I ADORE MUSIC, especially rock, electronic, indie, hip-hop, and jazz, including:

MF DOOM, Beck, Brian Eno, David Bowie, Chet Baker, John Coltrane, DJ Vadim, The Rolling Stones, Arcade Fire, John Lurie, Beirut, of Montreal, Eels, Madvillain, Nick Lowe, Minutemen, King Crimson, Bob Dylan, Muslimgauze, Elvis Costello, Muse, The Clash, The Beatles, Kid Koala, Sugar Minott, Duke Ellington, Electric Six, Bad Brains, Talking Heads, Woody Guthrie, Björk, Cansei de Ser Sexy, Simone Dinnerstein, Moby, Prince, Johnny Cash, Frank Sinatra, John Foxx & Harold Budd, Air, Tom Waits, Thievery Corporation, Robyn Hitchcock, Minor Threat, Manu Chao, OutKast, Boards of Canada, Dean Martin, Freddy Kempf, Laurie Anderson, Philip Selway.

Check it out: www.last.fm/user/zeldman

If you’re intrigued, as I am, by the trailer for David Fincher’s upcoming The Social Network, and if part of what compels you about the trailer is the musical score—a choral version of Radiohead’s “Creep”—you’ll be happy to know you can purchase said song via emusic.com: On The Rocks is the album, “Creep” is the track, and Scala, a Belgian all-teenage-girl choir, are the artists. Highly recommended.

P.S. If emusic.com had an affiliate program, I’d have free music for life.

via YouTube – Rudess Meets Bebot.

[tags]iphone, music, synthesizer, synthesis, instruments, demo, demos, synthesizers, Jordan Rudess[/tags]

[tags]petezeldman, drums, drumming, polyrthmic[/tags]

So I bought a 160 GB iPod Classic. I already have an iPhone, and you can borrow it when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers.

The Classic holds my digital music collection (currently, 31 GB) plus five or six movies digitized at high enough quality to play on a Cinema Screen, and has acres of drive space to spare. I feel that I will never fill it up, although I’ve thought that about every hard drive I’ve ever owned, and I soon filled them all.

The Classic is new and shiny and I almost never use it because the classic iPod interface feels prehistoric after using an iPhone. (Indeed, half the things I do on a computer feel awkward compared to doing them on an iPhone. Click on a friend’s street address in your iPhone. Wow! Now do the same thing on your computer. Ick.)

There are about five movies my toddler loves on the Classic, but she won’t watch them on the Classic. She wants the iPhone and asks for it by name, like cats do for Meow Mix.

The Classic is good for plugging your whole music collection into your stereo. Or it will be when the dock arrives. The Classic does not ship with a dock, and no dock is made for it, but you can order a $50 Universal Dock from Apple. The order takes four weeks to process plus another week to ship. Be kind and call those five weeks a month. A month after unpacking my new Classic I will be able to hook it into my stereo and charge it at the same time—something I expected to be able to do on the day it arrived.

The frustration of that wish is not tragic, but it is not particularly smart marketing, either. This, after all, is a product for people who ardently wish to carry their entire music collection plus a handful of movies in their pocket. Wish fulfillment is the product’s whole reason for being. (Well, wish fulfillment plus the execrable state of air travel, which can turn a jaunt between Chicago and New York into an odyssey of despair and boredom. Carry a Classic and those five hour delays fly by, even when nothing else is flying.)

The guaranteed nightmare of even the shortest business trip aside, what do you do with the Classic? Well, I sometimes bring it to the gym. Because sometimes at the gym, it takes a while to find the right groove. The iPhone’s 7.3 GBs aren’t enough to hold a sufficient musical selection to ensure a great workout.

On the other hand, I can’t answer a business call on my iPod. So even though the Classic gives me lots more music to choose from, I mostly bring my iPhone to the gym.

No iPod is an island, or should be.

Did I mention that the iPhone has a gorgeous, high-resolution screen and the iPod does not? Then there’s the whole gesturing with your fingertips business. How nice that feels, and how weird and slow and un-Apple-like it now feels to go back to the clickwheel that once felt so poshly smart and modern.

