There was an article the other day about the majority of the most influential rock bands being mostly British: Beatles, Rolling Stones, The Who, Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple, Sex Pistols, Iron Maiden, Oasis and of course, U2 (actually Irish). The US has only Nirvana, Metallica, and to a lesser degree, Pearl Jam and Guns’n'Roses, to show off at that level. US has many more big bands collectively, but few stand out as much as the British ones.

In fact, if I was to pick the most important bands in the past decades of rock, it would look something like this:
60s: Beatles, Rolling Stones
70s: Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd
80s: U2, Iron Maiden
90s: Nirvana, Metallica

Now, here’s the interesting thing: I can’t find for the life of me a single band for the current 2000s decade that I personally find important and influential. Green Day, Coldplay, and The White Stripes are coming close, but no cake. Green Day are just alt.punk (heard it all before), Coldplay are more pop than rock, and The White Stripes sound just like a more modern version of the Led Zeppelin. But none of these bands actually offers a new, fresh, and innovative sound like any of the bands I mentioned above.

Some will say that the decade is not out yet, and so I haven’t felt their impact to new artists just yet. But I don’t believe that this is the case here. I really don’t see any grass root innovation in rock anymore. The last one was in the early ’90s. Since then, the UK hasn’t had any new big bands, and USA just plays the “maintenance game”. I feel that I have heard it all before.

Let me be clear that there are bands out there that ARE innovative, bands like the Cloud Cult. But I can’t outright call them influential, since only few people know their existence. Even MGMT, who do sound different and have a major contract, only have had moderate success in the grand scheme of things.

I would go as far and say that most of the 2000s is governed by that folk indie-rock sound, like the Iron & Wine, The Decemberists, Fleet Foxes. Problem with this is, by being mostly indie (both as a genre, and as a business model), they don’t reach a lot of people — especially not worldwide, like any of the bands of the previous decades have done. Most of Europe couldn’t care less about folk-sounding indie rock, for example. And yet, they were taken as with a storm by the Nirvana!

So, what’s wrong with rock? Why this decade hasn’t produced brand new sounds to inspire the generations to come? There are two schools of thought about this, from two different people that I will indirectly quote below:

1. Eric Earley, the singer/songwriter of Blitzen Trapper (a band that plays ’70s-sounding folk rock), said in an interview a few months ago (sorry, can’t find the link back) that everything that can be done with rock is pretty much already been done. For him, it doesn’t matter if something sounds modern or not, only thing it matters is if the song is good or not — no matter the sub-genre.

My take: If that’s true, then why people don’t buy old, traditional songs anymore? I know for one, I can’t stand them, and I even realize that some of them are actually good. And, is it enough for an artist to rehash something others did 30 years before him?

2. My husband, Jean-Baptiste, a software engineer, and someone who doesn’t believes in stumbling blocks. He is a problem-solver at Google — that’s his job. JBQ believes that there are always new possibilities, and new things to invent. For him, there will always be that open-minded musician that will surprise us all with a completely new sound, when we least expect it.

My take: if that’s true, why this decade had not had a single major Rock-God band? What if there is indeed a finite number of rock genres and melodies that can sound good to the human ear?

Finally, my opinion: As most of the times when I present controversial food for thought, I think the truth lies somewhere in between. I believe that you can only re-invent something so many times before it still feels old. At the same time though, music software gets more powerful and allows for more experimentation and research: this allows for previously independent genres of music to merge, blurring the limits of what is rock and what is not (e.g. MGMT’s electro sound). Adding to this the upcoming death of the entertainment industry at large, there will be fewer people choosing the profession (although this might prove a good thing, since too many cooks…).

The pessimist in me believes that “rock” (and music as something more important than just a random song playing on the background while eating dinner) had a golden era between 1960 and 2000. We are currently living towards the decline of the multi-billion industry and the highly innovative musical times. I know that for some people this is something that they can’t grasp since they grew up with this status quo, but I can tell you that priorities do change in society faster than you think. Music will never die, but our investment level in it can change dramatically on different times of the human history.

