20 posts tagged “emusic”

I absently typed:

not openid

I have eight of Emusic's 2007 best sellers. Is that good?

Stuff I got from Emusic this month:

Plus oh, awesome, there's a new Japancakes album coming out in October available in advance!

Giving Machines by Japancakes (Emusic)

http://www.emusic...

I also got Jonathan Coulton's Ze Frank covers (except for Sandwich) as featured in this episode.

"the debt"

Sad. I didn't realize the Emusic refresh date creeps up like it does, so I went to spend all my downloads (I had around 70 left) at the last minute a day or two too late. So I already got a head start on this month, but all I downloaded last month were The Else and Grand National's A Drink and a Quick Decision (not available from Amazon?)

TMBG - The Else

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Grand National - A Drink And A Quick Decision

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I'm not terribly pleased with The Else. It has some good songs, but it doesn't cohere as an album the way The Spine does (and I wouldn't hold up The Spine as an example of a coherent album, but it works well enough). It shows better than much else of their recent work my problem with the same: it's excellently crafted, but I don't feel the same personality out of it that used to be there. The songs on The Else that I like, such as The Cap'm and Shadow Government, are full of personality, and the Venue Songs are brimming with it. It may very well be that The Else plus the bonus CD makes one good album, but I don't want to roll my own album again.

Or maybe I just don't like their gloomy songs.

While I'm talking about music, I got a head start on this month thanks to Chicago Public Radio's Sound Opinions and their 2007 retrospective-so-far episode. I grabbed the new LCD Soundsystem album Sound of Silver (which is only $7 on iTunes Plus, part of the Next Big Thing promotion), as well as Tim Fite's free album Over the Counter Culture. I also got the named El-P, Apples in Stereo, and Besnard Lakes releases, which were not only recommended by the Sound Opinions guys but had been in my save-for-later list for too long already. But I'll have to mention them again next month epdate anyway.

Quite past the 21st, but at any rate, the May/June haul from Emusic I'm still enjoying comprises:

The Rosebuds album came recommended by way of Shifted Sound, and while the two tracks played there are most of the best, the other songs are pretty decent too. Definitely worth picking up on Emusic, at least.

Meet Podington Bear

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Music from SSX Blur

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Also on Emusic I got Podington Bear's pseudoeponymous Meet Podington Bear, and Junkie XL's game soundtrack Music from SSX Blur. Both good instrumentals, if a bit generic. Podington Bear has a podcast (as one might guess from eir name), and I imagine you can get much of the same for free that way.

I must confess that, as I mentioned earlier outside of my epdates, I did also buy a couple albums from iTunes Plus:

It's suddenly the 21st again. It snuck up on me, so sadly this was the first month of Emusic when I didn't use all my downloads. I have enough stuff in my Save For Later list that I could have used them up, but no, I'm snapped back to 90 (plus two booster-pack downloads I have left).

But what did I get? An even smaller selection than last time.

Hymn Project

Next in the ongoing saga of iTunes DRM is the fact that iTunes 7 DRM has been re-cracked... sort of. There have been several tools that script QuickTime to play the encrypted file to a raw audio stream, then recompress the audio to an mp3. That slightly degrades the audio quality, which is already bad enough with mass market downloads.

Now, though, there's a new version of QTFairUse that grabs the unencrypted AAC stream and saves it. The process (as I understand it) reuses the AAC data with no recompression, so it's exactly the same audio as the encrypted file. It certainly seems to work: I decrypted the songs I bought from iTunes Store Japan yesterday (I gave them a special exception to my no-iTunes rule, so QTFairUse being available was serendipitous) and have perfectly playable AAC files. I can't actually tell if it's the same AAC data, though, so I have to trust that the claim it's lossless is factual.

The Else

If QTFairUse does in fact work as advertised, will I buy songs from iTunes now? Given that I'm still finding plenty of good music on Emusic, I probably won't bother. Speaking of principles, though, it's a matter of voting with dollars. I'd almost like to make an exception for the new They Might Be Giants album while it's an iTunes exclusive, but if I make an exception, it says that I don't actually care about DRM. With it currently the #11 top selling album on iTunes, they don't need my help to say it's a popular buy.

Even though I could continue to buy iTunes Store music and unlock it myself with a fairly clear conscience, I'd rather wait at least until the EMI content is available, and buy some of that, to help show I care about DRM.

I also got some loose tracks by The Advantage and others.

Looks like I didn't get as much this update, but I think I'm doing it earlier than normal (I'm trying to get on a regular monthly schedule for these posts), plus I didn't buy any booster packs last month.

I have 42 albums in my Save for Later list though. Geez.

Bully_cover

As mentioned in this post on game music on 17 dots, the score to one of my favorite games of 2006, Rockstar's Bully, is on Emusic—and currently a free download.