I tell you this. If Apple can put a capacious, chunked-out hard drive on the iPhone—even if doing so makes the phone a tad clunkier—the company will have on its hands its hottest convergent technology box yet. And I’ll be the first in line.

Only 95 shopping days ’til Christmas, Steve.

[tags]apple, ipod, iphone, comparison, shopping[/tags]

Has this happened to you? You’re using the iLike social music discovery network and things are humming along nicely. Then one day, because of a brief iLike.com server hiccup, the iLike Sidebar for iTunes is unable to download and refresh your friends’ photos. Instead of your music pals’ smiling faces, you see the classic “busted GIF” icon that web browsers use to denote “image file not found.”

Here is a screenshot of the iLike Sidebar with missing images.

Here is a screenshot, a few days later, with all friend images missing.

It’s what my iLike sidebar has looked like for the past two weeks. It may be what it will look like forever. Has anyone else encountered this problem? Anybody found a solution? Nothing I’ve tried works.

• Refreshing the sidebar by clicking the semi-circular “refresh” icon to the right of the label, “Recently played by your friends,” does not solve the problem.
• Hiding and re-showing the sidebar does not solve the problem.
• Waiting days, or even weeks, for the problem to correct itself does not solve the problem. The problem never corrects itself.
• Downloading a fresh copy of the iLike Sidebar and reinstalling does not solve the problem.

iLike’s FAQ does not address the problem. When you encounter a problem iLike’s FAQ does not address, you are supposed to contact iLike. I contacted iLike last week. I’ve also written to Dick Cheney. I haven’t heard back from either one. I’m more likely to hear from Cheney. Cheney doesn’t have a Facebook application and he isn’t adding 300,000 users a day.

Like every other recent website, iLike identifies itself as a beta. When you identify yourself as a beta, and you’re adding 300,000 users a day, it’s to be expected that your technology may be imperfect, and it’s also understandable that you may not have time to respond to every user who contacts you about a problem. Hell, I’m not a beta (and I’m not adding 300,000 users a day) and I can’t respond to everyone who contacts me. I get it.

In the scheme of things, a broken feature in a free web app is no big deal. I still like iLike. But if anyone knows how to squash this bug, I’d like it even better.

[tags]iLike, sidebar, bug[/tags]

[tags]aneventapart, imix, itunes, music, mixes[/tags]

I’ve got 45 files stuck in a download queue that blazes along at about 16 bytes per second, yes, I said bytes, before timing out and locking up. (Screen shots: 1, 2.) The first 50 files or so downloaded at normal speed; then everything ground to a halt, and it’s been that way for hours.

I don’t mind waiting for Apple to sort its network problems. I just wish iTunes would quit nudging me to sign in and download files that are just plumb stuck.

I like iLike

Speaking of music and bandwidth problems, in less than two weeks of use I have become addicted to iLike™. This clever web app uses iTunes APIs to keep track of the music you are playing and “watch” the music your friends are playing via a sidebar that installs itself in iTunes.

Think of it as part Truman Show, part personal radio station. Nobody will know you’re dissecting a moose, but everyone knows you’re listening to Barry Manilow. Insidiously and almost overnight, the app changes the way you listen to music. It might even change the music you listen to. (You might stop listening to Barry.)

With iLike, you can preview your friends’ music, recommend tracks to others, find free music by little-known bands that matches the music you’re listening to, and lots more. It’s a great little application. But the developers need more servers. The app often crawls. At times it’s too underpowered and overtaxed to find your friends’ music, or to record the music you just listened to. Sometimes it even goes offline, and then what do you have? Just you, listening to music. Which suddenly seems not to be enough.

[tags]itunes, ilike, web apps, bandwidth[/tags]

[tags]W3C, webdirections, accessibility, haslayout, browsers, mcsweeney’s, folkways[/tags]

We’re busy prepping for Atlanta, so here are some links:

Minolta quits camera biz

A former ad client, at one time the 3rd largest camera maker in the world, can’t compete against digital.

“Would you write your life story in pencil?” was an ad I tried to sell them for their Maxxum line of high quality, 35mm point-and-shoot SLRs. (Instead they bought “More Maxxum Magic!”, a line I did not write for them.) Even so, it’s sad to see them go.

