Tag Archives: music

May 19

The Songbird’s last song

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Some time ago I talked about Songbird, the media player I used when I got tired of Winamp over a year ago. Everything was fine with Songbird up to version 1.4.2, it had its annoyances but worked good enough for my needs. However, since 1.4.3 the Ipod Device Support plugin got ditched and whenever I tried syncing my iPod Nano 3rd Gen only around 200 files would be copied onto it.

I’ve been looking for a good alternative, I tried foobar2000 as I read it was a lightweight and made by some former Winamp developers. The interface was a bit confusing, and it didn’t feel natural, when your application takes over 10min to configure to have it in a decent state, you’ve lost me. Everyone should go with Philips’ motto: “Sense and simplicity”.

Then I came across MediaMonkey, and boy was I glad I found this! I heard about it before and saw screenshots but they threw me off because it looked like the inteface was overly complicated as well. But last week I decided to give it a try because I became sick and tired of having to listen to the same music over and over on my iPod (and I refuse to use iTunes). The default settings of MM were great, a little tweaking here and there and I was ready to go. Unfortunately Songbird doesn’t save ratings into the metadata (don’t ask me why) so I exported my Songbird playlists (had to use a plugin, Songbird doesn’t have native support for it…) and imported the playlists into MediaMonkey.

Comparing the memory footprint and performance of Songbird and MediaMonkey I can conclude that MediaMonkey is the way to go. Where Songbird takes around 60 to 100mb ram, MediaMonkey only takes around 30 to 40mb. Browsing through a large playlist (or your entire library for that matter) is very smooth compared to SB, so is searching (they have great search filters by the way).

In the end, it doesn’t matter if you want ipod support or not, MediaMonkey is superior to Songbird in almost every way. The only addition I had to download was the MiniLyrics Embedded application so I had my song lyrics in the MM sidebar.

MediaMonkey ; Songbird

Sep 03

Guitar Madness

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I played some guitar today, what’s the big deal? I played guitar ALONG with my brother playing his keyboard piano thing. It was cool, I now understand why there’s so many people trying to be good enough to play in a band because it’s just a lot more fun than playing solo.

Talking about soloing and crazy guitar play, I’ve come to the conclusion today I listen way too much to John Mayer. But when you see his “Live in LA” performance you can’t deny he’s one superb guitarist. His music is one of the kind I can listen to all day with repeat on and still not get tired of it. When listening, definitely have a good listen to the lyrics as well as most of the songs have great texts.

A mental note has been made for November 17, when the new album “Battle Studies” is released, let’s hope it’ll be as good as the other albums. As good as JM is at playing guitar, I’ve still got a long way to go to even be able to play any of his music at a decent speed on my guitar (and the fact I’ve got an acoustic one >_>) but the day I can play “Slow dancing in a burning room” is a day my skills will have reached a new level ^^. In case you’re curious:

Aug 24

Absolutely Stupid

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Everyone has done it before at some point in time. Downloading a file (most likely music), the thing is I know a lot of people who don’t know how torrents work and usually one or two people download songs off networks such as eDonkey or Limewire and send them over to friends using Windows Live messenger.

Know what’s funny? These people don’t stop to think, is what I’m doing illegal? Shouldn’t I take precautionary measures so I can’t get caught? So they just live their live happily until they do get caught (doesn’t happen a lot but it DOES happen!) and when they’re caught, they get fined an absolutely stupid amount of money. The funny thing is for downloading an album your fine will be 800 times higher than going to a store and stealing the physical disc.

I don’t get how organizations like the RIAA keep going strong in this digital age. The only reason I can think of is that the label firms give good money for lawyers and other stuff to get the most money out of people downloading music.

See, that’s what’s wrong! Labels spend money trying to deal with downloaders, instead, they should give the money to the artists! Artists only get a tiny fraction of the money when you buy a song or a cd anyways, so the labels aren’t protecting the artists’ creativity, they try to protect THEIR OWN pockets.

Instead of sueing people and spending much money in doing so, labels should use the money to develop online platforms such as the iTunes store and reduce prices for CDs (they could, because they’d spend less money on lawyers). Then everyone is happy, labels are happy because people will buy more songs again, artists are happy because people buy their music and people are happy because the prices are so low for songs that they’re willing to pay for the songs now.

Of course, there will always be illegal downloads, pickpocketing and stealing stuff from your average store hasn’t ceased to exist either. It’s fair that, when caught, you have to pay a fine but why do you have to pay almost a thousandfold more when downloading the same thing you wanted to steal? That’s just outrageous!

To end this post, here’s a list of (severe) crimes that won’t have a fine as high as downloading a song.

1. Child abduction: the fine is only like $25000.
2. Stealing the actual CD: the fine is $2,500
3. Rob your neighbor: the fine is $375,000
4. Burn a house down: The fine is just over $375,000
5. Stalk someone: The fine is $175,000
6. Start a dogfighting ring: the fine is $50,000
7. Murder someone: The maximum penalty is only $25,000 and 15 years in jail, and depending on your yearly salary, would probably be far slighter a penalty that $2 million.

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