A story on TechCrunch notes that Yahoo has released some code for their new browser based flash media player. While I don’t see a personal need to use their player when there are already so many perfectly good flash media players available, I can’t help but try it out. If it’s easier than installing the typical player or fiddling with a nifty module in blog software, maybe people will post more music! In fact, maybe I’ll start a real podcast one of these days…

I’ve linked a couple instrumental ditties below that I recorded on my Guitar Lute [image page] that were thrown up here on my private podcast recently. They aren’t perfect, but they were done
Spagnoletta
Minuet in Em

You should see a little grey player icon next to each mp3 link if you want to try the player. Otherwise, you can just click the direct link. [update: It doesn't seem to work in Opera, though is OK in Firefox, Safari, and IE]

This is a promo video of one of my favorite bands, Steel Eye Span from 1975. These guys were really popular in England, playing mainly traditional tunes, electrified. Along with Fairport Convention (with Dave Pegg from Jethro Tull) they were part of the British Folk revival of the 70s. This was one of their bigger hits, though not my favorite, still pretty good though. Maddy Prior is basically a folk icon.

Back when you could be in a band and not be a model.

I use Windows XP Pro at work, and I like to play music whenever I’m actually at my desk. There are a lot of different programs to choose from that can play my collection of MP3s, and I’ve used a lot of them over time. I used to use Winamp exclusively (see old story on this site), but their advertising gimmicks through via internet since they were purchased by AOL is annoying to say the least, and I never liked the playlist management in Winamp. Recent versions of Winamp added a ‘media library’ window sort of like what iTunes has, but yet another window floating around (Winamp already had three if you count the player, the equalizer, and the playlist thing) was just the last straw. I’ve used iTunes for several years now, mainly because that’s what I used on the Mac, more than out of any real thought that it was superior in some way. As software goes, it certainly *is* superior - and in many ways, but that’s not really the point of this post! For all iTunes really good points, it has some major detractions for me. It’s a big, bloated program for one, gobbling up many megabytes of my precious Ram. It’s also a bit of a CPU hog (though it’s really not all that bad considering the power it gives you to manipulate your music in real time (the party shuffle is one of my favorite pieces of iTunes). iTunes makes it very easy to work with MP3 tags as well, but more on that later.

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I’m an old Black Sabbath fan. War Pigs is one my favorite Sabbath tunes, and here’s a great cover by another awesome band, Cake with some appropriate film footage to boot. No Tony Iommi solo, but still worth a watch, IMHO.

Update March 6: Had another great time up at the Checkmate this month! Updated image.

I play Irish and Celtic music for fun. For about a year now I’ve been getting together pretty regularly with a friend to practice at least once a week. Occasionally we’ll cruise out to another friends’ place for a session (Seisiún) with some more folks, and once in a while we’ll take a field trip to see a band play. It’s always a learning experience - as a teacher once told me when I was taking my education classes, “after this class, you’ll never take a boring class again. Even if you’re not interested in the subject matter, you’ll be analyzing the teacher’s technique.” For almost a year I’ve been making half-hearted plans to run up to see…

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I heard a great interview this morning on WUSB (90.1 Stony Brook, NY - wusb.fm) on the Cheap Thrills show with Timothy Sellers of Artichoke, The Band. It was a great interview and Timothy is a really interesting (or perhaps a more apt description might be ‘interested’) guy, but the really cool part is that his latest album is a reinterpretation of the classic 1977 Sex Pistols album Never Mind the Bullocks. What’s great about it is that the ‘wretched sentiment’ (as Rosanne described it) of most of that album is presented in a totally un-offensive way, a purposeful contrast according to Tim. Investigating Artichoke a bit more you’ll find Tim’s previous album, “26 Scientists, Volume One Anning-Malthus” which seems equally interesting because each song is about a different famous scientist!

If you listen to a lot of music on the computer, listen up. I’ve tried a ton of music player apps over the years, and while my most recent favorite to date is Amarok, I can’t run it (without a lot of work in fink) on the Mac yet. I’ve been using iTunes long enough to understand it’s strange non-intuitive idiosyncrasies to the point that I actually enjoy using it. But whenever a comparable open source project comes along (especially if it uses Mozilla code) I have to check it out asap. Songbird is a ‘mash-up‘ of a browser and a music player. Whether it will get popular or not remains to be seen, but it does change the way you experience new music.

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