Hasta La Gadget!

Streaming music services have a bad reputation when it comes to paying their artists, who only earn a few cents each play. Rdio is trying to remedy that (and grow its subscriber base) by paying songsters $10 for every user they personally attract that stays around longer than a month. Brendan Benson, Scissor Sisters and Snoop Dogg Lion have already signed up, but it’s not just for big names, any musician with an Rdio account can join — tempting us to upload our Lady Gaga covers played on the Sousaphone in the quest for some of those rockstar riches.

Continue reading Rdio begins paying artists $10 for every user they attract

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Rdio begins paying artists $10 for every user they attract originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 02 Oct 2012 18:56:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Science and music, many would say opposite sides of the same coin. Unless you’re DOE biologist Peter Larsen at the Argonne National Laboratory, who would probably argue your legal tender has been double-headed all along. While Larsen is more likely to be studying the intricacies of microbes than Miles Davis, his latest work puts the two of them closer than ever before. Faced with the task of studying vast amounts of microbial data gathered from the English Channel, the biologist explored alternative ways of making sense of it all. While he could have made a spiffy set of charts, Larsen claims that there are certain parameters, like sunlight and temperature, that give the data a structure that lends itself to musical representation.

While classical music might seem the typical choice, due to the irregular nature of the data, the result is more free-form jazz, yet still surprisingly musical. If you were wondering if there is something particularly groovy about the microbes in the English Channel, there isn’t. Larsen and his colleagues used a similar idea in previous work looking at the relationship between a plant and a fungus. This isn’t the first time data has been “sonified,” but these processes that might initially seem to have no relation to music, rhythm and melody, actually highlight the patterns in natural phenomena. Want to get down to the microbial beat? You can hear a sample at the more coverage link.

[Image Credit: Argonne National Laboratory]

Filed under: Science, Alt

Microbial music: Using sound to represent data from the deep blue sea originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 02 Oct 2012 12:38:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Exactly 30 years ago, the first commercially-released CD album hit store shelves. On October 1, 1982, Billy Joel’s sixth studio album, 52nd Street, was re-released to the public. The album was originally launched in 1978, but it was selected for re-launch on the all-new digital compact disc to coincide with the release of the first CD player, the Sony CDP-101.

Research and development of the compact disc actually began well before 1982. Beginning in 1974, electronics company Philips wanted to create a whole new audio platform that was both small in size and better quality than vinyl records and cassette tapes. Three years later, the company finally established a lab where they would make CDs and CD players. They called them “compact discs” to follow along with their other naming conventions that they had, like the “compact cassette”.

At the time, Sony was also developing their own CD technology, but the two companies eventually merged their efforts and partnered up for the official consumer launch of the CD in 1982. Of course, CDs were met with a ton of skepticism at first. It wasn’t until several years later that CDs began to actually take off. Heck, I was still using cassette tapes in the 90s.

Even though the percentage of people in the world that use CDs is continually going down, you can’t deny that the format made a huge impact on the music industry. Even though nothing really outperforms the quality of a good vinyl record, newer platforms like CDs and MP3s are still extremely popular and are the go-to format for most music listeners these days.

[via The Next Web]

Image via Flickr

The CD turns 30 today is written by Craig Lloyd & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Like so many other technologies, it’s tough to pin down an exact birthday for the compact disc. If we’re tracing things back to the world of LaserDisc as a potential commercial product, we’re talking years or decades earlier. As far as laboratory testing is concerned for the tech as we’ve come to know, love and subsequently abandon, the we’re going back to the mid-70s in our journey. For the sake of simplicity, let’s go with the first commercial record to be released on the format. That would be 52nd Street by one William Martin Joel, a release that came a few years after the album’s issuing on vinyl, to coincide with the Sony’s CDP-101, which let audiophiles do more than just stare in wonder at the shiny plastic disc they just bought.

Filed under: Home Entertainment

The CD celebrates its 30th birthday, recalls a time when it was cool to play music with lasers originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 01 Oct 2012 10:16:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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AAC files and the arcane don’t have much in common on the surface. After some digging, however, PBS’ Idea Channel has found that magic is an uncannily good analogy for digital music rights and explaining the thorny ethical issues that come with them. Both music and spells stem from grassroots cultures that give away their content for free, but (at least until an anti-magic clampdown at eBay) have since become businesses. That nature poses a key ethical question: when we’re used to a free experience and can copy songs or spells as much as we like, what does it take to keep us as honest customers? As show host Mike Rugnetta suggests, it’s a matter of personal responsibility — if we want more of either, we have to think of the commerce as showing support for future work. You can catch Mike’s clever train of thought after the break, and ponder what constitutes DRM for a potion while you’re at it.

Continue reading PBS draws link between digital music ethics and magic spells, somehow makes it look simple (video)

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PBS draws link between digital music ethics and magic spells, somehow makes it look simple (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 28 Sep 2012 22:32:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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