Acts of Volition

In 1996, I went to see Sloan and Thrush Hermit play on their One Chord to Another tour at “The Barn” at UPEI. It was one of the greatest concerts I’ve ever seen. When Sloan’s last album came out, I wrote about it here on Acts of Volition.  •  Now, seven years later, their new album, Action Pact …

Driving into the office today, CBC Radio played Adam Sandler’s Lunchlady Land (live) followed by Leonard Nimoy’s Ballad of Bilbo Baggins. This truly is a great country.

While I don’t have the talent or motivation to follow through on this idea, I thought it was worth sharing. Would it make sense to have an album file format that served as a container for individual songs?  •  I imagine some of the following features:  •  A container file, similar to ZIP or TAR …

Just came from the CBC Radio offices here in Charlottetown where I recorded a quick piece with Matt Rainnie for a series on the local afternoon show, Mainstreet. He’s been bringing in people to share some of their favourite music. It seems I’m in good company as other geeks-with-taste who have …

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 …