Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

Carrie’s books | Carrie’s band

Category: Music

Gratuitous Girls Aloud references

  • iTunes Match: get a better music library for £21.99

    iTunes Match, Apple’s music-in-the-cloud service, is very good – but it’s worth a look even if you don’t want or need cloud-based music. For your £21.99 you get two things: a backup of your entire music library (more than 10,000 songs, in my case, saving me the hassle of getting a bigger backup disk) and an upgrade for all your low bitrate music.

    If you’re anything like me you’ve been ripping CDs and buying downloads for years, and back in the day file sizes mattered – so you’d rip at, say, 160Kbps to get as much music as possible on your player. Now, though, space isn’t the issue it used to be, and if you listen on good speakers or good headphones you can hear the flaws.

    The problem is that actually re-ripping all that music (assuming you still have the CDs) is an enormous job: as of yesterday I had 6,500 songs at lower bitrates.

    That’s where iTunes Match comes in. It takes a while, but it works brilliantly.  Jason Snell explains how to do it.

  • Illegal downloading and Adele

    Simon at No Rock’n’Roll Fun has written a typically excellent piece about the BPI’s latest sales figures.

    Despite all this “chronic” piracy going on, Adele’s album has sold more copies in a year than any album has ever sold. More than a Michael Jackson album managed in a year, even the good one. More than a Beatles album ever managed to whisk out the shops in twelve months. More, even, than the third Charlatans album sold in a year.

    So, how come Adele’s album was not only immune to the chronic piracy, but thrived in a world so stricken? Had there been secret umlauts sewn into the hemlines of the choruses, rendering it impossible to torrent?

    Were any of the many pirate-busting measures deployed? Did the pre-release circulate solely on a tape glued into a Walkman? Was every copy watermarked? Did a fleet of fake files get launched onto the internet to foil downloaders? Did Derren Brown hypnotise the world so that if they typed ‘Adele 21 free’ into Google they’d die?

    Nope. The success of Adele’s album seems to be nothing to do with avoiding piracy, and more to do with sticking out an album that people liked and wanted to buy.

    Worth remembering the next time you see the entertainment industry demanding new laws and filtering to fight the menace of piracy.ikoni

  • A brief review of the stupidly expensive SuperDarts headphones from Atomic Floyd

    Part 1: Thoughts on listening to music with Atomic Floyd’s SuperDarts 

    Shit, I’ve just wasted the best part of £200 in Amazon vouchers. They sound okay, but you don’t spend that much money for something to be okay.

    Part 2: Thoughts on listening to music with Atomic Floyd’s SuperDarts after turning the volume right up

    HOLY FUCK!

    Yes, they’re stupidly expensive, but the sound is really quite extraordinary. They were recommended by my Techradar colleague James Rivington, who reviewed them here. I think he quite liked them.

     

  • The REM best-of is superb value for money

    The deluxe version of the REM best-of (“Part Lies, Part Truth, Part Garbage 1982-2011) on iTunes is superb value for money: 40 songs and a further twelve videos for £11.99.

    If you’re interested, the videos are for Radio Free Europe, Talk About The Passion, Fall On Me, The One I Love, Orange Crush, Losing My Religion, Man on the Moon, What’s the Frequency, Kenneth?, All The Way To Reno, Leaving New York, Supernatural Superserious and Uberlin. That last one’s from the most recent album and is a beautiful wee song.

    See you at the overpriced reunion tour in ten years…

  • “Not just the funniest group in the world, but something serious and valuable, too”

    A lovely piece by Taylor Parkes on the genius of Half Man Half Biscuit:

    Even now, there’s still this perception of Half Man Half Biscuit as a comedy band: a post-punk Grumbleweeds, the indie Stilgoe. No group in history can have been so woefully misunderstood – Half Man Half Biscuit are, in fact, an antidote to wackiness, a bulwark against zaniness. Fiercely principled, highly literate, sometimes very close to angry, these are songs of open defiance; their real targets, more often than not, are stupidity as a leisure option, the hollowing-out of British culture, the slow death of the post-war settlement.

    This bit cracked me up:

    ‘Excavating Rita’ is – despite its wince-inducing title – a beautifully complex song about a grief-crazed Betterware salesman whose devotion extends to necrophilia. Poignant, tragic, grimly explicit, sympathetic and horribly funny, it’s hard to imagine anyone else attempting a song like this

    [Via TonyK]

  • No more adventures in hi-fi

    I love REM, and while I’m not surprised they’ve split up – that’s been on the cards for a decade, maybe more – it’s still a wee bit sad. Unless there’s a reunion tour somewhere down the line I won’t get to see them live again, and there won’t be any more records as weird and wonderful as New Adventures In Hi-Fi. It, like most REM albums, was hit and miss, but when REM got it right they were astonishing.

  • Apple’s cloud music service sounds good

    This could be interesting. Businessweek:

    Armed with licenses from the music labels and publishers, Apple will be able to scan customers’ digital music libraries in iTunes and quickly mirror their collections on its own servers, say three people briefed on the talks. If the sound quality of a particular song on a user’s hard drive isn’t good enough, Apple will be able to replace it with a higher-quality version. Users of the service will then be able to stream, whenever they want, their songs and albums directly to PCs, iPhones, iPads, and perhaps one day even cars.

    Sounds good, but of course price is going to be the key factor. The article suggests that it might be rolled into MobileMe, the£60-per-year cloud sync service Apple currently offers. That makes sense: MobileMe’s been due a revamp for a long time, and the rumours have been suggesting a music angle for a few months now.

  • “128 seconds that made people so happy”

    I spotted this on MetaFilter: a superb and desperately sad article about the rise and fall of Bill Haley.

    After ten minutes or so Billnitzer would bring him his food. But usually he was thinking about something, so he ignored it. After a while, though, he’d start to shift in his seat and look around. And then he’d start to hum. Billnitzer, refilling his coffee cup, knew the tune—everybody knew that tune. It was “(We’re Gonna) Rock Around the Clock,” the best-selling rock song of all time. She smiled, because she knew what he was doing. He was giving people around him clues. He wanted people to hear him and say, “You’re Bill Haley, aren’t you?”

    But they rarely did.

     

  • A wee plug for some nice guitar people

    I don’t play as much as I used to, or would like to – RSI tends to rear its ugly head fairly quickly – but one of my most treasured possessions is my electric guitar, a 1989 Fender Telecaster. I bought it second-hand a loooooong time ago, and I’ve been meaning to get it sorted out for several years now: the pickup switch was wonky and the guitar itself needed some serious TLC. And of course, the longer I left it the more work it needed.

    I finally decided to bite the bullet a few weeks ago and asked around for recommendations, because I don’t even know which guitar shops are still going in Glasgow. I was pointed towards Strung Out Guitars, a wee place across the road from the 13th Note venue. They’re very, very busy – my repair and setup took a fortnight because they had so many guitars to get through – and I can see why: my Telecaster came back looking and playing better than it has since the day I bought it.

    They’re a nice bunch of people too, and they clearly love what they do. If you need guitar-y things done, give them a shout.

     

  • Record companies: sell records? Us? Don’t be silly

    An illuminating piece by David Hepworth:

    When you have built up some anticipation around the release of anything, what on earth is the use of delaying that release and allowing that anticipation to fade into disinterest? Public attention is a finite resource and it is quickly diverted on to something else.