't have a good second hand CD store in your area, give secondspin a try. The trick with this place is to use cheap shipping and buy many titles at once. http://www.secondspin.com I haven't tried the CD Exchange, but know someone who is a satisfied regular user. Their selection seems more limited, but the overall price on some items may be better. http://www.thecdexchange.com/ And of course there is eBay... In New Jersey I recommend the Princeton Record Exchange on South Tulane across from the University. Any major city should have a store or two. Of course this raises issues with digital jukeboxes like it did with cassette tapes. 12:15:15 AM

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