Look no further!

After spending over a month hunting for the best pieces of (legally free) music online, I have now compiled a top-100 with the best of the best promotional tracks for you! I sampled over 4,000 songs from official label sites, band sites, promotional & serious music magazines sites. I ended up downloading 500 songs, and below I present you my top-100 (in my own music taste, of course). To save you the trouble, 95% of the music below can be classified as “alternative”. I wish more bands would offer 1-2 free mp3s per album for promotional purposes, as the idea totally works (and an editorial on the subject).

Disclaimer: No songs are stored on this server, and no copyright infringement is intended. The sole purpose of this article is informational. I did my best possible to make sure that the songs linked are legal, stored on official sites or on music/promotional sites that have the required distribution rights. If you represent one of the labels or artists found below and would like me to stop linking to your songs for some reason, please contact me.

Now, back to the meat. Have a careful listen on my No 1 song. You will either “get it” and fall in love with it, or you will outright loathe it (since it’s pretty experimental). The rest of the songs are much more conventional, and definitely “catchy”. If you like some of the artists below, don’t forget to support them by buying their music. Anyways, happy listening!

1. Cloud Cult – The Tornado Lessons
2. Fleet Foxes – Mykonos
3. Cloud Cult – Everybody here is a Cloud
4. Blitzen Trapper – Gold for Bread
5. Band Of Horses – The Funeral
6. Jane Vain and the Dark Matter – C’mon Baby Say Bang Bang
7. Tokyo Police Club – Nature of the experiment
8. Loquat – Swingset Chain
9. Midlake – Roscoe
10. Wiretree – Big Coat
11. Matti Paalanen – Here comes the rain
12. Blitzen Trapper – Furr
13. MGMT – Time to pretend
14. Malbec – Pictures In Magazines
15. People in Planes – If You Talk Too Much
16. Seabird – Rescue
17. Peter Bjorn & John – Let’s Call it Off
18. The New Frontiers – Black Lungs
19. Sin Fang Bous – Catch The Light
20. The Coral Sea – More Than You Know
21. Rock Kills Kid – Paralyzed
22. Blitzen Trapper – Wild Mountain Nation
23. The Verve – Lucky Man
24. Great Northern – Houses
25. Longwave – No Direction
26. Ag Silver – Can’t You See
27. The Hives – Hate to Say I Told You So
28. Ratatat – Wildcat
29. Paper Route – Empty house
30. The Postal Service – Such Great Heights
31. The Strokes – Last Nite
32. Aberdeen City – God Is Going To Get Sick Of Me
33. Ag Silver – Now Or Never
34. Blitzen Trapper – Crushing the Wheat
35. Alibi Tom – Fire
36. Anberlin – A day late
37. Anna Ternheim – To Be Gone
38. Aqualung – Brighter Than Sunshine
39. Band Of Horses – No One’s Gonna Love You
40. Barcelona – It’s About Time
41. Beat & Path – Goodbye beautiful day
42. Malbec – Home
43. The Sounds – Painted By Numbers
44. Early Day Miners – All Harm
45. Blind Divine – Something Magical
46. Seabird – Let Me Go On
47. Bloc Party – Signs (Armand Van Helden Remix)
48. Bowerbirds – In Our Talons
49. Cage the Elephant – Tiny Little Robots
50. Calexico – History of lovers
51. Chad VanGaalen – City of Electric Light
52. Chance – Independent
53. Cloud Cult – When Water Comes to Life
54. Bat For Lashes – Horse and I
55. Blonde Redhead – 23
56. La Rocca – This Life
57. 13ghosts – Beyond Door
58. The Whip – Trash
59. Art In Manila – Set The Woods
60. Asobi Seksu – Thursday
61. Malbec – World Cup
62. The Coral Sea – In This Moment’s Time
63. El Goodo – Feel So Fine
64. Elk City – Los Cruzados
65. Faunts – Memories of places we’ve never been
66. Fleet Foxes – White Winter Hymnal
67. Living Things – Let It Rain
68. Longwave – There’s a Fire
69. The Starlight Mints – Inside of me
70. Orenda Fink – Bloodline
71. Panic at the disco – The Only Difference Between Martyrdom and Suicide
72. Malbec – Story Of A Broken Heart
73. Cold War Kids – Hang me up to dry
74. Morning State – Oh Yeah
75. My Robot Friend – Robot High School
76. Halomobilo – Shallow
77. Band Of Horses – Is There a Ghost
78. The Rosebuds – Get Up Get Out
79. Station Victoria – All In Your Head
80. The A-Sides – Diamonds
81. The Raveonettes – Dead sound
82. Ben Skoglund – I Won’t Tell
83. The Cloud Room – Hey now now
84. The Comas – Come my sunshine
85. We Are Wolves – Fight and Kiss
86. Woodhands – I Wasnt Made For Fighting
87. Peter Bjorn & John – Young Folks
88. The Rantings of EVA – Infrared
89. Danger Is My Middle Name – Heroes and Underdogs
90. David Vandervelde – Jacket
91. The Republic Tigers – Buildings & Mountains
92. The Rosebuds – Leaves do fall
93. Quiet Company – Seal My Fate
94. The Voyeurs – Things People Say
95. Portugal. The Man – People Say
96. Vanderveen – Weekend Full of Weekends
97. We Are Scientists – Inaction
98. The Submarines – You Me and the Bourgeoise
99. Deshead – I Meant To Remember
100. The Rosebuds – Life Like

