8BitKid: Living Bit by Bit

For those that don’t know the Swedish techno sensation, Basshunter, check out this Wikipedia entry.  He tore up the charts with his thumping, incredibly geeky hits.  The first I’m sharing is “DotA”, a song about the custom Warcraft III game, “Death of the Ancients”.  Anyone who has a song referencing Ventrilo is okay by me.

Howdy all. Today and tomorrow I find myself in San Francisco for the Web 2.0 Expo peddling my wares. I don’t have much time to write something awe-inspiring, but to keep my 1-post-per-day pace I’d like to share with you this interesting combination of fonts and Dylan.

- click here to watch “typo_dylan”

Jeff Mangum, one of the founders of the Elephant Six Collective and the man behind Neutral Milk Hotel, has been somewhat off the radar since the band dissolved. However, just because he stepped out of the limelight it doesn’t mean that he hasn’t been busy.

One interesting side-project is the series of radio shows featuring mostly experimental music that he hosted on the excellent independent radio station, WFMU. You can find the archives here: http://wfmu.org/playlists/MU

For the intrepid “Neutral Milk Hotel” fans, you can purchase CD’s of the shows here (thanks to my brother for the link): http://neutralmilkhotel.org/wfmu.htm

Also, Mangum is the man behind the “Major Organ and the Adding Machine” project, featuring members of Elf Power, Olivia Tremor Control, Neutral Milk Hotel, Of Montreal, that put out an album on the Orange Twin label. They are gearing up for a film, and you can find the zany trailer below.

- audio courtesy of MFR

Songbird is an open-source media jukebox from the Mozilla Foundation (the people who brought you Firefox). The Songbird team recently released version 0.5 of their player, and I got a chance last night to test it out.

On first glance, you may think that you have just launched a reskinned iTunes that favors a darker color palate. However, there is a great deal more going on under the surface. Songbird does an excellent job of easily importing your existing iTunes library file to make the transition seamless. Once this is completed and you start digging deeper into the application, you begin to discover what truly sets Songbird apart.

First off, the developers have implemented a plugin system similar to Firefox. You can search for and install a variety of plugins to enable a host of functionality like album art, iPod compatibility, and more. This really opens the floodgates to innovation by providing a flexible music player platform.

Additionally, Songbird integrates with music on the web through a tightly integrated browser. I was able to create a playlist, search for a song on The Hype Machine, see not only the page in the browser but also all of the media present on the page in a search results pane, add the song to a playlist, and play it back as if it was locally stored. This notion of having a distributed music library is a phenomenal twist on music management. Now I can scour the web through Songbird for free tunes, add them to a playlist, and now have my music collection stored in the data cloud of the internet. However, this is all contingent on the user having a network connection to work, but Songbird provides an easy method to purchase discovered tracks from Amazon, Amie St., or iTunes.

Songbird has grown a tremendous amount since I first started playing with it back in the 0.1 days. It still has growing up to do, but this build shows the direction the team is taking the product, and it is great to see how well it is maturing. While I am not ready to ditch my iTunes marriage yet, I am starting to be seriously tempted.

- click here to download Songbird 0.5

As I was leaving the office the other day I was perusing the radio and stumbled across this excellent playlist courtesy of Santa Clara University’s KSCU. It was an incredibly spot-on selection given my mood, and really made the afternoon commute enjoyable. Many thanks to the DJ who exerted excellent taste and also played my request. Below is the snippet of the set recreated from memory (DJ, please feel free to correct me).

Elliott Smith: Rose Parade (thankscaptainobvious.net)
Jose Gonzales: Heartbeats
The Mountain Goats: No Children (my request)
Belle & Sebastian: Wrapped Up in Books (vaguespace.net)
Jens Lekman: Your Arms Around Me (bestfootforward.info)

Well, the Jens Lekman song might have actually been different. That was the point at which I got out of range of the station and the fuzziness forced me to switch the dial…

Shortly thereafter I found myself in the Haight-Ashbury area and felt inspired to swing by the Amoeba Music in San Francisco. While there I picked up two new albums. Check out songs from each below:

The Russian Futurists - Paul Simon, from “Our Thickness” (herohill.com)
Saturday Looks Good to Me - The Americans, from “Fill Up the Room”

If you just upgraded to Safari 3.1, you may have noticed that the Yahoo! Media Player is crashing the browser. This is due to a change in the latest version of Safari, and is being addressed and should be fixed ASAP (EDIT: this problem was fixed and pushed to the stable build as Wednesday afternoon, 3/19).

