Swapping the battery on an iAudio X5

The iAudio X5 running a Rockbox build has been my default music player practically forever. Even after a forgetful incident while deplaning a Lufthansa flight caused me to lose my first purchase of the X5L, my replacement was a 60 gig X5. It is bulky, clunky and rather plain but has everything else I needed in my player. Great hardware, FM radio, Aluminium chassis (survived two falls), good battery-life, wonderful sound and finally hackable hardware.

When it's battery finally started to give way, the portable player became a PMP at home, and when the input voltage fell to 1.8v it was time to change the battery. Thanks to this thread, I had enough of a peek into the internals of the player and the name of a replacement battery. RadioShack has the Dantona 3.7V/1100mAh Li-ion PDA Battery for Cowon/iAudio (Model: PDA-203LI | Catalog #: 55027810) available online for $25. If you find a local store that does "Ship to Store" you could get it delivered for free. This replacement has slightly lower capacity than the original, but there hasn't been much success in finding a battery with higher capacity that fits.

Replacing the battery is not that difficult. My only hesitation in starting with it was that I did not have a solder iron. And I was not going to buy an iron plus lead for what could be just two joins. I figured I could do a quick and dirty splice instead. The detailed steps are given below, with the numbers in the text referring to the numbers on the image.

You need a couple of small screwdrivers [1], one with a flat and the other with a Phillips head. I used a set that came as part of a spectacles repair kit. You also need to get the batteries [2] before you begin.

To get the back of the player [3] off, using the Phillips driver to unscrew the four screws holding it on. The first thing you will see is the hard-disk [4] and a tape holding it down along the top. There are also a couple of wires running down the sides as well. Carefully separate the wires, undo the tape and flick the top of the hard-disk to get it off. The hard-disk is connected to the body via a cable, which you should try your best to never damage.

Some versions, have a rubber cushion [5] between the hard-disk and the battery, use your flat screwdriver to gently ease it out. This will expose the battery [6] allowing you to pull it out and show the two wires connecting it to the circuit board.

Because I was not going to solder the battery on, the other approach was to cut the existing battery, stripping away the insulation for both the existing wires and the new battery and splicing them together. Which was when I realized I did not even have a decent insulation tape, so regular tape had to do instead.

Couple of tips. The wires are multi-strand. This is both good and back. Good, because it makes splicing that much easier. Bad because any weakness you introduce while stripping the insulation may cause the strands to break and short the board itself. Make sure you blow the board clean before re-assembly.

That is it. Repeat the steps in reverse to put everything together. In my case this left me with a player that is once again portable. And it still as great a media player.

Eigenharp

One month, four (or six) seasons, 75 episodes later, Battlestar Galactica is finally all done. Today we watched the final three episodes, Daybreak parts 1, 2 and 3. And true to its nature the ending was no disappointment. BSG stands up there with the best science fiction series of all time.

In honor of the completion of the series, here is a farewell to the haunting Cylon theme played on a geeky instrument called the eigenharp.

Finetune Pandora on Wii

Meant to put this on the blog for some time. If you have a Wii at home and want to use it to connect to Pandora, you are mostly out of luck. While Pandora has ostensibly embarked upon the path to make Pandora accessible from anywhere, Wii has yet to feel the love.

But there is a way out - enter Finetune. Finetune's Wii interface, allows the bundled Opera browser to display a stripped down version of the Finetune interface and play both standard & custom playlists.

10 Metals in 3 Minutes

Oh this is fun! Raz Ben Ari has a bunch of innovative pieces of rock and metal on his Youtube Channel. This one goes through 10 different Metal Genres in 3 minutes. And it flows pretty well - all the way from Glam Rock through Death to Metalcore.

Creative accounting killing creativity

This post is about the broken business models for the music and film industries, and another argument for fundamental reform in the entertainment business. Based on two articles in Techdirt - one dealing with the accounting for Movies (Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, to be precise) and the other dealing with profit sharing in Music.

Firstly the movies. All movies are set up as a separate company. This company takes all of the film's costs, while giving up 35% of everything the movie makes as fee to the parent studio. So while the studio starts to make a fee off every cent the movie brings in, the movie itself continues to run at a loss unless it is super hit like, say, Avatar. As Planet Money found out, the movie Gone in 60 seconds, that everyone in the world has seen - is losing $212 million. After the break is the leaked income statement for the Harry Potter movie that originally prompted this post.

