Although I already knew Jamendo it never occurred to be to download their whole catalog. Since I am a fan of choice I immediately thought about how I could download the catalog too. Since the only clue was a cryptic uri-like text how to achieve that it suddenly sounded like a great idea to write a universal tool and release it as open-source. This tool should allow users to download the whole catalog and keep their local jamendo mirror in sync with the server. So anytime new artists, albums or tracks are added the user does not need to download them all again.

So the only thing I had as a starting point was that cryptic uri pointing me to something I’ve never heard of called Rythmbox. Turns out that this is a GNOME music player application which has Jamendo integration. After some clueless poking around I decided to take a look at the source of Rythmbox, especially the Jamendo module.

This module is written in python and quite clean to read. And just by looking at the first lines I came across the interesting fact that there is a almost daily updated XML dump of the Jamendo catalog available from Jamendo. Hurray! Since Jamendo wants developers to interact with the platform they decided to put a documentation online which allows anyone to write tools and stream and download tracks. After all the clues I found I finally ended up on this page.

So there are the catalog download, track stream and torrent uris necessary to download the catalog. Now the only thing that is needed is a tool which parses the XML and creates a nice folder structure for us.

Parsing XML in C# (my prefered programming language) is easy. Basically you can use a tool called XSD.exe and let it generate first the XSD from the XML and then ready-to-use C# classes from that XSD.

After doing all that actually reading the whole catalog into a useable form breaks down to just three lines of code:

Isn’t it great how modern frameworks take away the complexity of such tasks. At this point I’ve already parsed the whole catalog into my tool and only wrote three lines of code. The rest was generated automatically for me. The best of all – this also works on non-windows operating systems when you use mono.

When the XML data is parsed and available in a nice data structure it’s easy to iterate through all artists, all albums and all tracks and then download the actual mp3 or ogg. And that’s basically what my tool does. It takes the XML, parses it, and downloads. It will check before downloading if the track already exists and will only download those added since the last run.

Additionally since I am deeply involved into the development of the GraphDB graph database at sones I want to make use of the Jamendo data and the graph structure it poses. Since the directory structure my tool is generating is only one aspect how you could possibly look at the data it’s quite interesting to demonstrate the capabilities of GraphDB based on that data.

The idea behind the graph representation of the data is that you could start from almost any starting point imaginable. No matter if you you start from a single track and drill up into genre and artists, or if you start at a location and drill down to tracks.

So what the Downloader does in matters of GraphDB integration is that it outputs a GraphQL script which can be imported into an instance of GraphDB.

The sourcecode of my tool is available on github and released unter the BSD license – feel free to play with it and to contribute.

Source 1: http://www.jamendo.com
Source 2: https://github.com/bietiekay/JAMENDOwnloader

I am using the Apple AirPlay technology for several years now… after it got implemented into iOS it’s just fantastic to have the option to have whatever sound source I want to playing loud and clear in any room I want to…

Okay it’s not quite as sophisticated as the sonos solution regarding the control of multiple music sources in multiple rooms but it get’s the job done in an apartment.

So back to the topic: Apple integrated the AirPlay technology into their wireless base station “AirPort Express”. Basically AirPlay is a piece of software which receives an encrypted audio stream over the network and outputs the stream to the SPDIF or audio jack.

Back in 2005 there already was an emulator of this protocol called “Fairport” but Apple decided to encrypt the AirPlay traffic. This led to the problem that the encryption key was unkown because it’s baked into the AirPort Express firmware. And this is where the good news start:

“My girlfriend moved house, and her Airport Express no longer made it with her wireless access point. I figured it’d be easy to find an ApEx emulator – there are several open source apps out there to play to them. However, I was disappointed to find that Apple used a public-key crypto scheme, and there’s a private key hiding inside the ApEx. So I took it apart (I still have scars from opening the glued case!), dumped the ROM, and reverse engineered the keys out of it.”

So to keep things short: Someone got an AirPort Express, dumped the firmware, extracted the AirPlay encryption keys and wrote an emulator of the AirPlay protocol which uses the key. Voilá!

