Month: October 2007

Some Are Getting It Indeed

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Album Download Site Finally! RADIOHEAD’s new way of distributing music seems to catch on. Another artist who’s excellent previous album often finds its way onto my playlist will release his upcoming album in a fashion similar to ‘In Rainbows’: Saul William‘s new release will be available as a DRM-free download in two flavors:

  • if you decide to pay 5$ you will be able to choose from a 192 kbits/s MP3, a 320 kbits/s MP3 or a FLAC version (yes!)
  • if you don’t want to pay anything you will still be able to download the 192 kbits/s MP3 version

Hey, even the free version is encoded with a higher bitrate than ‘In Rainbows’! I just hope the revenue generated by my five bucks will not be diminished by the bandwidth costs necessary to transfer those FLAC files to my hard disk.

Note that, according to the download site for the album, the MP3 files will be:

encoded with LAME v3.97 and love.

Sweet Irony

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After reading that the good people from id have released a Linux port of their ETQW demo, I decided to give it a try (even though it does not seem to be my kind of FPS) in order to test the 3D capabilities of my new laptop. When installing the demo I skipped through their EULA noting that 3e) forbids me to:

distribute the Software by any means, including, but not limited to, Internet or other electronic distribution, direct mail, retail, mail order, or other means;

The funny thing is that id distribute the demo via BitTorrent only – which automatically turns everybody downloading the software into a distributor of that file. The problem is of course that they use their standard EULA for the demo, but maybe somebody from the development department should have a chat with their lawyers sometime.

Oh, and as an update to my previous post: is it me or have hypertext experts turned RADIOHEAD’s homepage into a giant wobbly blob?

Update:  it seems that either Firefox or the Flash Plugin for Linux fail to render the animation underneath the text, rendering the website unusable.

3£

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In Rainbows For those that have been off-line last week: RADIOHEAD released their new album “In Rainbows” as a pay as much as you think it’s actually worth digital download. As I enjoyed their music for more then a decade I was happy to learn that they chose such a consumer friendly approach with this release.

Some might argue that three quid are not overly generous, but I find the release to be somewhat reduced: The songs come as 160 kbits/s mp3 files, which is pretty much as low as you can go – I would not even have considered purchasing a 128 kbits/s release. While I would have preferred a >=192 kbits/s (or even a FLAC) release, I have to admit that the sound quality is excellent.

In case you are unhappy about the lack of an official cover you can easily help yourself with this large collection of inoffical ones.

I have to say it’s a wonderful album and although it’s not as “complicated” as the previous ones (and I really enjoyed that complexity) it still is a RADIOHEAD album and I am happy to hear that the online release seems to be a success. One can just hope that other artists get the message that people will actually pay a realistic price for high quality music if you give them the freedom to listen to it any way they want to.

New Hardware

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Recently I got equipped with a shiny new Lattitude D830. It came with a WUXGA display and nVidia’s latest Quadro NVS 140M monster to fill all those pixels. After having read some installation reports I decided to install gutsy on this machine.

The installation went smoothly and (although I haven’t done thorough testing) everything seems to run out of the box. Well, except for sound. A common workaround for this is to compile a current alsa-driver snapshot. It didn’t work for me at first as for the gutsy gibbon the snd-hda-intel module is now being installed in a non-standard position:
/lib/modules/2.6.22-12-generic/ubuntu/media
Which caused a conflict with my newly installed version. After deleting the ubuntu module sound works, however the volume control does not always behave as expected.

Overall, performance is very nice, however it is really frustrating that even with such a powerful machine it is not possible to play one of Apple’s full HD clips without frame drops. Unfortunately it seems like we will not be seeing anything from nVidia in terms of hardware acceleration in the near future – for now I’m hoping that ffmpeg will introduce multithreading support for h264 decoding some time soon (this thread on ffmpeg-devel looks promising).