by R.I. Pienaar | May 9, 2004 | Front Page
Last night I went to see the Wolfsheim concert despite my earlier plans not to go. I was quite glad I went the concert was excellent.
The supporting acts were Trademark and Silence is Sexy.
I did not care much for Trademark, they seem to be a bit of a Kraftwerk inspired electronic band completely with glowing costumes and all, but it lacked something in the overall execution. Silence is Sexy was really good I thought, the female vocal has a very strong voice it may be worth trying to get hold of some of their music.
Wolfsheim was fantastic, it is mostly a 2 man band with what seemed to be temporary band members on drums and guitar, one member takes care of the music with the help of a Apple Powerbook while the other does all the singing, after listening to them now for 3 years or so it was really great to finally see them live other than on the DVD I have of their concerts.
The concert was held at the Carling Islington Academy. The venue is pretty small but has an impressive lightning system and good sized stage, the sound quality can do with some improvement though as there were quite a bit of distortion some times.
View the extended entry for some photos that I took with my Canon iXus 400, they wont allow you into concerts with professional camera equipment ๐
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by R.I. Pienaar | May 4, 2004 | Photography
Via PhotographyBLOG I found a nice workflow and action for creation black and white images from color without messing with the original file. The workflow is very flexible and seems to give good results that can be tailored to your needs.
by R.I. Pienaar | Apr 29, 2004 | Usefull Things
A lot of news sites is covering allofmp3.com‘s 1Mb / 1 US cent download service. I subscribed and spent $10 and have been happily downloading music since. They are suffering under a bit of load with lots of server busy messages, but it’s understandable given the attention they are receiving.
The story was first carried by the Sydney Morning Herald who spoke to a legal type that had the following to say:
We sought some advice from a Melbourne barrister and contributor to these pages, Simon Minahan, who practises in the area of intellectual property. His opinion: “There’s probably nothing to stop the individual from downloading this material for private use. For end users, the issue is a basic question relevant to acquiring a reproduction of any copyright work: has the rights owner consented?” Even if allofmp3.com’s asserted licence is bogus, says Minahan, “the end user would seem to have a good basis to argue that he is an innocent infringer, which would mean he isn’t liable to damages, although he would still be liable to an order requiring him to destroy or deliver up any copies and an order requiring him to refrain from doing it again.”
First thing I got was the Wolfsheim that I had issues with earlier followed by some rare Einsturzende Neubauten that I am finding hard to even find in the usual basements in Camden.
The quality is great, they keep the files in WAV format on their servers and you get to choose mp3, mp4, ogg or wma and the desired bitrate. Higher bitrate = bigger files = pay more. This means you get to wait a bit for your downloads to be ready, but you can easily feed it into wget or something like that to fetch once they notify you by email its all ready for the taking.
Here’s hoping it lasts.
by R.I. Pienaar | Apr 25, 2004 | Usefull Things
Microsoft is getting into the RSS thing it seems, they are providing a feed with their latest security alerts, you can subscribe to it here.
by R.I. Pienaar | Apr 25, 2004 | Uncategorized
I purchased the Casting Shadows CD by Wolfsheim. I did not look at it properly in the shop and it turns out its a copy protected CD.
I never listen to my CDs directly, I rip them as soon as I can and then put them away for save keeping, listening to the MP3s on my iPod or Laptop via the radio if I have to. I don’t pirate music all my MP3s are from CDs I actually own and I don’t share any music.
Now with this Wolfsheim CD I had no choice but to resort to asking someone to look on P2P networks for me since it does not work in my PC and for most does not work in my 1999 Sony Surround system. He found an excellent 192k bit rate copy, now at least I can listen to the music I bought the way I want. I do not know how a small band like Wolfsheim (they are big in Germany) would sell out to the big record labels like this but it is definately giving me second thoughts about buying any more music of theirs and I am now definately not going to the live show that is here next month.
