daverea.com

Yesterday’s weather wasn’t exactly peachy – temps in the low 60s with a mix of drizzle, thunderstorms and the occasional sunny break. If I’d been feeling a bit more hardcore, I probably would have ventured outside for my lunchtime run … but with a scratchy throat and a 1PM meeting looming, the other sparkies and I opted for an inside day. We hit the ellipticals and treadmills at the workout room, and watched the other lunchtime runners come and go.

Aside from the obvious provision of shelter and climate-control, the only real benefit to working out indoors is that we get to rock some tunes on the little mini-boom-box one of the freeze engineers donated. Yesterday, it happened to be tuned to 107.7 “The Lake”, a station out of Buffalo that – evidently by virtue of the crappy weather and resultant tropospheric ducting – was coming in surprisingly well.

As my 30 minutes on the elliptical drew to a close, a catchy song came on. I struggled to catch the words over the din of whirring exercise equipment, and only caught one snippet of the chorus: I don’t think that what you’re lookin’ for, can be found, in the places that you’re lookin’ for to… And I lost the signal. It sounded like some variation on the Goo Goo Dolls – but no one could place it. I managed to hold onto the tune through showering up and heading upstairs, and I jotted it down for later investigation.

This morning, a quick Google search showed me just whose music graced us during yesterday’s workout. As it turns out, the song was called “Dream Out Loud”, and it was written and performed by The Highway Beautiful. The duo looks to be Buffalo-based purveyors of “intelligent pop”, anchored by Jason Jurewicz’s acoustic guitar a vocals and augmented by drums and electronic accompaniment.

With iPod earbuds dutifully connected to my laptop, I’ve tiptoed my way through about half of their debut album, The Things that Lights Can Hide. I bought it for $12.95 over at CD Baby (another phenomenal online music store that doesn’t shackle their customers with DRM) and I have to say – it’s really phenomenal! The lyrics are smart (surely owing to the duo’s self-termed “intelligent pop” genre) and clean, the guitar work squarely appeals to the acoustic-lover in me (who still pines for John Mayer’s solo days) and the production quality is surprisingly pro-grade.

Why do I say surprisingly? Because The Highway Beautiful actually self-produced this first full-length album, and they did a really awesome job of it. Their website doesn’t provide too many details on where or when they recorded it, but whomever was at the controls did a damn nice job. The quality of the recording – and of the MP3 files downloaded from CDBaby – are both worth every penny of the purchase price. If you’re cheap, you can pick up the album for $8.99 at TradeBit, or you can grab it for $4.99 at Textango. But my guess is your money is best spent by buying at CD Baby, since 91% of the selling price goes directly to the band. Considering they’re currently touring in a 1998 Ford Windstar minivan, I imagine every little bit helps!

So, for this inaugural edition of Saturday Morning Tuneage – which I hope (but do not expect) will become a weekly feature here at daverea.com – The Things that Lights Can Hide by The Highway Beautiful gets a big thumbs-up. Maybe I’ll come up with a more novel rating system eventually, but for now let’s make it clear and simple: go buy this album!

Remember a few months ago, I mentioned that Amazon was planning to roll out a new music store featuring songs free of rights-restricting DRM technology? Of course you don’t, but that’s OK: it’s why we have links.

As of yesterday, Amazon has officially completed said rollout. I cordially refer you to: AmazonMP3 – a music store that {surprise!} respects your rights as a customer. Music you buy is music you own, and you can do whatever you want with it. Amazon even goes so far as to proudly proclaim the DRM-freeness of their music: “Play-anywhere, DRM-free music downloads.”

We’ve been asking for it, pleading for it, begging for it, out-and-out demanding it, and now they’ve brought it. Now it’s time for those of us who’ve been so loudly extolling the virtues of freedom to put our money where our mouth is. It’s time to go and buy music from Amazon, beceause they’ve got it right.

For my first purchase, I picked up Freedom by Paul McCartney. What I got was a phenomenal-sounding, 289kbps MP3 file that’s music to my ears – I bought it, I paid for it, and I can play it anywhere I choose. I can give it to Kelly as a gift, I can burn it to a CD (as many times as I choose) to play in my car, I can resample it or resize it, I can play it under whatever operating system or on whatever portable device I choose – and that’s the kind of freedom we all deserve for our hard-earned money.

Now go buy music! And post what you bought in the comments, too!

Thumbing their noses at Apple’s misguided attempt to thwart non-iTunes management of the latest iPod offerings, a group of talented coders has successfully reverse-engineered the SHA1 hash that Apple quietly slipped into the database upon which iPods depend:

ipodminusitunes: We’ve Won!

