David Emery OnlineSoundManager 2 > 360° player demo
Inline “donut player” example (experimental)… Canvas-based UI. Load progress, seek, play/pause etc.
This is totally cool – we use Soundmanager all over the place already; hopefully we can roll this out without breaking things for rubbish browsers…
Visit ➔Cafetiere
You know how your dad or someone always has a go-to joke or phrase for something? Well over the past year mine has become, “At least, it’s something to blog about.” After walking a few hundred yards in the wrong direction to go and get some Tarantula Piss and Ritz crackers from the petrol station, I took a photo of my Stan Smiths, pressed the stopwatch on, and set off; and one of my first tasks was to ford the mighty Hanna Creek. It wasn’t that tough, really; there’s a road bridge over it.
Flip Flop Flying is the blog of Craig Robinson – him of Minipops fame – and is one of my favourite reads. Lovely little normal stories.
Visit ➔Fuck the foundries
Seriously. Fuck them. They still think they’re in the business of shuffling little bits of metal around. You want to use a super-cool ultra-awesome totally-not-one-of-the-11-web-safe-fonts? Pick an open source font and get on with your life.
I couldn’t agree more. The font foundries – like the music industry before them – need to accept the fact that this whole internet thing exists and there’s nothing they can do about it. What they need to be doing – as soon as they possibly can – is changing their licensing so that you can use them on websites in a legal way.
Because they’re just about to have a huge influx of new potential customers for their fonts, so it might – you know – be useful to be able to sell to them.
Visit ➔RED ONE Camera Shoots Esquire Magazine Cover
Esquire magazine today announced that the June 2009 issue of their rather glorious magazine (on sale May 10) features Megan Fox on its cover, and more importantly, that the image was captured with a video camera. Yes. That’s right the REDone’s 4k image is the first I know of to be sitting nicely on the front cover of a high-end, public-at-large magazine.
The march of progress continues, although I think possibly the point may be: Why? It’s a nice enough cover but it’s hardly something that couldn’t have been achieved via a traditional camera.
What I wonder is how on earth you go about wading through the footage to find the ‘shots’? For example on Monday at the Sonic Youth gig I took over 1000 shots and picking between those was hard enough – what do you do when you have 10 minutes of footage at 25fps (which works out as 15,000 frames)?
Visit ➔D&AD Nominations Announced
The nominations for the 2009 D&AD Awards have just been announced. After last year’s furore, will graphic design figure this time?
Never mind graphic design, is anyone else thinking that the websites nominated are almost all rubbish? All chintzy, obvious marketing rubbish with no hint of style, class or innovation. It’s quite interesting how out of touch the traditional design world is from the ‘web’ world.
Visit ➔The Horrors - Primary Colours
Certainly a contender for album of the year, now in handy embedable form:
Visit ➔Fluid Images
Ultimately, I decided to use the approach from his third example, which was to set a max-width of 100% on all images on my website […] And as it turns out, this works just fine for most embedded videos, too.
Well that’s mighty clever.
Visit ➔Phil Spector convicted of murder
US music producer Phil Spector has been convicted of murdering actress Lana Clarkson, after a five-month retrial. The 68-year-old, famous for the “Wall of Sound” recording technique, faces between 18 years and life in prison.
So does that mean we have to expunge his existence from musical history, Glitter-style? Or is murder, you know, not as bad?
Visit ➔iTunes Price Changes Hurt Some Rankings
Two days after the Apple iTunes Music Store raised prices on some individual tracks, there was evidence the increases have hurt the sales rankings of songs given the higher $1.29 price.
While it is difficult to say with certainty whether a price increase had resulted in less revenue, rough estimates reveal slight, negative changes in chart position would result in a positive change in revenue. The changes in chart position between Tuesday and Thursday, however, clearly show that higher prices had forced many songs to cede chart position to lower-priced songs.
It’s no real surprise to me that for chart ‘hits’ a higher price leads to lower sales – a chart-based purchase is more likely to be an impulse purchase, so it follows that that impulse is more likely to be quashed by a higher purchase price (especially when placed next to lots of other cheaper chart tracks).
Visit ➔UMG and YouTube officially announce Vevo
The rumours were right. Universal Music Group and Google have announced their joint venture, Vevo – a video site offering UMG’s music videos, with advertising revenues shared between the two.
Isn’t this just the same as what should be at universalmusic.com/videos? Such a pointless piece of band-engineering and marketing rubbish.
Also, while you’ve got a moment check out umusic.com (which is the groups site, as opposed to just music – or something…) – it’s stunningly awful.
Visit ➔Combining Cufon and @font-face
Everyone wants @font-face to work everywhere, but as it stands, it only works in Safari and the upcoming versions of Firefox and Opera. In this article I’ll show you how to use Cufón only if we can’t load the font through other, faster methods.
