10 predictions for 2008
Year Zero will become the precedent. On the plane trip home from visiting family over Christmas, I read Eric Davis's analysis of Led Zeppelin's fourth album, part of the 33 1/3 book series. While a lot of it seemed like a stretch--as is the case with any highly intellectualized deconstruction of rock music--it did remind me of a certain sensation created by certain artists and albums, a sense that the listener is more than a mere consumer, but is in fact an active member in a secret club that only other members fully understand, a sort of musical Masonic society. Think of that Zeppelin album, the Grateful Dead, the Residents, or Secret Chiefs 3. In 2007, Trent Reznor, working with 42 Entertainment, took this kind of mystical clubbishness and updated it for the digital era. USB drives with leaked tracks from the upcoming Year Zero record were surreptitiously placed in bathroom stalls at concert venues. Phone numbers with frightening secret messages were encoded in bursts of static or out-of-phase audio signals. Cell phones were distributed to fans who figured out some of the clues; a phone call placed to those phones summoned them to a secret concert. In 2008, we'll see more of these kinds of musical events that use digital technology to break down the wall between audience and artist. The world's best offline record store will go online. There's nothing else like Amoeba Records. Its three locations in Berkeley, San Francisco, and Los Angeles offer unsurpassed selection--including cellophane-packaged vinyl I've never seen anywhere else--and seem to be curated by music fans with amazing depth and breadth of knowledge. In 2007, Amoeba took its first tentative steps into digital distribution, releasing exclusive recordings from Gram Parsons and Brandi Shearer in both MP3 and CD formats. In 2008, I predict Amoeba will finally go online in a huge way, offering an unsurpassed quantity of MP3 downloads from every imaginable source: major labels (like Amazon MP3 and the other high-profile stores), independent labels (like eMusic), and do-it-yourselfers (like CDBaby). Look for the nascent Amoeba label to offer distribution on terms never before seen in the recording industry--more of a non-exclusive commission model like CD Baby than a typical all-inclusive marketing-recording-publishing-distribution deal like most labels have favored--and for several high-profile artists who've recently quit their labels to sign on. The loudness wars will end. It's been repeated so many times, it's become a cliche: today's recordings are mastered too loud, eliminating dynamic range and making it hard to listen to a complete album. In 2008, artists and producers will finally begin to demand a return to proper mastering, and radio stations and record execs will be in no position to contradict them.The concert business will follow the recorded music business down. It's a bad time to be a big rock concert promoter like Live Nation. According to a recent story in Pollstar, the concert business actually declined in 2007, despite high-profile reunion tours by The Police and Van Halen and David Lee Roth--two acts with so much internal strife that nobody expected to see them on stage again. I say the 15 percent drop in ticket revenues from 2006 to 2007 will be followed by the same or greater drop next year. Music fans are fed up with exorbitant ticket prices, false scarcity, and quasi-legal scalpers, and there are only so many more nostalgia acts to trot out. Where are the young bands that can sell out 20,000-seat arenas for the next 5, 10, 20 years? (And before you call me out on the Arctic Monkeys, let me just counter with Oasis. Huge in the U.K., briefly popular in the U.S., and irrelevant to all but the die-hardest of fans 10 years later.) In other words, the concert business is about to suffer from the main problem that's hurting the recording industry--not MP3s, not piracy, but lack of interest and investment in artists with long-term (as opposed to instant) commercial potential.Led Zeppelin will play again, but not tour. Speaking of nostalgia, it won't be 1973, but the reunited Led Zeppelin will play a handful of shows in the U.S., focusing on a multi-night stand at New York's Madison Square Garden timed around Robert Plant's 60th birthday on August 20.
