Not your everyday blog

A few days ago I decided that it was time to ditch MP3s and move onto the flac file type. The files are larger but I also have way more hard drive space now than I did a few years ago and if I need more it is relatively cheap. I justified it by saying that the quality I gain from the space is worth it. If one of my physical copies were to be lost I would still be able to get the original back in all its glory.

I was going through my music collection seeing what I needed to re-rip from my CDs when I got back home to St. Louis. I then came across some of my music that was free, and legitimately so. I went off to websites and tried to see if these bands offered their music in a lossless format, about half of them did, and this made me happy. It got me thinking though, how many artists really release free music, and if they do, is it really worth it? I started a thread here to try and get a list of free music going and I also did some research all over the internet to see what the possibility of free music really was.

When going through sites it is really hard to cut out all of the stuff that people are just fanatical about and come up with some hard numbers that support any sort of sustainable defense. The first real piece of evidence I ran into was when I was researching the recently free released album from Nine Inch Nails, The Slip. Trent Reznor released the album free because the previous album, Ghosts I-V was released in a free edition, that only included Ghosts I, and a $5 edition that contained all  of the songs, in three months time Nine Inch Nails made $750,000 off of the album. Due to the success they released the next one for free as a thank you.

To me this begged the question, could a less successful artist have pulled off something as successful? At first I thought that the answer no was going to win no competition. The more I thought about it though I think a partially free release is a good way to get yourself some money and some attention. First off if a new artist released only free albums I think that once they got popular no one would ever buy a CD because they just expect to get it for free. If they have a CD with limited songs on it for free, and then an extended edition with everything for only $5 – $10 then I can’t help but feel like they would make a decent amount of money.

If a release was done like this it wouldn’t really require a record company either, which I think is the big advantage. You could charge $5 for the full album, more than you would see from a record company, as a digital download, and if someone wants a physical copy charge them $10, or what ever the difference is for you to make the physical copy. This way you get more money per CD sold and you even make your fans happy because they don’t have to try and find the album and upon finding it realized that buying it from a retail store is going to set them back almost $20.

After all this reading I came to a conclusion that I think holds a decent amount of water. Will music ever be widely free? Most likely not, the artists do have to make money. Whether they chose to break even or if they really want to make it a life style they do need some sort of financial backing to hold it. Although not free I can not help but feel that removing record companies, at least for a newer band, could give a lot of benefits. They get more money per unit sold and they are also not necessarily attached to a contract giving them the freedom to play around with how they like to distribute until they find something that works for them. The savings and benefits are passed onto the fans, and isn’t that what makes an artist truly successful anyway, having a happy loyal fan base?

I am not sure how many of you have been watching the Tonight Show With Conan O’Brien but I think that the show has only managed to get better with time. I have not really watched it much over the past few years because of the time slot he was on. Now that he is on earlier though I am watching it every night and I am remembering why I fell in love with him in the first place. His humor is sarcastic at times and he will often be the first to admit when one of his jokes is bad. I also love the skits he does in his shows, I feel like it is this that has always made him the better late night host in my mind.

Lately he has been doing a skit called Twitter Tracker that I have fallen completely in love with. Now, I won’t go on a rant about how much Twitter is stupid, because I do use it, but I will say it is stupid that someone would hang on every word a celebrity puts in their tweets. It isn’t interesting if I say that I went to Burger King and it isn’t interesting if some celebrity does it either.

This is the sole joke made in the Twitter Tracker skit on Conan’s show. The skit has an announcer that goes way over board when trying to set up for a tweet made by a celebrity, no matter how lame, or uninteresting it is. I feel the skit tries to put a stick in the celebrity’s eyes and let them know that just because 2,000,000 people follow you on twitter doesn’t make you the most interesting story. As a matter of fact it makes you even more lame since you take pride in having 2,000,000 people zealously follow what time you got out of bed this morning.

If you guys are going to Twitter, please Twitter responsibly, and follow people that are your friends, or at least have SOMETHING interesting to say.

A couple weeks ago I wrote an entry talking about the hardships of the TWAIN API used to interface with scanners and other image devices. I thought that this poor documentation was something that was not all that common and fairly rare. It ends up that I was wrong. I now agree that it would be for the best if there was a class taught that focused on APIs and proper documentation thereof.

Since using TWAIN I have had to use several other imaging APIs, including libtiff and the Independent JPEG Group’s JPEG library. I am starting to find out that not having almost any documentation at all is fairly common. I think that I would be able to get by on bad documentation if they at least gave some example programs on how to do the basics. I have found that expecting this is even too much to expect. I guess the people who make these libraries assume that the names of the functions are enough. I will give that some of them do have descriptive names, but, when you give them arguments like “x” and “y” I don’t really know what I am supposed to be passing to them.

The only way I have been able to achieve anything these past two weeks is through the use of online programming communities, such as Stack Overflow. If the people who write these APIs believe it is a safe assumption that these communities will pick up where they left off then they are sorely mistaken. Even when a community does understand how something works that doesn’t mean that you will get any sort of consistent answer. For one problem I had 4 different answers, all of which solved part of my problem and not my whole problem. The solutions were also fairly incompatible so mixing them was out of the question. No insult meant to the communities, they only try to help for the short comings of the API developers.

In short I would like to leave with a final though. API developers, if you want people to use your API and take it seriously please provide proper documentation to at least give some insurance on the success of your API. Just because you understand it doesn’t mean others will, you did develop it after all.

I was recently reminded by one of their many commercials that Microsoft is making an attempt at revamping their search engine. As with a few other Microsoft products, they seem to be trying to push this project away from the standard Microsoft name and image, probably in an attempt to draw in some of those Internet users who have come to fear that image but also don’t read much online news. So, they released Bing, using a name that has little to do with Microsoft, the Internet, or the searching thereof and seems to vaguely follow in the current ruling search giant’s footsteps (a recurring theme of Bing).

I’ve been trying to use Bing alongside my normal Google browsing on and off since it was release and I have to say that I haven’t been impressed. All the things that I still use Google for are either the same on Bing or moderately worse. For standard internet searching, they seem roughly on par with one another. Speed is to be expected these days, so that was a draw, and I came to the same answers and the same dead ends across both engines. Microsoft seems to have mirrored some of the Google functions that I use, like the calculator, though Live Search may have done that in the past and I simply did not notice. I was, however, a little sore at the lack of a definition function because that has become one of the most useful to me. I was also troubled by some of the results presentation and overall user interface of Bing, mostly when Bing is sure that you want one website for a particular search term and will simply hide all other results from you until you go through a click-gate. I suppose this goes along with the marketing strategy Microsoft has for Bing, but I personally use search engines to acquire information from the interwebs and display it in an easily-parsable manner, not have the engine parse the data for me. It’s a preference, but I don’t think I’m alone.

Speaking of marketing strategy, I’m not a fan of the Bing commercials. Based on these, I feel like Microsoft is attempting the same overarching strategy here that they use with their operating system: Make customers fear the alternative and they will come to us. The problem in the case of search engines, unlike the fight against Linux, is that people have a lot of experience with the alternative, and generally have no problems with it. In order to truly compete, Microsoft needs to bring some new ideas to the field, and, strictly looking at their search, not even the almighty Google has pulled that one off in the past couple of years.