The Flicker Blog and Podcast

…or at least, after a couple of failed attempts, that would currently seem to be the case.

With great thanks to the Matt Hickey at Crunch Gear, and to my great surprise, I appear to have successfully resurrected my 60Gb iPod Photo (that a couple of weeks ago seemed destined for a recycling bin somewhere).

I have to admit to being more than a little sceptical that what appeared to be a dead hard-drive could be coaxed back into life with a little pressure on it’s case (applied via a folded business card). Apparently, with repeated use, the heat generated by the drive causes the case to warp. At a certain point, the lack of tension in the casing that this causes results in failure.

So, armed with a Stanley Knife blade, I (eventually) managed to prise open the stubbornly locked shell of my iPod. It now sports a few battle scars following the procedure - but I’d rather own a functioning, scratched device than an expensive paperweight.
Once inside (being incredibly careful not to damage the fragile ribbon cable connecting the two halves) I folded an old business card in half twice, placed it on the back of the hard drive case, and snapped it back together.

With regards to the repair, I say it was completed ’successfully’ only tentatively, because my first attempt resulted in premature feelings of elation. The sad iPod icon gave way to a fresh-faced, newly booted iPod. But, half way through syncing, iTunes, my Mac and the iPod alll froze, with the iPod’s hard-drive making the most unhealthy of noises.

Still - spurred on by the seemingly miraculous results brought about by a piece of folded paper, I wanted to try at least once more before disposing of the device (or shelling out for a replacement hard-drive.) I figured that if a piece of folded paper could make such a difference, that too much of it would cause problems. So, once again, I struggled to get the device open, ripped away one quarter of the folded business card, and this time, appeared to achieve the desired result.

I have restored the iPod, verified the disk with ‘Disk Utility’ and filled it (to around 95% capacity) without any locks or unfortunate sounds. Certainly, I’m a lot less trusting of the device now, but if I can get a little more life out of it before it finally gives up, I’ll feel that this was quite an accomplishment.

• A History of the Doctor Who Theme
  All the information you could possibly want with regard to the history of the Doctor Who Theme, and the innovative individuals involved. Warning - barely legible 1996 era page design ahead!
  (tags: bbc radiophonic workshop music dr who musique concrete)
• BBC Radiophonic Workshop
  The wikipedia entry on the pioneering BBC Radiophonic Workshop - musical hackers of the 1960s and 70s.
  (tags: bbc radiophonic workshop)
• Delia Derbyshire
  And finally, the Wikipedia entry on Delia Derbyshire. Icon of experimental music at the BBC’s Radiophonic Workshop.
  (tags: bbc radiophonic workshop delia derbyshire musique concrete)

I have to admit to being completely blown away by this video. It presents several very complex interactions in a manner that’s both innovative and intuitive. Seeing synthesis approached like this underscores for me how poorly suited to the task, the interfaces of most virtual instruments are (Check the images of Reason for an example of what I mean). I’m sorry that I cannot link directly to the images - some people still insist on using frames on their sites!

Analogue synths of the 70’s and 80’s were restricted by the physical limitations of the components used to manipulate and program them. User feedback was predominately conducted via your ears, with the legending on knobs and sliders the only visual clue to what was happening inside the box.

I just don’t understand why companies resort to Pixel based renditions of retro analogue gear when designing virtual instruments. The video here shows what could be accomplished if only designers would move away from fetishistic renditions of retro hardware and embrace the possibilites afforfed by the platform they’re creating for.

In the world of hardware, physical limitations mean that you cannot dynamically represent the impact that parameters have upon one another. In the virtual world, these restrictions don’t exist, yet such limitations seem to be eagerly embraced.

Here’s what the Reactable creators have to say about their video:
‘Several simultaneous performers share complete control over the instrument by moving physical artefacts on the table surface and constructing different audio topologies in a kind of tangible modular synthesizer or graspable flow-controlled programming language.’

You can read more on the reactable website.

