Jim Pavloff has put up a couple of videos up on YouTube that re-create two Prodigy numbers in Ableton Live. He starts from a clean slate and gradually builds up the songs from samples and loops. It’s fascinating viewing.

Playing around with the Sony Ericsson S500c, I tried out the built-in MusicDJ app. Similiar to GarageBand it allows the user to build up a song in blocks. It’s a bit fiddly trying to compose on such a small screen and it’s really something that you need to do either with headphones on or away from other people. MusicDJ uses MIDI rather than real audio clips to keep the file sizes small but it is possible to convert to audio as follows. I transferred the file to my Mac (by emailing it to myself from the phone)…

In 1983 Steve Jobs in a characteristically brilliant speech introduced the Mac as the solution to IBM’s dominance in the PC industry. “IBM wants it all.” He says a few times. A clip of the speech is available on YouTube (embedded below):

Bill Drummond‘s memoir “45” is a great read (Amazon UK, US). It’s about his time with the KLF, producing, music and art and reaching the age of 45. He’s one of the more interesting artists around today. When he was with the KLF they wrote The Manual “HOW TO HAVE A NUMBER ONE – THE EASY WAY”. It has been out of print for a long time but is now available for free on the web.

Two charity songs have recently appeared on YouTube. First we have the youngsters and a collaborative project called ChartJackers with a song called I’ve Got Nothing for Children in Need.

Have you noticed your new CDs are louder than your old CDs (or even albums)? That’s because the volume has been turned up in the mastering process. This results in a loss of dynamics (less difference between quiet and loud) and hence a worse sounding record. Now there’s an industry organisation called Turn Me Up campaigning for a return to dynamics. They’ve made a demo video (embedded below from YouTube) which demonstrates the effects. Music Machinery has an excellent entry (complete with graphs) on this subject and here’s the Wikipedia article. Quiet is the new…

The below with apologies to Paul Simon…

Brilliant a cappella rendition of You’re Gonna Miss Me with only hand claps and empty soup pots as accompaniment. Embbed from YouTube below.

Apple just released version 9.0.1 of the steaming pile we like to call iTunes. Still crashes. Crashity-crash-crash-crash. Crap.