Tag: music

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Yet again with the iTunes icons

I decided that while the coloured vinyl was ok on its own, the addition of a coloured note was just too garish.

The anti-aliasing round the note needs tweaking, but I think it looks pretty good. Better than the original:

EDIT: OK, I’ve tweaked it. Here’s the final version:

For Mac users, there’s a zip of those designs I got as far as making into .icns files here. To change the iTunes icon: rename whichever icon you prefer as ‘iTunes.icns’. Then you need to quit iTunes, right-click it in the Finder and choose ‘show package contents’. In the ‘Resources’ folder, replace the original iTunes.icns file with your new one (but save a copy of the original somewhere just in case).

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Culture Other

More iTunes icons

I’ve updated my new iTunes icons for the release of iTunes 7.

I’ve switched to using LaVern Baker.

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Culture Other

New iTunes icons

I decided I don’t like the iTunes icon very much, so I’ve made myself some new ones:

Still by LaVern Baker, Young Boy Blues by Eddie “Buster” Forehand, and We Go Together by The Moonglows, since you asked. Picked for what they look like rather than the choons – I’ve only heard one of them anyway. The Forehand is actually a fraction too big – it looks out of place in the dock. I’m using the Moonglows for the moment.

EDIT:

since I’ve been getting a bit of Google traffic for this post, I thought I’d point out the two more recent posts on the subject (one, two).

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Culture

Bleep music store

There’s a lot to like about Bleep: high bit-rate non-DRMed mp3s, the ability to listen to the whole track online before buying (it automatically pauses after thirty seconds and you have to start it again, but I’ve found that if you open another tab in the same window and have that tab at the front, it just keeps playing), and the neato little customisable music players you can insert in your own site, like this:

or like this:

Yes, I know, by putting in the players I’m just providing them with free advertising, but I still think it’s quite cool.

But how the hell are you supposed to find music you like if you don’t already know what you’re looking for? There are no genre listings (admittedly, there is a rather limited range of genres they sell, but any kind of hint would help), no ‘people who bought this also bought…’, no idea of where to start other than to poke around at random and see what you find.

I guess I’m just not hip enough to be their customer.

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Culture

Supernature

At PFFA a while back, Melanie was complaining about a ‘best of the 70s’ compilation thtat was all one-hit wonders and disco. And how there was a lack of ‘Skynyrd, Doobies, CCR, Pink Floyd, Dire Straits, Aerosmith… [list of overblown guitar-rock acts continued for half a dozen more names]’. As though Skynyrd ever made a piece of music as good as this:

or indeed this:

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Culture

Cultural blinkers

I’ve got quite a lot of African music these days.* I bought the first CD (The Rough Guide To The Music of Kenya and Tanzania) some years ago because I had fond memories of the music I remembered them playing on buses in East Africa, a style of music I now know is called soukous.

It was only really when I started getting music from the internet that my selection of African music moved from one or two CDs to hundreds of songs, much of it downloaded from mp3 blogs but also quite a lot I paid for – Calabash particularly made it easier. Now that I have enough that it comes up on iTunes quite often, the initial touristy, exotic quality has worn off a bit and I just find it hard to believe that this stuff is so far below the cultural radar in the UK. It’s not difficult music for the Western ear in the way that music from North Africa or Asia can be; I mean, it has a distinctly African quality to it, and that’s part of the charm, just as a sense of place is part of the charm of reggae, or country music. But most of it is to some degree or another derived from familiar genres – jazz, Latin, funk, or whatever. And indeed reggae and hip hop, for the more recent stuff. And the best of it is just very good music.

I wouldn’t expect an African band to have a string of hit singles in the UK, but there’s a complete absence from the fringes of the fringes of the mainstream of even one act that a man in the street might be able to name. It just seems ridiculous. Indeed, the whole of African music hardly even gets its own genre – instead it’s bundled into the ghetto of ‘world music’ along with French chansons, dub remixes of Finnish folk songs and the Spanish klezmer.

My point isn’t really about African music. If I have a point. It’s that unwillingness to reach out beyond the culture you happen to have been born into. It’s the same complaint people have about the lack of translated novels for sale. I don’t think it’s anything as decisive as the rejection of other cultures, just a complete absence of interest.

Oh well. If the English can learn to enjoy garlic and spicy food, who knows where we’ll end. Maybe in a few years the hottest new tunes from the dancefloors of Kinshasa will go straight to the jukebox of the Dog and Duck.

*mainly via Calabash, Benn loxo du taccu, Aduna, Matsuli Music, Awesome Tapes From Africa and the Rough Guide compilations.