Tag: music

Winamp Supports Podcasts

Post ImagePodcasting News is reporting today that popular music player Winamp has added support for podcasting in their new version, 5.1:

WinAmp lets users play music and video files, features a media library, SHOUTcast radio and TV, skins, visualizations and an integrated podcast directory.

I don’t use Winamp, so the new feature doesn’t really make a difference to me. Except, it means Winamp and iTunes both support podcasts now, so it begs the question:

How long until Windows Media Player supports podcasting?

My guess is sooner rather than later.

Read: Winamp

REVIEW: Stay on My Side Tonight – Jimmy Eat World

Post ImageA quick review for today. I recently acquired the new EP from Jimmy Eat World called “Stay on My Side Tonight“, and I absolutely loved it. You’ll remember Jimmy Eat World by their huge hits “The Middle”, “Sweetness”, “Work”, and “Pain”.

This new album includes only five tracks, one of which is a remix of the song “Drugs or Me” from the Futures album. I quite liked all the songs, but the one I like the most is “Disintegration”. I just can’t get it out of my head! And not because it’s annoying or anything, but because it’s a great song – great music, great lyrics. Definitely listen to that track, I think you’ll like it.

I’ll give this album a solid 8/10, keeping in mind that it’s a shorter EP. “Stay on My Side Tonight” has been available online since September 13th, but if you’re still into purchasing music at a physical store, you can pick it up October 4th.

Read: Jimmy Eat World

REVIEW: Life In Slow Motion – David Gray

Post ImageToday’s review is for David Gray’s album titled “Life In Slow Motion“. The first single from the album is called “The One I Love”, a track you’ve probably heard on the radio. Actually I heard the song a while ago, but never caught who the artist was. This is actually David Gray’s seventh album, though it’s the first I have heard of him. From David’s website:

In a break with prior tradition Life In Slow Motion is the first of David’s albums to be recorded in a ‘full scale’ studio environment as opposed to the ‘bedroom’ sized facilities favoured in the past. This increased physical space is matched by an evolution in David’s musical aspirations.

I really enjoyed “Life In Slow Motion”. My main criticism applies to almost every album released these days – only ten tracks for a total playing time of 45 minutes is not enough! Why these artists can’t spend a few more months and crank out longer albums is beyond me.

The album itself is what I would call “slow and easy”. All of the songs are easy to listen to, easy to sing along with, and easy to get hooked on. My favorite song is probably “The One I Love”. The album is full of different instruments like a piano, an acoustic guitar, a harmonica, and others. Some other stand out songs for me are “Hospital Food”, “Ain’t No Love”, and “Nos Da Cariad”.

I would highly recommend “Life In Slow Motion” if you’re looking for some good music that is outside the normal top 40 stuff we hear everyday. I’ll give David Gray’s latest album 7/10.

Read: David Gray

MusicGiants

Post ImageI have always had two questions in the back of my mind about purchasing music online. First, how do the record labels/music stores decide what quality to encode an audio track at for sale? And secondly, how can they charge similar prices for CD’s and online music, the latter of which is generally much lower quality than a CD? Well I still don’t know the answers to those questions, but I discovered via Om Malik a new service called MusicGiants that sells high quality music:

Musicgiants, a high-def digital music download service is all set to launch on Wednesday. Billed as a download service for audiophiles, the 15-person company will offer songs that are uncompressed and are encoded using windows media technology at 1100 kbps. In comparison, Apple’s iTunes and others like Real’s Rhapsody offer music at a compression rate which is a tad lower than the CD-quality, mostly to keep the file sizes down. Musicgiants’ business model is predicated on widespread deployment of broadband and speeds which can handle the big-phat downloads. So far, the service works only on Windows PCs.

The songs cost $1.29 a download, and you have to pay $50 a year membership fee. The Nevada-based company claims its sound quality is seven times that of other download services.

I generally rip CD’s into WMA at very high quality, though not as high as MusicGiants – I guess I am a “sorta-audiophile”. I can’t really tell the difference when I play music on my computer, but I definitely can on my Zen with good earphones. MusicGiants looks like a very interesting concept, but I am not sure how well it will fly. Most people seem to be pretty happy purchasing from iTunes and others at a lower quality bitrate.