The following “garbage” bug happens once every 20 alerts or so from AT&T after I hang up on a phone call (the bug could totally be AT&T’s of course, but I smell it’s the iPhone’s). It happens both with firmware 2.x and 3.x. I don’t remember it happening with firmware 1.x. English, French and Greek are enabled in the keyboard layouts — if that helps.

I just stumbled against a band called Art in Manila, for whom their label give away 2 free mp3 samples. I heard the songs, I liked what I heard, and went to iTunes to check the rest of their songs. I liked 4 more of their songs via the iTunes preview, which I purchased. Looking around for more info, I found that Orenda Fink is their singer. I checked her 2 free promotional mp3 songs, and I also liked what I heard. So I ended up purchasing one additional song from the singer’s solo album (”Blind Asylum”). Snooping a bit more, I am now looking at the O+S band, which is the singer’s latest project and they also have 2 free songs. If I like what I hear again, I will be buying once more tonight.

Moral of the story: 1-2 free mp3 samples (e.g. your 4rd or 5th best song) of your album should be given away for promotional reasons (and make absolutely sure you have tagged them correctly). However, this will only work if your songs are actually good. If you only have 1-2 good songs in the whole album, then you should get another job anyway.

Update: Bought a song from O+S too just now (”Lonely Ghosts”).

Swedish music video filmmaker and reader of this blog, Matti Nurmilehto, put my “butter smooth slow-motion” tutorial into action with his PAL 50i HV20 camera and Sony Vegas. Here’s the smooth slo-mo footage he got out of it after following the tutorial:

You should expect even smoother slo-mo from a 60i NTSC camera using my tutorial.

Stu “Prolost” Maschwitz posed the question of what filmmaking-related app would be nice for the iPhone. I replied that a cast & crew scheduling app, with push or wifi notifications, GPS locations of the crew, alarms, IM between the crew, and a backend DB somewhere, would have been great. If the app was to be developed & designed carefully, an iPhone can last at least 2-3 days on WiFi with the app constantly connected to check for messages (I was getting 3 days of registered VoIP on WiFi years ago already on my Nokia phones of the time).

And then it hit me: without background apps on the iPhone, this idea is busted. It just wouldn’t be a realistic solution.

Sure, we can talk all day about background apps needed because we want our Tweeter or IM notifications in real time, but in all honesty, that’s more play than work. The idea above instead, is a real work app, and can easily save a lot of money during the shooting of a feature film. To me, this example made me feel even more the need for bg apps, than any other example in the past given by the average net user.

