Author Archive for Brent

iTunes Store “Complete My Album” amnesty expires June 26

Published
by
Brent
on June 15, 2007
in music and rants
. 0 Comments

(Cross-posted from FatLab Music)

An big deadline is approaching for customers of the iTunes Store. This past March, Apple introduced “Complete My Album”, which gives you a credit against albums purchased within 180 days of buying an individual track.

But what about singles you bought long ago? Well, Apple set June 26, 2007 as the date “Complete My Album” expires for tracks purchased before December 28, 2006. (FAQ link)

That’s less than two weeks away, so go to iTunes and see what you can buy and for how much:

(all affiliate proceeds help me feed my dogs)
Apple iTunes

But before you get too excited, there are gobs of exceptions. Hidden in the FAQ is one catch 22 where you can be penalized for, get this, having purchased too many individual tracks. Case in point: I spent $7.92 to buy an album from my youth, Use Your Illusion II by Guns N’ Roses. I bought all eight tracks of the “partial album only” which Apple was offering, so kudos to them for letting me upgrade now to the full album, right? Nope.

The CMA FAQ says:

…if you previously acquired so many single tracks from the same album that the price would be less than the current price of a single song…, you will not be able to purchase the remaining tracks.

Since “Use Your Illusion II” now costs only $6.99, if I had bought less — only 6 of the 8 tracks — I could have upgraded for $1.05. Instead it will now cost me $14.91 total after I repurchase the full album and with it tracks I already own, in a DRM’d low-res format no less. It’s a stoopid policy which punishes individual track purchasing, and worse, it was Apple (or GnR’s label) who restricted me from buying the full album in the first place.

I like the convenience of the iTunes Store and all, but if Apple does enough of this, CDs on Amazon are looking pretty good again.

welcome to findtheothers.com

Published
by
Brent
on May 19, 2007
in meta
. 0 Comments

Our goal in starting this blog was to get some content going while we looked for a domain name suitable for the grand scheme for world domination we’re cooking up. We spent a long long time bouncing very webby names back and forth, and I can tell you there are very few names not registered. It’s staggering. After actively avoiding duplicating vowels or verbing a noun or ‘r’-ing a verb or bre.ak.ing words into international TLDs, there’s not much left. But we’ve had our eye on this gem for awhile, and when it’s previous owner let it lapse (thank you!), we were ready to snatch it up.

No details yet to tell about what exactly findtheothers is going to be, but we think the things we have been and will be writing about in this blog will feel right at home, with the many “others” we find to chime in and join us.

Nice colors, no?

Published
by
Brent
on May 3, 2007
in geeky
. 0 Comments
   
   
   
   
   
   

Too bad the AACS owns them.

PHP Snippet to convert frames to film timecode

Published
by
Brent
on May 2, 2007
in code snippets, development, geeky, independent film, php and tips
. 0 Comments

Here is a PHP code snippet I wrote that converts frames to an hour:minute:second.frames timecode string, given (I think) any framerate in FPS. I use it to log start times of MPEG clips I join together. With each joined clip, I increment a counter then convert that counter to timecode and log it.

PHP [Show Plain Code]:
function convert_frames_to_timecode($frames, $fps) {

    $sec = floor($frames / $fps);
    if ($sec) $remainder = $frames % $fps;

    $min = floor($sec / 60);
    if ($min) $sec = $sec % 60;

    $hr = floor($min / 60);
    if ($hr) $min = $min % 60;

    $remainder = str_pad($remainder, 2, "0", STR_PAD_LEFT);
    $sec = str_pad($sec, 2, "0", STR_PAD_LEFT);
    $min = str_pad($min, 2, "0", STR_PAD_LEFT);
    $hr = str_pad($hr, 2, "0", STR_PAD_LEFT);

    return "$hr:$min:$sec.$remainder";
}

Input integers for $frames and $fps. Returns a string formatted like “01:23:45.01″. Example:

PHP [Show Plain Code]:
$framecnt = 12345;
$smptelog = "";

$smptelog .= convert_frames_to_timecode($framecnt, 30) . "\n";

Returns "00:06:51.15".

DISCLAIMER: It works for me at 30fps and 60fps, I don’t know about fractional framerates. Test away and comment here with improvements.

