In a fascinating article about trends in sound engineering, Rolling Stone notes that producers are now specifically mixing tracks to compensate for the failings in MP3 -- it seems to me that as a society, we're happy to sacrifice fidelity for ease of use, flexibility and low-cost (see, for example, the trend from landlines to cordless phones to mobile phones to Skype). Designing for that, as opposed to lamenting it -- is a damned good and realistic thing to do.

Producers also now alter the way they mix albums to compensate for the limitations of MP3 sound. "You have to be aware of how people will hear music, and pretty much everyone is listening to MP3," says producer Butch Vig, a member of Garbage and the producer of Nirvana's Never- mind. "Some of the effects get lost. So you sometimes have to over-exaggerate things." Other producers believe that intensely compressed CDs make for better MP3s, since the loudness of the music will compensate for the flatness of the digital format.

Link (via /.)

Buoyed by the news that three of the four labels are now making music available as DRM-free MP3s, Wired's digital music columnist Eliot Van Buskirk has resigned from all the DRM-based subscription services he had subscribed to: Yahoo, Napster and Rhapsody. In a fascinating piece, he recounts the process of resigning from each one. Yahoo only took one minute, but check out the rigmarole Napster puts you through!

Napster
What a pain. There's no way to cancel online, so I called the cancellation number (800.839.4210) and waited on hold for about 20 minutes listening to messages like "Did you know that your Napster subscription lets you access over 5 million tracks? Please hold, and a customer service representative will be with you shortly."

A woman came on the line and asked me a bunch of questions (Was this my first call? Could I confirm my email? Is there a phone number on which she could call me back in case something goes wrong with the call? Can I hold again?). Granted, this is two days after Christmas, but still, I wasn't too happy at how long this was taking.

When she took me off hold again, I told her I wanted to cancel because 2007 was the year 3 of the major labels started selling music without DRM. Back on hold.

She came back -- presumably after consulting a manager or the internet to find out what DRM is -- and then responded, "I don't understand, because all of our music contains DRM." Back on hold. This time, I told her I wanted to cancel because the files were DRMed, and she finally canceled my subscription.

Total time for cancellation: 30 minutes and 32 seconds

(Emphasis mine) Link

Warner Music has announced that it will begin to sell non-DRM'ed MP3 music files on Amazon, making it the third (of four) major labels to sign up for DRM-free distribution of their music, Universal and EMI being the other two. Only Sony BMG have held out -- and that's the same label that gave us the infamous Sony Rootkit, a dangerous hacker-tool that Sony infected millions of PCs with in a failed bid to prevent copying of its music.

Warner will not sell its music in DRM-free form on iTunes, which is in keeping with the general tenor of the move to DRM-free music. Apple's dominance in online music sales has been reinforced by the fact that nearly all the music it has sold is locked to Apple's players with a DRM scheme called FairPlay. Thanks to laws like the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, it's illegal for competitors of Apple to break this DRM and offer competing products that will play the music you bought from Apple. This lock-in gives Apple a Wal-Mart-like degree of control over the business-practices of the labels, since Apple customers who make a substantial investment in iTunes music face the prospect of losing their money should they switch to competing players.

The only way to maneuver around this is by offering DRM-free MP3 tracks, which can be played on iPods and their competitors. Apple CEO Steve Jobs called on the labels to deliver DRM-free music last year, even as several European nations were considering legislation, regulation or court action to force Apple to open up its DRM to competitors.

Warner's move to sell its music in the superior DRM-free form only through Apple's competitors seems like petty gamesmanship, since MP3s are MP3s, no matter where you buy them, and an Apple customer who buys an MP3 in the iTunes Store is every bit as able to shop somewhere else for music and players as is someone who buys music from Amazon. This is a move that pits Warner's long-term corporate strategy -- punishing Apple to reduce its market power -- against the needs of its artists, who benefit from having the largest possible pool of retail outlets for their music in its most superior form.

