music

Rock Band … well, rocks!

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I played Guitar Hero for the first time last Christmas at a relative’s house. Since then I’ve dabbled with the GH demo kiosk at Best Buy and played drums briefly on Rock Band at a friend’s house. It seemed like a lot of fun and really appealed to the air guitarist and table drummer in me (as it would to most men, I would assume).

So for my birthday this past October, my wife and daughter surprised me with Rock Band for the Wii. While this was a great gift, I knew that Rock Band 2 was just around the corner (at the time, just a month away). So I returned the game and pre-ordered RB2 through Amazon.

As time went by, the release date for Rock Band 2 kept being pushed out. At one point it was the second week of January! Amazon duly kept sending me e-mail updates as to when my game would be arriving. I had pretty much resigned myself to not having my birthday present until early 2009. Then, suddenly, earlier this week I got an e-mail from Amazon saying it had shipped! It arrived on my doorstep Thursday night.

Friday evening, my daughter and I unpacked everything. The drums and guitar are wireless, but the microphone is corded (it’s a nice long cord though). You have to daisy-chain the small wireless receivers to the Wii via USB connections, so it’s a little messy in that regard, but it’s worth it to have the convenience of wireless instruments. Once we had everything connected, we gave Quickplay mode a try, my daughter on vocals and me on guitar, both on Easy mode. Considering she didn’t really know the songs, she picked them up really fast. Before we knew it, we had “Eye of the Tiger,” “Hungry Like a Wolf,” and “We Got the Beat” down.

The one thing that bugs me about games like this is the requirement to “unlock” songs. The box lists all of these tracks (“plus many more!”) but when you start, you can’t play just any of them. My daughter, for example, noticed Blondie’s “One Way or Another” was on the box, but wasn’t available in Quickplay until we manage to unlock it in Tour mode. I had the same issue with Dance Dance Revolution: Hottest Party (though eventually I did get all the songs unlocked).

So Saturday night I spent about two hours playing by myself in Tour mode, unlocking more songs. It was addictive! I would finish a set (on guitar) which would unlock more songs, some of which I’d be like: oh, I’ve got to try that one! So I’d keep going and going.

Tonight I finally gave the drums a try, which was great fun too. This is just really a fun fun game. It helps if you’re musically inclined and know some of the songs, but seeing my eight year-old belt out “Eye of the Tiger” shows that anyone can play this game and have a great time.

Have you seen those recent car commercials on TV where they show all of these classic toys (the Big Wheel, Sit-n-Spin, etc.) and then show the adult in the new car, correlating the feeling of those new toys on Christmas morning to driving that new car? That’s sorta what playing Rock Band 2 is like for me … growing up playing air guitar, drumming on the steering wheel in the car, now realized as a video game in my living room. It rocks!

An evening with TSO

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For my birthday last month, my younger siblings got me tickets to the Trans-Siberian Orchestra concert here in Tampa tonight.

If you listen to any Christmas radio, you’ve probably heard TSO standards like “Christmas Eve/Sarajevo” or “Wizards in Winter.” In fact, until tonight those were the only two songs by the group I had on my iPod. If you haven’t heard, or heard of, the Trans-Siberian Orchestra, think Christmas music in the rock-opera style and you should have a good idea of what TSO is all about.

Not only was the music and singing fantastic, the light show and pyrotechnics were amazing. It was also cool to see the wide range of people at the show: couples, families, and folks of all ages. In fact, the two guys sitting next to me, drinking some beers and “woo!”ing during all the good parts looked like they belonged at the hockey game instead of a concert, but were having a great time like everyone else. You never would have pegged them as TSO fans if you ran into them on the street.

Overall, it was a cool experience and a nice way to start the upcoming holiday season. Time to hit up the Amazon MP3 store for some more tracks for the Christmas playlist!

Graduation at East High

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I took my daughter to see “High School Musical 3: Senior Year” this afternoon. I guess everyone who wanted to see this saw it opening weekend, because this was only the third weekend of its release and the theater was pretty empty … and all the kids were girls under 10, as I expected.

“Senior Year” follows the now-familiar (to anyone with a young daughter) characters of Troy, Gabriella, Sharpay, Ryan, Chad, Taylor, and Kelsi as they finish their last year at East High and face graduation and moving on to college.

Like the first two films, this one has some snappy song-and-dance routines but is a little light on story/plot (but I guess HSM is about the music after all, right?). My daughter’s favorite song was “The Boys are Back,” sung by Troy and Chad in a junk yard scene where they reminisce about being kids pretending to be ninjas, superheroes, etc. My daughter particularly liked the part where they turned into 8-year old versions of themselves. I didn’t really see anything “big budget” about this movie compared to the originals which aired directly on the Disney Channel. I guess doing a full theater release was just one more way for Disney to rake in the cash before the end of the franchise (like they won’t make a ton on merchandising and tie-ins anyway!).

It’s an amazing world our kids are growing up in: when we got home after the movie, I purchased the HSM3 soundtrack from the Amazon MP3 store (for $4 less than the DRMed version on iTunes) and then burned it onto CD so she had it for her bedtime listening enjoyment. Incredible.

If you’re a parent who’s seen HSM3 (or any of the HSM movies for that matter), you owe it to yourself to check out the “Night School Musical: Senior Year Equivalent” sketch from Saturday Night Live.

Take On Me, the literal version

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a-Ha’s “Take On Me” was a groundbreaking music video. I still remember seeing it for the first time on MTV at my grandmother’s house back in the 80s (we didn’t have cable at home). Here’s a hilarious version of it that explains what’s really going on. Pipe wrench fight!

