resistance to persistence

yvonne of longoverdew.com just pointed me at a new online music listening service. i’ve seen a lot of these, but this one’s different.

listen to music and see graphical relationships at musicovery.com

you can select your musical genres, what kind of mood you’re in (energetic, calm, dark, etc) and the service will select music related to that. it also shows songs related to the song playing. you can narrow the music to a time period when it was released and even discover new music you hadn’t heard before. i’ve had it going for the past half hour and keep hearing new songs or old songs i’ve forgotten about.

i’ll keep this service in mind if i’ve forgotten my ipod or want to find some new tunes.

iPod Touch - all that I wanted

I was right! After Apple announced the iPhone, I felt a bit left out…I wanted all those features in an iPod, especially the widescreen video. It’s the reason I held off upgrading to an iPod Video edition. Today, Apple announced the iPod Touch, all the features of the iPhone, minus the phone. Exactly what I asked for when I blogged about it back in January.

Here’s what I said back in January…

Here’s what I want to see…take the iPhone, minus the phone capabilities, take out the internet capabilities (nice, but not essential) and just leave me the widescreen ipod. That’s all I want. I want videos widescreen, the new navigation capabilities with coverflow, rotational knowledge, etc. All that is cool. And maybe leave in the 2MP camera along with iPhoto so I can load up some photos too. I’ll use it to backup my memory card from my camera while I’m travelling.

I was pretty close. They left the internet capabilities…I should have guessed at that…anything that allows you to buy songs online with the updated iTunes wifi music store. I still would have liked the camera to stay, but I’ll make due with my cameraphone instead.

I can’t wait to try one out (and even more to have one). They’re out September 28. Another occasion to have the press watch the large overnight lineups and push the Apple stock even higher.

The controls will take a bit to get used to. I will actually miss the wheel control. When I’m walking to work, my iPod is in my pocket. And I always know where the pause button is and I can even adjust the volume up or down without having to look at it or take it out of my pocket. This is also very important in the winter time. The less I have to take off my gloves the better. With the iPod touch, I’ll have to turn the screen on (I’ll turn it off to save power) with the home button twice and then adjust the volume or pause. But I’ll have to visually see where these buttons…no more blind pocket pressing unless I get really good at remembering where on the screen the pause button is. Sometimes having some tactile buttons are a good thing. Don’t get me wrong, I love the Touch and will be anxious to see one and try out the controls in person, especially since we don’t have the iPhones in Canada.

The iPod Touch comes in 2 sizes, 8GB for $299 USD ($329 CDN) or 16GB for $399 ($449 CDN).

What do you think about the new iPod Touch? Are you going to buy one? Leave me a comment.

watch a demonstration of the apple iphone in action

In yesterday’s MacWorld keynote address, Steve Jobs introduced the now very popular Apple iPhone. But after the keynote address was over, I still felt lost. What about me? The music listener/show watcher who wants a bigger ipod? What is a fan of music/shows going to do with 8Gb of space on the iPhone?

My 40Gb ipod is busted, and I’ve been using my wife’s 20Gb ipod with a limited selection of my music. I had previously filled the 40Gb and that’s without any video. The answer was previously to buy the 80Gb ipod. But I’ve held off since I knew there had to be a new ipod on the way soon…it’s been so long for a larger screen format. The screen on the existing ipod isn’t wide format and I knew that had to be coming soon. I guessed it would be the full face of the ipod sideways and the iPhone was exactly what I envisioned and more. More that I don’t necessarily need, and more than I can necessarily use in Canada (phone data rates are way too expensive).

Here’s what I want to see…take the iPhone, minus the phone capabilities, take out the internet capabilities (nice, but not essential) and just leave me the widescreen ipod. That’s all I want. I want videos widescreen, the new navigation capabilities with coverflow, rotational knowledge, etc. All that is cool. And maybe leave in the 2MP camera along with iPhoto so I can load up some photos too. I’ll use it to backup my memory card from my camera while I’m travelling.

It will be easy enough for Apple to take the existing iphone, pare it down to just ipod capabilities. And I’m sure they’ll do it as well, but just not yet. They don’t want to take away any press from the iPhone. Hopefully it’ll only be about 3 months and they’ll have a new widescreen iPod with more storage capability. It’s the next logical step in the product line.

check out this free stack of tunes i got! it’s like christmas

Yesterday I walked outside my office building to see a few people with boxes of music CDs, opening the cases, throwing the CDs on the ground and stepping on them. Not something you’d typically see. They work for an online music sales/download company (I won’t reveal which one, but thanks to them!) explained they have to get rid of the CDs and they can’t give them away to charity (tax implications maybe? I’m just guessing as I don’t understand why) so they have to destroy them…or people could just take them. Hundreds of CDs, free for the taking. The pickings were slim, but depending on your tastes, there were some good choices. Barely any hip-hop, but I got what I could. I walked away with a stack of 8. 4 of them were even still in plastic wrapping. My coworkers came away with a similar amount. My coworker Pete Nema also does music reviews, so maybe he found a gem in his pile of tunes.

what i got
snoop dogg - tha last meal
david banner - baptized in dirty water
juvenile - tha g-code
juvenile - 400 degrees
treble charger - detox
our lady peace - healthy in paranoid times
sarah mclachlan - selections from afterglow live (for my wife)
just the hits 2005

I gotta testify, come up in the spot looking extra fly……For the day i die, I’ma touch the sky

Tonight’s gonna be a fun time. I surprised J with a pair of tickets to the Kanye West concert tonight. This will be the 3rd time I’ve seen him. Her first. When the tour was announced, I decided she might like to see him, so I ordered a set of tickets when they went on sale but never told J about it. Then shortly after that, he was on Saturday Night Live. She watched his performance and said “If he ever comes on tour here again, I want to go see him”. Perfect! She didn’t know about the tour at all, nor did she know I had got tickets. I kept it secret until just a few days ago when I gave her the tickets. She was jumping up and down! She liked College Dropout a lot, but loves Late Registration. The CD is constantly in the car stereo.

We’ve got great seats tonight, near the front of the stage. I’m looking forward to seeing J excited when he comes on. And yesterday just happened to be our 1.5 year wedding anniversary (heck, I’ll take credit for any kind of anniversary that I can). It should be a blast tonight. Maybe I’ll even get some photos.

via del.icio.us/popular: Someone’s gone and mashed up Kanye West’s College Dropout disc, ala Jay-Z’s Black Album. 10 tracks, with nice album art to print as well. Get it while it’s available, before the lawyers step in and shut it down. Although this will probably be great press for Kanye’s Late Registration album, out Aug 30th. I know I’ll be going to the cd store early that morning.

Yesterday was the big Marc Ecko’s Getting Up festival here in Toronto. It was a 2 day event, but I only went to Sunday’s show. My good pal Vik was out for the day with me. It started at 1pm, but we showed up around 6 since it was raining and figured the less popular performers would be on early in the day. Kardinal Offishall was finishing his set as we walked in. Wandered around for a bit and caught the finals of the DJ Battle.

There was a room with a shoes display (rare Nike, etc) we looked at for a while. A guy from fixins.com asked to take a photo of me with my shoes. I was wearing my Gravis shoes but they’re pretty old and battered. I guess they have a photo gallery of people and their shoes. Hopefully it’s not a Do’s & Don’ts gallery where I’m a Don’t.

In the same room, they had some artwork, video displays of graffiti taggers, Kid Robot had books & toys.

What? What? Okay! Next up was Lil Jon & The East Side Boys. I’m not a huge fan as I find it to be just a lot of repetitive chanting with no real lyrics and I find the songs to all sound the same. He’s got a few hits that I like and the crowd got hyped spinning white cloths around in the air. Then somehow he snuck off stage, back through the crowd and appeared right behind us at the camera podium and did a slow song from there. A cool surprise to end the set.

Next up was DJ A-Trak, the 5-time world turntable champion. I’d read about him before and he retired from the competitions because he was winning everything and nobody else could get a shot at winning. He did some scratching for about 10 minutes. I could listen to that for hours. They had video of him on the big screen so you could see what he was doing as well. So fast. A-Trak is now Kanye’s DJ so Kanye was up next.

Kanye was great as usual. He burst on stage with Diamonds and got the crowd going. He also did another new track from Late Registration and it’s gonna be a hit for sure. He did Gold Diggers from the new album, along with a lot from College Dropout. He even messed up the lyrics on 2 songs and had to stop. Surprising to see Kanye mess up lyrics. Kanye said good night and left the stage when he was done. A-Trak played some closing tunes and then Kanye burst back on stage for Jesus Walks. A really great song, especially live. Marc Ecko came out on stage and asked who got goosebumps during the song. He also asked the crowd to end the violence on the streets. There’s been a high number of shootings in the city lately and said he wouldn’t bring the festival back if it continued. A nice thought, but I don’t think that’s going to cure gun violence.

Video Vixens contest was up next. Esther Baxter (Ms Freek-A-Leek!) was co-hosting (google her for sure). 13 women got on stage hoping to win a part in a rap video. They strutted their stuff, shook their stuff and then the crowd hollered or booed for each girl. A lot of booing….it was harsh. 5 girls got hollers, then that was trimmed down to top 3. Sonya (I believe that was her name - to the right on the photo) won the contest.

Last, but not least was Ludacris. He jumped out on stage and did “Number One Spot” (the Austin Powers song). I’m not a fan of this song…it’s like a joke song. But he did a selection of songs from all his albums, testing the crowd to see if they knew it all, or just his recent stuff. Luda’s always entertaining to see.

A great concert event. I definitely hope there’s more like this next year. This was the first outdoor rap concert I’d been to and I liked it a lot better than the indoor arena-style concerts.

Photo gallery from the show with all the photos.

One of the neat features of the iPod is using the disc wheel to move around within a song. Click the wheel, scroll the marker to a point in the song and it plays from there. I was playing by moving back and forth to different areas in the song and realized this was similar to a dj scratching a song, in really large scratches. It’s not possible to do as it reads & plays back way too slow from one point to another, but it would be really cool if Apple could speed things up and allow you to freely move throughout a song and continue playing. You could scratch within points of your song, making your iPod the smallest turntable around. This would go great with Numark’s new iPod DJ Mixer.