*BC series* New Release: Sanxion7 - red01.ruby

For this one, I'm going to start by focusing on the latest release, and get a little bit into the most recent prior ones.

I'm always happy to give an artist a chance when he's a fellow Wisconsinite. The music scene in Madison is often overlooked for reasons I can't understand. For years, I've heard from a diverse assortment of very talented artists that fail to gain the exposure they deserve. Hopefully, the Bandcamp model is giving artists like Sanxion7 an opportunity they might not otherwise have.

A quick clarification (i.e. "retcon")

I realized with that last post that I never really established what qualifies as a "new" release as opposed to a "retro." Initially I wanted to review new releases within a week or so of hitting stores, but since I tend to go for long periods without posting, that doesn't always apply. Also, I sometimes don't have time to let an album sink in during that amount of time.

Therefore, let me state for the record (no pun intended) that I will generally use the term "New Release" to apply to an album that has come out within the last 2-3 months, that I started listening to shortly after release. If a review is backlogged anymore than that, it will just be a "Review." I'll limit "Retro Reviews" to anything around 4+ years old. Sound like a deal? Too bad, it wasn't an offer. My house, my rules. :-P

*BC series* New Release: Dragonfly Lingo - Offscreen

Blog/Website
Album

I'm starting off my series of Bandcamp reviews with what is so far my favorite work amongst the electronic stuff I've checked out.

Having designed sound for stage productions and at least one piece for an independent film (which unfortunately didn't make the final cut) gives Dragonfly Lingo's Mitia Wexler a bit of an edge in implementing the concept for his debut album, Offscreen.

Bandcamp review mini-series

So, what do you* really want to know about this magical, cheap website, Bandcamp? The same thing as with any other such site. I know exactly what you're expecting: all that cheap and free music in one place...the music is pure SHIT, isn't it? Fear not, for I am preparing to answer that question in a few future reviews.

It seems to be a fairly common perception that cheap/free = crap, and that's often quite accurate. But bear in mind that due to BC's pricing model, the artist is likely making MORE from sales than with a major label! Don't assume that an artist on a site like this isn't talented enough to get on a major label. There's some quality shit here; it's not all amateur-hour, basement-recorded, glorified karaoke garbage.

Now I'm sure there doesn't need to be another rant like this on the Internet, but I'm going there anyway. Most major labels are bullshit. Everyone should know by now that big labels don't sign artists based on their talent, but based on how well they will sell. That is a financially sensible strategy, but it's also a weakness. There's a lot of talent not signed to major labels, and a lot of it is on BC. And yes, there's shit as well. This is equal opportunity, just as the Internet should be. This model is not an alternative, not just a place for artists to go when they can't make it to a major label. It's a replacement. It's what the future of this fucking industry should be.

If you need recommendations to get you started, keep an eye out during the next week or two. I have at least 4 BC albums that need reviewing, and I'll be looking for more as well. The first one is coming tonight.

Website: Bandcamp

Every now and then, a music-oriented website comes to my attention and really impresses me. MySpace started out as a nifty idea for the independent artist, but the potential for abuse and shift in direction was obvious from the get-go. When I first found mp3.com over a decade ago, it was a fantastic site for discovering lesser-known artists, but they whored themselves out pretty quickly.

I finally found the perfect spiritual successor to mp3.com, and it looks like they've implemented a solid model with great potential. It's the perfect example for the direction the music industry should be taking in the age of the Internet. The name of the site is Bandcamp, and when I first discovered it about two months ago, I decided right away that it should be the subject of my first website review. After giving it some time and thought, here are my observations.

New Release: Nine Inch Nails - Pretty Hate Machine (remastered)

It's been a while since I posted a review. A long while. I guess new releases just haven't been impressing me a whole lot lately. There are some things that have grabbed my interest and given me some ideas for new directions to go with a blog. Until those are fully-formed, though, I really must wax ecstatic about what I got in the mail today.

Linux audio players suck

OK, I can't stand it anymore; I have to bitch about this. In the world of open-source software, you'd think it would be easy to find a decent media player. Indeed, there are dozens of them, and the best video player ever (VLC) even has multiple Linux packages available.

But what of audio players? Well, if you like bloatware like iTunes and Winamp (recent versions), then you can be happy. If you don't mind sacrificing half of the features you're used to, this is the jackpot. If you like fighting with bugs and inconsistency, you don't have to look hard. If you want all the features in a nice little package taking up minimal real estate, then you're fucked.