ShairPort is available in source code on the site of the guy and obviously it’s unsure if Apple will react by changing the encryption key in the future. But for the time being it works as advertised:

I took one of my computers and followed the instructions to update perl, install Macports and then run ShairPort. So when ShairPort is run it looks not as appealing as expected:

Notably  it uses IPv6 to communicate between iTunes and ShairPort… Oh I almost forgot to show how it looks in iTunes:

On another side note: It works on Linux, Windows and Mac OS X

Source 1: Apple AirPlay
Source 2: Sonos
Source 3: Apple AirPort Express
Source 4: ShairPort

“The SXSW® Music and Media Conference showcases hundreds of musical acts from around the globe on over eighty stages in downtown Austin. By day, conference registrants do business in the SXSW® Trade Show in the Austin Convention Center and partake of a full agenda of informative, provocative panel discussions featuring hundreds of speakers of international stature.”

Source 1: http://www.sxsw.com/music
Source 2: http://sites.google.com/site/sxswtorrent/2010

It’s finally here.

Filmed in Sacramento, Portland, and Victoria by the Nine Inch Nails team, edited and produced by their fans, The Gift is a stunning work in 1080p High Definition video with 5.1 Surround Sound, multi-language subtitles, and artistically-driven ethics.”

You’re reading it right: the final production is ready to be downloaded. I am downloading it right now.

It’s a complete Nine Inch Nails live concert in full-hd. Free for all / Not for sale. Get it while it’s hot!

Source: http://thisoneisonus.org

Great pop music with a touch of rock. Powerful and fast. One of my favourites in the album is “My Delirium” – a song that has a subtle feeling of the Cardigans song “My Favourite Game”.

Ladyhawke writes in her blog about it:

“I wrote the song a year and a half ago after days of no sleep due to terrible jetlag. I felt like I was going out of my mind. I was missing my friends and family back home, and I was basically living to hear my phone ring in hope that it would be one of them calling. So my delirium came out of me thinking I was going crazy from lack of sleep!

I always knew this song had the potential for a really imaginative video, considering the general theme of the song is me going crazy. So when I read the treatment sent in by the Frater guys, a duo of London based directors who specialise inanimation, I knew it was the one!”

Source: http://www.ladyhawkemusic.com/

Imogen Heap - Ellipse

Great thing is that it’s available right now. And it’s available in two flavours. You can have the single-cd version which holds all the great songs. And you can have the deluxe version which holds all great songs + the instrumental version of each song.

Great stuff! It seems I have to catch up some great tunes from this artist in the near future!

UPDATE: Before you need to buy that album, just listen to it first:

Hand aufs Herz: Klingen die Stimmen so wie die Personen aussehen? Also ich komm immer wieder aus dem Staunen nicht heraus wenn ich die Stimmen höre und die Gesicher dazu sprechen sehe. Da muss doch ein Trick dabei sein!

Ach übrigends sind heute auch noch zwei neue Folgen der “drei Fragezeichen” erschienen…

“Und ein weiterer Schritt im Free! Music! Contest wurde getan: Der Sampler steht nun zum Download zur Verfügung! Da die Rückfrage kam: Natürlich sind alle Stücke unter Creative Commons lizenziert.

Fast vier Stunden Musik waren eingereicht worden und am Ende stand eines fest: Mit einer einzelnen CD wären wir nicht in der Lage gewesen, die Qualität der Einsendungen entsprechend zu würdigen. Also verzichten wir auf ungefähr 70% des Gewinns und haben dafür 100% mehr feinste freie Musik. ”

Track-Listing

Source: musik.klarmachen-zum-aendern.de

Brave young Manda has moved out to once again fill our music players with great songs.

Source 1: http://www.planetmanda.com/

For example Jason and his management encourage bootleg recordings by even offering several spots near the mixing desk. Yes you’re reading it right: You can go to his concert and record it! You can even download several concerts in excellent quality (flac’n'stuff) on archive.org. How cool is this!

