happylife

Hand sorting

As a part of my consisting cleaning up project, I set up a large CD shelf in my house and arranged all my CDs on it. It wasn't an easy job because the number of my CDs comes up to more than one thousand. It's quite a doddle for computers to sort one thousand of data and whatever sorting algorithm works, but for me as a human, it took whole day and it was a very important problem how to sort them. My first process was to group all my CDs by its size. As you know, there are two size of CD; 12 cm and 8 cm. It took more than one hour to make two piles of CDs. The second process was to divide each pile into five classes: classical, jazz, pop & rock, Japanese pop & rock and others. It was a two hour job, but the  process was the hardest. I had to sort each class of CDs by its artist's name and title. It took more than five hours and I was very tired when I finished all the work. However, I am satisfied with the result. I can now pick up any CD I want in a second. All I have to do next is to store all of my favorite CDs into iTunes library and sell out the disused ones to the second hand CD shop. I think it's not the age of storing CDs on the shelf.

To unlock the iTune's DRM

More and more people including me seem to change the way to enjoy music. It has become more popular to download music instead of purchasing CDs. Actually I have not bought any music CDs for more than two years. The more people shift to this style, the less sales of CDs cannot be avoided.  I don't know whether it is good or bad, but I can say it is the trend. The combination of iTunes, iPod and its music store is the most successful service around music in the past several years. I was surprised to find that I have purchased more than 200 songs from the music store. One problem of this service is that the songs are all copy-protected and we can't copy them without limitations. I don't intend to make illegal copies but this limitation had been an unpleasant and stressful thing for me until I unlocked them yesterday. If you have some song files with DRM(Digital Rights Management) and you are feeling unpleasant, QTFairUse6 will let you happier. All I had to do was executing the unlocking program on the PC with iTunes and waiting for thirty or more minutes before all the protected files were converted into unlocked files.

Pandora closed

As I mentioned before in this blog, I was a fan of Pandora, the greatest music radio service on the Internet. As soon as I came back to Japan, I was shocked to know that the service was closed except for in the U.S. due to a license reason. Although Tim Westergren, the funder of Pandora says that he has an ultimate goal of being able to offer the service everywhere, it must be a hard way especially in Japan. We are living in the transient period from the old analog records to the new digital data distributions. The copyright law in most countries are behind the new technologies and and we sometimes encounter such unreasonable situations. I think that the transient cannot be stopped by anyone and sooner or later the happy world is to be realized where all the people can enjoy any music they like for free or almost free. I hope the old world people who are clinging to their established interest give up and the happy world for consumers or listeners comes as soon as possible.

The weight of music

When I was in a junior high-school, I touched my friend's Walkman for the first time. I clearly remember the feel of my shock at that time now. It was almost a magic that I could enjoy dynamic stereo sound just by wearing small headphones. Technology has improved more greatly since then  and we can now hold hundreds or thousands of music in a tiny device such as iPod which is even smaller than the traditional audio cassette tape. Literally, we can enjoy whatever music we like whenever and wherever we like. It's really great and convenient, but I can't help considering about our attitude to music. As for me, I am always doing something when I listen to music. All the music is flowing on the background and I rarely listen to a music in order only to listen to it. Plus, if the music I am listening to does not fit to my feel at that time, I skip it without hesitating. It would have been a bad attitude in the age of analog record players. I think the weight or preciousness of  music has become lighter as the music player has done.

To search by lyrics

Thanks to music related services on the Internet, we can listen to music with its information such as its title, player and so on. However, what are you doing when you came across favorite but unknown music on the radio or in a cafe and you wanted to enjoy it again? My tips is using Google; just google the phrase you remember in the music with a keyword "lyrics." For example, when I came across a song which I liked but didn't know what it was in a cafe the other day, I googled "let the rain fall" with "lyrics" and I got to know the song information as "Come Clean" by Hilary Duff. Of course, I downloaded the song from iTunes Music Store and I can enjoy it with my iPod whenever I like. The great point of this tips is that we can get not only the song title but also the complete lyrics. How convenient!

Failed to start

An electronic piano with full sized keyboard has been lying at the corner of my room for almost one and a half year. I brought it from Japan with not a small cost, but it is now covered with dust. What a waste! I wanted to play the piano when I brought it in for sure, but for some reasons I couldn't start practicing it. Every time I play the piano I need to connect it to the TV speaker by plugging out the DVD line because it has no built in speaker and I have no special speaker for it. It's a bit of drag for me but I know it is just an excuse. I was busy for some time, but I must say I am not busier than average people working in Japan or even in Canada. The idea such as "I can do it whenever I want to do it" often results in the situation of "I didn't do it because I could do it at any time."

Ukulele code

I sometimes play the ukulele when I'm thinking about something in my room. I often feel relax with this simple, light and easy instrument. It has four nylon strings tuned to GCEA. It is characteristic that the first G is usually raised one octave. Some people drop the first G one octave, which is called "Low-G tune," to spread the lower range, however, I prefer the normal tuning because it sounds more ukulelish. As I have been playing for years, I can play several songs, but I feel a little bit bored with the same songs. I'm now reading a ukulele code book because I hope to play whatever music I like with a melody and codes. The code theory looks interesting just like a puzzle. If I could fully understand the code theory and remember some finger patterns, I might be able to play ad-lib. If you think ukulele is a kind of toy instrument, I strongly recommend to see this video. You must change your opinion to this instrument.

iTunes DRM

As you know, iTMS(iTunes Music Store) is the most successful and the only successful music download service operated by Apple computer. We can now get almost any songs whenever we like through the Internet. Most of the songs are priced at less than $1.00 per one song which I think reasonable. Once we downloaded song data, we can play it on our PC, iPod, or CD. We can copy the song data into iPod or CD-ROM as many times as we like, however, the copyable count from the PC to another PC is limited up to 5 times. It was the only problem for me because I worried what happen if I change or update my PC more than 5 times. My main note PC is now affected by a so called "spyware" and I'm thinking about reinstall it, but if I reinstall it, do I have to consume the iTunes counter? If so and if I do such re-installation 5 more times, can't I enjoy all the music data any more? It was my fear which I found was utterly groundless when I looked into the structure of iTunes DRM(Digital Rights Management). It was better designed than I had expected, that is, when we copy the music data from the old PC to the new PC, we can "de-authorize" the old PC to rewind the counter and if we broke or lost the old PC before the de-authorization we can de-authorize all the PC and re-authorize another PC up to 5 times. Therefore, we can own the music data forever. What a reasonable and well designed system!