Top 10 Records Of 2009

I favorited a YouTube video -- DE STAAT live: I am here to lose control

Annie Leibovitz American Music

n the art forms you are experienced or well versed in, what kinds of stuff is notorious for being only liked by the experts, and what kinds of stuff is notorious for only being liked by less experienced or educated casual consumers? -- In photography, Lee Friedlander and Garry Winogrand are hailed as masters by those well-versed in the medium. Whereas Ansel Adams or Annie Liebowitz are popular with the masses and often derided by the cognoscenti (though I happen to like all four of them).

Track how millions of fans interact with online music everyday.

Reading a newspaper, I saw a picture of birds on the electric wires. I cut out the photo and decided to make a song, using the exact location of the birds as notes (no Photoshop edit). I knew it wasn't the most original idea in the universe. I was just curious to hear what melody the birds were creating. I sent the music to the photographer, Paulo Pinto, who I Googled on the internet. He told his editor, who told a reporter and the story ended up as an interview in the very same newspaper. Here I've posted a short video made with the photo, the music and the score (composed by the birds).

FLAC stands for Free Lossless Audio Codec, an audio format similar to MP3, but lossless, meaning that audio is compressed in FLAC without any loss in quality. This is similar to how Zip works, except with FLAC you will get much better compression because it is designed specifically for audio, and you can play back compressed FLAC files in your favorite player (or your car or home stereo, see supported devices) just like you would an MP3 file. FLAC stands out as the fastest and most widely supported lossless audio codec, and the only one that at once is non-proprietary, is unencumbered by patents, has an open-source reference implementation, has a well documented format and API, and has several other independent implementations.

Dutch DJ Tiësto's fourth studio album Kaleidoscope comes with a variety of collaborative vocal guests spots including Jónsi of Sigur Rós, Kele of Bloc Party, Nelly Furtado, Calvin Harris, Emily Haines, and Tegan & Sara. He explains the logjam: The starting point was to work with different artists that I liked. It was as simple as that. Sigur Rós make beautiful music. Bloc Party are fantastic and exciting and innovative. But the hardest thing initially was to get those kind of people to collaborate. They don't work with dance artists as a rule, and especially not a dance DJ, but when we started producing these tracks, I was surprised at how well the styles work together. The first collaboration took place a year ago or so with T&S.

This great data visualisation from the NY Times comes to us via a really fascinating website called Information is Beautiful. It represents the sales in billions of today’s dollars of the various music formats over time.

If you’re like most people these days, you’ve probably got a lot of music on your computer — whether from your own CD library, or downloaded from Amazon, iTunes, or (ahem) elsewhere. But if the only thing you’re doing with your music collection is listening to it, you’re missing out. There are a large number of web applications devoted to helping you get more from the music you already have.

Recorded in Los Angeles, New York City, and Macau, vosotros teams up with long-time collaborator Sam Barsh to create a musical journey through time.

Breaking new ground in hand-held music technology, Loopy is a sophisticated loop-based musical scratchpad and performance instrument. It’s also an easy to use, beautiful yet powerful recording studio. No musical ability required!

A friend commented recently that she doesn't understand why people put up with such poor sound quality for phone calls on cell phones, and particularly iPhones. "I can hardly hear the person talking to me," she said. "I don't think smart phones are making any improvement to the quality of the phone call," she added. "Is it not important anymore?" She wondered why people accepted such poor quality, and so did Jonathan Berger, but a lot of people just don't hear it the same way.

The live music archive for Death Cab for Cutie at the Internet Archive.

PodWorks is a Mac OS X application that compensates for the iPod's only downside: Apple only allows you to copy songs to your iPod. If you have two Macs and want to use your iPod to transfer music from one to the other, or you only store your music and videos on your iPod and need to copy them back onto your hard drive after a disk failure, you are out of luck! This is where PodWorks comes in: it allows you to copy songs and videos from any iPod or iPhone to any Mac running OS X 10.4 or higher.

Surveys iTunes for tracks whose files are no longer available (as indicated by a "!" next to their names) and removes them. Any playlists that subsequently contain no tracks will then be deleted. Progress is displayed every 500 tracks.

For some time I have been looking for ways to add tags to iTunes. It seems that the Grouping option in iTunes is able to make this work.

Maar hoe verhoudt dit album zich tot het eerdere werk van Folds? Voorganger Songs For Silverman - uit 2005 alweer! - vond ik een hoogtepunt in Folds' oeuvre en daar komt 'ie met dit album eerlijk gezegd niet overheen. Dat wil echter niet zeggen dat Way To Normal een tegenvaller is. Integendeel. Met het eerder genoemde "You Don't Know Me" en het fraaie "Cologne" staan er geheide livekrakers op en het algehele niveau is onverminderd hoog.

