Let's make this a little easier

It's early days for this blog (I haven't told anyone about it - I'm going to wait until there's a bit more stuff on it, before I let people know) but I'm going to add a SkypeMe button - it's got a call divert to my cell if I'm away too. I'll add it here, and to my profile on the right.

Selling music again (and again and again...)

So I ripped my CD of Crosby, Stills & Nash's eponymous debut album onto Rhythmbox. I only bought it recently as an audio accompaniment to Barney Hoskyns' Hotel California.

After I ripped it, I checked the default medium: OGG at 160kbs. In other words, as cruddy as an iTunes download (and only half as good as their "premier" range). That's no good - so I chose the FLAC format which was on offer and started again. FLAC is lossless and it can't hold DRM. It's the future (partly because Apple are starting to get behind it so they can sell their largest disk-size ipods) and it might even mean the end of the past.

How many times have Atlantic got the same person to buy the CSN album? Let's say you were 16 when the album came out in 1969. You bought the album and played it to death at home and at friends. You couldn't do without it even when your mum drove you around, so you bought it on compact cassette too. When you got your first car of your own it had a Stereo-8 machine in it. So you bought one in that format too.

The cassette knackered after a while from over playing, but that's okay because you'd bought a music centre with one of your first pay cheques when you graduated from college, and taped it from the (now crackly) record to play on your brand new walkman. This was your first and not last foray into the murky world of piracy.

You looked for the prerecorded MiniDisc version for your new player in 1993, but couldn't find one (glad you chose this over the Phillips Digital Compact Cassette you considered), so you plugged a phono to jack into the back of your brand new CD player and recorded your album (not the vinyl, which was now almost unlistenable, since someone told you that you could clean your vinyl with acetone, but the CD which you bought when it was re-released in 1992) onto your minidisc player.

When you got an iPod for Christmas 2001 you burned the CD onto it. But it sounded much worse than the minidisc version. Even though there was ATRAC compression on the minidisc, the combination of the low bit-rate and crappy iPod headphones thinned out Graham, Steven and David's tonsils a little. When you bought the album on iTunes in 2006 (on a whim - because you could) it didn't sound any better.

So will your FLAC version (when Apple start selling them - and when all the rest follow) be the last time you pay money for Suite: Judy Blue Eyes? And if the companies run out of old records to resell in new formats, will they have to start investing in A&R again, and signing and recording new artists?

How I learned to love Ubuntu... (tales from a Linux newbie)

Okay, so it's not the most original start to a blog post, but I'm loving my Ubuntu at the moment. I've been researching distros and quietly trying them out for around a year. I was initially prompted to try them because of the onset of M$ Vista. I wrote this on my MySpace blog at the time. As this is password protected, I'll paste it here in full:

26 Nov 2006

Get ready for Linux... (I'm next in line)

Just read a really interesting article about Microsoft's new Vista operating system (replacing Windows and available to all from next January). One of its central wheezes is that you have to "activate" with their website to use it indefinitely. This is even if you've bought it legally. If you don't your whole computer (not just the program) will lock.

This post isn't about the freedom of information implications about this idea, although that might form the subject of another post. This post is to explore how wrong headed this kind of approach is in the 21^st century.

In the old-school "Command & Control" model, you can see how this makes sense: make everyone register = wipe out of piracy in one fell swoop.

Right I suppose, but I don't think it'll take Microsoft where they want to go.

In today and tomorrow's web, to quote my friend Erich Ludwig at Calabash Music, "obscurity is more dangerous than piracy". Windows' easy-to-crack-and-circumvent security has made it THE choice of software everywhere I've been in the world – from Israel to South Africa, Nigeria and Senegal. How many of the copies of software I've worked on in these countries are kosher, I don't know. But what's for certain – most of these developing world countries' users won't be able to afford to pay Microsoft license fees unless they get a global pricing structure right. Getting this structure right would bring problems of its own – geographically splitting the world in a way that other industries (the recording industry for instance) is finding impossible.

So from Windows being a de facto "free" operating system (because of the prevalence of piracy), much of the world – including fast growing markets like India and China – will have to choose between paying for and "activating" Vista and finding an alternative.

I think this will open up people's appetite for free alternatives. Enter Linux.

I for one will be looking for free alternatives to Windows before January. I hope you'll join me.

From today I can finally say that (on desktops and laptops at least) I've kicked the Window$ habit. If I can remember rightly the steps went something like this:

1. Tried my ancient Gateway laptop (a.k.a. "The Tripewriter") with Dreamlinux. Wasn't much of a dream, more a bit of a nightmare. It didn't recognise the soundcard, wifi card or much else.

2. Tried with Xandros. This is kind of a half-way-house. It recognised everything, but partly because it was such a compromise (what's the point jumping in the deep end if you go in with water-wings?) and also because it wasn't free - therefore not community maintained, I decided against it. The search continued.

3. Dual booted The Tripewriter with Ubuntu Dapper Drake. Still no sound or wifi, but I was getting cocky, so I erased the windows side and stopped farting about with a live CD. There was method there - part of the reason why the machine was so-called was because it was basically a typewriter. I had a smaller laptop (a Vaio TX-3) for travelling, so this computer was going to stay at home and get acquainted with OpenOffice. So, although it was crippled, I had one of my two laptops running Linux only.

4. Dual booted the Vaio. This is how it is now.

5. Once Gutsy Gibbon came out, The Tripewriter recognised everything (after a little tweaking) - wifi card, soundcard, video the lot. It works faster than the Vaio running Windows XP Pro. The last problem was syncing to my phone.

6. Missed my iTunes for a bit, but got over it. The sound quality of downloads is generally dire. I now run RhythmBox.

7. Sorted the sync problem with ScheduleWorld running via Evolution and Google Calendar - visible with a button on the desktop via Prism

Sorted!!

So there you are. Not massively exciting if you know about Linux already, but hopefully useful if you're about to (or even tried to) dip your toe into the not-so-murky waters of the Open Source community.