I just have to go to a record shop and buy something made by this guy!

By the way: his current album isn’t bad at all… it’s great!

Source 1: http://www.archive.org/details/JasonMraz
Source 2: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jason_Mraz

Tears for Fears,

Everybody wants to rule the world

“A mashup, bootleg or blend (also mash up and mash-up) is a song or composition created by blending two or more songs, usually by overlaying the vocal track of one song seamlessly over the music track of another.

In full swing at the end of the 20th century, mashups have been described positively as “ultimate post-modern pop song[s]” or “‘culture jamming in its purest form’” They have also been described negatively as “the logical extension of the sampling fever of the ’80s taken to its dumbest extreme”. Due to the questionable legal status of mash ups and little chance of profits “there’s a real punk rock attitude attached to the movement”.” (Source)

Oh… by the way: This is not the first time I am writing about Mash-Ups… be sure to have a look here and here.

Source 1: http://www.mashup-charts.com/
Source 2: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mashup_%28music%29

It’s said that the new version is faster and more stable. I installed 3 hours ago and I still cannot use it since it’s syncing with iTunes ever since.

More on that topic when songbird is ready….

Source: http://getsongbird.com/

Source: http://lrlrl.coldplay.com/leftright.html

I just found a great new album (well it’s 2008…but…). Just in time for the upcoming summer. Thanks very much for that great music.

Oh – it’s free – if YOU want it – just click the link and download it – it’s great, have I mentioned that?

Source: http://www.sean-fournier.com/ohmy/

So what I have is a number of audiobooks ripped as mp3s on my harddisk looking something like this:

If you only have the CD what you would like to do is rip the whole CD as ONE large m4a AAC encoded audiofile. We need it to be an m4a because we later want to inject chapter marks. If you have this big AAC file just skip the next few steps. But if you got those several small mp3 files – one for each chapter you want to merge them together and reencode them as m4a AAC.

There is a great free tool to merge these mp3 files together. It’s called (who would have thought) Merge MP3 and is available completely for free. It’ll create one big mp3 file out of your several small ones.

After you got that huge mp3 file you want to convert it into a m4a file with AAC encoding. I recommend using iTunes.

When you got that one huge m4a file you want to load it into a tool called Chapter Master. It’s not free and will set you back $15 but it’s worth as I did not find anything else that was a) that cheap b) that comfortable c) working.

Load the m4a file into Chapter Master, add the chapters in the right order and at the right time. Eventually you want to add an album art picture. Click save and you’re done.

The resulting file is a m4b file recognized by iTunes as an audiobook with chapters.

Source 1: http://www.shchuka.com/software/mergemp3
Source 2: http://www.rightword.com.au/products/chaptermaster/download.asp

I thought about things like: Would I need my whole library or would it suffice to have 8/16/32 GB of it? Do I want to have additional applications or just a music player?

After the last update several things came together to a conclusion:

• There’s not a 160 GB iPod anymore. Since my library is almost that I wouldn’t be able to put my library on a 120 GB classic.
• The touch is cheaper now
• mostly I am listening to podcasts, which I do need to by in sync all the time, that means: remaining playtime sync and syncing without manual work

Since my wife doesn’t like the look of the new nano we decided to get the 16 GB Touch.

It was delivered today and I am hugely impressed with it so far. It’s what I wanted and the way I wanted it. The feature of having my podcasts and audiobooks start/stop positions synced is just fantastic (listening to the first 20 minutes on the go and the rest at home is now possible because the position where I stopped listening on the iPod is synced to the iTunes).

Did I mention that we took the engraving option?

Yo Ho!

Like this peakmeter control which uses a software digital signal processing or a software dsp library – everything written entirely in managed code (C#) and both open source. Both examples show that you can use digital signal processing for audio and image content… and for more.

The peakmeter control:

“DSP processing is very interesting subject to learn and work with. This block receives digital samples from the source. It approximates the original waveform and finds its peak magnitudes.
Since I would not be able to go in details about how FFT (Fast Fourier Transform) works in this article, I recommend the interested reader to visit some of the links in the reference section to increase his/her knowledge about this process.”