Oh and if you’re in Canada, don’t get too exicted, you currently have to live in the US to use the service.

Read: MusicGiants

REVIEW: Music of the Sun – Rihanna

Post ImageTime for the second album review this week! You’ve no doubt heard Rihanna’s first single, “Pon de Replay” on the radio or MuchMusic or something. It’s extremely catchy, and is played everywhere. Unfortunately, it’s probably the best song on the album.

Rihanna is only seventeen years old, and hails from Barbados. She’s a very attractive young woman, and she definitely has some talent, but I just couldn’t get into the album. “Music of the Sun” consists mainly of dance tracks and ballads, and the dance tracks are the better of the two. I really like “Pon de Replay”, and there’s a fairly decent remix on the album featuring Elephant Man. Other songs I kinda liked were “Let Me” which has a great hook, “If It’s It Lovin’ That You Want” (minus the weird opening) and “Rush” which is another great club track. I found the ballads to be lacking in something…they don’t seem very original. You could substitute a number of singers in Rihanna’s place for the ballads and achieve the same result.

The album isn’t bad, but it’s not great either. If I had to choose, I’d probably buy just the single and not the album. I’ll give this album 4/10.

Read: Rihanna

REVIEW: PCD – The Pussycat Dolls

Post ImageThe first of my album reviews this week is the new album “PCD” by The Pussycat Dolls, which was released on September 13th. Like most people, their first single “Don’t Cha” featuring Busta Rhymes was my first exposure to the group and I became hooked. As you can learn at Wikipedia though, the all-girl group actually has a very interesting history:

The Pussycat Dolls are a female burlesque dance troupe based in Los Angeles, as well as in Caesars Palace in Las Vegas. The group was founded by choreographer Robin Antin in 1993.

A number of celebrities have also guest-performed with the group. The dancers perform in lingerie and old-fashioned pin-up costumes and there is no nudity or explicit sex in their performances. The group has become nationally popular and has been featured in magazines, television specials for MTV and VH1, ad campaigns, and movies. Carmen Electra has been the group’s lead performer for many of these magazine articles and television appearances, and she has been featured on stage with the Pussycat Dolls most frequently of all the celebrity performers. Nicole Scherzinger (aka Nicole Kea), a former member of the American Popstars winners Eden’s Crush, has now become the group’s lead singer. Other past and present members of the group include Carmit Bachar, Cyia Batten, Kasey Campbell, Kaya Jones, Ashley Roberts, Rachel Sterling, Jessica Sutta, Melody Thornton, and Kimberly Wyatt

The list of celebrities who have performed with the group is quite impressive. So that’s the group – what about the album?

Well I can honestly say I quite enjoyed PCD; I’m still enjoying it, in fact. Stand out songs for me include “Don’t Cha”, “Beep” which features BEP’s Will.i.am, “Tainted Love/Where Did Our Love Go” which is a cover medley, and “Wait a Minute” which features Timbaland. The first single is definitely catchy, but the other songs on the album offer much more depth (and a greater variety of voices). There’s even a pretty good slow song, called “Feelin’ Good”. “Stickwitu” is another slower tune. I would have to say “Right Now” is the song I least enjoyed – it just gets kind of annoying after a while.

I’d give the album a solid 7/10. It’s a typical record label album, with only 12 tracks for a total listening time of just over 44 minutes. There are more enjoyable songs than not though, so it’s definitely an album you can listen to from start to finish without getting bored. And have you seen the video? I mean, that’s enough for me!

The Pussycat Dolls also have one of my favorite music websites. The design is clean, and simple to navigate. Most importantly, they publish both RSS and Atom feeds so you can keep up to date on the group without having to go online. I wish more music sites had that. The site does use flash, but not in a way that makes the site unusable, so I don’t mind it in this case. The best part of the website – they don’t have music playing automatically when you visit! That is the worst feature on most music sites.

Read: The Pussycat Dolls

Bronfman on Apple and Music

Post ImageWarner Music Group CEO Edgar Bronfman Jr. has publicly responded to the comments made by Apple’s CEO Steve Jobs last week. Jobs called the record labels “greedy” and pledged to keep iTunes prices at 99 cents. Mr. Bronfman made it clear he disagrees:

He called Apple’s across-the-board $0.99-per-song charge unfair.

“There’s no content that I know of that does not have variable pricing,” said Mr. Bronfman at the Goldman Sachs Communacopia investor conference. “Not all songs are created equal—not all time periods are created equal. We want, and will insist upon having, variable pricing.”

I actually agree with Mr. Bronfman on that point; I think there should be variable pricing. What I don’t think he’d agree with is a maximum price, and no minimum price. Just as some songs are worth more than 99 cents, some are worth less and so consumers shouldn’t have to pay a premium for them. I also don’t think any song should cost more than $2.49 – if you have a CD with only one good song, that’s a fair price I’d say. Most consumers don’t want to buy an entire album, just the songs they like – a model that the record industry is clearly not used to. I like to have an entire album, and the record labels prefer me to purchase an entire album, so I think if variable pricing actually comes to pass, there should be big discounts for users who purchase an entire album.

I disagree with Mr. Bronfman on the following point though:

“We are selling our songs through iPod, but we don’t have a share of iPod’s revenue,” he said. “We want to share in those revenue streams. We have to get out of the mindset that our content has promotional value only.

“We have to keep thinking how we are going to monetize our product for our shareholders,” added Mr. Bronfman. “We are the arms supplier in the device wars between Samsung, Sony, Apple, and others.”

Um, no. The record labels sell their songs through iTunes, not through the iPod. There’s no way they should get a cut of iPod sales. And to say they are the arms supplier? Hardly! People don’t buy an iPod over a Sony player because of the music. Wake up and smell the coffee Edgar!

Read: Red Herring

Where is Christina?!

Post ImageI took a couple of hours to just plant myself in front of the TV tonight, and I happened to catch VH1’s Greatest TV Moments for Christina Aguilera. I have always liked Xtina, ever since the first time I saw “Genie in a Bottle.” I vaguely remember running to get my Mom to come watch the TV when the video came on, telling her that Christina was gonna make it big – she thought it was funny and no doubt chalked it up to simple teenage infatuation (Christina is three years and ten days older than me). But I was right! (Yes, I also liked Britney, but she’s a little crazy now for my tastes…Christina is much more real.)

Anyway, thats why I am wondering, where is Christina!? Her last album came out in October of 2002! I think it’s time for a new album Christina! I also wish her website had an RSS feed. I hate signing up for mailing lists, because the messages almost always get filtered as spam and I get enough email now as it is. I’d much rather subscribe to a news feed in my aggregator.

Just another way the record industry snubs technology I suppose.

Read: Christina Aguilera

iPod Nano Reviews

Post ImageOf course, one of the bigger announcements over the last week was the unveiling of the latest member of the iPod family, affectionately named “Nano”. Engadget today posted a “review roundup“, so that you can better make a decision on whether or not to buy one:

You probably already have a pretty good idea by now whether or not you’re going to break down and spring for an iPod nano, but on the off-chance that you haven’t made up your mind yet we figured we’d throw together a roundup of reviews. Most are, well, rather gushing, but if you dig around you’ll find a few valid criticisms, like that Apple was forced to put the headphone jack at the bottom of the player to make room for the display up top.

The device does look pretty damn cool, but a couple things bother me. One is that note about the headphone jack being at the bottom – it would be so much cooler if the Nano featured bluetooth and just connected wirelessly to a pair of headphones. Another thing is the battery life. iPod’s aren’t known for their impressive battery life, and the Nano claims to get only 14 hours. My 20 GB Zen Touch can run for days without getting charged, and it often does as I use it my car, granted it is quite a bit larger.

Read: Engadget

Amazon.com to open digital music store?

Post ImageRight now this is speculation at best, but Amazon.com appears to be readying a digital music service to compete with iTunes, among others. Honestly, I am surprised it is taking so long. The world’s largest marketplace, and yet no music service.

Ecommerce giant Amazon.com appears to be preparing a digital music service to compete with Apple Computer’s iTunes at last, according to a job listing posted on a popular industry blog.

The company has not publicly said that it intends to launch a full-fledged digital music offering. However, several music industry executives confirmed Thursday that the company has been actively discussing plans to enter the market for several months, including proposals for a subscription-based service.

They probably won’t support Canada at launch, so don’t get your hopes up if you’re north of the border like me.

Read: CNET News.com