Back to Black vinyl! 60th Anniversary of the vinyl long play album December 28, 2008
Posted by oktyabr in audiophile, listen to this, musik links, opinions, other cool stuff, personal.7 comments
Think vinyl is dead? But it’s not! Far from it in fact. And as evidence take a look at Universal Music Group’s “Back to Black Vinyl” campaign celebrating the 60th Anniversary of the LP (“long play”) album! I know, I know, I’m sure at least one reader must think this born of quaint nostalgia known to frequent the “boomer” generation but think about it… when is the last time you saw a new release on cassette, reel to reel or 8 track?
By contrast vinyl has never gone away completely and fairly recent marketing schemes seem to indicate it might be making a bigger come back than you may think…
HDtracks – itunes for the audiophile? December 28, 2008
Posted by oktyabr in audiophile, listen to this, musik links, opinions, other cool stuff, personal.add a comment
HDTracks is a relatively new service that offers *extremely* high quality music for downloads. Their library is still relatively small but their prices are quite reasonable and the significant difference between their high bit rate offerings and 128kbs mp3s offered by their more well known competitors is literally astounding when played over similarly high quality speakers and equipment!
Springnote, best of Web 2.0? December 28, 2008
Posted by oktyabr in other cool stuff, web 2.0.add a comment
Recently I went in search of a way to collaborate with others in a structured, nested manner, preferably for free. After taking a look at a few possibilities I stumbled across Springnote and while I’m still not quite sure exactly when the hammer will fall (i.e., how they plan to eventually make money from it), it has quickly earned my praise and respect as possibly one of the most useful webapps of 2008! (more…)
Freeware I can’t live without December 8, 2008
Posted by oktyabr in personal.add a comment
Looks like it’s time for my semi-annual reinstall of Windows and I wanted to post a short list of “must have” applications that will go on shortly after:
AIMP2 — Fast winamp replacement for audio playback with lots of neat features.
http://www.aimp2.us/
Ashampoo Burning Studio Free — A recent addition I haven’t really had a chance to play with yet. Looks like it might have lots of nag-alerts but I’ll give it the benefit of the doubt. http://www.snapfiles.com/get/burningstudiofree.html
Burrrn — Best freeware application I’ve found for burning audio CDs.
Fast and can handle several different audio formats at the same time!
http://www.burrrn.net/?page_id=4
Crimson Editor – If I could only have one text editor this one would be it: http://www.crimsoneditor.com/
Fairstars CD Ripper — twice as fast as anything else I’ve used, easy
to configure, nice clean interface. http://www.fairstars.com/
FLAC – audio tools for the Free Lossless Audio Codec, the ONLY way to store music on a PC!
http://flac.sourceforge.net/
Flock — My top notch web browser and so much more! http://flock.com/
ImgBurn — very fast, very light .iso burner: http://www.imgburn.com/
IZarc — My favorite archive manager. http://www.izarc.org/
K-Lite Codec Pack — play everything. http://www.codecguide.com/about_kl.htm
Rising Antivirus — A new kid on the block with low resources and lots of power.
http://www.rising-global.com/
The GIMP for windows — Top notch image editing software with most of the capabilities of Photoshop without the price. http://www.gimp.org/windows/
Wega2 – Image viewer. Has excellent EXIF data abilities and batch processing, something I would normally use Irfanview for. http://www.snapfiles.com/get/wegaviewer.html
Slimserver — The BEST free server software to get music from your hard drive to another PC, a networked music device (I have the Roku Soundbridge), or even a gaming console (Xbox 360 works great!):
http://www.slimdevices.com/su_downloads.html
Songbird — Mozilla based music manager and player. http://getsongbird.com/
Syncback Free — Nice way to back up and synchronize drives.
http://www.2brightsparks.com/downloads.html#freeware
VLC media player — Simple, fast and mighty powerful playback (and server!) of just about all audio and video formats. http://www.videolan.org/vlc/
I’m sure there are many, many more that should be on this list but I really need to get to work on this machine!
