Supposedly this is an industry first – a major record label, Columbia Music Entertainment, releasing content under a Creative Commons license. And not just one track, but for an entire album! Of course, many other artists have done this before, so the concept isn’t new. It’s true that we could have gone further – to allow reselling of remixed works would have really made headlines, and I pushed for it really hard, I did, I was thiiis close – but alas, the appeal of being able to say you’re signed with JASRAC was too great for the artists.

Baby-steps, as they say. Especially in Japan. So download the tracks while you can and go have some fun!

Update 3/25/2008: The local Creative Commons chapter has issued a press released – w00t!

アマゾンからのパクリ：

アーティストについて

約2000組のアーティストと12000名を超えるリスナー(2008年1月現在)が登録しているコロムビアミュージックエンタテイメントの音楽コミュニティ『音レボ』。その第1回オーディションで12000名のリスナーからの人気投票で第1位に選ばれ今回デビューすることになったのがGOOD CREW(グッドクルー)です。

勿論自分も関わってるプロジェクトですが、正直の意見を言うとこのバンド、面白い！是非聞いてみてください！

Otorevo will soon be releasing the first album under the new Otorevo label and by the winner of Japan’s first all-internet voted music contest! The band is Good Crew, the album is Nippon Ha:ski, and the link for your enjoyment is an exclusive deal with Amazon – pre-order now!

Quote of the Month:

I’m beginning to suspect there are two “Matts” – because you never sleep, man!

Apologies to those of you who haven’t heard from me in a while.  This quote is in response to my work on a project called 音レボリューション、 or 音レボ for short.  Here’s an old interview with the current CEO of one of the companies helping build it out.  From the few brief encounters I’ve had, Hirose-san strikes me as an amazing man.  A music company run by an engineer = change or bust :)

I believe there are few times during one’s life when an opportunity or project comes along that makes you want to drop everything and help out.  The speed of development and intensity of the team have contributed to this effort; the project is awesome, the people are amazing.  We’re still far from done, but the potential is limitless.

w00t!

I finally got around to porting over most of the media files from the ol’ server, and had almost forgotten one of the best mash-up albums of all time – PopChop! My PopChop page (link also in the sidebar) now includes a flash-player for you lazy bums so you can listen to each tune immediately.

Seriously – who would have thought Missy Elliot and the Cure could sound so good together? Now I can’t wait to see an MTV video mash-up to complement the tune.

The basic deal after putting your favorite workout music on the device is you get to choose from a number of objectives for your run: a target distance – say 3k, 5k, or 10k; a set time to run – say 30 min., 45 min., or 60 min; or a set number of calories to burn – say 400, 500, whatever. All of the options are customizable, so you could set to run for 88 minutes if you wanted.

During the run, you have the option of listening to a female voice (a sort of gruffly sultry mix) or male voice announce every fixed unit of your target how much you have left. In other words, if your objective is to run a set time, she’ll chime in every 5 minutes with how much time has elapsed, or how much time is left if you’ve passed the half-way point (which she announces enthusiastically as well). If your objective is to run a set distance, she’ll chime in every 1k or 1mile doing the same thing as with time. You can of course mute the “trainer” if you want, but I found it quite useful and surprisingly not annoying – music fades to the background so that you don’t have the voice yelling in your ears.

Another surprisingly fun part of this kit is its online integration with Nike+. Not only does the nano store up to 1000 workouts, but it presents each one in a nice graph and subsequently allows you to compare all of your runs with yourself – to gauge your progress – or with the million+ other users who are logging their runs. If you click on the thumbnail and look at the path, you’ll see some stats from my last run. Each little circle on the yellow line represents when I listened to the trainer-voice – the evenly spaced ones were the fixed-interval announcements, and the randomly spaced ones are when I clicked to hear my progress. You’ll notice the yellow line is also a bit squiggly, basically visualizing my speed throughout. There’s a pretty big hill towards the end of my run, so that probably slowed me down a bit :P

I’ve only tested the kit once, but it feels quite accurate. And it’s super exciting to finally have the stats to my runs logged without any hassle. Sitting down with pen and paper to jot times and calculate progress is the last thing I want to do after sweating for an hour. This is a seriously well implemented example of how technology is making my life easier and more enjoyable.

Technorati Tags: fitness, ipod

SMEJ won’t kiss the bride because they’re the only child of traditional, conservative, grumpy parents who don’t want their offspring to wed a breed of a different race. Does the offspring follow true love, or custom? You decide – This Is Japan, afterall.

• A network HD which stores all my tunes ripped with Apple’s Lossless Audio Codec
• Mac Mini connected to the netHD through SMB
• iTunes playing a Party Shuffle with desired settings
• Nicecast jacked into iTunes, transcoding (theoretically, though in reality probably just re-encoding) the stream to mp3 @ 160kbps

The obvious drawback is that I’m sucking up bandwidth just loading the tracks into iTunes; but that’s all running locally behind the router, so it has minimal effect on the mp3 stream.

Still, I can’t imagine an easier way to setup a personal radio station. While I realize this has been possible for quite some time, a number of factors – notably ease and cost – have likely prevented the ordinary Jane and Joe from setting up something like this (legal issues aside…) Talk about a threat to an industry; with Skype pressing forward too, the FCC most definitely has a rough road ahead.

So, what does one do if in such disagreement with their employer’s practices? Albeit it’s a completely different arm …