I’ve just been sent this link, containing a bunch of samples used by Daft Punk on their last album Discovery.

I should start by saying that personally, I’ve never liked the idea of sampling stuff in our releases, and take pride in the fact that every sound originated with us. Samplers are an amazing tool, and offer a huge range of creative possibilities when used imaginatively. We use them all the time to sample and manipulate sounds - not riffs.

Call me a snob, but out and out lifting of the hook of a track, with minimal extra input is not terribly clever or imaginative. Make your own mind up about the examples given here, but I was stunned. Completely.

An interesting (if not a little cynical and manipulative) method for generating a buzz in the blog space around your product – give bloggers a year’s free trial of your product in exchange for a blog post or trackback linking to your product page.
Terribly phallic logo aside, the product (bandwagon) is an interesting concept – backup your iTunes music library to an online server, simply and painlessly. I’m not 100 percent sure how useful I’ll find it (being relatively organised already with regard to backups). Also, the price (currently $99 per year) seems quite high given the volume of physical storage that you could buy for a similar amount. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if a .mac account (at a near identical price) soon offers a similar service covering your entire media collection.

That said – free trials like this are an incredible way of refining a product and evaluating usefulness and I’ll be keen to give it a go.
Privacy concerns aside, the off-site backup for consumers data appears to be an increasingly viable market and I wish bandwagon every success. More and more, I’m alarmed at the amount of personally important data that I’m accumulating and a product such as this may ease my concerns.

It’s all go on the digital distribution front at this site. First off, there’s a new EP (Minimus) containing five new Flicker tracks, and available exclusively from the iTunes Music Store.

Then, there’s a new podcast, intended to showcase new music from us. In this first edition, you can listen to lengthy excerpts from all tracks included in the above mentioned EP.

We decided that it is important that anyone interested in our material can hear significantly more than the 30 seconds currently afforded by iTunes. This is particularly important with club focussed music, where lengthy intros facilitate equally lengthy and seamless DJ mixes. Slow-build arrangements don’t necessarily reveal the true nature of the track in the opening bars, or in fact, in any given 30 second sample.

It’s always been true that the medium has dictated the format and length of mass produced music (from wax cylinders through to compact discs) but in this instance, the promotional method is creating an artificial limitation - the medium is not at fault. It is as if when writing material, you should now produce the musical equivilent of the elevator pitch to have the greatest chance of commercial success.

Were we to write and arrange our material so that the first 30 seconds gives the casual listener a more representative sample of what’s to come, we would then risk rendering the material less appropriate for the intended context - a club (which of course is creating another restriction on form, but one that we choose intentionally). Anyway, all this technology is supposed to be about creativity and freedom of expression, right?

So, subscribing to this podcast will allow those interested, to hear representative samples of all the available music, and stay up-to-date with all of our future releases. Enjoy.

Updated
Why I didn’t think of this before, I’ve no idea (thanks to Ian for the suggestion). So, here is a tracklisting, and links to all of the tracks included in the podcast:

Track 01. Minimus. Buy this track via iTunes

Track 02. Bring You Two. Buy this track via iTunes

Track 03. Dumb Key. Buy this track via iTunes

Track 04. Key Dumb. Buy this track via iTunes

Track 05. Skidmark. Buy this track via iTunes

For what it’s worth - The music in the intro is an old (unfinished) track called ‘It’s Over’, dusted off for use because it somehow seemed right in the context. Who knows, maybe one day it’ll turn into a fully blown track itself.

My initial impressions of iTunes 7 were very positive (read to the bottom for the very big BUT).

Top of the list of welcome new ‘features’ for me is that (finally) recordings that contain without pauses between tracks are now played back without (amazingly enough) pauses between tracks. This means that my collection of Fabric Mix CDs can now be enjoyed as intended, without the need to separately rip the whole CD as a single track. If only my iPod would exhibit similar behaviour!