This looks like a very good solution, and could probably be adapted to work with sIFR as well if you so wished.
Visit ➔Now That's What I Call Unrecouped
Common wisdom has it that the artists who get record deals then go straight to the bargain bins are by definition not very good. But this is myopic. Quite often they aren’t very good, it’s true, but some of them are there due to bad timing, bad luck, wrong single choice or simply that Jo Whiley’s producer decided they didn’t like the record.
Brilliant stuff. There are quite a few bands that I’ve worked with over the years that I’d add to this list, but I’m not going to name names as I think for some it might be a bit soon (the wounds are still fresh…).
Visit ➔Posterous
Posterous – The place to post everything. Just email us. Dead simple blog by email.
I’d checked out Posterous a while back but forgotten about it for being maybe a bit to simple (I forget exactly why, to be honest) but they seem to be rocking a pretty good service at the moment. You just email them at post@posterous.com and they take care of the rest – setting up a blog, hosting the images/audio/video attachments you send, the works basically.
The key for me is that they also let that data be sucked out again as well, either via RSS or direct via the MetaWebLog API which means they’re a perfect (free) backend service to power post-via-email onto pretty much any site. Incredibly handy if – like me – you look after 50+ Textpattern sites that need to be maintained by a bunch of people that can’t necessarily be inclined to deal with logging into a CMS on a regular basis.
Visit ➔No Rock And Roll Fun: 25,000
Music. It’s bloody brilliant, isn’t it?
No Rock And Roll Fun is one of my favourite music blogs, and one of the few UK based ones at that. Well worth reading if you’re not already.
Visit ➔God Help The Girl
The new project from Belle and Sebastian’s Stuart Murdoch, which we launched yesterday. Contains my first use of the new CSS 3 ‘column-count’ property to have multiple columns of text, which was so crazy easy (and degrades nicely to one column in IE) that I’m probably going to use it all over the place now…
Visit ➔Celebration Electric Tarot
We as Celebration, have felt the continual growth of web culture’s need for barrier-free exchange. We also feel that the traditional methods of releasing music have put too much distance between us. As we see it, the current music business model is crumbling. The birth of the MP3 has dreampt the death of the CD, and so all across the board Cd sales have dropped. What has given way is something so magical and evolutionary, that we have only begun to understand the cultural impact of this sharing. So, past the piles of broken CD cases and badly scratched, polycarbonate, rainbow discs, there lies a fantastic world of freedom—freedom to share instantly with little or no impact on the evironment, in a seemingly infinite, eternal and virtually cost free universe of the World Wide Web. This is our emancipation. Without the need for manufacturing CDs and the danse macabre of the promotional corporate machine, we can be free to release our music when and how we want—no waiting. we know nothing of the marketing world and don’t care about the vampires anymore.
Our plan and experiment is to post new songs monthly, as we create and record them. Under the creative commons attribution non-commercial share alike license, all of our new music will be free to download on our new website. When we have enough music for an album, we will release it on vinyl for those who want to have something to hold. As artists we can only stand for our music, our art, our creation. So here it is—laid bare.
Good luck to them – I’m a big fan. If you have the means, making your music free like this could have some interesting repercussions artistically (free of the shackles of the album format, ‘hit singles’ and the like).
Visit ➔Department of Eagles - No One Does It Like You
A simply lovely video for one of the best tracks of last year.
I particularly like the singing ghosts:
Visit ➔OnLive Makes PC Upgrades Extinct
You may never buy a new video card ever again. Actually, the only PC gaming hardware you might ever need will cost you less than a Wii, should OnLive’s potential live up to its promise.
[…]
The concept is simple. Your controller input isn’t going from your hand to the controller to the machine in front of you, it’s going from your hand to the controller through the internet to OnLive’s machines then back again as streamed video. Whether you’re using a USB gamepad, Bluetooth wireless controller, or tried and true keyboard and mouse, the processing and output happens on OnLive’s side, then is fed back to your terminal, with the game “perceptually” played locally.
Very interesting, especially considering the rise in netbooks and other low performance, connected platforms (cough iPhone cough).
Visit ➔Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable
Revolutions create a curious inversion of perception. In ordinary times, people who do no more than describe the world around them are seen as pragmatists, while those who imagine fabulous alternative futures are viewed as radicals. The last couple of decades haven’t been ordinary, however. Inside the papers, the pragmatists were the ones simply looking out the window and noticing that the real world was increasingly resembling the unthinkable scenario. These people were treated as if they were barking mad. Meanwhile the people spinning visions of popular walled gardens and enthusiastic micropayment adoption, visions unsupported by reality, were regarded not as charlatans but saviors.
A absolute must read article. RIP the newspaper industry; long live journalism.
Visit ➔