Monochrom Brandmarker

An attempt to evaluate the power of brands by making Austrian people draw twelve logos from memory, 25 people per brand. Via Coudal.com.

Magnolia Blossom

Mac OS X dashboard widget embeds social networking in your desktop: “Watch websites scroll across as they are bookmarked by ma.gnolia.com members. Spend less time scrolling through pages of text and find those eye-catching sites now!”

Gapers Block

Clean, good-looking, well written Chicago blog.

In Progress: Logo Design (A)

Cameron Moll on the National Gazette identity he and Jason Santa Maria are designing.

In Progress: Logo Design (B)

Jason Santa Maria on the National Gazette identity he and Cameron Moll are designing.

Top 15 Skylines in the World v. 3.0

An urban planner picks his Top 15 skylines. Via Gapers Block.

Dieter Steffmann typefaces

Immense archive of Dieter Steffmann fonts. “Acorn Initials” is typical Steffmann work. Re-blogged from March 2004.

CNN.com redesigns

1024 wide. Looks great. Pity about non-validating table layout. Via Hivelogic.com.

coComment

In one central place, track comments you’ve left on blogs all over the place.

My Life in the Bush of Ghosts

“…total access to original tracks with remix and sampling… Download all the multitracks on two of the songs. Through … Creative Commons licenses, you are free to edit, remix, sample and mutilate these tracks however you like. Add them to your own song or create a new one. Visitors are welcome to post their mixes or songs that incorporate these audio files on the site for others to hear and rate.”

Drupal

Open source content management platform that cares about accessibility and standards.

Airbag – Styrofoam

Adventures in food management.

Designers must write

“As my ability to shape both written and oral communication improves, I am better equipped to direct the work of others.” (Via Cameron Moll.)

In Search of a Comprehensive Type Design Theory

“Type designers might be convinced that our profession is vital to society, but we wouldn’t risk going on strike.”

Ironic Sans – Pre-pixelated clothes

“Stop worrying about whether or not the producer of that Reality TV show you’re on will pixelate your carefully chosen t-shirt. Beat them to the punch with pre-pixelated products!” (Via K10k.net.)

Thank You for Smoking – main titles

Beautiful! via Stan.

America’s Technology Future at Risk

A new study released by the Economic Strategy Institute explains why U.S. companies can’t compete in key new business sectors, and offers a variety of regulatory and investment prescriptions (via Thomas L. Friedman).

Teaching at Risk: Progress and Potholes

The Final Report of the Teaching Commission (via Thomas L. Friedman).

It’s a great time to start a business

Six reasons to start a business today (by 37signals’s David Heinemeier Hansson).

IE7 Improvements and Bug Tracking

Eric Meyer weighs in.

W3C: Failed Commitments?

Much ado about nothing. Forest. Trees.

Happy Doomsday to You!

“Washington was about one horseman short of an apocalypse yesterday.”

Four jobs I’ve had

1. Writer for The Washington Post and City Paper
2. Laborer in a PVC coating factory
3. Art director
4. Keyboardist (Yatz, Spoons, Pop Maru, Insect Surfers)

Four movies I can watch over and over

1. Rushmore
2. Swing Time
3. North By Northwest
4. Best in Show

Four places I’ve lived

1. New York City
2. Washington DC
3. Bloomington IN
4. Pittsburgh PA

Four TV shows I love

1. The Office (Brit.)
2. Arrested Development
3. The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
4. The News Hour with Jim Lehrer

Four places I’ve vacationed

1. Istanbul
2. Rome
3. San Francisco
4. London

Four of my favorite dishes

1. Madras Rava Masala at Dosa Hut
2. White Omelette at Penelope
3. Sag Paneer
4. Tofu in Spicy Ramen

Four sites I visit daily

1. Coudal Partners
2. Daring Fireball
3. Signal vs. Noise (by 37signals)
4. A List Apart

Four places I would rather be right now

1. Anywhere with Carrie, baby, and doggie.
2. Seriously.
3. That is my answer.
4. Home best.

Four bloggers I am tagging

1. Eric Meyer
2. Tanya Rabourn
3. Jason Santa Maria
4. Greg Storey