Of course, the labels -- Warner included -- already shamelessly steal from their artists in the realm of digital downloads, through a crooked accounting process. Here's how it works: artists are generally entitled to a seven percent royalty on "sales," but are contractually guaranteed a fifty percent royalty on "licensing." When the labels "sell" you a song online, they actually claim that they're only giving you a license to the music (and that's why they can attach all kinds of unreasonable conditions to the transaction -- see next paragraph for more). If you're only getting a license -- rather than making a purchase -- then 49.5 cents from every $0.99 track should go straight to the artist. Instead, they get a measly seven cents.

What kind of unreasonable conditions are attached to the "license" you get when you buy online music? Well, of course Sony made you "agree" to let them install spyware and a rootkit on your computer in order to listen to your music. But they're hardly alone -- Amazon's "license agreement" tells you you're not allowed to loan, re-sell, or make other uses of your music that would be consistent with a sale. If you buy a CD from Amazon, they not only don't try to stop you from selling it used -- they encourage you to do so, and will even broker the transaction. But if you "buy" (sorry, license) the same album from Amazon as a download -- often at a higher cost than the used CD will run you -- they make you "agree" that you won't even loan it to your kid brother, or give it away to the school library when you get tired of it.

A music distribution startup founder emailed me last week and asked what kind of terms and conditions I would consider reasonable for digital music sales. The answer was easy: "Don't violate copyright law." Anything more than that is just picking your customers' pockets by confiscating the rights that copyright law grants them -- the right to loan, sell, give away, format-shift, time-shift, etc.

But it's still good news that Warner has joined the war on DRM, even if they're screwing their artists (and the rest of us) to do so. At this rate, all four labels will go DRM-free by 2008, and by 2010, they'll finally start offering us a fair shake on their products, just as the last music fan and the last new artist defects to P2P, convinced that buying or selling music through the labels only gets you screwed, one way or another. Link (Thanks, Adam!)

Wired News contracted with P2P survey company BigChampagne to pull together a series of top-ten charts for P2P music, movies, TV and artists. Interestingly, these diverge in some important ways from the box-office charts . For example, box-office-smashing turds like Spider-Man 3 didn't even crack the top ten -- neither did Shrek 3; and Transformers, ranked third at the box office, slipped to seven on the P2P chart.

Top Movies of 2007

1. Resident Evil: Extinction
2. Pirates of The Caribbean: At World's End
3. I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry
4. Ratatouille
5. Superbad
6. Beowulf
7. Transformers
8. American Gangster
9. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
10. Stardust

Link

Happy xmas! I've just posted a 2:23 reading I did of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland -- the first book I ever read to myself, and one of my all time favorites. The reading's under a Creative Commons Attribution-only license, so do anything you'd like with it! MP3 Link, Other formats

A wax-cylinder afficianado has produced a killer roundup of Christmas music digitized from the dead recording medium, all from the first couple-three decades of the twentieth century.

Last year I posted a series of entries entitled "Vintage Christmas Wax" which most folks were pretty happy about. Alas, several of the old links have expired. Rather than have everyone search for the active links, I decided to compile the remaining links into one simple post. So, once again, here is a collection of vintage wax recordings from the early 1900s through the late 1930s (my favorite continues to be Eddie Cantor). Many of these fantastic transfers are from The Antique Christmas Lights Museum. Others were sourced from The Cylinder Preservation & Digitization Project, Canada's Virtual Gramaphone, the Library & Archives Canada, The Library of Congress, The Edison National Historic Site, and the Internet Archive. Happy Holidays!!! NOTE: Some of the files may take some time to load.

Link (via Beyond the Beyond)

For the past 24 weeks, I've been reading Bruce Sterling's classic 1992 nonfiction book The Hacker Crackdown aloud on my podcast. The Hacker Crackdown was the first free online book I ever heard of, and it tells the engrossing story of the 1990 "Operation Sundevil" Secret Service sweep of hackers, which led to the formation of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, my former employer.

