Some CDs, yesterday
Yesterday was the 26th birthday of the compact disc, apparently. Wired put forward some reasonable environmental reasons why we should all be migrating to downloads, and for the last few years I’ve stood my ground as someone who prefers to buy the CD rather than download, and as such have managed to confuse myself into thinking I like the CD format, when I really don’t. Even though it’s been around for a quarter of a century, it remains a sterile, charmless format that’s stuck around so long because nothing cheaper and quicker has come along to replace it. Horrible digipaks, 3″ CDs and all manner of lurid packaging have come along to liven things up, but it’s never going to sound as good or look as good as vinyl, or be as convenient as pinging round high-def MP3s and carrying your music round on your laptop. What I do like, though, is having some kind of physical collection of music, which appeals to the terrible, OCD collector-boy in me, I admit, and is a total bastard when you move house. I also don’t really tend to listen to stuff I’ve downloaded very much, whereas the physical CD reminds me that this music exists and I should listen to it, instead of it being swallowed up into a mass of 15,000 digital songs, never to be seen again. How very interesting all that was for you.
In other news, I’ve been having a poke around imeem to see what it does. On first impressions, it looks to me like a worse last.fm (but then I am a wholehearted last.fm convert), but it does have a very useful feature for embedding music into blogs and onto other sites, which I might make some use of, although it would help if WordPress actually let you embed anything. GRR. You can currently only embed audio with the WordPress audio plugin, which looks a bit clunky, like this:
– Sunnyvale Noise Sub-element, ‘Godzilla vs. Kathleen Hanna.
Sort it out, WordPress.
Finally, an overdue bit of Shatnerwatch, as Shatner endorses tech blog TechCrunch over here in inimitable style. This excerpt from Shatner’s autobiography is also priceless, not least for the way in which every word begins with a capital letter, such is the importance of everything Shatner imparts.
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“In other news, I’ve been having a poke around imeem to see what it does.:”
You didn’t mention the one thing that makes imeem different from last.fm – you can upload music and share it – imeem is simply youtube for music. Both sites have a load of cool features for discovering music but imeem’s entire catalog is built from users who uploaded tracks by their favourite bands because these users believed they were something awesome that needed to be shared.
Hmm. I bet you work for them.