How to ensure tracks play in sequence in iTunes
How to ensure tracks play in sequence in iTunes
But what's the fun of that? I want to hear these multifile songs as much as their single-file counterparts. I recently downloaded the Beatles' Abbey Road, which was the first long-playing album I ever owned way back when. You guessed it: the Side Two medley downloads as eight separate tracks.So I selected the eight tracks in iTunes' Album view, dragged the selection into Audacity, selected tracks two through eight individually, and pasted them in order after the first track, "You Never Give Me Your Money."You may want to adjust Audacity's default view to give yourself a second-by-second view of the tracks. To do so, click View > Zoom in or press Ctrl-1 (Command-1 on a Mac).Place the selector at the very end of the track, click Edit > Select > Track Start to Cursor (or select the very start of the track and click Edit > Select > Cursor to Track End), and press Ctrl-X or Command-X to cut the track. Next, select the very end of the first track and press Ctrl-P or Command-P to paste the second track after the first. Repeat the steps until the separate tracks are in order in a single track.Move the selector to the end of the second track and choose Edit > Select > Track Start to Cursor to combine separate tracks intended to play in sequence.Screenshot by Dennis O'Reilly/CNETPlay the recombined tracks to ensure they run together seamlessly. You may need to add or delete a microsecond or two to the splice. Once all the tracks have been spliced into a single file that plays as an LP album side (or however you wish the tracks to play together), select the very end of the combined track and click Edit > Select > Track Start to Cursor.To move the combined track out of Audacity, click File > Export Selection. Give the file a name, select the folder you want to store the track in (or click New Folder), choose the type of file (probably MP3), and click the Options button to change the track's bit-rate mode, quality, variable speed, and channel mode.When you export the combined file in Audacity you can set the track's bit rate and other quality options.Screenshot by Dennis O'Reilly/CNETTo import the combined track to your iTunes library, return to iTunes and click File > Add to Library. Navigate to and select the file you just exported from Audacity and click Open.In iTunes, click File > Add to Library, select the file with the combined tracks you exported from Audacity, and click Open.Screenshot by Dennis O'Reilly/CNET Note that Audacity's default file-save location is your Documents folder in Windows and the program's own folder in Applications on a Mac.Audacity is a full-featured audio editor. I've only scratched the surface of the program's capabilities. As I mentioned above, I was able to splice two separate tracks from an album (cut four from side A and cut one from side B) relatively smoothly despite their slightly different tempos.Doing so took some trial and error, but Audacity makes it easy to undo and redo your edits, although you have to be careful when working with multiple audio tracks at one time that you haven't inadvertently selected more audio than you intended.To replace the individual tracks you just combined with the new multitrack file, simply uncheck the single tracks in the iTunes library. You can annotate the new file with the names of the individual tracks or other information by right-clicking the file and choosing Get Info > Info.
But what's the fun of that? I want to hear these multifile songs as much as their single-file counterparts. I recently downloaded the Beatles' Abbey Road, which was the first long-playing album I ever owned way back when. You guessed it: the Side Two medley downloads as eight separate tracks.So I selected the eight tracks in iTunes' Album view, dragged the selection into Audacity, selected tracks two through eight individually, and pasted them in order after the first track, "You Never Give Me Your Money."You may want to adjust Audacity's default view to give yourself a second-by-second view of the tracks. To do so, click View > Zoom in or press Ctrl-1 (Command-1 on a Mac).Place the selector at the very end of the track, click Edit > Select > Track Start to Cursor (or select the very start of the track and click Edit > Select > Cursor to Track End), and press Ctrl-X or Command-X to cut the track. Next, select the very end of the first track and press Ctrl-P or Command-P to paste the second track after the first. Repeat the steps until the separate tracks are in order in a single track.Move the selector to the end of the second track and choose Edit > Select > Track Start to Cursor to combine separate tracks intended to play in sequence.Screenshot by Dennis O'Reilly/CNETPlay the recombined tracks to ensure they run together seamlessly. You may need to add or delete a microsecond or two to the splice. Once all the tracks have been spliced into a single file that plays as an LP album side (or however you wish the tracks to play together), select the very end of the combined track and click Edit > Select > Track Start to Cursor.To move the combined track out of Audacity, click File > Export Selection. Give the file a name, select the folder you want to store the track in (or click New Folder), choose the type of file (probably MP3), and click the Options button to change the track's bit-rate mode, quality, variable speed, and channel mode.When you export the combined file in Audacity you can set the track's bit rate and other quality options.Screenshot by Dennis O'Reilly/CNETTo import the combined track to your iTunes library, return to iTunes and click File > Add to Library. Navigate to and select the file you just exported from Audacity and click Open.In iTunes, click File > Add to Library, select the file with the combined tracks you exported from Audacity, and click Open.Screenshot by Dennis O'Reilly/CNET Note that Audacity's default file-save location is your Documents folder in Windows and the program's own folder in Applications on a Mac.Audacity is a full-featured audio editor. I've only scratched the surface of the program's capabilities. As I mentioned above, I was able to splice two separate tracks from an album (cut four from side A and cut one from side B) relatively smoothly despite their slightly different tempos.Doing so took some trial and error, but Audacity makes it easy to undo and redo your edits, although you have to be careful when working with multiple audio tracks at one time that you haven't inadvertently selected more audio than you intended.To replace the individual tracks you just combined with the new multitrack file, simply uncheck the single tracks in the iTunes library. You can annotate the new file with the names of the individual tracks or other information by right-clicking the file and choosing Get Info > Info.