IMO, Apple should get a clue, and make sure they offer bg apps by January. That’s all I have to say about this. Either their phone is a smartphone that’s it’s truly useful to people, or it’s a glorifying ‘feature phone’.

Then, of course, there’s the Android platform, which does allow background apps.

Geeks.com, the place for cheap mp3 players, sent over the SanDisk Sansa View 16 GB for a review, along an 8 GB microSDHC card for it. In the box, we also received its USB cable (proprietary connector is used) and some standard earphones.

It took about 2 hours to fully charge the player the first time. The UI loads within 10 seconds and greets you with a scrolling interface. The icons are: Music, Photos, Videos, and More (Radio, voice recording, device settings). When a song is playing, a new icon appears called “Now Playing” (it doesn’t show up otherwise). The UI is controlled by an iPod-like wheel that is actually rotatable rather than touch-sensitive. There’s also a “Home” button, a power on/off/HOLD slider on the side of the device, next to the microphone. The 3.5mm headphone jack is placed on the bottom of the player, next to the proprietary USB connector. The 2.4″ LCD screen is very readable and supports many colors, however the font used in it is pretty ugly.

The device sports 16 GB of internal flash, but it also has a microSD card slot. We tested the slot with an 8 GB card that Geeks supplied for the test.

The music menu has all the normal options one would expect, e.g. playlists, artists, songs, podcasts, audiobooks, genres, and a few more, like “recently added”, “my top rated”, and [voice/FM] “recordings”. When you click on a song, it will start playing, with the band name, album title, song title on the top, followed by the album art, and the progress bar. Clicking the bottom part of the wheel, it will bring a new menu up, that includes options like “Add to Library”, Rate music, repeat, shuffle, EQ, Go List and even “Delete song”. The device supports MP3 and WMA, but the latest firmware adds AAC support too (.m4a). Audio quality was very good.

The Photo menu has some nice slideshow options, while the video menu allows you to resume a video you had started watching earlier. It supports WMV and h.264 videos up to the QVGA resolution. The FM radio option allows you to set presets and even record radio stations, while the voice recording is also pretty straight forward too.

It all sounds good in first glance, and someone could go as far as to say that this might be the next best mp3 player after the iPod, if it wasn’t for the inconsistent UI. There are multiple ways to go “back” to a previous menu, that make the whole usability pretty confusing. On that, we should add that the device failed to read all of our AAC’s album art, and about 40% of our mp3 album art (all jpeg files embedded in the tags, ID3Tag v2.3). The Nokia cellphones also only read about 50% of my mp3’s album art, but if at least there was consistency in the failing of the two devices, I would have talked about a bug on my tagging, but both devices fail on different songs, so it seems that they are just buggy (iTunes and Mp3Tag can read all of them for example).

Also, the player is advertised as having gapless playback, but while the feature seems to have been worked on, it was certainly not as gapless as the iPod is. There was still a small sound heard when hoping between tracks.

The biggest problem however was the database corruption that I experienced twice within the last 3 weeks. The device would fail to recognize that it had GBs of songs in it, even when the “system info” utility correctly reported how much of the flash space was used. In order to fix the problem, you need to either delete or add a song via a PC, so you can force a re-generation of the DB (that takes up a few minutes when the device is full). Problem is, if you are high up in the mountains camping, and you don’t have a laptop with you, here goes your music for the time being.

The USB usability is a bit weird too (the UI for it doesn’t make it clear which mode is set on). More over, when I try to “eject” the device from Explorer, the device reproducibly crashes my Explorer (other devices don’t do that).

On the up side, the player can deliver over 25 hours of continuous playback, which is a feat. Overall, this is a good player if you just want to listen to some music and radio without having high expectations of a consistent interface and usability. It’s definitely better than most cheap mp3 players out there, but nowhere near the mighty iPod (or even the Zune).

When I learned that the new Canon SX200 IS digicam has not only exposure compensation in video mode, manual focus in steps, but also the very important exposure & focus locking, along manual white balance/color/sharpness/contrast/saturation/skinTone/R/G/B, it was a sure sale for me. So we went with my JBQ today at Costco and bought one for $330 (he got a toy too, he bought a 120GB iPod Classic to fit his 50 GBs of music).

