This month in digital music libraries - April 2022
April 28, 2022 in digital music by Dan Gravell
In this month’s issue, musical hardware modding, metadata edge cases and a bunch of ‘TIL’s.
Hardware modding
Hardware modding (creating new systems using flexible automation hardware and software) is all the rage, and in a world of blogs and social media it’s easy to publicise your project.
There’s been an increasing stream of activity in the iPod modding community. What’s interesting about this, I think, is not the device specifically, nor the mods, but the fact that some are striving for specific hardware for music playback. It’s a theme we’ve seen elsewhere.
More on the growing #iPod modding movement https://t.co/61nSUjtJGh #pimpmyipod pic.twitter.com/pMfE2NH7JK
— bliss (@bliss_music) March 27, 2022
I also noticed the Microsoft Zune community are alive, well and very healthy!
Meanwhile, how about a smart speaker that just works inside your house, and reacts to physical gestures rather than voice…
Controlling Squeezboxes with a Mi Magic Cube and @home_assistant https://t.co/js2Mtfseuw #selfhosting pic.twitter.com/FgwVnhAQDq
— bliss (@bliss_music) March 31, 2022
Streaming inevitably leads to lower quality content
A bit click-baity, but in any given market then if one metric is incentivised (“listens”) it’s inevitable that metric will be gamed for profit.
Interesting thoughts from Michelangelo from @volumio : "if the success and profitability of music are determined by how many “listens” it can generate, we might have in the long run a lot of “mediocrity” and less “niche content” https://t.co/wkqC7XVRI4
— Astiga (@astigamusic) April 21, 2022
Musical metadata anomolies
Anyone that’s worked with music metadata knows these!
I've been tripped up by pretty much all of these... https://t.co/BOUvIQ24dy thanks @dustriorg
— bliss (@bliss_music) April 4, 2022
Today I learned…
Two interesting ‘TIL’s this month.
TIL downloads from @AppleMusic contain 0.5MB empty space to make it faster to fill in extra metadata https://t.co/WyoBnC7svZ . Thanks @DaAleksandersen pic.twitter.com/iBohcZKaeU
— bliss (@bliss_music) April 11, 2022
Good job “storage is cheap” right?
At least the above is rectifiable. Meanwhile…
TIL @UMG apply an audible "watermark" to recordings they digitally distribute (including to streaming services) which identifies the service the file was delivered to. https://t.co/wBTiAedDGW . Thanks @matthewmontag
— bliss (@bliss_music) April 20, 2022
And on a completely separate subject, Wikipedia has a specific page for “Honorific artist titles in music”. It turns out the Internet is beautiful.
Everyone knows who the "Queen of Soul" was, but it turns out honorific artist titles go much, much further. https://t.co/BCJSUGFErF
— bliss (@bliss_music) April 22, 2022
Photo by Bruno Bučar on Unsplash