A real page turner from Adobe
A real page turner from Adobe
The only main difference is that Adobe offers no automatic search and import feature, and does not have a direct portal to the Internet for searching and downloading books. There are two main views from which to navigate the entire application. The library view lets you manage your collection, while the reading view lets you work within one individual eBook or PDF file.Adobe Digital Editions is compatible with any PDF or .epub (International Digital Publishing Forum standard) file. Loading files consists of either dragging and dropping them into the application window or choosing "Add File" in the Library menu.You can view books through Adobe Digital Editions in thumbnail or list view by title, author, publisher, last read, number of pages, date added or status. You can also read any metadata, such as permissions information, attached to a file.Adobe Digital Edition's "bookshelves" are akin to playlists. You drag and drop files from the general library into bookshelves in a column on the left to categorize books, magazine and other digital documents by genre, type or source. Books can be viewed in double or single page views of adjustable screen fits. The simplicity makes sense given the fact that the software is intended to integrate with the Sony Reader.This is the mobile eBook device that is sure to be a favorite with baby boomers once they progress to large print status. The light and sleek PDA-looking thing, which offers adjustable font size, will surely trump clunky large print books, especially given that only bestsellers are usually available in large print. Adobe's new tool may be an effort to attract users now for when that time comes.The cozy interface may also inspire more people to finally take advantage of the proliferation of public domain works now freely available thanks to the mad race of organizations like Google and Microsoft to scan the world's libraries.Reading view in Adobe Digital EditionsAdobe Digital EditionsThere is also a great marginalia tool in the reading view that will make the college English majors jump for joy. You can tab between the annotated pages or bookmark pages with no annotations. My only wish is that Adobe offered a direct Internet portal for finding and downloading files."That doesn't mean in the future that we won't offer ways in the future to acquire content. Adobe sees itself as a helper through this application, we don't intend to become a silo to content like iTunes," said Bill McCoy, general manager of Adobe's digital publishing business.Adobe has a Sample eBook library that will automatically import directly into the ADE and does integrate with sites like eBooks.com, according to McCoy. Other than that, you have to go through your Web browser to find public domain books via Google Books Search or Microsoft Live Search Books and then import them manually.The company said it expects to release Adobe Digital Editions for Linux, and Windows and Mac versions in French, German, Japanese, Korean and Chinese by the end of 2007.
The only main difference is that Adobe offers no automatic search and import feature, and does not have a direct portal to the Internet for searching and downloading books. There are two main views from which to navigate the entire application. The library view lets you manage your collection, while the reading view lets you work within one individual eBook or PDF file.Adobe Digital Editions is compatible with any PDF or .epub (International Digital Publishing Forum standard) file. Loading files consists of either dragging and dropping them into the application window or choosing "Add File" in the Library menu.You can view books through Adobe Digital Editions in thumbnail or list view by title, author, publisher, last read, number of pages, date added or status. You can also read any metadata, such as permissions information, attached to a file.Adobe Digital Edition's "bookshelves" are akin to playlists. You drag and drop files from the general library into bookshelves in a column on the left to categorize books, magazine and other digital documents by genre, type or source. Books can be viewed in double or single page views of adjustable screen fits. The simplicity makes sense given the fact that the software is intended to integrate with the Sony Reader.This is the mobile eBook device that is sure to be a favorite with baby boomers once they progress to large print status. The light and sleek PDA-looking thing, which offers adjustable font size, will surely trump clunky large print books, especially given that only bestsellers are usually available in large print. Adobe's new tool may be an effort to attract users now for when that time comes.The cozy interface may also inspire more people to finally take advantage of the proliferation of public domain works now freely available thanks to the mad race of organizations like Google and Microsoft to scan the world's libraries.Reading view in Adobe Digital EditionsAdobe Digital EditionsThere is also a great marginalia tool in the reading view that will make the college English majors jump for joy. You can tab between the annotated pages or bookmark pages with no annotations. My only wish is that Adobe offered a direct Internet portal for finding and downloading files."That doesn't mean in the future that we won't offer ways in the future to acquire content. Adobe sees itself as a helper through this application, we don't intend to become a silo to content like iTunes," said Bill McCoy, general manager of Adobe's digital publishing business.Adobe has a Sample eBook library that will automatically import directly into the ADE and does integrate with sites like eBooks.com, according to McCoy. Other than that, you have to go through your Web browser to find public domain books via Google Books Search or Microsoft Live Search Books and then import them manually.The company said it expects to release Adobe Digital Editions for Linux, and Windows and Mac versions in French, German, Japanese, Korean and Chinese by the end of 2007.
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