Ocarina is the first true musical instrument created for the iPhone.

Unlock your iPod with Senuti, a simple application that allows you to transfer songs from your iPod to your computer.

I wrote a post back in April called ‘Should I Be Worried About Piracy?‘, to which my answer was, in a nutshell, “no”. This was meant to be a bit of a controversial post, though at the time I didn’t get much of the flak that I was bracing myself for. So I figured that most people saw the sense of it. I even had some good feedback about it elsewhere. But today, I received a passionate and very angry comment on that post - and it highlights some important issues and it raises some things that are both emotionally charged and based in the world of real, day-to-day economics.

Decibel Audio Player is a GTK+ open-source (GPL license) audio player designed for GNU/Linux, which aims at being very straightforward to use by mean of a very clean and user friendly interface.

Yet Another FLAC to MP3 script

Never miss a hot track again. Peel is an MP3 blog reader and player rolled into one. Subscribe and stream music the minute it becomes available!

We’re the best home on the web for your band’s music.

Het voormalige Nighttown aan de West-Kruiskade is getransformeerd tot een duurzaam pop/cultureel podium en danceclub Watt. De eerste Sustainable Dance Club ter wereld heeft duurzame features zoals een energieopwekkende dansvloer, relax roof en zero-waste bars.

Opentape is a free, open-source package that lets you make and host your own mixtapes on the web. Upload songs (via web or FTP), reorder, rename, customize the style, and share what you like on other sites with an embeddable player.

The following script takes the 20 top artists in your musical profile from Last.fm, and finds the collection of top 5 similar artists for this top 20. The resulting is a list of artists similar to your preferred artists. As the list is larger (maximum = 100), your musical preference is more diverse.

Yesterday at the Yahoo! Developer Network Blog Jim Bumgardner, a front-end engineer and “Yahoo! Music Nerd,” announced the release of the Yahoo! Music API:

Site of the band The Postal Service.

Project Neon is the codename for an Amarok internal all mighty project, aiming to provide nightly binary packages of the most recent Amarok code base. It makes the current development easily available for everyone.

Widgets e.d. van 3voor12. Leuk!

Over the past decade and a half, a revolution in recording technology has changed the way albums are produced, mixed and mastered — almost always for the worse. "They make it loud to get [listeners'] attention," Bendeth says. Engineers do that by applyi

CDs are fine things for listening to and archiving, but they're bulky. Think of all the shelf space you could free up if that digital music resided on one little hard drive rather than hundreds of boxed-up plastic discs. It's a commitment, but putting all

If you have any mp3 playing device that does not register itself as a music player, but as a usb-disc, you can use this trick under Linux to get your mp3 player working with rhythmbox

A plugin for the Rhythmbox music player that shows recommended artists based on the track you are currently listening to. Inspired by Banshee's recommendation feature.

Play is an application for playing and managing audio files.

Tag is a metadata editor for FLAC, Ogg Vorbis, Monkey's Audio and WavPack files.

Max is an application for creating high-quality audio files in various formats, from compact discs or files.

guitar tabs, guitar chords and lyrics

Great to see a large public broadcaster provide Ogg streams!

To blame all the woes of the music industry on illegal downloads is poppycock. It's time for some new thinking

“Common sense tells me that the maximum penalty for transmitting an MP3 file should not be over 1000-fold the maximum penalty of shoplifting a CD from a store.”

a documentary about the current state of copyright and culture

Mirage is a ready-to-try implementation of the latest research in automatic playlist generation and music similarity. Mirage analyzes your music collection and computes similarity models for each song. After your music has been analyzed, Mirage is able to

Jinzora enables you to stream your digital music and videos to any internet connected computer using a web browser.

The Hype Machine follows music blog discussion. Every day, hundreds of people around the world write about music they love. Then it all ends up here.

De muzieksite.

Magazine over media.

Amie Street is the most fun way to discover and buy music online because we have a social network that facilitates music discovery and because we price music right - all songs start free and rise in price the more they are purchased. Our dynamic prices al

Nrc Next had gisteren een interessant artikel over de muziekindustrie en een actie van popmuzikant Prince, die zijn laatste cd gratis weggeeft aan de bezoekers van zijn 21 concerten in Londen.

At Neuros, our unique commitment to open-source product development allows our users to be active participants in making our digital media devices the best in the world.

Google is better than Limewire for downloading Music mp3s dl