Povert

I’ve been working on a Christmas present for my brother-in-law, who is a musician.

I went to a local goodwill and found the keyboard. I added a “crash” button to it and an audio out jack.

Circuit bending involves finding interesting short circuits. It’s kind of random, but a lot of fun. End result is some screwed up sounds.

Anyway, that’s what the crash button does, which is that large round red button.

I recorded some of it. To hear what the crashing sounds like, click here. I edited it and cut stuff out — because it’s so random, you often end up with silence, which is no fun to listen to. The very first part is just the “demo” song on the keyboard.

Something kind of neat — if you short-circuit the right points, you can get the keyboard to play some songs which aren’t otherwise available, like Happy Birthday, something by Chopin, Twinkle Twinkle and a Christmas song. I didn’t solder connections between those points, though. I’m still working on my soldering skills, I don’t think I’m using the best wire and I already had to use the dremel to route out paths in the plastic for the other wires.

Apple is really starting to irritate me.

I own 2 macs, an Apple TV and an iPhone. I am an iTunes customer — I currently subscribe to 2 shows. I would subscribe to more, but NBC is being dumb. But that’s another issue.

In the course of Flapping Crane’s existence, we’ve made some music. Funny music. Music I’d like to be ringtones on my iPhone.

I can kind of accept that Apple wouldn’t provide a means to make anything into a ringtone. But they appear to be actively trying to stop third-party developers from allowing it.

This is stupid. I can use iTunes to do all manner of illegal things. I can play music that I (gasp!) didn’t pay for. I can import friends’ cds. But I pay for music. The awesome thing about iTunes has always been that it’s convenient and fairly-priced. The DRM is potentially troublesome, but I’ve never run up against it.

I would probably be willing to buy ringtones from iTunes if they weren’t being bastards. Specifically — I want to be able to make my own music into ringtones. They are actively preventing it. They are removing functionality.

Is this of catastrophic importance? No. It’s just goddamn ringtones. But I am becoming increasingly annoyed by this, and my attitude towards Apple is starting to go south.

I’ve got a trial going with eMusic. I haven’t decided whether to subscribe. But Amazon now has an mp3 store with no DRM. If Apple wasn’t behaving this way I might stick with them out of loyalty. But I don’t foresee myself buying anything anymore from ITMS besides the TV shows I’m subscribed to.

Bottom line — Apple apparently thinks it can treat its customers like shit. I’ve influenced friends and family in their purchases, and for years I’ve highly recommended Apple products. I’m starting to question that.

They haven’t lost me yet, but they’re well on their way.

I thought it was a cruel April Fool’s Joke when I first saw it, but it looks to be true — starting next month Apple will be offering DRM-free tracks from EMI at double the bit rate. Single tracks will cost $1.29 (as opposed to $0.99) and people can upgrade previous purchases for $0.30 per track.

From EMI’s press release: “Complete albums from EMI Music artists purchased on the iTunes Store will automatically be sold at the higher sound quality and DRM-free, with no change in the price.”

This makes me happy. DRM is annoying.

I’ve got a Coldplay album or two that I will upgrade, along with a few scattered songs from other EMI artists.

I wonder how this will interact with the new Complete My Album thing — will the tracks you download to complete the album be DRM-free and 256 kbps? If so, if the previously purchased tracks had DRM and were 128 kbps, will they be replaced?

I was out driving in this horrible weather earlier and heard a cover of Bull in the Heather. I’ve heard a lot of odd covers lately, but this one takes the cake.

It’s by “the go! team”. You can hear it on their MySpace page.

I can’t even say if I like it or not. It’s a good cover. It’s just very odd to hear a cover of that song. Never thought I’d hear one.

For those of you who don’t remember, Bull in the Heather was one of Sonic Youth’s few hits. You can watch the video on YouTube. It was on “Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star”, which caught a lot of flack (unfairly, I think) from fans. It was kind of seen as a more mainstream album. Which is a silly criticism in my opinion, but hey.

By the way, the woman in pigtails bouncing around in the video is Kathleen Hanna of Bikini Kill fame.