Argh, WMG can suck my balls. I must admit that in *all* the years of the DRM / Copyright / file sharing / Napster debate, I’ve never really been hit by it. Although in principle, DRM or similar is kind of annoying – I mean, I paid for it – I should be able to do what I want with it, right? Well, no, not at all – you just bought a license to listen to the music. The reason I’ve never really got in to downloading music – either illegally or legitimately through iTunes is two-fold – 1) I don’t trust myself to remember that I’ve bought some music in case I start deleting stuff and 2) I have an ever growing CD collection which I’m proud of, and I like having the actual CD.
OK, slight tangent there. Anyway, I’ve just been bitten – albeit algorithmically – by the copyright debate. Shortly after I got my new Macbook Pro, I was farting about with iMovie HD and making some silly videos. These included a bit of my brother’s dog, and a trip when we went to a shooting range, and shot some guns. Hardly ground-breaking or Cannes-winning stuff. In fact, they’re so amateur that they’re pretty laughable now. But nevertheless, they were good fun when I was putting them together, part of which was figuring out the soundtrack. I spent ages working out the best tunes to back my brother’s dog running around in a park (Jungle Brothers) or being driven around in a car (Passenger, by Iggy Pop).
Anyway, some of my videos got WMG’d at YouTube. On some of these videos, I now just see a message that says
Your video, Seven Stages of Dog – Part 2, may have audio content from Growing On Me by The Darkness that is owned or licensed by WMG.
Obviously referring to the part where Iggy (a 2 year 50lb bull terrier / shepherd mix plays with Dante, a 130lb Italian Mastiff, with humourous consequences).
So the point is, WMGs access to YouTube and its algorithms to analyse all videos to find illegal use of their music has caught me out and the music to the video is muted. And that makes the video even more dull than before. What’s unusual however, is that there are other videos I have made that use exactly the same styles, but they didn’t get flagged. And a cursory search of YouTube shows thousands more videos with copyrighted music on arguably much bigger or questionable videos. So obviously whatever software they’re using isn’t perfect.
But I’m still struggling to understand how my use of the music for my crappy “home videos” can really be damaging them and I’d argue that my use is “fair use”. It’s not for profit, it’s clearly not for anything sensible or real, it’s just a bit of fun for me and anyone who might be interested (which, judging by the view count, is not many) and whereever I use music, the artist is credited for it. If anything, I’d go the opposite way and say that for the odd few people who actually watch these videos, might think “oooh Ocean Colour Scene, haven’t heard them in a while” and go and buy a CD. (Or fire up Limewire I suppose.)
Well needless to say, I find it all very crap. This sort of thing can only stifle the creativity that places like YouTube are slowly opening up. Fat little kids who previously had no lives are somehow “cewebrities” because they get creative with a webcam. (Ooer!). But no, WMG can’t monetise it (yet) so their decision is to pull the plug. Of course, you can use the “AudioSwap” – i.e., a list of public domain tracks that are free for use – but how long before they’re used up and everyone’s videos starts to look very very similar. In fact, it gets worse. I saw one poor who had her videos deleted for singing her favourite bands music!
If I really cared enough about this, I’d find a list of all WMG’s artists and never buy their music again. But I don’t, so I won’t. But still, it’s tiresome and officious, and is nowt but a sign of things to come.
So on a lighter note, here’s another video I made that doesn’t have any copyrighted music. It is obviously a blatant rip off of a movie, so quite how long it stays out there, well, who knows.
So megoodmate Al and me have this thing. On our birthdays (which happen every year) we do something really stupid. In the year of our 24th birthdays, we drank 24 cans of beer (and a bunch of other crap too) in 24 hours 12 hours. In the year of our 26th birthdays we rode our motorbikes for 26 hours from England to Spain. (Don’t do that. It’s not clever.)
This year it’s the year of our 29th birthday. Now, since Al is getting married this year – in fact in April – the chances of us doing anything together to celebrate our birthdays is quite unlikely. So I’ve come up with something to do on my own. A triathlon. Now, it’s only a novice triathlon as I am, after all, a novice. So that means a 400m swim, a 12k bike and a 3k run. I’m struggling to come up with something that makes it vaguely to do with the number 29.
I’m training hard. The cycling is no problem as I regularly do 20+ miles. The swimming is OK – and since it’s a novice triathlon, it’s a pool swim, so 16 lengths – but the running is the main problem. I’ve never been a fan of running as it’s so boring.
Anyway, should be fun. Today I did an 8 mile ride, 3 mile run, 8 mile ride, 3 mile run and then a final 8 mile ride. Suffice it to say, I’m pretty shagged right now. What have I got myself in for?
(And what’s worse? There’s a guy at work who has done the Ironman – 4.5 mile swim, 112 mile cycle and a 26 mile run, in one day – 5 times!)
Let’s say that you happened to have a folder of MP3s somewhere. Perhaps on a disc. Perhaps on a drive. Perhaps it was on a friend’s computer. Perhaps there were literally tons of awesome albums that you would quite like. You know, for, erm, backup purposes.
