Acts of Volition

When the MP3 format first appeared there were some who dismissed it because it was a step backwards in quality. This is true. Many MP3s are encoded at 128Kb/s at which certain slight differences can be discerned on a good pair of headphones.  •  Obviously, these people were wrong. The slight loss …

A link found from Matt Haughey's a.wholelottanothing.org lead me to a talk by Brewster Kahle of the Internet Archive. His organization is working a variety of projects to make public domain content available in an "internet library". Among these projects is the WayBack Machine, which archives the …

The Creative Commons organization gives artists the tools they need to release their work into the public domain with limitations.  •  As a nod of support to the organization, my old band, Horton's Choice, has released our recordings under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike …

If you catch this in time (before 10PM Atlantic time, Friday night) - tune into CBC Radio One (RealAudio). The program IDEAS is running an interesting feature on a Toronto composer who interviewed his grandfather about his life, and set the recordings to music.  •  Don't worry if you missed it …

Rob and I have been toying around with an idea on and off for the past year (read: we've written a few emails). The idea, which would be called the Open Music Project, if the name wasn't already taken, is basically open source music.  •  The raw, isolated tracks of a recording can be compared to …

I watched U2's Boston concert DVD last night and I was pleased. Having seen the Elevation Tour in Montreal, I was curious to see how the DVD-on-laptop-in-bed experience would compare with the 18,000-people-in-a-stadium experience. Obviously it didn't touch the real thing, but it was a nice …

All this talk of great music has got me thinking (more than I should, perhaps). I love music. I can't listen to music in bed at night because instead of going to sleep, I listen intently until the entire CD is though and only then can I think of sleeping.  •  What I love most about music is the …

SPIN magazine has released their 50 best bands of all time. While this is somewhat of a foolish exercise, I thought we could have a short and fruitless debate about it.  •  I'm not sure what Rage Against the Machine, Outkast, and Korn are doing in there. Other than that, I think they did as good a …

As is often the case, I have only now discovered something that was cool a year ago. In the music-journalist-speak the Canadian indie-rock Supergroup, The New Pornographers won a Juno for Best Alternative Album for their album Mass Romantic. Their name comes from a Jimmy Swaggart quote where he …