In the meantime, if you try to deactivate the current plugin (v0.3), you may encounter a problem. This is a non-fatal error, and your admin panel should return to normal through just hitting the “back” button on your browser. However, I have found and corrected the bug, so please download and install the new version.

- Download the Yahoo! Media Player Wordpress Plugin v0.4 with bug fix

This is a classic video of someone miming Natalie Imbruglia’s “Torn” lyric-by-lyric at an Amensty International event.  Keep watching, because there will be a twist, and then yet another twist.

If you haven’t noticed, there is a music player integrated into this site. It creates those small play buttons next to each mp3 links (such as for this incredibly amazing song), and also creates the player in the bottom-left corner of the screen. If you want to see a richer demo, play with my music posts category. This player is a free piece of software available courtesy of Yahoo!. While they have already done an excellent job of making the player easy to integrate into a site, I decided to test my coding chops and make a plugin for the Wordpress blogging platform (the one that this site uses) to make it even easier to install and manage.

I recently had some free time to work on the plugin, and it now is up to version 0.3. I have completely rewritten the plugin, and added some functionality. There is now an “options” pane that will allow you to turn on the “beta” build of the player, so to speak, so you can test the new features coming down the pipe.

Also, I must disclose that while I am a Yahoo! employee, I work on this in my free time since I love the utility, am a big music fan, and needed a cool coding project. Please play around with this latest version and pass along any feedback.

Download: Yahoo! Media Player Wordpress plugin v0.3

Last night I went to see “The Mountain Goats” play at the Troubadour in LA. “The Mountain Goats” is really the stage moniker for John Darnielle, whose musical catalogue is rich with autobiographical tales. His songs travel through those universally-wandered emotional roads of divorce, heartache, hope, and the secret desire to have aliens kill all of your friends. This is the second time I have been lucky enough to see him live, the first being at last year’s South by Southwest.

The Troubadour is an intimate venue, which complemented Darnielle’s personal style well. His shows foster a feeling of community. At one point he confessed that he was going to play a song he hadn’t rehearsed because he knew it was the right one for the moment. Mid-way through he forgot the next line and turned to the audience for help. A fan quickly fed him the lyrics, and he continued strumming on. This is the kind of trust that he places in the crowd; he creates the feeling that the concert-goers are sharing in his catharsis. I left the show uplifted, overcome with a feeling of togetherness and a general air of happiness that comes with knowing that one has experienced something unique. Perhaps this is cliche, but again, that communal joy is why I go see live music.

For the second encore, Darnielle played this song:
The Mountain Goats - “This Year” (from The Sunset Tree)

I thought it would be great to have a Mac Mini hooked up to my TV so I could have “Front Row” on the big screen. Well, this turned out to be a more complex (and more expensive) project then I had originally imagined.

After getting the Mini, the first thing I did was snag the right cables and accessories. This included a DVI <–> HDMI cable, the Apple wireless keyboard, and the Apple Mighty Mouse. With these gizmo’s, I was ready to enjoy some couch-browsing. This is when the first problem arose. I realized I was out of HDMI ports. This problem was compounded by the fact that my receiver doesn’t handle HDMI switching and was out of digital inputs. After a great deal of searching, I found a company called “Octava” that makes this wonderful product. The fantastic thing about their HDMI switcher is that it switches digital-optical signals as well. I ordered one immediately.

After the switch I arrived I got everything hooked up and was ready to rock. Actually, I wasn’t. You see, the DVI-to-HDMI setup was causing severe overscan issues (where the pixels extend out of the visible area of the screen). In order to correct the overscan, I had to spend way too many hours tweaking with SwitchResX. I finally found a custom set of settings that corrected most of the overscan. Alright, so now I was ready to sit back and enjoy some quality Front Row time.

Read the rest of this entry »