Cover Flow - the ability to browse the contents of your library by the flipping through the album art, did initially seem like rather gratuitous (but nicely executed) eye candy. Nonetheless, I have to confess I’ve become rather seduced by it. The interplay between the visual display and the library text view is very useful. Click the genre column in the text view to sort your library by genre. Scroll to the desired genre, and you can then use Cover Flow to navigate visually through your collection by genre.

This turns out to be rather helpful - recognition of images is far easier than scanning (very) long lists of text for the desired item. Surely, this feature will soon appear in Front Row? The ability to navigate your collection with a remote from across the room in this way would be a useful, and visually seductive method of interaction.

Of course, any mention of the benefits of Cover Flow also requires mention of the fact that iTunes can now gather cover art automatically for you (assuming the images exist in the iTunes music store). There’s clearly the potential for privacy issues here - I can imagine Apple being subpoenaed for records of who’s been encoding what, by record companies. Still, for the time being, Apple states that they do not keep any information regarding the contents of your music library, and the CDDB functionality (present from day one) could theoretically, be used for similarly nefarious purposes. I’d conclude that we have to give up a little information if we want our applications to be more useful.

The administration of your iPod is now better implemented too. A mounted device now has a whole series of pages, directly accessible from within the application (as opposed to a preferences pane). This addition further improves the relationship between the device and the application.

Now… on to the negative. I bought 4 CDs yesterday. Arriving home late last night, I was hoping to quickly import them for inclusion on my iPod. What on earth has happened to CD Importing? It has become unbelievably slow! I actually thought that my Superdrive was broken, or that CD manufacturers have started encoding deliberate errors in manufactured CDs to cause ripping problems. I believe that the ripping of each CD was slower than playing the thing for real! At the very least, I ended up only encoding two of the four CDs before giving up and going to bed. I’m doing the remaining two this morning.

This is a huge step backwards for me, and compromises one of the core functions of the app very heavily. Conspiracy theorists will no doubt suggest that Apple are slowly trying to move users towards buying all music rather than encoding it (at the behest of the record companies) but I’d like to hope that is just a bug, and will be remedied in due course. Nonetheless, I’ve considered finding a way to downgrade to version 6 in the meantime. The new features are nice, but I need to import CDs in a time frame that’s measured in minutes, not hours.

Predicting the demise of the iPod and iTunes is clearly a popular sport, and a pretty safe bet given Apple could hardly become more dominant in this space. The only real uncertainty is the scale of the demise. I have begun to wonder this week however, if the change is beginning to occur.

The new iPod nano is the first new iPod whose design has underwhelmed me. I’ve only seen images, but the original Nano remains a far more attractive object to me - the new coloured cases leave the nano looking more like the original iPod mini, and consequently, as if Apple are running out of ideas. Of course, there are limits to how far the form factor can be changed, and why fix something that’s not broken? But on a purely subjective level, this is the first evolution of the iPod that hasn’t had me secretly wanting to go out and buy one, despite already owning a fully functioning 60Gb iPod Photo. Of course - the new Shuffle design does redeem them considerably!

Damn you YouTube and serendipitous discovery! Even if I do later discover more impressive videos, I promise not to share (or go on about them) here. Well, at least not today.

Shlomo on Later with Jools Holland being, well, utterly amazing!

OK - so half of the appeal is in the way that this has been edited, but none the less, it’s pretty amazing!

I’d be lying if I didn’t admit to some pleasure in the email I received from Beatport yesteday:
‘Our team wanted to let each of you know about a recent issue created by the new Flash version 9.0 for PCs (Mac users can ignore this email.) Macromedia/Adobe released a new version of Flash that is creating a log-in issue for all Beatport customers who use the Firefox web browser and the new Flash version 9.0.’

I’ve written previously, twice actually, on the awful (Flash based) user experience offered by what could, and should be, a very attractive customer proposition.

I would dearly love to know who felt that building an entire e-commerce site in Flash was a good idea? Or what business need was being met by abandoning most of the commonly used, and widely understood interaction principles - those supported by the most humble of browsers and the HTML format?

I won’t say I told you so!