A WordPress fix for broken curly quotes in Magpie RSS titles

Published
by
Brent
on April 25, 2007
in development, geeky, meta, tips and tools of my trade
. 1 Comment

Over on my FatLab Music homepage, I list the five most recent blog entries from our blog, Roll Over. WordPress makes this very simple with the wp_rss() function, available on any page in your site by including path_to_blog/wp-includes/rss.php. But I also wanted to parse an iPhoto photocast feed for some Lightbox JS magic. Since wp_rss() only pulls from your local blog, I installed a copy of Magpie RSS, the codebase WordPress uses for wp_rss(), independent of my blog install. In addition, because wp_rss() is actually a wrapper for Magpie RSS, you get a PHP error when Magpie’s rss_fetch.inc attempts to redeclare functions already declared in WordPress’s rss.php on the same page.

So now, I have achieved both my last five Roll Over posts and the Frankie Photocast — loaded (and cached!) by the stand-alone install of Magpie, not by WordPress.

Unfortunately, WordPress does this fancy quotes thing, converting straight quotes (") into curly quotes (“ and ”), among an array of other characters. Magpie RSS completely horked on the non-standard-ASCII quotes and output weird substitutions in their place. I didn’t end up finding the final cause, but I suspect either Magpie just can’t handle the extended character set (doubtful), or there was an encoding mismatch along the way (more likely).

I learned from this article that wptexturize() in wp-includes/formatting.php does the fancy quote translation, and the article goes on to show the line of code to comment out which disables this feature.

Rather than edit the WP codebase (which I see has been updated again) and have to remember which files to repatch with each update, I found the Unfancy Quote Plugin from Semilogic. Download, install, and enable and you’re good! Feeds and everything get passed thru this plugin and fancy quotes are un-curlied back to feed-friendly straight quotes.

Stop Calling It A Nor’easter

Published
by
Brent
on April 20, 2007
in rants
. 0 Comments

It must have been all over ‘e world news, because wha’ever happens in New York City happens to ‘e world. See, we got seven inches of rain in one day. Lots of flooding, pretty serious. But I had to turn off ‘e TV cuz ‘e newscasters were falling all over ‘emselves to say “nor’easter” all ‘e time.

I’m from Minnesota, so ‘is New England drawl some folks have can be a bit much sometimes (like Minn-ee-soooo-tans are ones to talk). But c’mon, “nor’easter”? Yeah, it’s a big low pressure system ‘at parks itself off ‘e Atlantic coast and churns rain from ‘e nor’east all over ‘e upper nor’east of ‘e country. But WHO says “nor’east” ever?

Unless ye tell someone to “drive nor’east a bit, ‘en turn left”, ye shouldn’t call ‘e storm a “nor’easter”.

Google news confirms ‘is horrible epidemic. Over a ‘ree day period starting April 15 2007 (’e day of ‘e Great Spring Nor’easter of 2007 as wikifolks are calling it), 6000+ references were made to Nor’easter while a measly 120 used ‘e more complicated yet sensible Northeaster. Local New York channel CW11 actually went as far as posting a screen graphic saying “APRIL NOR ‘EASTER”, as if it was neither April nor Easter, and ‘EASTER was abbreviated from something far too complicated to spell out.

Seems I’m not alone in my disdain for ‘is rampant appropriation of salty-dog-speak:

For decades, Edgar Comee, of Brunswick, Maine, waged a determined battle against use of ‘e term “nor’easter” by ‘e press, which usage he considered “a pretentious and altogether lamentable affectation” and “the odious, even loathsome, practice of landlubbers who would be seen as salty as the sea itself.” –wikipedia.com

I’m not a sailor. I doubt (m)any of ‘e newscasters are ei’er. I didn’t just get back from ‘e Sou’ By Sou’west Film Festival. No, I went to ‘e SouTH by SouTHwest.

TH is a phoneme peculiar to only a few world languages. It should be treasured, not apostrophized. All you landlubbers, c’mon now: norTHeaster, norTHeaster.

‘ank you.

Perceivable progress

Published
by
Brent
on April 14, 2007
in organization and todo
. 0 Comments

I actively use 4 macs in my day-to-day business.

I just can’t get rid of one if it’s still chugging away, so I repurpose it as a file server or an email terminal. My mac family now spans three processor generations, ergo I have varying degrees of performance as I move from machine to machine.

Naturally, I find myself not using my oldest computer (a first-gen 17″ G4 PowerBook) too often for even the most basic of computing tasks. This makes me wonder:

  • Has Apple purged G4 optimizations as Tiger has evolved? (My Dual G5 still seems to run great.)
  • Is 10.4 getting so fat that it’s bogging down my 1GHz old-skool machine?
  • Is it simply because my other three computers are at least 4x faster in MHz alone, not to mention two of them being Intel Core Duos?

