Done some music serving on youtube today. I think I got inspired by the Byrnes and Eno post of yesterday. Anyway, through some unexpected moments of inspiration I searched for one of my favorite German bands Gammalapagos and there are actually a couple of videos around of them playing live. Here is one of the tracks of their first album.

Link.

Brian Eno and I recently finished our first collaboration in about 30 years. The name of the new record is Everything That Happens Will Happen Today. For the most part, Brian did the music and I wrote some tunes, words and sang. It’s familiar but completely new as well. We’re pretty excited.

Cool thing is they only released it on the internet for now and the album is released in high quality DRM free MP3 and Flac. That almost is enough reason to buy it.

I somehow landed on last.fm to find they link to some Talking Heads youtube videos. Seeing Psycho Killer again, from the movie Stop making sense, brought back some sweet memories.

Great video. Someone singing a song reverse. Try to get the name of the song before the middle of the video.

I visited the Arcade Fire concert in Cologne yesterday. What a fine band. I completely enjoyed the band an the show. Very impressing and inspiring. Here is a picture posted on flickr:

And here is the setlist

Keep the car running
No Cars go
Haiti
Black mirror
Intervention
Neon Bible(Extended version)
Windowsill
The well & the lighthouse
Crown of Love
Ocean of Noise
Tunnels(long version)
Power Out
Rebellion
————————————
My body is a cage
Wake Up

On the not so good side I can only say that the sound in the Palladium was awful. The sound guys forgot to turn on the microphone for Win a number of times. Apart from that they had a big problem with songs that had just a little bit more bass in them. Due to the fact that volumes were already at max the extra basses turned the Palladium into a big bowl of acoustic soup. That way at least three songs, including “Black Mirror”, got completely ruined. Thanks guys.

Every time I need to do this, I forget where I found it. This information is copied from here.

Vorbis ogg:
vorbisgain -arfs *

mp3 (using mp3gain):
find -type d -exec sh -c "mp3gain \"{}\"/*.mp3" \;

mp4 and mp3:
find -type d -exec sh -c "mp3gain \"{}\"/*.mp3" \;

mpc:
find -type d -exec sh -c "mp3gain \"{}\"/*.mpc" \;

flac: just use the –replay-gain option when encoding or use the following (treating all the flacs as one album!):

find originals -name "*.flac" -type f -print0 | xargs -0 metaflac --preserve-modtime --add-replay-gain

or you can create the following small script and call it with the name of your base directory (/srv/music, or something like that). This will treat all songs in one directory as one album.
#!/bin/sh
basedir=${1:-.}

IFS="
"
for dir in `find $basedir -type d`; do
ls $dir/*.flac >/dev/null 2>&1 && metaflac --add-replay-gain $dir/*.flac
done

You can listen to Justice. Nice video, nice song. Nothing new though.

I regularly check the SVN builds of Amarok my favorite music program (if you are using linux, go check it out). Since I also use Gentoo, I just needed to have a good ebuild for it. I found a very good file on the Amarok forums, but had some small problems with it (it did too much), so I made a small update.

If you are interested, here it is.

03/06 small update: on the Amarok forums someone pointed out that the same result could be achieved in a more elegant way. The download now points to the more elegant file.

06/08 update: Andrew pointed out that you need to update the ebuild with a couple of things. Please read the comments for the information. Personally I didn’t have any luck lately since the process now seems to need unsermake and QT4. I am working on that.