When I told Bruce I wanted to read The Hacker Crackdown aloud, he said, "You're going to read the E911 document aloud?" The E911 document ("Control Office Administration Of Enhanced 911 Services For Special Services and Account Centers") is an impenetrable bureaucratic document that was pilfered from a Bell South compute by a young hacker, and which led to an incredible domino-chain of legal and political ramifications. Bell South claimed that the slim document cost more than $79,000 to produce (the calculus by which this number was arrived at is hilariously dumb), and that the document itself was so hot that it could not even be shown to a jury, lest it enter the court record and be used to crash the nation's emergency telecoms infrastructure. (It turns out that the document was not secret after all -- that another division of Bell was selling it for $10)

So this week on my podcast, I got to the E911 document. It took about 25 minutes to read it aloud. It is the most amazing jumble of acronyms, passive voice prose and gibberish that I've ever seen. It's a hoot -- and a guaranteed soporific. Go ahead and download the podcast and see if you can make any sense of it. Link, Link to subscribe to my podcast feed

The Phone Recording Archive sports hundreds of samples of recorded voices from different phone systems around the USA, including a ton of old Bell System clips, such favorites as:

* Invalid Access code
* Not from this calling area
* All circuits are busy
* Can't process custom calling request
* Dial 1 first
* Disconnected number
* Don't dial 0
* Don't dial 1
* Please hang up and try again
* Due to heavy calling...
* Please check the instruction manual
* Call not completed as dialed
* Call did not go through
* Call not completed, please check number or call operator
* Due to telephone company facility trouble...
* Not from the phone you are using

Link (Thanks, Luke!)

DJ Useo sez, "After determining that some laughs would benefit us all, 19 international bootleggers adopted fake DJ names & released a collection that is funnier than you've ever heard before. The well-known mixers will reveal their true DJ names in a week's time. Meanwhile, have lots of fun guessing. Clues abound in the packaging."

Comedy is subjective and many of these mixes didn't do much for me, but a couple of them were such total standouts that the whole album rates inclusion -- for example, Soulwhacker's Smells Like Your Muddah (Alan Sherman's "Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah" vs Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit"), and DJ M.Aynot Feed's Get Ur Typewriter On. I'm halfway through the album -- I'm sure there are more treasures to come. Link (Thanks, DJ Useo!)

Old Radio Fun (home of public domain, DRM-free old radio plays) has just posted its free Christmas collection, which includes the radio play of "Its a Wonderful Life," some Jack Benny, a Dragnet episode called "Big Little Jesus" (!!), and plenty of other great stuff. Lovely hearthside listening! Link (Thanks, Shawn!)

(Image from Under the evergreens, or, A night with St. Nicholas (George C Lorimer, 1874), hosted in the Internet Archive's Children's Book collection)

John sez, "Earlier this year I edited an anthology called Logorrhea: Good Words Make Good Stories (featuring writers like Michael Moorcock, Hal Duncan, Jeff VanderMeer, Elizabeth Hand, Marly Youmans, and more). The concept was stories based on spelling-bee winning words. Jeff VanderMeer took it upon himself to write a story using not only his own word, but all the words the other contributors used. Now, we've recorded each section of Jeff's story as a podcast and had the contributors post the section of Jeff's story that used the same word that they did on their website so you can listen and read Jeff's story in its entirety online. Not all the contributors have the text on their site yet; where we're waiting for contributors, I've posted the text on my blog." Link (Thanks, John!)

This week's Spider Robinson podcast features a wonderful musical interlude: Doug Cox, Salil Bhatt and Vishwa Mohan Bhatt performing "Beware of the Man (Who Calls You Bro)" from their new CD Slide to Freedom, which features Bhatt playing his trademark instrument the mohan veena, a stringed slide instrument of his own invention. The podcast also includes a few other interludes from the CD, but this is the standout track, a rootsy, slidey, funny and raucous track.

Also on the podcast is Robinson reading excerpts from all three volumes of the Lifehouse Trilogy, including Chapter 2 of Mindkiller, also published as a story under the title "God is an Iron," one of my favorite Robinson pieces. MP3 Link (Music begins at 19:27), Podcast subscription feed

Nemozob's little collection of mashups has some real gold -- especially The Immigrant Check (the Beasties vs the Stones Led Zeppelin) -- that use older material for raw fodder. Link (Thanks, Tom!)