uncategorized

This is a guest post by Amanda Krause, a post graduate student at Heriot Watt University who’s researching everyday music listening habits. She has a few online music questionnaires and is looking for music fans to help answer a few questions.   My name is Amanda Krause. I am a post graduate student at Heriot Watt University in Edinburgh, researching in the field of applied psychology. My research interests center on how [...]

How’s your hearing? Mine’s finally returning after over a month of near-deafness in one ear. It was quite a downer, especially since I’d not been able to listen to any music in all that time. You’re probably a music fan too, so imagine what a month of silence would be like! I consider myself very lucky that my hearing loss was only temporary, but it seems that the tinnitus could well be permanent in both ears. And [...]

I’m still trying to recover from a virus that’s left my head feeling like a frisbee. I’m currently virtually deaf in one ear: listening to any sound makes it buzz and whine and hurt like hell. Couple that with the permanent tinnitus I have in the other ear makes me think that my auditory inputs are in need of some serious downtime. For a music fan and blogger that’s quite a sacrifice, but in a way it serves me right [...]

America’s “fall season” of new TV shows is hitting the UK with only a week or two’s delay these days, thanks to Sky TV and the like securing broadcast rights that give them a fighting chance against the bit-torrenters. American TV is probably now the best in the world; there’s little from the UK or elsewhere that can compete. Of course a lot of it is still complete dross, but here are my favourite current shows [...]

Easter bunnies may have big ears, but if you only have one ear why must you be forced to pay for bi-aural stereo sound? A regular premium subscription to Spotify gives you access to two full channels of high-quality streaming music: one stream for the right ear and one for the left. This so-called “stereophonic soundwave” (or “stereo” as it is known in the music industry) is based on a recording technique invented [...]

Time to reclaim some disk space: how much of my mp3 collection is now on Spotify? I reckon Spotify has: A fair amount of the synthpop and electronica (missing VNV Nation, And One, Seabound, Anthony Rother) Much of the Industrial/EBM (except for KMFDM – I bought and ripped all their albums, so that amounts for a fair chunk of this) Most of the Rock – Indie – Punk (except for The Toy Dolls – again, I bought and ripped [...]

1978 Analog stream from wireless radio LEGAL 1979 Vinyl records LEGAL 1981 Cassette tape copies 1986 CD LEGAL 1999 mp3 from Napster 2001 mp3 from eDonkey 2002 mp3 from Soulseek 2003 mp3 from Kazaa Lite 2004 mp3 from Suprnova (BitTorrent) 2005 FLAC from OiNK (BitTorrent) 2006 mp3 from Pirate Bay (BitTorrent) 2009 Ogg Vorbis stream from Spotify LEGAL

Short story about a clever Internet-enabled kitty-cat looking for fish: Part 2 has been viewed over 30,000 times now. Part 4 was deleted by Warner because they did not want me to promote their artist Deee-lite.

A late delivery from the PSL – wrt inventor of StarForce, Redmond A. Simonsen died earlier this year. Simonsen’s ground-breaking board game from 1974 gave The Human League their name (as well as The Pansentient League and the Pansentient Hegenomy). From the StarForce Rules of Play (page 21): So it goes.