songfacts

2006-09-27T23:24:00.000-07:00

which is that band that you could listen to, no matter what mood, time of day, ambience etc.. ?
mine would be fleetwood mac.

no quarter

2006-09-13T22:24:00.000-07:00

Led Zep and Tool versions back to back. first thing in the morning.
awesome!

(Image since html table in blogger is buggy)

can't wait to experience Led Zep's vocals and Tool's music.
garageband here i come...

favoritest albums

2006-08-29T02:58:00.000-07:00

what are your favorite albums of all time?
mine would be (in no order)

revolver (beatles)
parachutes (coldplay)
ten (pearl jam)
affirmation (savage garden)
rumours ( fleetwood mac )
dsotm ( floyd )
led zeppelin ( led zep )
the joshua tree (u2)
lateralus ( tool )

kurai ondrum illai

2006-08-28T22:09:00.000-07:00

found this video. i love it. you can see my attempt at translating this song here

yip

2006-08-28T09:06:00.000-07:00

ok bear with me for my audio geekery. i had to blog this. i have successfully created a DTS audio cd that plays in my home theater. Listening to the wall CD 1 on my home theater as am blogging. you gotta hear this to believe my excitement. pure genuine 5.1 DTS audio ( no upmixing from flac or mp3 or any other stereo source ). Oooooooooh... bliiiissssss.
me has 5 floyd albums on dts now.. yip

fav harry belafonte

2006-08-25T23:00:00.000-07:00

island in the sun
Oh, island in the sun
Willed to me by my father's hand
All my days I will sing in praise
Of your forest, waters, your shining sand

and

jamaica farewell
Down the way where the nights are gay
And the sun shines daily on the mountaintop
I took a trip on a sailing ship
But when I reached Jamaica I made her stop
Now I'm sad to say
I'm on my way
I won't be back for many a day
My heart is down
My head is turning around
I had to leave a little girl in Kingston town

whats your fav harry belafonte ?

flac search

2006-08-24T05:24:00.000-07:00

i just made the flac search working. can you see it on the right under the mp3 search? Just like the mp3 search it just uses google to search with some search params for weeding out the crap. check it out. I got rush of blood to the head thru my search. want techno? try this. Listen for yourself to see the clarity. Oh ya, get vlc if you are on windows or linux or mac or bsd.

Audio tip - 2

2006-08-24T04:24:00.000-07:00

Want more more more more quality out of your music and mp3 is killing it? try FLAC ( Free lossless audio codec ). No more of codecs deciding normal human hearing and weeding out supposedly unheard frequencies. I've decided to re-do my complete collection ( which is currently in mp3 and Ogg vorbis ) in FLAC now. The downside obviously is the space. FLAC occupies roughly about 5 times more space than a 128 kbps mp3 ( i hate them ). I should have done this long ago if only i had the time (cpu cycles and mine) and space ( Terrabyte disks out yet ? ). The best part i guess is that the support for FLAC is increasing well these days. My toast titanium is supporting FLAC ( thy be w000000test ). It can write Music DVDs and Audio CDs from FLAC. Combine this with Audio Tip 1 and you can see my intellectual masturbation reaching a near orgasm.

Audio tip - 1

2006-08-24T04:02:00.000-07:00

I am tired of writing my mp3s ( ya ya i know lossy but glossy ) from my CD collection on re-writable CDs to listen on my home theater. My home theater, ( Sony DAV - DX 150 which plays divx too) though a good one is stupid that it wont play if there are more than 200 mp3s on the root folder (Hence writing them on DVDs in mp3 format is just not an option). And so i ended up rewriting cds every alternate day with my freshly acquired mp3s for the mood.

Found a solution. The new Roxio Toast Titanium 7 on my mbp is able to write Music DVDs with customizable menus, playlists, shuffle etc etc. The audio format is dolby digital 192 kbps ( not customizable). The downside is that it takes about 5 hours on my 1.83 GHz dual core mbp to encode my mp3z onto dolby digital format. Upside is that it holds more than 500 songs with a dolby digital encoding with shuffle,playlists etc for manipulating play orders.

Since the source is mp3 the quality is not mindblowing but pretty much ok ( i am a audiophile who hears artifacts on 128kbps mp3s with a sampling rate of 44 kHz. )

listen

2006-08-20T08:48:00.000-07:00

radio davidbyrne rocks. also listed in eclectic section in iTunes.

Talk about peer pressure... uff!

