Tag: mp3

An experiment

On By Luther M. SilerIn Writing5 Comments

So.  Uh.  The first day of school was today, and Open House and the first teacher day were yesterday, and Aretha fucking Franklin died today, and all of those things are sort of rattling around in my head and clamoring for my attention and demanding to be blogged about, and those are probably coming, don’t get me wrong, but instead?  This:

Every so often I get asked about whether I’ve got my books available on audio, and I have to say no.  And that’s always sort of stuck in my craw, and a couple of times I’ve tried to get auditions at Audible and not really gotten anywhere– I got a few submissions for Benevolence Archives, Vol. 1 when I tried it the first time, and I think I was probably being a bit too picky about the voice, and at any rate right now I have no one knocking down my door to record my books for me.

But I’ve got this professional-quality microphone right here on my desk, not being used often enough for the money I spent for it, and so screw it, I recorded one of the stories from Balremesh and other stories myself, and I don’t know a thing about audio or audiobooks so maybe you give this a listen and let me know if it sucks or not?  Be as brutal as you like; I’ve got no ego about it.  If I suck, I’d like to be stopped from doing it again.  🙂

(One thing, tho: there is going to be a volume difference between the introduction and the actual story.  I didn’t necessarily put it there on purpose, but once I realized it was there I left it in because I wasn’t sure if people would prefer one recording level over another and I figured that might be useful data.  So if you have a preference, or if one is way too loud or way too quiet, let me know.)

ALSO:  If you were one of my Patrons, you’d have had access to this for a couple of weeks now!  Wanna join the coolest group of Patrons on the planet?  You can, for just a buck a month!

On what happened to my money

On By Luther M. SilerIn Music3 Comments

music-thinkingI have purchased what seems like a considerable amount of music over the summer.  I feel like this list says something about me (other than “this sucker still pays for music,”) but I’m not exactly sure what:

  • Matisyahu, Akeda
  • Murs and ¡Mayday!, Mursday
  • Mika, The Boy Who Knew Too Much and Life in Cartoon Motion
  • YG, My Krazy Life
  • 3rd Bass, Derelicts of Dialect
  • Macy Gray, Covered
  • Phish, Fuego
  • Nappy Roots, The Pursuit of Nappyness
  • Tom Waits, Mule Variations
  • Weird Al Yankovic, Mandatory Fun
  • Lou Reed, Transformer
  • Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers, Hypnotic Eye

Toss in half-a-dozen or so individual tracks, too.

In case you’re wondering, there’s a Guardians of the Galaxy review coming, but probably not today.  I need to let this one roll around in my head a bit; the review’s gonna be more mixed than I wanted it to be but the parts I liked I liked a lot.

In which I stab my eyes

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, Music2 Comments

574962p

So– hah– this post was gonna start with the words “just a quick note, since I want to be at school by 8:30” when I sat down twenty minutes ago to start writing it, before I 1) decided to look and see how much a song I heard on the radio would cost to download and 2) make sure to download a new album onto my non-3G iPad so that I could listen to it at work today.   I was going to spend a couple of minutes talking about this New York testing fiasco, where they switched to a Common Core-based standardized test and, in accordance with prophecy, “proficiency” scores fell through the fucking floor.

Neither of those two things worked, though, and now I’m all “fuck everything digital” and no it has not escaped me that I’m using a computer to write that on the internet, and if you’re so clever how come you haven’t figured out a way to go fuck yourself yet?

One, the goddamn MP3 album was three bucks more expensive than the CD.  And that’s bullshit, always.  You cannot charge me more to Not Send Me a Thing than you do to Send Me a Thing.  The digital version of a thing should always be less expensive than the Actual Thing.  And most of the time shouldn’t exist.  I’ve been converted to MP3s because MP3s are genuinely more useful than CDs are– yes, I really do want my entire twelve-some-odd-thousand song music collection with me all the goddamn time, because I never know what I’m going to be in the mood for, and my tastes are catholic enough that it’s difficult to even come up with a proper representative sample.

I pay $25 a year for iTunes Match, which is supposed to ensure that everything on my computer also lives in the cloud and can be accessed by both my phone and my iPad.  Granted, in the case of the iPad, if I want to be able to listen to something when not in reach of a wireless network I need to specifically download it, but I knew that when I bought the thing.

So why is the fuckin’ album I want to download the only album that doesn’t seem to have shown up on the iPad, almost a week after I initially downloaded it?  Hell if I know, and attempting to convince my iPad to find the damn album has unleashed hell in a manner that I don’t have time to describe.  Needless to say: technology clusterfuck, and nothing has the right album covers anymore, among other more massive but less obvious problems, and THIS DOESN’T FUCKING HAPPEN WITH CDS, GODDAMMIT, AND MAYBE SOCIETY SHOULD THINK ABOUT THIS SHIT A BIT?  Earlier this week just about my entire (small, as I hate them) collection of books disappeared out of both devices.  I had to redownload everygoddamnthing twice.  Have I ever had to redownload a physical book?  Nope, not once, and the total number of books I’ve lost or accidentally destroyed over the course of my life is probably twenty, most of which were lost in The Great Dog Piss Incident of 2009.  It happens to digital files all the fucking time.

I fucking hate the future.  Also, standardized tests, but I’ll bitch about that later, apparently.