The software DSP library:

“A C# open source library that provides fully featured (1) single and double precision complex number data types, (2) complex number math library, (3) 1D, 2D and 3D complex and real symmetric fast Fourier transforms, and (4) highly accurate statistical routines. The library is optimized for both speed and numerical accuracy. The reason that this library is called a “Digital Signal Processing” library is because complex numbers, FFTs and statistical functions form the basis of any DSP library — although it is the hope that this library will continue to evolve to a more full fledged DSP library.”

Source 1: http://www.codeproject.com/KB/audio-video/PeakMeterCS.aspx
Source 2: http://www.exocortex.org/dsp/

“As usual I’ve got a very strange wish what nobody else seems to have on this planet. I have several computers of different platforms. And on one of this machines there are speakers attached…I want to have the possibility to output from any of the machines to the speakers. And please loss-less and low latency!”

It took more than 3 years to fulfill this particular wish. But now it’s done. In 2005 I mentioned the Airfoil software that could run on MacOS X and forward sound from almost every application to an AirTunes compatible device. As it turns out Rogue Amoeba did their homework and created a free “Airfoil Speakers” application which can be used on Windows and MacOS X.

So the things are simple: Start the speaker application on a machine that is in the same network/subnet as the Airfoil master. The virtual speaker is then displayed on the master machine and you can assign a sound source from that machine to the speaker. Hmm… Simple Setup sample: One machine is in my kitchen (Windows XP machine) and one machine is on my desk – an iMac. In the kitchen only the speaker application is started and the iMac instantly “sees” the speaker. One click and the sound output of my desk machine is forwarded through the network to the kitchen… Easy and cool. One can think of any other combination of Speaker/Master application – even multiple speakers can be powered by one master…oh joy!

So here is what the master looks like:

and this is what it looks like on a client (speaker):

Source 1: nerd wish of 2005
Source 2: http://rogueamoeba.com/airfoil/

“A mashup or bootleg^[1] is a song or composition created from the combination of the music from one song with the a cappella from another (also mash up and mash-up). These songs may be considered part of the European bastard pop musical genre. “A mash-up is a song created out of pieces of two or more songs, usually by overlaying the vocal track of one song seamlessly over the music track of another… Mash-ups are incredible fun and a fascinating way to reexperience some of your favorite tunes.”"

And there is this website – offering over 200 tracks and extras around the mashup theme – even best-of-samplers are available:

Source 1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mashup_(music)
Source 2: http://www.bootieusa.com/

“YouTube has stacks and stacks of music videos on their website. I have written a little dashboard widget called iTube. iTube gets the artist and title of the song you are playing in iTunes. It then performs a search on youtube and plays the first hit in the widget window. Once installed iTube works by itself in the background, so start a song up iTunes then look at your dashboard and with a little luck you’ll be watching what you are listening to.”

Source: http://philipandrews.org/blog/itube/

I seriously don’t know why they are doing that – it’s not as if any material released previously came to any notice so far – but what the heck – Radiohead decided to put their current music video (which isn’t bad) and the raw data that was used to create it to the public using the Creative Commons license:

“The animation data used to make the video are licensed to the public under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike license at Google Code. This means you are free to use the data to make your own video projects, as long as you abide by the CC license’s conditions. (To be clear, the song and its accompanying video are not under CC license; the data used to make the video are.)”

Source: http://code.google.com/creative/radiohead/

“Following on from her critically acclaimed sets ‘Love In The Time Of Science’ and her first for Rough Trade ‘Fisherman’s Woman’, the forthcoming ‘Me And Armini’ (released 8th September) sees her working once again with her long time producer/collaborator Dan Carey resulting in what we feel is destined to be one of the albums of 2008.

‘Me And Armini’ is a hugely ambitious and aspirational pop record with Emiliana’s soaring voice centre stage, bolstered by a rich gamut of musical styles. From the summery skank of the title track to the surging, breathless, first single ‘Jungle Drum’ (released 29th September) and yearning, spine-tingling ‘Big Jumps’ and much more in between ‘Me And Armini’ is a truly fantastic album.