2006-08-17T03:00:00.000-07:00

Chorus:
Im every woman, its all in me
Anything you want done, baby
Ill do it naturally
Im every woman, its all in me
I can read your thoughts right now
Every one from a to z

I can cast a spell
With secrets you cant tell
Mix a special brew
Put fire inside of you
But anytime you feel
Danger or fear
Instantly I will appear, cause

Chorus

I can sense your needs
Like rain on to the seeds
I can make a rhyme
Of confusion in your mind
And when it comes down
To some good old fashioned love
Thats what Ive got plenty of, cause

Chorus

I aint braggin cause Im the one
You just ask me ooh and it shall be done
And dont bother to compare
cause Ive got it
Ive got it, Ive got it, yeah

Im every woman (repeat and fade)

~ Chaka Khan (and/or Whitney)

-------------------------------------

I think all men and women need a bit more of the 'woman' (and all her positive attributes) in them to make humanity a li'l bit better.. no i'm not saying it coz i believe in female supremacy.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.

err.. ok maybe just a li'l bit :)

degrading music

2006-08-15T01:17:00.000-07:00

where is the music industry heading ? i have this weird feeling that music is degrading with each passing year. i am sure all of you will agree. is it just that everyone kind of gets stuck to the songs/genre they liked first (maybe in their teens or in college) and expect everything else to be like it and they discover its not and then automatically start having a hate toward everything which isnt their like? though outwardly sounds like a plausible explanation, its far from true. most of us are open to genre shifts at various points in our life. like a teenager discovering rock n roll, then moving on to country, classics and classical as he ages. so its not our rigidity with a genre/era that is making it look like music is degrading. the truth is that it actually is.

Reminds me of Rush's song "spirit of the radio" where the lines go like.. "...all these machinery making modern music can still be open-hearted, not so coldly charted.." , ".. one likes to beleive in the freedom of music, but glittering prizes and endless compromises shatter the illusion of integrity.." and "..for the words of the profits are written on the studio wall, concert hall-- echoes with the sounds of salesmen." the song hits it right on the head. point one is that even in 1980, geddy lee feels that music is rotting. point two, he blames it on the marketing and the music labels associated with the musician. I would also like to cite another example in the book "the clockwork orange" where alex likes ludwig van ( beethoven as referred by alex ), mozart, rossini, schubert etc. and thinks that the modern music of his era ( pianos and blues ) is all cal ( nadsat for crap ).

which contemporary band do you like the most ?
i tried answering and i really cant come out with more than 2 or 3 (tool,u2?,coldplay?) all of whom have been better earlier actually. i really cant stand most of the albums that have been released in the last 10 years.

it sends shivers through my spine to think of how music will be when i am 40. if we let the marketing managers of record labels dictate our music taste, we are going to be fueling someone's greed and also end up spoiling some great, talented, yet greedy and foolish bands. think of what happened to metallica. Do we want load, reload and St. Anger? encourage indie labels and start digging for your music and dont pick up anything from the "hot new" or "rocking new releases" from your supermarket. did you know that supermarkets employ people to crowd next to "new releases" and to pretend picking up the cds with zest like they were normal shoppers. so stop buying or listening to commercial music. you are doing your future generations and music a gargantuan favor.

my fav tool

2006-07-13T08:33:00.000-07:00

my fav picks :

reflection
parabola
disposition
lateralus
schizm
aenima
third eye
the grudge
vicarious
pushit
10000 days, wings part II
undertow
sweat
sober
prison sex
parabol
jambi
bottom
no quarter ( zep cover )

10000 trivia

2006-07-13T08:10:00.000-07:00

am in love with 10000 days, the latest album by tool. if you dont know tool, then you should atleast know that they are the "intelligent man's rock band" like say, queensryche. this comparison might put someone off but i was just comparing the intelligence here.
ok now trivy time for 10000 days.

the album name came from the fact that keenan's mom was paralyzed and lived on a wheelchair for 27 years before death which is 10000 days approx.

the song "wings for marie" is referring to judith "marie" garrison, keenan's mom.

the song "rosetta stoned" comes from "rosetta stone" which is a carved granite stone used in archeology for deciphering heiroglyphs. also "rosetta stone" was used as a pen name for "dr. seuss" (fox in socks?), a famous children's author.

hidden message time. :-) .the song "intension" when played backwards carries the following message repeated twice at around 1 minute in the reversed track : "work hard; stay in school; listen to your mother; your father is right"

the song "lost keys (blame hoffman) is a tribute to dr. albert hoffman who discovered lsd.

"vigniti tres" translates to 23 in latin.