The camera records in 1280×720 resolution, at 30.00 fps, at 24 mbps bitrate, with the h.264 (baseline level 4.1) codec & mono uncompressed audio, in the MOV container. Now, think that the best AVCHD camcorder out there, also records at a maximum of 24 mbps, but at the much more demanding 1920×1080 resolution. This means that 720p at 24 mbps is actually a very solid, very generous bitrate.

I set up a scene on my balcony and tested SX200 IS’ video capabilities against my Panasonic FX150, Kodak V1253, and my trusty Canon HV20. Please note that while I shot everything in auto, I turned down to the minimum the color/sharpness/contrast/saturation/SkinTone of the SX200 IS, because that’s the look I like the best (and it’s more color-grading friendly). Please take a good note: the DEFAULT video look of the camera is MUCH more punchy and sharp in every way, which it might be what some consumers want, but definitely not what a serious videographer wants (the damn thing doesn’t color grade otherwise).

The Panasonic has a larger sensor, it records 24 fps in MJPEG at 25 mbps. Unfortunately, this bitrate doesn’t seem to be enough for the less-optimized MJPEG codec, as the picture shows below. The very famous Panasonic LX3 produces the same looking video as the FX150 btw, the two digicams are more alike than different in their video behavior. The Panasonics have exposure compensation, but not locking, creating a very jumpy exposure effect, which kills the seriousness of the footage captured. On the upside, its MJPEG format is very smoothly editable under Sony Vegas, unlike the much slower format of the SX200 IS.

The Kodak V1253, records in 720/30p at 12 mbps MPEG4-SP (simple profile, the same kind of the mpeg4 format as… cellphones record as). The Kodak cameras are plagued with color problems mostly, and the fact that they have absolutely no controls (not even exposure compensation). Under Vegas, its format is near-uneditable, and makes the editor very crash-prone (it realistically requires proxy editing). What Kodak has for it instead, is cheaper prices, starting at $120 (I guess, you get what you pay for).

The Canon HV20, is an HDV camera, shooting 1440×1080i mpeg2 at 25 mbps. In order to properly compare it with these mostly-30p 720p cameras, I had to shoot in the shade with an ND4 filter, at 1/30th shutter speed. I always have Cinemode ON btw, in order to emulate the filmic look (which is why the screenshot is not very sharp and might surprise some of you). I used 720/60i project properties on Vegas (in other words, I trusted Vegas to do a proper resize of the footage), and I used “blend fields” as the de-interlacing algorithm as it provided the best-looking image compared to not de-interlacing at all, or using interpolation (I tried all three options, and analyzed their best(”full”) captured screenshots before I decided which one to include above). Compared to the SX200 IS, it has of course many more options and controls since it’s a real camcorder, but most importantly, it has a better lens that provides twice as much background blur.

As you can see, the HV20 (as expected, even with the less sharp Cinemode mode) and the SX200 IS kill the competition out of the water. Yes, I know of the newer Panasonics that use AVCHD-lite instead of MJPEG, but they still don’t have as much control or bitrate as this Canon camera! Sure, the SX200 IS doesn’t have shutter speed control and a 24p mode, but compared to ANY other consumer 720p digicam below $500, it has the MOST controls and the BEST image!

If they add shutter speed control and 24p option in a future model (even without IRIS/ISO control), that team at Canon should get a medal.

Verdict: get one yourself! Don’t bother with its competition (unless you prefer to buy an actual camcorder, or a DSLR).

Update: Read the comments below, there’s some more info.

“[Lost]It’s going to be one of the last huge television shows in terms of size of cast and scope of production… Given the fact that network television is changing, it may be one of the last great rides of this kind of big epic storytelling.”

This is what the resident director/producer of Lost, Jack Bender, said to journalists recently. Of course, I know all about TV going back to being episodic (and cheaper, as the whole entertainment industry is getting sized down), but this just sucks every time I read it anyway.

I just want my EPIC shows back! I want complexity!