‘Me And Armini’ will be released as a digital single in the US exclusively via iTunes on 19th August, with the album of the same name to follow on 9th September. “

Download the song “Me and Armini” here.

Source 1: http://www.arjanwrites.com/arjanwrites/2008/07/free-download-e.html
Source 2: http://www.myspace.com/emilianatorrini

The video was created by flight404 using Processing…

“Processing is an open source programming language and environment for people who want to program images, animation, and interactions. It is used by students, artists, designers, researchers, and hobbyists for learning, prototyping, and production. It is created to teach fundamentals of computer programming within a visual context and to serve as a software sketchbook and professional production tool. Processing is developed by artists and designers as an alternative to proprietary software tools in the same domain.”

Source 1: http://www.flight404.com/blog/?cat=1
Source 2: http://processing.org/download/index.html

“DOT.TUNES is not some lightweight iTunes utility. It’s a fully developed web server application that supports MP3, AAC, AIFF, WAV, MPEG, MP4, and MOV files, allowing you to share your iTunes library contents with your friends in other cities, your classmates across the dorm or the coworkers scattered throughout the building. DOT.TUNES contains a custom web server designed specifically to serve the audio tracks from your iTunes at lightning fast speeds. Through seamless integration with your iTunes base, DOT.TUNES easily handles large libraries without missing a beat.”

I tried it and it’s working quite well – especially if you consider that there’s a bunch of plugins available.(which you have to pay for)

Source: http://www.dottunes.net

They even started to make a whole show centered around the current mixed tape.

Get it now!

Source: http://www.mercedes-benz.tv/mixedtape

It’s called “Dive Deep” and is the first album presenting different vocal artists each song. I am missing Skye Edwards voice but with all the variation on this album it’s back to the roots as if Skye was there.

Source: http://www.morcheeba.net

If you cannot drop by you also can tune into the live stream the FeM Streaming Team is going to send out over the intertubes. Yes that’s right: the complete concert is available through a live stream.

Tune into the live stream around 2200 CEST and watch a great concert…

Until that go to their mySpace site and listen to some songs…

Source 1: http://www.lascif-corpse.de/
Source 2: http://bi-club.de/
Source 3: http://www.myspace.com/lascifcorpse
Source 4: mms://streaming-internet.fem.tu-ilmenau.de/bi-club

“Ardour is a digital audio workstation. You can use it to record, edit and mix multi-track audio. You can produce your own CDs, mix video soundtracks, or just experiment with new ideas about music and sound.

Ardour capabilities include: multichannel recording, non-destructive editing with unlimited undo/redo, full automation support, a powerful mixer, unlimited tracks/busses/plugins, timecode synchronization, and hardware control from surfaces like the Mackie Control Universal. If you’ve been looking for a tool similar to ProTools, Nuendo, Pyramix, or Sequoia, you might have found it.

Above all, Ardour strives to meet the needs of professional users. This means implementing all the “hard stuff” that other DAWs ( even some leading commercial apps ) handle incorrectly or not at all. Ardour has a completely flexible “anything to anywhere” routing system, and will allow as many physical I/O ports as your system allows. Ardour supports a wide range of audio-for-video features such as video-synced playback and pullup/pulldown sample rates. You will also find powerful features such as “persistent undo”, multi-language support, and destructive track punching modes that aren’t available on other platforms.”

Source: http://www.ardour.org/

I am in the middle of a jolly exiting jazz-swing-neo-whatever phase when it comes to the music I am listening these days. There’s “Big Bad Voodoo Daddy” – a band which I will talk more about in the next days and there’s one (for me) very very new

“Silje Nergaard (born June 19, 1966 in Steinkjer, Norway), is a very successful Norwegian pop and jazz musician. While some very old titles of her (e. g. Si det, si det from 1985) rather have a distinct pop feel, she has now almost completely given up making pop music, which is the reason why virtually the entirety of her later releases consists of jazzy tunes.”