Tiwtter and stuff

Twitter has its quirks, as I've discovered, but what bothers me more is the fact that many developers seem to take a "whatever" kind of approach to using the APIs. My previous post expressed disgust in the widget available through Blogspot (I'm sure there are better ones out there). I've now also discovered that the KDE "microblogging" desktop widget could use some work. My account is currently locked for an hour because I fat-fingered my password, and the widget gave no error message. I thought it had just flaked out, so I switched tabs back and forth once or twice to refresh, which attempts to log in again even though it clearly had a bad password given to it. I love the most recent versions of KDE, but come on, folks...password failure is a pretty simple thing to pop up a quick error message for.

In other news, I'm about to undertake a full-on case mod, which you can see on my other blog (link on the right). I'll post pics and info there as it progresses. Check it out if you're interested.

And finally, something music-related (!) for my music blog: I may be almost convinced that Slacker Personal Radio is even better than Pandora. Keep an eye out sometime in the next few weeks for a review, after I've given it a very thorough test-drive.

Gadget removal

OK, had to do away with the Twitter gadget already.

Apparently, Twitter places a limit of 350 API calls per hour on a given account. This is a perfectly reasonable number; I don't think I could make 350 queries from my Droid in an hour if I tried.

Yet, after posting once around 10AM and doing nothing more for the next 6 hours, I was still getting an error message from Touiteur saying I'd exceeded my API call rate limit. Turns out the blog gadget is making those calls. That's way too many calls in an hour for a blog gadget. Especially for a blog that no one actually reads (or posts to). :-P Guess I'll have to figure something else out if I want the posts to show up here; I can't have my blog effectively blocking access from my phone, now, can I?

Twitter

Something must be wrong with me. I was sure I'd never have a blog. I made one anyway, and the regular updates didn't last very long, just as I'd suspected. Then I started using Google Buzz here and there, which actually wasn't such a big deal since it's well-organized, and neatly integrated into Gmail. Now I have a fucking Twitter account, too.

I didn't understand Twitter for a long time. OK, I got that you could post to a blog-like thing via text message, which I guess is nifty. But I had a hard time following conversations on it, and thought it counter-intuitive to have something set up to read responses before what prompted them (and my blind [and/or apathetic] ass didn't see the "in reply to" links for a long time, meaning I was sifting through posts to find a corresponding date). Now that I've seriously checked it out, it makes a little more sense.

Noticing that not everyone uses Twitter to try and talk to each other had a lot to do with my coming around. Also, the ability to steer clear of high-schoolers comes easier than I'd expected. That helps even more. The icing on the cake, for me, has been Touiteur, an excellent application for the Android OS for viewing and posting to one's account. The pleasure of using that app alone is almost enough to justify having an account.

Anyway, if you're interested, you can probably see that I already added a gadget to the sidebar here showing recent "tweets" and a link. I'm not going to try harvesting followers since I don't even know what I'll use it for yet, but feel free if you have your own account and want to keep tabs.

VirtualBox updates

Yeah, I know I'm not posting anything lately. This is totally unrelated to the blog, but I have to put it somewhere. I'll start making real posts again eventually.

I'm running Ubuntu 10.04 on my work laptop, and I need a Windows VM (mostly for IE stuff), so I use VirtualBox.

Problem is, every time I update my Ubuntu kernel, it breaks VirtualBox, and I always have a hell of a time on Google figuring out how to fix it. So by posting it here, hopefully I'll remember, or at least be able to find it again!

At any rate, the problem is that attempting to start a VM produces an error something like:

"Inexistent host networking interface, named 'vboxnet0'"

Ignoring the fact that "inexistent" is not actually a word, what has happened here is a problem. The real problem is not that the network interface has disappeared (although it looks that way), but that the vboxdrv kernel module isn't working properly anymore due to the kernel update. So the kernel module just needs to be recompiled, like so:

sudo /etc/init.d/vboxdrv setup

So all of those people out there opening bug reports and telling people not to upgrade VirtualBox are just plain wrong. This should be fixed by the developer, but what needs to be done is to have some kind of trigger in place that recompiles this module any time the kernel is updated. Hopefully this post makes its way into the Google results for this problem so that it turns up an actual solution for someone.

**EDIT: My mistake: "inexistent" is indeed a word. Apparently it's just so rare that Google wants to auto-correct it every time.