Edinburgh Fringe - Inside

Last night we went to see Inside (Zoo Roxy - 18:25), described as physical dance theatre revolving around themes of violence and incarceration within the prison system, the production sees 5 male dancers tell their story on stage.

You might think that this doesn't sound like the kind of thing I'd be interested in ... you'd be right, if not for the fact that the whole thing has a live musical accompaniment by none other than 65daysofstatic.

I have to admit, the dancing didn't really interest me and I didn't have a clue what was going on for the most part, but 65dos sounded amazing and it was worth going to see just for that.

Overall 3/5

PSI Metallica Cover?

Just got £2 free Amazon Mp3 credit and while trying to decide how to spend it, I came across a Pitchshifter track on a Metallica tribute album (The Blackest Album 4: An Industrial Tribute to Metallica). Pitchshifter covering St. Anger, bit strange, but ok.

Decent Hi-Fi system

I implore everyone to listen to music on a decent audio setup every now and then, I listen to 90% of my music on my iPod and the other 9.9% while sat at my computer using a speaker system which only has the right channel and that is placed off to one side and some 4ft above my head when I'm at the computer.

But tonight, I'm sitting in front of my TV with my laptop listening to music through a reasonable amp and some decent speakers and I can't believe how much better it sounds.

New ATR!

Shows how not in the loop I am, but ATR have released a new track, available in WAV here. Only just listening now, but it sounds pretty damn good, pretty much old school ATR, Carl Crack's replacement sounds ok too. I am pretty excited about seeing them live in Amsterdam on the 3rd of next month.

Edit: MP3 if you don't want to download a 30Mb WAV.

iPod - every track rated

I've spent the past 6 months or so trying to rate every single track on my iPod. Just managed to finish the task this week, it's going to be strange going back to choosing what to listen to rather than working my way through my entire CD collection one random track after another.

Amazon MP3 Download II

Amazon are obviously trying to aggressively expand their MP3 download side of things as they've just given me a free £2 to spend on MP3s because I bought a £7 album last month. Not one to avoid being persauded to spend money to save money, I just purchased another Toxic Holocaust album, getting it for the bargain price of £5. The 12 tracks only run to 30 minutes again, but it sounds good so far, despite being an earlier record, I think the recording is slightly better quality than Hell on Earth which had a bit of an echo to it.

Also picked up the opportunity to get "Killing in the Name of" for 29p for no other reason than it will be funny if it gets to be Xmas number 1.

Amazon seem to be doing a thing at the moment where if you spend money on CDs you get money off downloads, £5 gets you £1 back, £10, £2 and £15, £3. Might have to order a couple of CDs just to get the free MP3s :)

Once Sent from the Golden Hall

Once Sent from the Golden Hall, originally uploaded by chored.

Just received some stuff from Amazon this morning, including the album "Once sent from the Golden Hall" by Amon Amarth. Didn't realise I was getting the special remastered edition which comes with a strictly limited edition pop up guitarist! If you collect the 4 remastered versions, they contain pop-ups of the whole band :)

Amazon MP3 Download

I've never really been convinced about buying music downloads, ever since the days of iTunes only doing DRM'd songs I've always preferred to buy CDs and get something physical to hold. I like owning stuff, I like being able to flick through CD artwork and if my house burns down my insurance company will pay out to replace physical property but probably won't cover downloads to my computer.

With all that in mind, I was a bit disappointed to be unable to find Toxic Holocaust's 2005 offering "Hell on Earth" anywhere to buy on CD in the UK. Amazon were selling the MP3 download for £6.99, so I thought what the hell.

I have to say, user experience was pretty good, downloaded a small app from Amazon, clicked buy this album, entered my Amazon password, confirmed and I was already starting to download the songs. The Amazon app automatically adds the tracks into iTunes, which is pretty cool and I guess means it's as easy as buying from iTunes itself. (BTW, digging the iTunes taskbar integration in Windows 7).