What is it about this shirt?

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mn1_000048-738149Last month when we were on vacation, I bought this t-shirt at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum in Cleveland. Out of all the other shirts in the gift shop, I thought this one was the coolest: it was simple, had no writing (except for the small Rock Hall logo on the back), and just looked sweet. It also helped that it was subtle: the younger people I was with had no idea what the “symbol” was … they thought it was just a cool logo.

I’ve worn the shirt a couple of times since I bought it and every time, at least one person comes up to me to comment on it.

One lady thought it was the disc used in toy guns (like this one, I guess?). One person thought it was a stylized bio-hazard symbol. Most older folks know what it is, though, and just say what a cool shirt it is. I had two people approach me about it just today while grocery shopping!

I have a lot of other t-shirts, but this is the only one that seems to inspire complete strangers to walk up to me and talk about it.

Oh, and if you still don’t know what it is … look here and search the page for “snap-in.”

I love my iPod. I #$%@ HATE iTunes!

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I love my 30gb iPod Video … I really do. The interface is simple and elegant; the hardware is a marvel; its changed how I listen to music, and what I listen to: I don’t listen to radio at all anymore, I listen to podcasts (or when the podcasts run out, music!).

So why, why, WHY does Apple ruin such a perfect device with the millstone-around-the-neck that is iTunes? Where do I start?

  • iTunes is slow: my main desktop that I use for iTunes is a 3.0GHz P4 with 2gb of RAM running Vista Home Premium. Ok, yes, it’s a few years old and doesn’t have dual cores, but it’s not exactly slow. And yet iTunes runs like molasses: switching between views in the library is slow, typing into the search box is slow, right-clicking on my iPod under Devices to get to the context menu is slow. The entire thing is just sloooooow.
  • iTunes is bloated: why do I have a Apple TV tab in my iTunes preferences when I don’t have an Apple TV? Why does it install the Apple Mobile Device Support service and the Syncing tab under Preferences when I don’t have an iPhone?
  • iTunes is broken: this drives me nuts … I update the tags on my MP3s, add album art, etc. Then I’ll notice, while a track is playing on my iPod, that the cover art is gone. I check iTunes, and sure enough, the art has been removed. Sometimes it even seems to update the Album Artist tag for me. I’ve spent a lot of time tagging everything the way I want it … don’t mess with my tags! (And before you ask, yes, I have “automatically download missing album artwork” turned off).
  • iTunes is sneaky: remember a few months ago when Apple tried to slip in their Safari browser through their Windows updater? Well, if you’ve upgraded to iTunes 7.7 recently, you’ll find a new MobileMe icon in your control panel! Yep, they did it again. I’m not going to use MobileMe, don’t mess around and put icons for stuff I don’t want on my PC (for steps on how to remove it, see here).

There are a few things I like about iTunes: the podcatcher functionality, Smart Playlists, the ability to organize my music library hierarchy on my PC, etc. I only use it, though, because I have to. I stopped buying tracks from the iTunes Music Store once Amazon launched their DRM-free music store so I don’t need it for that. If you know of a good iTunes replacement that will work with my iPod, please let me know!

A new music player for TiVo: Harmonium

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I’ve been using Galleon for a long time (since its JavaHMO roots) to play my music library on my TiVos. Now there’s nothing wrong with it, but development has pretty much come to a complete halt.

Enter a new HME music application: Harmonium by Charles Perry. It’s still in early beta (only up to version 0.3.1) but shows promise. It has a sharp, high-definition interface, allows creation of playlists on-the-fly, is easy to use, and its free.

For now, I’ve shut off my Galleon music applications and am checking out Harmonium. I’ve run into a few snags and one thing it’s missing is the ability to parse my iTunes library directly (which means not having to export playlists into separate files) but like I said, it’s still an early beta. Now that it’s up and running my next mini-project will be to get it to run through Galleon so I don’t have two separate java processes hogging resources on my Ubuntu server (they both use the java service wrapper, so this should be possible). Stay tuned.

5th gen iPod Video

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iPodMy luck continues … I was the winner of a random drawing for a customer satisfaction survey I filled out some months back. My prize: a 30gb 5th generation Apple iPod with Video!

Now, there was nothing really wrong with my trusty Archos Jukebox Studio 20 that has served me well for close to four years, but it’s not as sexy as the iPod. I’ve only had it a couple of days, and am still in the process of learning iTunes and copying my 4000+ tracks to the new device, but it is one sweet little gadget.

The color screen is amazingly crisp and bright (I love the movie theater-style fade in/out of the backlight). The click/scroll wheel is fun to use and the interface and controls are much more intuitive than the Archos (hey, it’s made by Apple after all!).

Archos Jukebox Studio 20

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Jukebox 20I found out quick that using the Microdrive along with my iPAQ to play MP3s on the road wasn’t a perfect solution. The Microdrive would only hold about 50 songs, suck the iPAQ’s batteries dry, and using Windows Media Player is not exactly my idea of fun. At the same time, I was looking at portable hard drives so I could actually carry around large files and applications, more than I could fit on CompactFlash.

Enter the Archos Jukebox Studio 20. This little gizmo has a 20gb hard drive in it and doubles as a USB hard drive and a portable MP3 player. It’s a little on the heavy side, and the user interface needs work, but it’s usable and the battery life is pretty good (rechargeable, too). It even has a line out so I can connect it to my home stero and have hours of music. I’ve got a little over 1,000 tracks on it now and still have gigs left over. There’s even an open-source project to write new firmware for it, called RockBox. Had the Windows-compatible iPod been available when I bought the Jukebox, I might have gone for that, but I am very happy with the device.