🔗 You kids like the wrong music

Ethan Hein back at it again with a great post deciphering the idea that it doesn’t take musical ability to be a popular singer these days…

You kids like the wrong music, part two:

It’s true, we don’t expect unamplified and unedited singing at Caruso’s level anymore. But we expect a lot of other things. For one thing, we expect singers to write their own material, which Caruso didn’t do. For another, we demand a lot of studio technique that Caruso would have found unbearably alien. To say that “edited” recordings are of intrinsically lower musical value than live recordings makes no sense. By that standard, we should require that all movies be plays that are filmed in real time. Film acting isn’t the same craft as stage acting, and unamplified stage singing isn’t the same craft as studio singing. Some people manage to master both crafts, but not many.

So much great stuff here. Read the whole thing.

🔗 Joe Steel's Apple TV wish list for WWDC 2017

I love how passionate Joe Steel is about the Apple TV. Read his WWDC 2017 tvOS wish list here.

The ATV is my go to device at home. Despite its many flaws, I really enjoy mine. Steel echoes many of the features I included on my own WWDC 2017 wish list. 

🔗 Oliver Sacks, Neurologist Who Wrote About the Brain’s Quirks, Dies at 82

Click here to read The New York Times's coverage.

Oliver Sacks's books have had a huge impact on me. I especially recommend you read Musicophilia if you are interested in him and do not know where to start.

🔗 Limitations streaming iTunes music in the cloud with third party apps

Couldn't agree more with this post from MacStories. The original story they are covering is this post from the app developer Steamclock about limitations that third party apps have when accessing iTunes tracks stored in the cloud.

From Steamclock's blog post:

According to our latest stats, 17% of Party Monster users have been unable to play a song in their iTunes library, and 22% of WeddingDJ users have tried to cue a playlist that has so many unplayable tracks that we need to display a warning. While it’s a miracle that we’ve been able to maintain a 4 star rating through all of this, it’s not going to last if we stay the course.

Given all of this, we have a couple options. We could double down and go pro, catering to serious DJs who can load DRM-free music into our sandbox. Pro DJs who use our apps often have a large licensed library of songs, and won’t rely on iTunes Match or Apple Music.

Alternatively, we could steer towards the mass market, drop crossfading support, and regain full iTunes compatibility. We could also put in the work to add support for Spotify or other competing streaming services, and focus our apps less on playback features and more on having a great UI for queueing.

I am glad this problem is getting some publicity. I have been frustrated with the fact that iTunes tracks can't stream from third party apps for years.

🔗 The Tragedy of iTunes and Classical Music

Robinson Meyer's The Tragedy of iTunes and Classical Music is the best thing I have read all week. It is a perfect overview of the problems haunting serious music geeks when it comes to archiving large and complex music collections in iTunes.

When the developer Erik Kemp designed the first metadata system for MP3s in 1996, he provided only three options for attaching text to the music. Every audio file could be labeled with only an artist, song name, and album title.

Kemp’s system has since been augmented and improved upon, but never replaced. Which makes sense: Like the web itself, his schema was shipped, good enough, and an improvement on the vacuum which preceded it. Those three big tags, as they’re called, work well with pop and rock written between 1960 and 1995. This didn’t prevent rampant mislabeling in the early days of the web, though, as anyone who remembers Napster can tell you. His system stumbles even more, though, when it needs to capture hip hop’s tradition of guest MCs or jazz’s vibrant culture of studio musicianship.

And they really, really fall apart when they need to classify classical music.

Read the whole thing, it's great! File this under "things I wish I had written myself."

🔗 Tweetbot 2

Tweetbot 2 for Mac is out. If you are a Twitter power user or just plain addicted, this is worth checking out. It provides a far superior experience to twitter.com and especially the official Twitter app for Mac. Best of all, it is now permanently 13 dollars.

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🔗 Highnote: Tempo And Key Control For Your Music

Highnote is an excellent little app for iOS that allows you to change the tempo and key of the music in your library. Like all Mac and iOS apps that require access to your device’s music library, it can only work with audio files that are locally downloaded. My iTunes Match subscription allows me to stream my iTunes library from multiple Macs and iDevices without the files occupying any space. Other apps cannot access songs in the cloud unless they are also downloaded to the device. This is a disappointment of mine that I wish Apple would address. While it is a drag to have to go into the Music app and download songs before use, Highnote is still a great little utility for slowing down, speeding up, or changing the key of the songs in your music library, tasks I typically associate with doing on a desktop computer.

For $1.99, it is worth checking out. And they’ve already announced an Apple Watch app! Good for them, though I’m not sure I will be needing to use these tools on my wrist.

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🔗 Paul Lansky's Three Moves performed by Jonny Allen

Never seen anyone make this piece look so easy before. http://youtu.be/DTliXQ0GxB0

🔗 Marco Arment sums up my largest concerns about Apple

Marco Arment sums up my largest concerns about Apple in his recent post, Apple has lost the functional high ground.

Below I have quoted a few highlights (but read the whole thing yourself, it is very short).

Apple’s hardware today is amazing — it has never been better. But the software quality has taken such a nosedive in the last few years that I’m deeply concerned for its future. I’m typing this on a computer whose existence I didn’t even think would be possible yet, but it runs an OS riddled with embarrassing bugs and fundamental regressions. Just a few years ago, we would have relentlessly made fun of Windows users for these same bugs on their inferior OS, but we can’t talk anymore.

And also…

I suspect the rapid decline of Apple’s software is a sign that marketing is too high a priority at Apple today: having major new releases every year is clearly impossible for the engineering teams to keep up with while maintaining quality. Maybe it’s an engineering problem, but I suspect not — I doubt that any cohesive engineering team could keep up with these demands and maintain significantly higher quality.

I could not agree more.

🔗 Rob Knopper: 12 Days of Delécluse

day 7: every piece of gear you’ll need for self-recording — ROB KNOPPER:

welcome to day 7 of the #12daysofdelécluse, in which we count down to the release of my new album, delécluse:douze études for snare drum. in addition to posting étude 7 today, i’m posting day 2 (of 3) of the complete guide to self-recording. see day one of the complete guide to self-recording here.

I am so impressed with these recordings and the entire presentation of Rob Knopper’s website. Every performing musician should have a website with a design and focus that represent their accomplishments so tastefully.

I will surely be buying the album and his clever Delécluse Starter Stickings™.