Want to get an impression of one of my favourite songs of her (it’s “You Send Me Flowers”) ? Go ahead:

(thanks to last.fm)

Source: http://www.siljenergaard.com/

“Last.fm is a service that records what you listen to, and then presents you with an array of interesting things based upon your tastes — artists you might like, users with similar taste, personalised radio streams, charts, and much more.”

Since last.fm is monitoring what music I am listening to it can also be used to create some kind of “personal chart list” which you can put on your website… it may look like this:

(this actually is a realtime chart of my account)

In the meantime I was redirected to another quite similar service called “Pandora”. You also get a free high-quality radio from them. But Pandora is working very differently in the inside. Instead of taking the social approach like last.fm, Pandora wants to investigate the “genome of music”:

“Together we set out to capture the essence of music at the most fundamental level. We ended up assembling literally hundreds of musical attributes or “genes” into a very large Music Genome. Taken together these genes capture the unique and magical musical identity of a song – everything from melody, harmony and rhythm, to instrumentation, orchestration, arrangement, lyrics, and of course the rich world of singing and vocal harmony. It’s not about what a band looks like, or what genre they supposedly belong to, or about who buys their records – it’s about what each individual song sounds like.”

Since last.fm has a really nice tool for my mac and is working really well for my music taste I am going to stick with it… for everyone else: go and try both.

Source 1: http://www.last.fm/
Source 2: http://www.pandora.com/

Weihnachten, das ist die Zeit der sentimentalen Rückblicke und selbstkritischen Fragen (“Was zum Teufel hab ich eigentlich das Jahr über gemacht?”) und noch kritischeren Bernd-das-Brot-like-Jahresausblicke (“Macht euch keine Hoffnung: Das nächste Jahr wird noch viel schlimmer.” und “Die Hölle, das sind die Anderen.”).

Und man kramt auch Sachen wieder raus. Da liegt bei mir nun eine alte Ärzte-DVD auf dem Schreibtisch.

Der Datenträger deckt die ersten Schaffensjahre der Gruppe ab.

Neben hinglänglich bekannten Videos…

“Gehn wie ein Ägypter”

“Westerland”

“Bitte, Bitte”

…auch diverse Live-Auftritte im TV…

“Teenagerliebe”

“Zu spät”

“Du willst mich küssen”

“Radio brennt”

…sowie Interviewmaterial…

Farin

Bela

Sahnie

… und nicht zu vergessen die Moskito-Sachen:

“Das ist Rock ‘n’ Roll”

Mein persönlicher Favorit ist “Du willst mich küssen”. Allein schon mit dem Gedanken, ein Nerd würde den Song laut und ungeniert im Schulflur trällern:

“Du willst mich küssen, doch das geht mir zu schnell. Du solltest wissen: Ich bin intellektuell.”

“Ben Westbeech, Briony, Cris Tanzi, Divas Harmony feat. Kayla & Trip, Golden Era of Sound feat. Dionne Charles, Granufunk & Sonny Plankton, Kristin Hild, Lady Destiny, Layonne & Krako, My Toys Like Me, Reebosound, S. Maily, Stee Downes, Super Star Planet, Switch”… oh wait… GRANUFUNK?

Source: More

Apparently the Gears of War Soundtrack by Megadeth is downloadable for free. Get the song and the lyrics here.

Source: http://www.megadeth.com/

It’s been some days when I wrote about my wish and need for low latency network audio solutions. And now it seems that there is something to help the situation: JACK.

“Have you ever wanted to take the audio output of one piece of software and send it to another? How about taking the output of that same program and send it to two others, then record the result in the first program? If so, JACK may be what you’ve been looking for.

JACK is a low-latency audio server, written for POSIX conformant operating systems such as GNU/Linux and Apple’s OS X. It can connect a number of different applications to an audio device, as well as allowing them to share audio between themselves. Its clients can run in their own processes (ie. as normal applications), or can they can run within the JACK server (ie. as a “plugin”).”