Well you might get as far as importing those in to your library and they would probably work. But if the tracks/albums weren’t labelled very well, then your library would get ugly. And if you tried to use the CDDB iTunes “Get CD track names” functionality, you’d be presented with a message along the lines of “iTunes can only access CDDB track names for CDs that it imported itself, please reimport the CD” – or words to that effect.
Your options are to burn Audio CDs of all the albums and then import them, which is a time-consuming hassle, or to use one of the various iTunes Applescripts available to try and hack the names in from the various sources. My experience of these scripts/sites – it doesn’t work. (You could of course import them and name them manually… but, well, let’s not even go there.)
The way around this is through Toast and a variation on option 1. I have Toast Titanium 8, but I know this functionality goes back at least as far as 7, if not further. It’s a little fiddly, but definitely better than creating real CDs of these albums. It’s quite simple – create an Audio CD in Toast as usual, but rather than burning it to CD, look under File > for an option to “save as disc image” (or Apple + D). It’ll create an .s2df file, which, again using Toast, can be mounted as a disc image (under Utilities or Shift + Apple + M). As soon as you do this, iTunes will likely spark in to life and start importing for you.
Far quicker than creating CDs, and yes, it’ll quite happily query CDDB to get the track names for you. Job done.
Here’s an Applescript I wrote. Basically, select a playlist in the left menu (e.g., My Top Rated) run this script and it will create a playlist folder with a playlist for every album (and every track in that album) for each album in the playlist. Make sense!?
I wrote it because the way I keep track (so to speak) of tunes I like is by rating them as 4 or 5 stars – which makes them appear in the My Top Rated smart playlist. But I also hate having incomplete albums on my iPod, so this is a simple way of syncing your My Top Rated, and all tracks of the albums in it.
Probably needs iTunes 8 or greater (or whenever playlist folders were introduced) and if it destroys something, it’s not my fault! It will also delete an existing playlist folder, so you can regenerate the folders as required.
It seems I’ve always been an angry man. I recently received several copies of the same stupid damn email. You will have seen it, it’s the “Bill Gates is going to give you some money for forwarding this email” bullshit. Here’s a sample..
Title: PLLLLEEEAAASSSSEEE REEEAAADDD! IT WAS ON GOOD MORNINGAMERICATODAY!
After scrolling through pages and pages of email addresses you get to some text:
“To all of my friends, I do not usually forward messages,
But this is from my friend Pearlas Sandborn and she really is
an attorney.
If she says that this will work – It will work. After all,What have
you got to lose?
SORRY EVERYBODY.. JUST HAD TO TAKE THE CHANCE!!! I’m an
attorney, And I know the law. This thing is for real. Rest assured
AOL and Intel will follow through with their pr omises for
fear of facing a multimillion-dollar class action suit similar to the one
filed by PepsiCo against General Electric not too long a go.
Dear Friends: Please do not take this for a junk letter.
Bill Gates sharing his fortune. If you ignore this, You will repent
later .
Microsoft and AOL are now the largest Internet companies
and in an effort to make sure that Internet Explorer remains the
most widely used program, Microsoft and AOL are running an e-mail
beta test.
When you forward this e-mail to friends, Microsoft can and will
track it (If you are a Microsoft Windows user) For a two weeks
time period.
For every person that you forward this e-mail to, Microsoft will pay
you $245.00 For every person that you sent it to that forwards it on,
Microsoft will pay you $243.00 and for every third person that receives
it, You will be paid $241.00. Within two weeks, Microsoft will contact
you for your address and then send you a check.
Regards. Charles S Bailey Genera l Manager Field Oper ations”
Blah blah blah etc. Obviously such a load of crap. Yahda yahda.
Why am I mentioning this? Because I was blogging about the same damn thing, way back in 2004! So I was just as angry then, and people nowadays are still as stupid. Nothing changes.
I keep forgetting a nifty thing about Firefox. You have the quick search area at the top right corner of the browser. When you’re visiting a page that has a search box, if you click the icon to the left of the box, you might see the option to add that site to your quick search list.
The site will need to be implementing the Open Search kajiggers. For anyone wanting to do this, add the following line to your document:
and then create a file called Search.xml in the root of your site that looks like this.
replacing template=”" with the correct search URL for your site. Notice also the image is the base64 encoding of your 16 x 16 icon. Marvellous.
Anyway, it seems that Google UK doesn’t do this and I imagine, due to the availability of the above, Mozilla aren’t really maintaining the search extensions part of the Mozilla Org site, as searching for a Google UK quicksearch, isn’t helpful.
So here’s the XML you need. It will also make the default to use only UK pages.
In OSX, save the file in
YourUser > Library > Application Support > Firefox > searchplugins
In Windows XP:
C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\searchplugins
Enjoy.
This is a really quick thing, just to say that I’m not dead. I’ve been back in the real world for the passed year or so, since my travelling adventures.
My travelling ambitions are by no means dead though, and I will be getting back to the wanderlust things soon – I have an adventure in mind for later thi year. Until then, though, this blog will be a little quiet.