Naturally it’s going to be at least the last two. (TODO: I should do some performance testing see if each subsequent 10.4.x update causes any measurable degradation in performance.)

But to shamelessly make this a life lesson (feels like church: “And in the same way, God…”), I realized that I work better when I can feel myself making progress. If it takes what is probably only 5 seconds extra to check my email, I won’t do it. Every little second delay adds up, and I feel like I’m going nowhere. I’ll go to another system to accomplish the same task, but I can *feel* it working.

I’m not sure that feeling my progress counts as “motivation”, but it eliminates a huge mental obstacle that makes working just that much harder some days. It really doesn’t matter how far down a deep and dark tunnel the finish line for a project is, as long as I can tell I’ll eventually get there.

Now work that in to a software package.

Has Musical Theatre jumped the shark?

Published
by
Brent
on March 30, 2007
in rants and theatre
. 2 Comments

NBC’s “Grease: You’re The One That I Want” finished last Sunday, but was anybody watching? I hope not. The low production values, questionable music selections, an inexcusably shallow talent pool — it all adds up to everyone I know calling this show “unwatchable”. Being that I plan to make much of my living in musical theatre, it is horrifying to me that Broadway’s latest attempt to be cool in the national spotlight was so half-assed.

Unfortunately for the (mostly) talented kids on the show, the producers seemed bent on playing up the underdog theme. The 2nd place runner-up, Austin “Hot Danny” Miller, played Woody in the 2006 NYMF production of my musical “Go-Go Beach” and was great. But his NBC bio page has ZERO mention of any of his theatre experience. His occupation? “Former “Days of Our Lives” Actor”. (Hmmm, doesn’t NBC air “Days”?) I could care less if they mentioned Go-Go, but at least mention that the kid starred in the Vegas production of Hairspray — he’s hardly just the Billy-Elliot-of-Texas, son-of-a-feedstore-owner kid they make him out to be.

The same story with other kids who were portrayed as waitresses or trainers or whatever. That might all *technically* be true, but c’mon. The producers deliberately turned a blind eye to underplay any previous theatre experience, in an attempt to appear to find a “raw” talent or something, while secretly certain their winner would have the stamina to perform a Broadway schedule.

So, you’ve got a nation of potential ticket buyers being shown that hard work and years of training aren’t necessary to be a star on Broadway. Just win a TV popularity contest. Great, now come pay $100 to see the show.

So why do this? Why create drama when the story of these kids’ struggle to become actors is already ripe with drama. Countless musicals have been written *about* the backstage drama of being in a musical. “Grease: YTOTIW” did an extreme disservice to the hard-working, talented kids all over New York. The show promoted an annoyingly diverse palette of “types”, focusing the final rounds on carefully manufactured Reality TV drama, rather than actual talent.

Broadway tried, and you know what, it’s just not hip. If he hasn’t already, the Fonz is on his bike revving his engine.

need new look

Published
by
Brent
on March 29, 2007
in meta
. 0 Comments

By the way Ben, I think K2 could use some help. I like it and all for structure and mechanics, but I think we can fancy it up. Just thinking out loud here. :)

Once we get a new name…

EDIT: and by the way, I shut off the “convert emoticons” WordPress option. That’s so 1995.

Tools of my trade

Published
by
Brent
on March 29, 2007
in music and tools of my trade
. 0 Comments

I’m up late mixing down theme park backing tracks for a Christmas-All-Year-Round kind of place. Actually, I’m not mixing. I just set a big multi-bounce in motion and DP is chugging away unattended. It’s times like this I appreciate the tools I have which let me run a full-scale music production business from a home-based studio.

That business, FatLab Music, is in our seventh year. The first five was solely our recording studio venture “The Audio Workshop”, and somewhere overlapping along the way we dba’d the FatLab name. Our mixing desk has undergone three or four major reconfigurations, and we’re constantly refining our setup.

Now, I see lists of gear flaunted on people’s sites all the time — as if seeing just the right Furman power conditioner in their rack will sell me on someone’s talents over the next guy’s. Whatever. A list means nothing — *why* I bought it (and am I still using it) means everything.

So, I’m starting a series of posts — something between a review and an endorsement — on each item in my music production setup. A little feature summary, some pros/cons, and what kinds of projects it gets used for.

But not tonight — it’s 2:33a, and for now my 9 week old puppy is asleep. Recording theme park vocals in 8 hours…