I haven’t ever bought one song through iTunes - and it’s because of their stupid DRM (Digital Rights Management) which controlled where you could play that music you bought. That might be changing now as Apple announced at MacWorld (though I heard it through ReadWriteWeb) that they will be offering the 10 million songs in the iTunes store without the onerous restrictions. They will even offer re-downloads of songs you may have already purchased (at high quality) without it. There have been many times that I wanted to grab something off iTunes but refused to do so on principal (and because I have Linux machines that I wouldn’t have been able to listen to the stuff on afterward) and I’m happy to see Apple has finally gotten bold enough to stand up to the record companies on this issue.

As folks who read this blog know, I’m always checking out new ways to access, sort through, catalog, and otherwise enjoy my music files. As a long time Mac user (at least since they dumped their old OS and started using BSD), iTunes has really been the slickest, easiest to use and most fully functional music player available to me. But Apple’s incessant attempts to impose more ingenious and arguably ever more diabolical forms of their DRM (digital rights management) upon me in order to limit what I can do with my own music have basically forced me into an as-yet unending search for a better, free and open solution.
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A form of addiction just sucked two hours of my life away. Now that I have all my music collected together in one place (I didn’t have room on the old machine for both the music and anything else), I’ve set about the monumental task of correcting all the ID3 tags and adding cover art to the files, filling in the missing information, etc. It is a task that is both tedious and exhilarating at the same time.
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Earlier last year I posted here that if you like playing music on your computer that you should check out Songbird. It’s been a long time since then, and the folks at Pioneers of the Inevitable have been hard at work “working on creating a non-proprietary, cross platform, extensible tool that will help enable new ways to playback, manage, and discover music”. It’s an open source iTunes based on Mozilla code (Firefox), and if you haven’t tried it in a while, nows the time as they have finally released version 1.0. I’ve been using Amarok lately on my Ubuntu desktop at work so Songbird is going to be a tough sell for me. My Amarok uses a MySQL database to store all the song info so searches and sorts are incredibly fast - I don’t know if Songbird has a similar integration or not. I know that Songbird is missing some other stuff I dig about Amarok, but since I can’t run Amarok on the Mac (yet), and have been forced into using iTunes (which I don’t really like) Songbird is looking more like a viable alternative. Watch the intro videos or read on for more info that I’ll try to update as I use the program.

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This just in - thanks to Karl H:

NEW YORK—In a stunning reversal of their long-stated reluctance to take it, members of heavy-metal band Twisted Sister announced Monday that, after 24 years of fervent refusal, they are now willing to take it. “I acknowledge that we promised not to take it anymore, but things change. The world is a different place today, and with that in mind, we would like to go on record as saying that, starting right now, we are going to take it,” read a statement released by the band’s lead singer, Dee Snider. “To clarify, we would still prefer not to take it, but as of now, taking it is an option that we would be open to. That is all.” Bassist Mark “the Animal” Mendoza also stated that, in regards to what he wants to do with his life, he no longer solely wants to rock, but would instead prefer doing other things, such as raising a family and working as a claims adjuster in Rye, NY.

I felt old. Most of the people at the show had big black X’s on their forearms indicating they weren’t old enough to buy the beer and liquor which was still flowing pretty freely at the two bars at Terminal 5. My wrist was decked in the coveted blue band, but I only bought one round. None of us wanted to leave the rail and possibly lose our place in the front along the gate - we had gotten there early and camped out on the left side of the stage.
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Thanks to Ned for turning me on to the following (new to me) Built to Spill video for the song Conventional Wisdom from their 2006 You in Reverse album. Incredibly groovy guitar soundscapes are complimented by an awesome Jousting presentation with American Jousting Alliance’s founder James Zoppe, the Red Knight and the band.