I've been using the free version for a week. My initial impressions:
The awesome:
It feels a lot like iTunes, except you don't have to pay for anything. This is sounds boring, but it's actually amazing.
The catalog is really deep. Lots of both indie and major label music.
It's got a Pandora-like "radio station" option, in case you like that (I do).
The ads are not nearly as annoying as I expected.
The not-so-awesome:
There's no web component. If you want to listen at work, or on a friend's computer, you have to download the Spotify player and install it there. Gack. Likewise, if you want to share a track with your friends, they must have Spotify to listen. Double gack.
The ads are still annoying, especially in the wrong context. I don't want to hear a clip from the latest Pitbull track in the middle of listening to R.E.M.
Tons of missing artwork and info, especially for indie music. I swear there's a business opportunity here to compete with AllMusic and Gracenote by actually doing the work they fail to do.
You also still can't find The Beatles, Zeppelin or Pink Floyd. They (the copyright owners and publishers) want you to buy that stuff.
John Mayer 2011 Clinic – “Manage the Temptation to Publish Yourself” – Berklee Blogs. - John Mayer's presentation at Berklee is pretty great. The first half focuses on how social media has become an addictive replacement for actual work -- Mayer tells the audience how he eventually had to swear off Twitter when his obsession with writing clever tweets started to eclipse his songwriting. I recently wrote that social media seema to fill mental gaps and Mayer's story sounds similar, except he's all famous and stuff.
How to Hook Up Heads and Cabinets - simple primer on understanding Ohms and how they relate to wattage pumped from amps to speaker cabs. Took me awhile to wrap my head around why more cabs results in less impedance.
Seth's Blog: "It will be good exposure". - Good thoughts on the balancing act of working for payment and working for free in exchange for credibility, goodwill and other intangibles.
...a.k.a. a collaborative songwriting effort by Jerin Falkner and myself.
We don't even have a proper website or mailing list yet, but we do have a Facebook page which we hope you will check out. We also have one other thing: a live show! We'll be performing live without a net, test-driving our co-written musical wares for a lucky audience at 9pm on August 6th at Egan's Ballard Jamhouse here in Seattle. Here's the Facebook event.
If you're thinking about checking out the show, we recommend calling or emailing the venue for reservations. Admission is $5. Seating at Egan's is limited and this show is highly likely to sell out.
More good stuff -- including, we hope, a record! -- to follow as the year rolls on.
I recently got re-acquainted with Jarod Watson at a Kirby Krackle show this past spring. Jarod used to show up with taper equipment at my shows (and others like Everyday Jones and Flowmotion) and record full sets for the Internet Archive. A few days ago he posted an IA link to a show I did at the Borders in Redmond in 2005. Wow. Listening to these sets is pretty surreal.
Jarod's actually posted four different shows, all from 2005. Lots of FLAC and Ogg formats, coffee grinders and evidence of my brief foray into live looping.
I haven't listened to everything here, but my favorite so far? This:
Scott Andrew, "Secret World" (live, Peter Gabriel cover)
State-of-the-art geek rock. Sort of like Megadeth except we're not speed metal and we have songs about Transformers. So, nothing like Megadeth actually.
We're going to be debuting the record at a live show at the San Diego Comic Con in just a few weeks, but until then you can feast your ears on the title track:
The new Kirby Krackle album is far from finished but the rhythm section can now enjoy a cigar. Yesterday, Nelson and I went into Don's studio in Shoreline and cut the drum and bass tracks for the entire album. Thirteen songs, nine hours, one lunch break. Kyle was there to provide a guide vocal and guitar accompaniment.
I'm tired.
The new album should be ready to go by the time the San Diego Comic Con rolls around in July.
We start recording the third KK record just five days from today. Zoinks!
Posted May 31, 2011
How ridiculous is it that I'm about to write an entire post about a Gateway computer I bought in 1998, complete with uninteresting photo of the aforementioned nondescript beige box? Extremely ridiculous, that's how ridiculous.
Have I ever mentioned that I made it through five years of college without ever having an email address? In fact, I barely touched a computer except to write papers for school. This despite teaching myself BASIC programming while a teenager on an Atari 800. I was pretty good at it, but I never considered any sort of career in computers because of all that math. I hated math and it hated me back. That's another post in itself.
Over a decade later I got my first dot-com job at the only dot-com worth working at in Cleveland. I knew I had to make up for lost time, because nearly everything I knew that got me that job was basically linked to aptitude rather than skill. So I purchased a Gateway G-350 with an employee discount. My first real PC. Windows 98 -- pre-installed! The very first thing I did was mess up the startup config. Phone support talked me through the fix.
I learned so much with that computer. Mostly HTML/CSS, Perl and Apache. I wrote a lot of terrible code that would horrify anyone who actually knew how to write good code. Many, many late nights. I also learned JavaScript, which led to an obsession with DHTML and web standards, which led me to start a blog, which led to to a brief-but-glorious tech writing career, a bunch of code and a number of opportunities that landed me in Seattle where I am today. Much of my contributions to the ill-fated DHTML Bible book were written at that computer.
I also learned how to record audio! The first versions of Gravel Road Requiem and Cast The Net Wide were recorded using that same machine. Some of that original audio is still in the final versions. I did most of the artwork with Photoshop and the GIMP there, too.
Eventually that computer became a web-surfing and email-reading device. Now running Win2K, it was just too slow to do anything else. My phone has more processing power. Last week, after I'd discovered that it had been over a year since I'd last booted the thing, I decided it was probably time to find new homes for the beige boxes taking up our floorspace.
Over the weekend I backed up the entire contents of the hard drive -- almost 13 years of work -- to a 1TB external drive the size of a small pork chop. Then I removed and shelved the original hard drive and loaded the now-brainless PC along with my wife's old PC (purchased around the same time, except she got a better deal on a G-460) into the car and took it to the local recycling center.
If this all seems overly wistful, you should know that I'm the type of person who has to make one last pass through the empty apartment to say goodbye to the linoleum. But it's no different than bidding farewell to your first car or your first home. Our relationships with people are rightfully elevated, but things can be important too, especially when they mark a waypoint in our lives.
So yeah, I was sad when I placed them on the PLEASE PLACE RECYCLED ITEMS HERE cart inside the entrance. They probably won't find much use for its 350MHz Celeron processor, outdated RAM and stock A/V cards.
We had a good run, ol' buddy. Thanks for everything.
I've been using the free version for a week. My initial impressions:
