Art Gillespie

In yet another essay about startups and founders of same, Paul drops this gem:

“In an artificial world, only extremists live naturally.”

Put that in your quotes.txt file and smoke it.

Aptly. Named.

Over at the BBC, they’re reporting on what will surely remembered as the beginning of the end of civilization.

“Get all these muhfukkin’ cells off my muhfukkin’ plane!”

I have a proposition: Every time you catch someone quoting an entire message in an email or forum reply or top-posting without preamble, politely (or not, as is your custom) refer them to this excellent post from Jon Gruber.

On Top

Does it take more time to edit the portions of quoted text included in your reply? Yes. So does spell-checking and proofreading. It also takes time to shower and brush your teeth each day.

Billy Bragg has a thought-provoking op-ed over on the New York Times’ web site.

The musicians who posted their work on Bebo.com are no different from investors in a start-up enterprise. Their investment is the content provided for free while the site has no liquid assets. Now that the business has reaped huge benefits, surely they deserve a dividend.

The claim that sites such as MySpace and Bebo are doing us a favor by promoting our work is disingenuous. Radio stations also promote our work, but they pay us a royalty that recognizes our contribution to their business. Why should that not apply to the Internet, too?

This is interesting–since most of the ink on the ‘modern age of music’ seems to revolve around the MPAA suing illegal downloaders, I haven’t heard much about the performing rights’ organizations efforts to get residuals for online performance–have they been working on this? I mean, why *shouldn’t* ad-based media companies work like radio stations?

Via eisnein on the Ableton forums.

Gnarls Barkley *The Odd Couple*

This has been on repeat on all my devices for the past two days. Just great–I can’t imagine anyone who wouldn’t find something to like here. Except people who always find something not to like. Faves: ‘Blind Mary’, ‘Whatever’ (The song the Violent Femmes never recorded in an alternate future where the Femmes are the BIGGEST. BAND. IN. THE. WORLD. and faucets spew candy and *really* cold chocolate milk. Or something.), and the crazy screaming during the chorus of ‘Open Book’. But really I’m digging every single song except ‘Neighbors’… best album I’ve heard since…

since…

Portishead *Third*

I normally don’t grab leaks, but this is *Portishead*, people. That’s right: Art Gillespie, bit-torrenting enemy of the poor downtrodden working class record labels. (To which I say *pshaw!*. With the current exchange rate, that limited edition box set with the sexy ‘P’ usb stick is pretty fucking expensive. So there: now I’m Art Gillespie, friend of the working musician.) Anyway, before *The Odd Couple* was released, I was listening to this over and over and over and over. So. fucking. good. Faves: ‘Nylon Smile’, ‘We Carry On’. Also tracks 1 through 11.

My only nit with the Portishead record is that it didn’t make me 25 again.

Anyway, it’s been an *awesome* year for records so far. Bring on the Raconteurs’ new album! And Beck and Danger Mouse, and Martina-Topley Bird and Danger Mouse, and, is there anyone DM *isn’t* producing this year?

When Time Machine was announced, I thought it was cool and dutifully turned it on when I upgraded to Leopard. I only thought of it as backup as in hard-drive-just-died backup, you know, *backup in case of a catastrophe*.

While I have yet to have to do a full restore from Time Machine because of a dead drive (knock wood), it did just save me from my own stupidity in a way I never imagined: While working on user interface stuff, I saved and closed an important Photoshop file *cropped* without undoing the crop, so that all that was left of my user interface was the one button graphic I happened to be exporting. I have no idea how long this would have taken me to restore under my old backup system (where by ‘restore under my old backup system’ I mean ‘redo the file from scratch’), but it took *seconds* with Time Machine–since Finder thumbnail previews appear in Time Machine, it was a snap to figure out which of the backups had the ‘last good’ version of the file.

And that was a revelation: Time Machine is really more like revision control than it is backup. Revision control for your *whole effing system*. With a sort of visual diff built in (via the Finder Quick Look stuff). That’s just flat-out extraordinary in a flying-cars, no-monetary-system, United Federation of Planets sort of way.

And for you music geeks, think about it: with a big enough backup drive, you have a copy of every iteration of your projects–not just the project file itself, but all the associated media and edits on same, too.

If you’re diligent about bouncing a mix every hour or so into your project folder in mp3, you can even use Quick Look to ‘preview’ the version in Time Machine (this is a good reason for audio software manufacturers to implement Quick Look plug-ins for their project files. I shudder to think of the work involved, but it would be *damned* useful.)

About a hundred people have tipped me off to this today and I have to say that for something I’m very unlikely to use for my own work, I’m ridiculously excited about this. It’s as if someone just found the cure for cancer–something everyone thought was impossible is now possible. (Apparently it’s only theoretically impossible )

What’s really interesting to me is whether direct note access will make it possible to separate instruments out of a mix. Can I explode a two channel drum loop into its constituent parts? Can I isolate vocals out of a full mix?

I had the distinct pleasure of having dinner with Peter and his wife at NAMM a couple years ago. Congratulations to them and everyone else at Celemony. Wow.

The folks over at iZotope have done a fantastic job of porting iDrum feature-for-feature and pixel-for-pixel over to Windows. Better them than me! Check it out here.