Showing posts with label BubbleUPnP. Show all posts
Showing posts with label BubbleUPnP. Show all posts

Saturday 27 June 2020

The Inconvenience of Convenience


Last week I bought two albums "Two Sevens Clash (40th Anniversary)" by Culture  and "Kitchen Sink" by Nadine Shah (oddly being released digitally song by song) and after consideration decided to but just the digital version. I didn't buy the CDs because I thought I would be unlikely to play the CD but have played the albums several times since purchase , plus because of the convenience of my digital apps (BubbleuP'n'P and Windows Media Player) I have played several related albums forsaking my normal work soundtrack of BBC 6Music.

I often reckoned that the introduction of CD was a McDonaldisation of music (see my post of music media history from 2015 here) which essentially allowed you to store more music in a smaller place , skip songs , program the order and lots more and was stored in a digital format which does lose a lot of the original sound by letting only hear what we can / need to hear.

The thing is I think nothing of playing a vinyl album or single but digital discs are are now a chore , you have to find it , open the case open the player and then either play or select what you want to play. We have been conditioned to get want we want with a click or two. When was the last time you played a CD or DVD? We are all part of the "click" generation.

I am not sure it can go much further, ever song I share on this blog is on Youtube or Vimeo , and as I am writing this I have "Two Sevens Clash (40th Anniversary)" playing on Windows Media Player. When I go down I will listen to some vinyl or maybe watch something on my Tivo , Netflix or Amazon Prime.

Looking outside the cloudy sky is looking very ominous, more thunderstorms on the way.

"Two Sevens Clash (40th Anniversary)" by Culture is an absolutely essential reggae album, I think this is going on my phone to listen to when I walk.

Tuesday 23 June 2020

Wild, Wild Life


One of the many benefits of the lockdown has been the proliferation of wildlife and the cleansing of the atmosphere thanks to the use of airplanes and cars being significantly reduced. So we've seen frogs , bees and butterflies as well as small birds , although there seem to be many more magpies as well and I'm sure I seldom saw more than one a day.

The problem with this is that th ehuman race is so insistent on it's own convenience we will soon be back to the same air and car traffic with the subsequent increase in polutions, although I still often can cross the road easily whithout having to wait for traffic lights.

Another increase is the number of people out running , although they may have been there before when I was office based, but I was out last night and the noise was so great I was glad to get off the estate I was on and into  the greenery and woods , but then I hit the A167 and then there was traffic noise pollution.

Today I have turned off the radio and am listening to my own music collection which I am playing on my Kindle Fire using BubbleUPnP and I downloaded the 40th Aniversary copy of "Two Sevens Clash" by Culture which differs significantly from the thirtieth anniversary one (barring the origianl album) but the track order seems to be all over the place. I am going to look at this later and it may need some manual adjustment, but the album is full of great songs.

I'm now listening to Caravan & The New Symphonia and was slight surprised to find what "The Dog, The Dog He's At It Again" was about, although it should have been obvious.

So I will leave you with "Wild Wild Life" by The Talking Heads from "True Stories" . Enjoy

Friday 17 April 2020

Music While You Work ... at the touch of a button


One of the things about working from home is that I was listening to 6Music a lot , and my inherent laziness means that unless a CD is with reaching distance I don't play it , but I have an app on my Kindle Fire called BubbleUPnP that wirelessly links to my digital collection (which Alexa can't / won't do , in fact it won't even play the music I have bought from Amazon , every time I ask it says I have to use Spotify which I won't on principle) so I've linked my Kindle Fire up to some Altec-Lansing speakers and now can play music at several touches of buttons and screens (I love how so many things are sold "at the touch of a button"). Here's an example on my Instagram channel.

I've discovered that my digital collection is missing several of my Captain Beefheart album so I need to excavate them from the box that they are in to add them , specifically "Clear Spot" and "The Spotlight Kid". "Trout Mask Replica" and "Unconditionally Guaranteed" are on there but there are a lot that need ripping from the CDs I have.

I am torn between sharing "Grow Fins" from "The Spotlight Kid" (with it's four / five note riff and incendiary harp sound) and "Orange Claw Hammer" from "Trout Mask Replica" (which was an unaccompanied sea shanty style , but I have one with musical backing, which I will share at some point but I found one with Frank Zappa on guitar) so I can't decide so will go with both , this Friday morning.




Friday 21 July 2017

Fire


On Wednesday I ditched the iPad and got a Kindle Fire. Basically the iPad was an excellent device but tried to tie you into Apple and some non Apple apps didn't behave the way I wanted including YouTube and TED. I originally bought it because someone showed me GarageBand, but while that was great to play with, and I managed to record a couple of things, it forced into such things as defining the length of your song before you recorded it, and it took me six months to export my first MP3 after having recording the song. I think it was a space issue and on someone's advice I deleted a load of apps and it finally exported.

I recorded a couple more but, for me it was awkward. So eventually Garageband became something I dabbled with every now and then, and all I was really doing was keeping it charged and updating IOS.

So I got the Kindle Fire and it doesn't like Google apps so can't really use the Google Play Store or Google Docs or NOW TV (which uses some Google Framework). There are ways of circumventing this but I like life easy. I've not yet connected it to Social Media, but have installed TED and managed to print via Bluetooth to my Canon Pixma Printer. It was the first photograph I took with the device , which only has a 2 MP camera, but it was late at night and I wasn't sure what I was doing when taking the picture, but I took it and printed. That's one thing I never did with the iPad (although I never tried).

I've downloaded a Music Studio, which gets good reviews, but will check that out in the coming weeks.

I then played some YouTube stuff using my Bluetooth soundbar for sound and that was good.

Then the biggest plus' which in my opinion has mad the purchase worthwhile already , was the installation of BubbleUPnP which connected to my DNLA Server meaning that my whole digital music collection is available to me. I am now seriously thinking of giving away big chunks of my CD collection.

So far, so happy.

It's Friday, so we need a "fire" related song and the ones that spring to mind are Arthur Brown, Bruce Springsteen and The Pointer Sisters but as usual I'm going a little further afield with Nick Cave's take on "Fire Down Below" from Johnny Depp and Gore Verbinsky's pirate song project "Rogues Gallery".