This alone isn’t what I was searching for…but there is NetJack – the network extension for JACK.

“Netjack is a Realtime Audio Transport over a generic IP Network. It is fully integrated into JACK.”

Source 1: another nerd wish- low latency network audio
Source 2: http://jackaudio.org
Source 3: http://jackosx.com
Source 4: http://netjack.sf.net
Source 5: http://www.grame.fr/~letz/jackdmp.html

As always: great music, free download.

Source: http://www.mercedes-benz.com/mixedtape

Source: http://www.ccc-r.de/boycott/#Music

Source: http://www.mixed-tape.com/

Last year I told you about Bobby Baby – a girl from sweden which makes great music since she is 12. Known since 2005 as Bobby Baby (before: Ella Glockenspiel) she is going to be in germany for some gigs next month:

Watch her current video:

Source 1: http://www.bobbybaby.net
Source 2: http://www.antistar.de

Source: http://vowe.net/archives/007362.html

“The buzz on Adrienne Pierce continues to build. The Vancouver born singer/songwriter taps into a singular source to create music that has universal appeal. Her independently-produced debut, “Small Fires,” is a pop gem full of sublime songcraft and intense performances.” - John Goodman, North Shore News

Visit her website, and buy her music!

Source: http://www.adriennepierce.com/

Hmm… great club. bad music. nuff said.

Source: http://www.cm-club.de/

• Compression Ratios ranging from ultra high (58 CDs fit on one!) to High-End Audio (2.5:1), for absolutely perfect audiophile encodings
• Crystal Clear, Award Winning Sound Quality at every compression ratio and bit rate!
• Support for Embedded Album Art (Covers, Booklets, Lyrics!)
• Store Entire Audio Album in a Single .mp4 File with all the Features of an Audio CD embedded inside, but at a fraction of the space!
• Reference Quality MPEG-4 Audio Codec
• Fully Compatible with the Latest Version of the State-of-the-art MPEG-4 Audio Standard (LC-AAC, HE-AAC and HE-AAC v2)

Source: Nero Digital Audio

Pictures made by der Andi.

Source: streaming.fem.tu-ilmenau.de

Today it’s once again time for the Ilmenau Newcomer Festival “Vorsicht Band! 2006″. And this time again there’s FeM involved. But first the facts:

16 Newcomer bands from all across germany are going to perform in the next two days. Since the 16 where chosen from 272 you can bet that there’s only the best the newcomer scene has to offer these days.

And now to the juicy facts from FeM: You can watch the whole Newcomer Festival “Vorsicht Band! 2006″ over the internet for free. Just connect to one of the following Windows Media livestreams:

Broadband Internet (1 Mbit and above): mms://streaming.fem.tu-ilmenau.de/vorsichtband2006
Narrowband Internet (below DSL): mms://streaming.fem.tu-ilmenau.de/vorsichtband2006_modem

To be precise:

And some facts for the nerds: 3 stages, 9 cameras, 30 people, 10.000m cableing,…

Source 1: http://streaming.fem.tu-ilmenau.de

Source 2: http://www.ilmenau-festival.de

Source: http://www.mixed-tape.com/

“Microsoft Windows hat in der Öffentlichkeit was Sicherheit betrifft einen schlechten Stand. Windows gilt als System mit offenen Scheunentoren und wird von der Elite gemieden. Doch in den letzten Jahren hat sich eine Menge getan und die letzten Releases von Windows XP wie auch das bevorstehende Windows Vista kommen mit signifikanten und grundlegenden Änderungen daher, die das Bild bald ändern könnten.

Im Gespräch bietet FX Einblicke in die Vorgehensweise von Microsoft in den letzten Jahren und erklärt, welche konkreten Ergebnisse Microsoft in seinen aktuellen und kommenden Betriebssystem-Releases erreicht hat und anstrebt. Am Ende gibt es auch einen Blick auf die Ist-Situation bei Linux.”

Source: http://www.chaosradio.de/cre022.html