10000 days

2006-07-09T06:30:00.000-07:00

1. Vicarious

2. Jambi

3. Wings For Marie (Pt 1)

4. 10,000 Days (Wings Pt 2)

5. The Pot

6. Lipan Conjuring

7. Lost Keys (Blame Hofmann)

8. Rosetta Stoned

9. Intension

10. Right In Two

11. Viginti Tres

Yet to digest to write a complete review, but sounds like a great successor to Lateralus from one hearing.

my fav gibberish

2006-07-02T23:25:00.000-07:00

"Babble, Babble, Bitch, Bitch
Rebel, Rebel, Party, Party
Sex, sex, sex, don't forget the violence
Blah, blah, blah
Got your lovey-dovey sad and lonely
Stick your stupid slogan in
Everybody sing along"

~ Marilyn Manson - This Is The New Shit

So which are your fav gibberish lyrics?

colors

2006-06-23T21:29:00.000-07:00

bands with colors in their names :

pink floyd
black sabbath
red hot chilli peppers
black eyed peas
white zombie
whitesnake
blue
silverchair
maroon 5
deep purple
blue oyster cult
pink
green day
grey daze
goldfinger
simply red
blackcrowes

got more?

is your music taste rigged?

2006-06-18T12:43:00.000-07:00

polyphonic hmi is a music analysis company founded in barcelona.HSS (Hit Song Science) is a software that uses a process called “spectral deconvolution” to isolate and analyse around 30 parameters that define a piece of music, including such things as sonic brilliance, octave, cadence, frequency range, fullness of sound, chord progression, timbre and “bend” (variations in pitch at the beginning and end of the same note). they have a database of about 3m songs that had successful musical arrangements with their distribution of popularity.
though music has changed considerably over the years, music intelligence software like "Music Science" of platinum blue ( "polyphonic hmi in 2005") can find that the patterns in the music of u2 are similar to beethoven compositions in lots of underlying parameters understood by the software.
HSS is now commercially used by a lot of pop recording companies. norah jones, anastacia, maroon 5 are apparantly using it with their albums to guage the popularity before releasing.
songs like "you're beautiful" by james blunt, "candy shop" by 50 cent were supposedly predicted by HSS to be stunning hits. it has been confirmed by a variety of recording companies that HSS predicts the hit pattern bullseye every time.
here is another astonishing piece of information : HSS is serving indian music industry since march. could himesh rashammiya be using this? HSS now has a database of indian pop music from its very roots.
now enough about the technology. how is this going to hamper creativity? isnt it enough that we already have run-of-the-mill bands that use guitars as percussion instruments? think of all those songs which are going to sound amazingly pleasing to your ear but sinisterly similar to each other at the same time.if we are going to let music take this path, then music is not going to evolve. we are going to kill it and we are going to become clockwork oranges who are programmed not to have a choice to dislike music.
isnt this very similar to the versificator in 1984 which generates hapless music in order to curb creativity among the masses?

favoritest u2 lines

2006-06-18T03:47:00.000-07:00

what are your favoritest u2 lines?

mine :

Summer stretching on the grass
Summer dresses pass
In the shade of a willow tree
Creeps a crawling over me
Over me and over you
Stuck together with God's glue
It's going to get stickier too

for n00b leechers

2006-06-18T02:31:00.000-07:00

this is a repeat post from my blog
i felt this piece belonged here :-)

instead of re-posting it here, i have built a search component. see the mp3 search on the right.

now you dont have to remember that search query or copy/paste it from my blog every time. just type your text there. ;-)

and you can just visit songfacts and search that long forgotten mp3 which just popped into your mind.

P.S. dont ask me stupid Qs as to why i dont buy my own music if i love it so much.

jobs and dylan

2006-06-17T23:31:00.000-07:00

what do steve jobs and bob dylan have in common ? i found these people quite similar though they were born more than a decade apart and followed totally differant careers.
what dylan did to music in his 20s, jobs did to computing at the same age. they both brought creativity into their professions and unleased a new wave of change that has affected music and computing that is today. they both had a midcareer slump. dylan in early 70's ( remember "nashville skyline", "self portrait" and "new morning" ?) and jobs when he left apple and apple computers had it slump in the early 90s. then both of them revived stunningly to reaffirm their relevance to their respective professions. think of "blood on the tracks", "infidels", "time out of mind", "ipod", "macbook pro", "imac","mac mini", "mac os x".
its not surprising that steve jobs, idolised bob dylan and its believed that jobs became the lover of joan baez in large measure because baez had been the lover of dylan.

fsirt psot

2006-06-17T22:45:00.000-07:00

this has been pending for long. we badly need a blog to discuss music. anything music. songfacts, trivia, covers requests,recommendations etc. etc. i am going to keep this blog open for people. if you want to become a co-author of this blog, just drop in a comment requesting so and i will add you to the list and you can make your own posts with your bits about music. we need not restrict the discussion to any genre of music. lets talk about ms subbulakshmi, rush, bjork and shakira in the same breath. lets play.