The whole experience was pretty painless. Although, I didn't realise that the 11 tracks only run to 27.5 minutes, which makes the £6.99 seem a little less of a good deal. The album is good, not as good as An Overdose of Death, but still pretty rocking. I need to listen to it properly, but at 27.5 minutes, I'm sure I can get 16 rotations a day in at work ;)

I did get a bit panicky that maybe it's cheaper in iTunes, after some iTunes connectivity issues I'm glad to report it's £7.99 on iTunes. Although I don't know how bitrate compares and not sure if the iTunes version is DRM'd or not.

Rob Zombie: String Tribute

This has to be one of the weirder string tribute albums, Rob Zombie String Tribute. Apocalyptica have a lot to answer for!

Spotify - Or how I stopped listening to Tool and started to buy CDs again

I'm a bit behind the curve on this one, but just got round to trying out Spotify earlier this evening. For those as out the loop as me, it's basically an app where you can stream music to your PC at no cost, a pretty large library of music is available and you pay for it by listening to the odd advert much like comercial radio. For £0.99 you can buy a day free from adverts and for £9.99 a month you can access all the content advert free.

The app itself is a black iTunes clone which is pretty straightforward to use. Search for music, add it to a queue and play the music. You can also set up playlists and it has the ability to link in to your last.fm account to track all your new found music. The only thing which appears to be missing is some way of rating tracks/albums you have listened to, in order to go back and find a band you though were pretty good later when you're buying CDs

I was a bit sceptical at first, maybe only 40% of bands I searched for are available. I thought this was a bit poor, and was thinking maybe it's aimed more at mainstream tastes rather than my strange musical listening habits. But after a bit of perseverance, I've found more music I want to listen to than I have time to listen to, and that's without searching for anything I am already familiar with, so it's not all bad.

The adverts are surprisingly well spaced, you can listen to a lot more music before being interupted than I thought would be the case. So far, the adverts have been about 20 seconds of adverts per 15-20 minutes of music. They're also not as intrusive as I thought they might be, although it would be nice if they tried to sell me some albums I might actually buy rather than the Pop albums they seem to be pushing. (Not sure if this will change based on my listening habits).

90% of music I listen to tends to be at work on my iPod and without the ability to stream from the internet there, I'm not going to be able to listen to Spotify. So it's back to either downloading music illegally (something I have pretty much stopped doing) or buying CDs (something I wish I did more). [Although it has to be said the UK's current archaic copyright laws mean that buying the CD and ripping it to my iPod is technically illegal as well]. The one strength Spotify does offer though is being able to preview an entire album completely legally before purchase.

It's a bit surreal though, if I was to find a torrent for an album I was interested in, download the album and listen to it before deciding to buy the CD, I'd open myself up to the possibility of a $1.9 million fine (at least if I lived in the US). But load up Spotify, listen to the same album with perhaps an advert for some album I'm never going to buy and that's completely legal.

Anyway, I don't see me ever paying £9.99 a month for the service, the adverts are too unintrusive to make it worthwhile and I'm unlikely to listen to more than a couple of hours a week. For that £9.99 I could buy a CD and listen to it to death for 37 hours a week (Interesting fact: for the past month or so I've basically been listening to the last 3 Tool albums non-stop while at work, but now I want something new, hence the Spotify experiemtn). Being able to sample music free of charge before purchasing the CD definitely helps, it saves me loading up the MySpace page of the band in question and dealing with the Flash hell to listen to maybe 2 tracks off an album. It also frees me from the poor quality 15 second samples Amazon allow you to listen to on their website.

Since signing up for Spotify this evening, I've added 6 albums to my Amazon wish list which I will probably buy in the next week (maybe ... ;) and 5 of them were from bands I haven't ever heard before.

Overall, Spotify is a pretty good service, could it be better? Yeh, it could have every album available on Amazon available to listen to, but that's no mean feat and the range that is there is still pretty good. It's more appealing that last.fm radio since I can choose all the bands up front and listen to a whole album if I want. To sum it up:

Amazon recommendations + Spotify == Expanded Horizons.

August 8th

It's August 8th, which means you have 2 hours and 10 minutes (In the UK at least) to listen to this NOFX track. If only there was a track from a different band for every day of the year!