Month: April 2010

The reason for war on porn in the app store may have been to support Apple’s ad network for the app store. Keeping things under tight control makes advertisers happy. For example, much of YouTube and Myspace will never get good CPMs, because advertisers don’t want to be next to sex, drugs or rock n roll.

This may not be a *good* idea, because Apple is losing sales of apps, losing compelling apps (given that iPhone buyers would be motivated by porn on the platform), and reducing in-app commerce in order to up their revenues on in-app advertising. But that’s the tradeoff from Apple’s perspective.

And of course, from the perspective of a free society it’s a rancid idea. Free societies thrive on truth about sexuality and wither from neo-Victorianism. But whatever.

New MacBook Pros support audio over Mini DisplayPort

Those hooking up the latest MacBook Pros to an HDTV using an HDMI adapter can now do so a little more easily: Apple has updated its implementation of Mini DisplayPort to pass audio signals through to any device that supports them. Until now, the miniDP port only transmitted video, even though the DisplayPort spec supports optional alternate signal channels such as audio or USB.

Apple confirmed to Ars that the just-updated MacBook Pros will pass both video and audio signals to an HDTV or receiver when using an miniDP to HDMI adapter

Moving troops into position for the upcoming Battle of the Living Room.

This is probably to help with using macs for audio and video production, not to sell laptops that you’ll hook up to your TV. But it doesn’t hurt either — I imagine that this change is happening across the board with recent macs.

gurdonark on playlists:

Last.fm is the one place in which I check out what people hear on their scrobble playlists, to learn about new artists.

i also find that last.fm is better than worlds of self-promotion when it comes to getting listeners for my own work. I find people here there and yon listen to me via that service.

Remember when one read Trouser Press or Creem to find music to try?
One read a review and then one bought the record, largely because the reviewer said “sounds like x” but sometimes because the reviewer “sounds like nothing you ever heard before’. I don’t remember a negative review being a deal-killer nor a positive reviewer being a religious conversion. It was all about the style and the sense of the moment.

As a young teen, we all went one better. Lisa Robinson’s “rock scene” magazine was out when i was 13 or 14 or 15 or so. This was an amazing magazine–black and white pictures of unsigned and barely-signed NY bands. One read there about bands one could not buy–early Television, early Ramones, Wayne/Jayne County, Talking Heads. One became a fan of bands from text. What an ephemeral, wonderful thing–to love a sound that one has heard only in print.

Now, you can play the track on last.fm, or hear it on pandora, or even just download it from a netlabel, all without violating anyone’s rights.

A puzzle: I listen to last.fm and never have trouble finding things to hear.
I subscribe to emusic and always delay and debate what to buy with my
35 or so credits. The only reviews I consistently read are in Gramophone, and yet I never buy those reviewed works at all. They just help me learn and think.

I have a friend with great musical taste who posts box.net playlists of her favorite tracks. She likes great stuff, but I never want to listen to tracks except through properly licensed ways of doing things. Besides, I’d rather she say to her friends ‘listen to this great song, it matters to me” rather than “here’s 15 tracks on this theme”. But with her tastes and other friends and strangers’ tastes, I’ll delightedly look at their last.fm scrobble, and pick and choose and enjoy.

I love discovering musicians through conversation. For example, I had a conversation about afrobeat acts this weekend, so now I’m planning to go spelunking in the stacks for afrobeat bands.

jPlayer is a jQuery plugin that allows you to:

• play and control audio files in your webpage
• create and style an audio player using just HTML and CSS
• add sound effects to your jQuery projects
• stream faster using HTML5 and alternative ogg format support

All of this with HTML5 <audio> support for compliant browsers that allow mp3 or ogg format, while supporting other browsers using mp3 format with no visible Flash.