Trent Reznor has just announced another set of free MP3s that have been released for free download.
They have been released ahead of the final NIN tour of the USA with support from Janes Addiction and StreetSweeper and the download includes 2 tracks from each artist.
You Can get the files in 320kbps MP3, FLAC, M4A and WAV formats from ninja2009.com.
Enjoy 
So much blood for such a tiny little hole, Problems do have solutions.
(Nine Inch Nails, The Downward Spiral)
I couldn’t think of a more fitting start to this post about the demise of Nine Inch Nails.
Trent Reznor, front man of NIN has announced that the entity (Its hard to call one man a band) will be no more at the end of this tour. NIN have been around for the past twenty years and in that time have influenced the sounds of many people.
Even the likes of Johnny Cash covered Hurt before his death. A song that is an eeire fit with the life Johnny had lived.
If you somehow managed to miss the music of NIN go visit the NIN site and download some. The follow can be got for free.
The final leg of the tour is in the USA and will have Janes Addiction appearing. A fitting end as they were the band that helped launch Trent into the lime light all those years ago.
NIN… the passing of an era.
Microsoft have just started a new music download service for mobile phones in the UK. Given the flood of music download sites available since the DRM walls fell you would assume this was your standard US $1/song MP3 download type of site but you would be wrong.
No, Microsoft have decided to use a brutal DRM that will lock the purchased songs to JUST ONE handset. Lose, break or just update your phone and you have to purchase all your songs again. Let me state that again in case you missed it…….Lose, break or just update your phone and you have to purchase all your songs again. No transfer of songs is allowed.
You must be wondering why anyone would use this service. With that level of DRM you would assume that cheap songs would be the bait to lure you in but you would be mistaken. Each song from this service will cost you $2 US.
Just as DRM became as good as dead in the music sphere we have Microsoft come along and try to revive it and charge more to cover the costs of DRM. I would have loved to have watched the meeting that thought this service was a good idea. You can just picture see someone saying the following.
“The DRM on Spore worked so well for EA games. Why is nobody using DRM on music anymore…. Hang on… I bet they would pay far more if we DRM locked music files instead of selling those DRM free MP3 things.”
Please help this service fail. DO NOT PURCHASE FROM IT!
I know that is a contradiction, how can something that is available for free make more money than something that is only available in a paid for format?
According to Amazon, this is exactly what happened. The Best selling album for 2008 on their MP3 site was Ghosts I-IV by Nine Inch Nails. An album released under the Creative Commons licence, hence free to share. The band even provides the seed for Ghosts I on The Pirate Bay site.
This raises the question, given that the album is effectively free why would anyone pay for it?
Trent Reznor, Mr NIN, is no fan of the record industry and after the famous Steal It speech split with his record company to go it alone. All releases since have been effectivly free yet people still pay because they know any money they pay goes directly to the band, not to line the pockets of fat cats in some faceless record company.
This just shows people are willing to support things they believe in or care about.
This latest blow to the record industry must have left many VERY scared. The ONLY thing record companies actually do is find new bands then publish their music. Both tasks that are now back in the hands of the artists. Will 2009 be the year we see the big 4 ask for a bail out or will Britney and the other plasic made up bands support them for another year?
I have always been a fan of the industrial and electronic music that employs industrial and harsh sounds in their sound scapes. I loved the release of Ghosts I-IV by Nine Inch Nails this year, a real departure for Trent Reznor to make a 4 disk instrumental album but a still pure NIN at heart.
If you like the more challenging to listen to forms of electronic music, such as NIN and Aphex Twin then A.n.K.h // are worth a listen to. I found them on Jamendo the other day and they have gone into my playlist for when I am coding at work. They have released three albums to date and their stuff ranges from the more ambient through to full on tracks.
I found Fresh Body Shop on Jamendo recently. A prolific group for an unsigned band with four albums under their belt already. I liked the tracks I streamed so grabbed all four of their albums and have had them on random at work. I write software for a living and work with a set of headphone on most of the time.
I have really enjoyed their stuff, the Rusty Demo Songs album I think is their best. Hard to pin down really but you can hear influence from as diverse artists as Beck, Radiohead, Clodplay and Nine Inch Nails. While the style varies they do have a sound that is their own.
Well worth the download and under the Creative Commons licence so it is free.
Well it has just taken the better part of 2 hours to get CD ripping configured to how I want. When I first installed Ubuntu and run up Juicer, The default ripping software, I could not get the MP3 selection to work so I uninstalled Juicer and made a note to look for different software.
Today after a bit of searching on CD Ripping I realised it is probably the best application and installed it again. That was the easy part, I then had a fight with the MP3 configuration string to get ID3 tags working and CDs ripping at a good bit rate. It turns out that when the configuration string is wrong Juicer will not let you select that encoding selection.
Here is the configuration I settled on in the end, a good example of what I mean by cryptic.
audio/x-raw-int,rate=44100,channels=2 ! lame name=enc preset=extreme ! xingmux ! id3v2mux
Here is the breakdown of what is going on
audio/x-raw-int,rate=44100,channels=2 gives the basic details about the file, 44100KHz sample in stereo.
lame name=enc preset=extreme tells Lame, the MP3 encoder, how to encode the file. I use the high quality variable bitrate preset.
xingmux is where things get fuzzy. No idea what this does but searching around it appears to set the correct vbr tags in the ID3 block of the files. People said use it so in it went.
id3v2mux is what puts the standard ID3 tags into the file, such as artist name etc.
Finding mistakes in lines like the above can be a real headache. In Windows I just used Media Player to rip and tag, where you simply selected bitrate in a slider. That said, I did have to buy a plugin to allow MP3 ripping instead of ripping to WMA.
Has this hair pulling episode put me off Linux, not yet. Now its up and running I can just forget about it. I had years of Windows trouble shooting under my belt to help in problem solving in that platform and here I am a noob again, I know it will get easier with more experience
Jamendo is place for bands to make their free music available for download. At time of posting they have just over 13000 albums of free music available in good quality MP3 format.
You can navigate the site via band name, album name or genre tags. When you drill into an area there are all the normal ordering modes you would expect such as most downloaded, most played etc. There is also a tag cloud to let you get a feel of how many albums are available under each tag.
You can preview songs while you navigate so you can listen before you download. I have grabbed a number of albums from the site so far and all have been well recorded and encoded.
