Base-Art - Music

Last.FM : social-ism for audiophiles

2005-10-19T19:39:21+02:00

(I must be ill or something, 3 posts the same day :)

I discovered few weeks ago last.fm, it’s a great shot! it simply keeps track of what music you listen, make some stats and trove some neighbours for you, having similar music tastes. This process help me to discover new music. And all of this for free, even though you can upgrade your account and pay few bucks to have some more goodies.

From the developer point of view, it’s really well designed with its WS API, writting an AudioScrobbler plugin for ResPyre was quite easy :-) So, if you have a look on the left side of this blog, you’ll see the last tracks i’ve listened to.

Vieilles Charrues 2005

2005-07-25T18:15:29+02:00

De retour des labours, un peu humides cette annÃ©e :) MalgrÃ© un programme un peu moins intÃ©ressant que d’habitude, l’ambiance Ã©tait au rendez-vous (et la boue aussi!). J’ai essayÃ© d’assister Ã un maximum de concerts dont voici quelques impressions.

Vendredi

Hollywood Porn Stars, un groupe de rock belge bien sympa, Ã surveiller :)
An Pierle, je n’ai assistÃ© qu’Ã la fin du concert, mais ca m’a bien dÃ©contractÃ© le dos
New Order, la premiÃ¨re chanson m’a suffit
Ghinzu, des guitares et une voix comme je les aime, une ambiance terrible. Bien quoi !
Luke, impressionnant. Contrairement Ã certains je ne pense pas que ce n’est que de la musique pour ado. Les textes riches d’idÃ©es sont agrÃ©mentÃ©s de mÃ©lodies entrainantes, ca dÃ©potte
Deep Purple, la lÃ©gende du rock, mieux en vrai que dans le Live in Japan!

Samedi

Amadou et Mariam, des textes simples et bien rythmÃ©s, trÃ¨s sympa. Amadou est impressionnant Ã la guitare !
Mickey 3D, bonne prestation scÃ©nique, mais j’ai prÃ©fÃ©rÃ© leur prÃ©cÃ©dent passage aux charrues en 2003
Louis Bertignac, je n’ai assistÃ© qu’Ã la fin du concert, j’ai un peu regrettÃ© d’en avoir ratÃ© le dÃ©but
Iggy pop et les Stooges, l’Iguane Ã©gal Ã lui-mÃªme. Je plains son cadreur car un iguane c’est pas Ã©vident Ã filmer ;)

Dimanche

le spectacle de Annibal et ses Ã©lÃ©phants, hilarant, j’avais mal au ventre et j’en pleurait de rire. Coup de chapeau au fantastique acteur qu’est Jean-Louis, qui a rÃ©ussi Ã dÃ©troner l’impitoyable Mr Cabot!- Nosfell, alors lui c’est un phÃ©nomÃ¨ne. Il commence chaque chanson par s’enregistrer un sample, et le repasse ensuite en boucle en ajoutant de nouveaux sons. De plus, il chante avec une langue bizarre venant de son enfance .. trÃ¨s original, ma foi ! (merci Guillaume pour les explications ;)
Franz Ferdinand, top bon. J’attend leur prochain album avec impatience car ils ont jouÃ© pas mal de nouveaux morceaux bien sympathiques.
Kool Shen, bof bof pas mon genre, mais c’etait mieux avant avec NTM ;)

Plus globalement, merci aux bÃ©nÃ©voles et Ã l’Ã©quipe d’organisation (sympa les copeaux de bois, pour combler un peu la boue). Ambiance de fou au camping la nuit, j’ai pas dormi des masses, mais ma tente a survÃ©cu !

A l’annÃ©e prochaine :)

Remixes

2005-03-18T16:14:28+01:00

Yesterday i watched Tracks, a really good frecnh/dutch tv show about underground (music, techies, whatever) .. Yes, there still are some good shows on TV. TrashTV sucks !!

Anyway the show was about remixes. Some bands do all their business with that (they are probably paying lot of royalties for that). I particularly liked two of them :

Boss Hoss : they do country with everything, even Britney !
Scala & Colacny Brothers: they do classic chorus with 90’s (hard)rock. They made a very intersting album remixing french various artists. I need that one !

Besides, Realplayer format simply sucks, Boss Hoss provides some MP3, thanks guys !

2005/05/08 update: i bought Scala & Colacny brothers ResPyre album few weeks ago. It’s wonderful !

it’s all about music

2004-10-04T09:16:08+02:00

Once upon something else than a time, there was a guy listening some music (u2, an old one, the new one is not the u2 i like to hear) and thinking about the thing behind this … People (‘pirates’ comme on dit chez tipiak(tm)) use to have lots, lots of music, usually in a big hdd … so what you want to listen is not as easy as saying ‘i want a quarter pound w/ cheese’ if you have hundreds of songs :) That’s why some people design software jukeboxes capable of handling all that stuff (partly) instead of you. There are so many of these things just poking around (apt-cache says):

juk : music organizer and player for KDE
juke : A curses-based jukebox program
madman : An advanced music manager application
moosic : Daemon/client combo to easily queue music files for playing
netjuke : Web-Based Audio Streaming Jukebox
noatun : Media player (for video and audio)
pytone : Music jukebox with advanced features for DJs and a text-mode user interface
rhythmbox : music player and organizer for GNOME
vux : A rating-based, random ogg and mp3 player
zinf : Extensible, cross-platform audio player

And some others that seem to be popular like amaroK. I think the first one was mp3sb written in p3rl (around 1998, jkx ?) and resPyre is its successor (CORBA, Python). Despite the website is dead, there is some software and at least one person using it. Pretty well for more than one year (excepted during blind tests with friends :) Indeed there are some issues, buglets and other goodies and/or features which makes it fun to use. i have one computer (mostly) dedicated to music, running the server and few clients (LIRC, web) making it easy to control by network or TV remote.

The thing starts playing, using statistical calculations to find the music i listen more, and sometimes trying to show me artists i don’t know / listen much. That’s how i like to proceed most of the time, i’m guided by resPyre music flow. When a song is played all along, its score is incremented, when a song is being played to much times, it’s pushed away for a while. So i’m not always listening the same music i love, and the system learn my tastes :) I guess other jukeboxes behave in a similar way (if not, they should ;) The second must-have is crossfading, i can’t imagine a jukebox without this. And guess what there must have some Python in the music-monster !!

Though jukeboxes seem well integrated in the desktop, i’m not using any (Gnome, KDE, …) so this is useless for me. I want only something easy to access and control (xbindkeys for shortcuts and OSD for status display are perfect for example).

Well i’ve tried many jukeboxes and most of them use OGG and MP3 tags to organize the music. In my opinion, that sucks. Essential infos (artist, album, song nb, song title) can easily be guessed if people use a schema (BandName/Album/01 - Song.mp3) to store their music. Song duration is guessable if you have the file (and using a good audio lib), so why store it in the tag ? I believe ‘Genre’ tags suck too. Music is a kind of art, and people can have different opinions and labels to put on music. For instance Metallica (yeah the four horsemen) are a ‘hard-rock’ band for many people. But they play ‘slows’ too. So, what’s the balance ? And if a band can be categorized under two different labels, that sucks too :) Nothing can be black and white together.

The revolver rocks

2004-05-24T20:16:40+02:00

Who said Guns N’ Roses were dead ? Well in fact the group is dead, but Slash and Duff Mc Kagan created a new band called Velvet Revolver. And … as we say in France “Ca dÃ©chire sa grand-mÃ¨re” !!