After free software coders around the world have succeeded in circumventing each and every one of Apple’s freedom-restricting efforts, you’d think the company would get the message. We paid for our iPods. We paid for our music. We will use them however we want, and we don’t appreciate it when you try to tell us otherwise.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go use gtkpod to put some new music on my iPod Mini.

Thinking about buying a new iPod? I was. After Apple announced the new 6th generation of iPod digital music players a few weeks ago, I more or less made the decision to buy one if my trusty iPod Mini (a much-beloved gift from Kelly, complete with engraved appeal to my sentimental side) ever goes quietly into that good night.

But after reading this news about the latest crop of iPods, I’m not feeling any love for Apple. In fact, I’m feeling a pretty substantial burning sensation on the left side of my back, just below the shoulderblade – right where Apple plunged a dagger into the backs of thousands of iPod users like me.

See, I’m not a big fan of iTunes. I’ve purchased music there, but for the most part I like good old-fashioned CDs. I’ve got a great system set up for pulling their contents onto my computer, and subsequently onto my iPod. That system doesn’t involve iTunes – rather, it relies on code crafted by a community of brilliant programmers who designed software that gives me the freedom to manage my iPod – and my music collection – the way I want to. They then give that software (including the source code) away for free.

With their latest iPods, the folks at Apple have included a nice bit of encryption in the database file that runs the iPod. That means, at least for the time being, that all the software that I – and thousands of others like me – use to move content onto and off of our iPods won’t work. Since the independent programmers don’t have the encryption keys, they can’t update the database to reflect new song additions and deletions.

I can’t, for the life of me, think of any reason Apple would want to do something like this apart from a devilous desire – no, try thirst – for control. They want to control the way you and I use a music player that we’ve bought and paid for. They want to restrict our options to the one that they provide, and ultimately stand to profit from. While it’s an understandable decision from a business point of view, it turns the stomach of the freedom-loving American Geek in me.

Perhaps an analogy is apropos here…

When I buy a mountain bike – a device austensibly intended for my entertainment and fitness – I want to be able to use it any way I please. If I don’t like the stock drivetrain, or the tires selected by the manufacturer, or the way the brakes feel … I can change them. If I were sufficiently motivated and talented, I could CNC mill new brake cantilevers from raw aircraft aluminum – and this is precisely what hundreds of dedicated coders around the world have done for the iPod – another device that exists for my entertainment and (when I wear it while running) fitness. If the manufacturer of my shiny new mountain bike followed Apple’s twisted logic, the wheels would seize up and refuse to turn if I so much as installed a new seat or handlebar grips.

This is a source of great confusion for me: we have always been a nation of people who very much dislike having our hands forced. As consumers, we demand choice – and we’re willing to buy, boycott, pickett and sue our way to having that choice, even if it’s something as mundane as choosing a veggie burger at McDonald’s. In the same way, there’s a whole generation of mechanics who loudly lament the digitization of the automobile, longing for the days when problems could be solved by tweaking distributor caps and timing chains, rather than engine computers and sensor calibrations. Which leads me to the dichotomous conclusion: either people don’t know, or people don’t care.

Given our cultural propensity toward freedom, I can’t imagine it’s the later. And so millions upon millions of songs have been downloaded from iTunes, and countless iPods are being listened to around the world as I type this entry. Maybe all that music is drowning out the growing sound of freedom being siphoned from our computers, from our music collections, from our wallets and from our digital lives.

Don’t believe me? If you’re the proud owner of a 6th generation iPod, and iTunes starts crashing your PC, just try using one of the many alternatives out there! You’ll find your iPod locked-down, displaying “0 Songs” until you get iTunes working again. Guess you better hope Apple has good support folks ready on the other end of that toll call you’re about to make!

Or if you happen to drop your iPod in a puddle the next time you’re out for a run, and you decide to replace it with another brand of player instead, just try to bring your iTunes music library along for the switch. You’ll find that Apple’s DRM promptly locks down your files, rendering all that music you’ve paid real money for completely useless. Now, you’re stuck burning those songs to countless CDs and re-ripping them, accepting the drop in clarity that will inevitably result as the music is decoded and re-encoded with lossy compression – if you’re savvy enough to do so.

Will we wake up soon? I hope so. In the mean time, many of those brilliant coders will surely be working diligently toward an open solution to Apple’s encrypted iPod database format. My hat goes gratefully and respectfully off to each and every one of them.

…enough said.