Here’s a video boy of Soulja Boy Tell’em from Jimmy Fallon. As far as awful goes, this is hard to beat. I’m no fan of Kanye, but I can’t think of any sound he could make that I wouldn’t rather hear compared to this. And, I spent 10 minutes trying. Balancing his check book, better. Telling a story about losing socks in the dryer, better. Reading the dictionary line for line, better…

My one question is, what’s the magic trick that allows someone with this little talent to be famous?

It appears that if you purchase applications using the app store from an iPhone, those applications can not be re-downloaded using iTunes on a computer later. However, they will sync back to iTunes using the “Transfer purchases from [phone name]” option under the file menu. That at least reduces my need to re-download, however I hope that option is available after having transfered the apps to iTunes.

That’s a long way of saying “Sync purchases back to a computer frequently, just in case.”

Oh yeah, I recommended listening to Apple’s back up reminders in iTunes also. I nearly lost hundred of purchased songs in the G5 debacle. My backup drive had quite inconveniently become corrupted about a week before the incident… Luckily, I managed to recover the filesystem some time later.

… while I’m nagging about safety, and my own stupid mistakes, don’t take your backup drive out to bars for audio recording… even if you are short for time and desperate for storage.

I’ve loaded up the player section of the site with a small selection of the music I’ve been involved with this year. Here’s a brief summary.

weekend2 ) This is a track from my most recent writing binge. It seems like I must have been in a Kraftwerk sort of mood. It’s a fairly simple track, but I like some of the sounds, and the production is more along the lines of what I’ve been wanting to achieve.

can not remember ) That means exactly what it says. I don’t remember exactly when or why I wrote this, or what I was thinking at the time. I ran across this while digging through iTunes for material. However, I really like how I decided to mix this at the time. It also features some alright piano parts, and a nice dramatic middle section. And finally, for once, I didn’t completely slaughter the track while trying to find my way out of the good parts.

The Feed @ The Lot ) This is from a live performance by a band named The Feed recorded at The Lot festival held here in town back in August. The subject matter is a little touchy, abuse of women, but the song is good. The Feed is normally a three piece featuring keys, bass, and drums. However, in this instance they were joined by the Funky Butt Brass band, also local, which adds to the song nicely.

So Many Dynamos @ The Lot ) This is another recording from The Lot festival. However this time the band is another local band, So Many Dynamos. I hadn’t seen these guys before. They play a style that blends standard pop, probably some Joy Division/New Order, and there also seems to be a good dose of Industrial or Electronica in there also. In short, poppy songs with an odd infusion of somewhat challenging synth parts and percussion. I know that probably doesn’t have you rushing to play it, but I’m almost positive you’ve wasted 5 minutes doing less worthwhile things in the past. I promise, it is interesting music.

Rum Drum Ramblers ) This is the audio portion of the second song we recorded with the Rum Drum Ramblers at the City Museum for lofisessions.com. The Ramblers are nice hard working guys. They play a fun old time sort of music that I can’t help but think is somehow inspired by the musical history of the city. It’s the type of song that you would never think to look for, that turns out to just be good. The kazoo, whistling, and stand up bass are spot on. You can’t help but enjoy this song.

Sunyatta Marshall ) This is another excerpt from the work I did on lofisessions. This time the artist is Sunyatta Marshall. Typically Sunyatta fronts the band The Helium Tapes, however we just got her and the keyboard player Brandon for this session, then only Sunyatta for this song. If our local entertainment paper, The Riverfront Times, gave out an award for “Best Pop Song Recorded While Walking”, I hope this would at least be considered. Sunyatta has a great voice, and writes interesting lyrics. Both skills are demonstrated nicely on this song.

I may add some more tracks if I can dig them up. Most of that stuff, while recovered, is still a very disorganized mess after the infamous death of my G5 PowerMac earlier this year.

The old site was lost when I accidentally let my hosting account lapse. I’d been meaning to redesign for a while anyways. So, I’ve been working for the last few days and have come up with what you see before you.

The audio player section on the right should work in most browsers. It’s been tested in Safari, IE 7 on XP and Vista, Mac OS Firefox, and iPhone. Currently, Firefox is having problems. It’s an attempt at making a “universal” player that works without flash or plugins. It’s just some javascript and an embed tag. The embed tag is rebuilt when a song is selected. Song info is loaded from an xml file hosted here on the site. The icon to the right of each track can be used to download tracks if all else fails.

There are still plenty of things to fix. Consider yourself warned if you go digging into the comment forms, etc.

EDIT: the player is now working in all the major browsers. It turns out rebuilding the element containing an <object> element ( a <div> in this case ), thus creating a new element completely unrelated to the previous, works better than my first attempt, which set the outerHTML attribute on an <embed> element.

EDIT: the comment display and input form are now useable also. I think I’m pretty much done now.