The music industry follows a similar model. Here instead of the separate movie company, the impacted party is the artist themselves. All costs borne by the artist while 63% of everything the album makes goes to the Record Label before it is offset against the costs. Apparently Courtney Love did a great job breaking down the accounting almost 10 years ago.

There you go - no wonder the MPAA and RIAA can find numerous examples of loss-making movies and albums. It is because they are designed to lose money in the first place.

Know your classic rock

Listen to the guitar riff and identify the album the song appears on!

Enter Swingman

Who here likes Enter Sandman?
Me, me, oh me!
Who here thinks swing is foot-tappilicious?
Uhm, me?
Who here thinks Enter Sandman should swing?
???

Enter Sandman- the Swing Version by plamere

Someone over Music Machinery, decided to post a few songs, that had been through a piece of Python code, that produced a swing version of the song by - taking each beat and time-stretching the first half of each beat while time-shrinking the second half. A couple more songs below, but more available here.

Every Breath You Take (swing version) by TeeJay

Sweet Child O' Mine (Swing Version) by plamere

Crowd sourced chill

Chillout is a song by zefrank, that has a fun story of crowd sourcing associated with it. Not to mention a catchy stick-in-your-head kind of tune.

iMusic

The ability to share and enjoy music is inherent the music itself. No matter what the MPAAs and RIAAs of this world want us to believe, music is not just another merchandise. It is not like a scoop of ice-cream that you enjoy more if you have the whole thing yourself. Music is meant to be exchanged, loved, discussed and sometimes cherished.

Notwithstanding the lawsuits, the advertisements, and admonishments - music will be shared. It is not music piracy - that is something that has been shoved down our throats by the powers that be. Sharing music is natural, that is what humans do - we do not sit in our cubicles listening to music and slamming on the pause button everytime somebody comes within earshot. And humans are not thieves either. We do not live to cheat someone of their ability to earn a living. Each and every one of us understands that we need to earn a living and therefore we are willing to share a bit of what we have in order to allow someone else to live.

The mechanism that can work therefore has two primary requirements

• The same mechanism should be used for buying and sharing music.
  
• Music should be cheap, damn cheap - not 99 cents, but 5 cents a song.
  

Let's call this portal iMusic. Now iMusic is a p2p portal. It is probably built using the Gnutella protocol and also allow bit torrent to exchange files. Now, the network has two kinds of users - customers and authorized resellers. Authorized resellers are authorized outside the system, probably by the music agency themselves, and are allowed to "sell" music. Also underlying the the entire portal is a paying mechanism geared for small denomination high volume transactions - something like paypal. And unlike eBay that has a one way redirection, PayPay here talks back to iMusic too.

Now every user on iMusic has a "buy ratio". This is like the credit rating on iMusic. This is the ratio of the number of songs you bought to the number of songs you downloaded for free. The smaller this number is, you are a freeloader, while a 100 means you only buy music and dont download anything for free at all.

Your account 'knows' all songs that you bought/traded. Others only know your "buy ratio". You decide the buy ratio levels you want to trade with. This is something like the upload/download ratios that are currently in use on the varius p2p sites. However this tracks based on actual transactions - either a successful copy or a buy. The smaller this ratio is for you, the more difficult it is for you to find users who will want to trade with you for free. Ofcourse your Search will show you all the possibilities, making your trading process all the more tempting but difficult to complete.

Whenever you like a song, or know you will like a song and dont want to bother with Searching and downloading, you connect to one of the authorized resellers and buy a song from them. Of course, authorized resellers could be a lot more creative and sell you "plans" with them. A user can sign up with one or more "plans" or just go to any authorized reseller to buy a song. Of course why would you do that, because the more loyal you are, your reseller could positively impact your buy ratio by registering more "buys" on your behalf. Frequent flyer miles anyone?

The iMusic marketplace will thrive on the existence of opposing forces to prevent large scale piracy. Users want as high "buy ratios" as possible so that when they want to check out new songs, they do not have to go through too many "You do not have enough credit to access the song shared by this user!" messages. At the same time, a user's own threshold limit will determine his standing with other users.

iMusic will also spawn a reseller program and associated competition to drive down prices. The reseller program will be handled by a central "reseller clearing house" that in a way owns the entire iMusic mechanism. All artists are affiliated to this iMusic mechanism. Each successful sale entails a small payment from the iMusic clearing house to the artist and subsequent recovery from the resellers. Ofcourse the market between the artists themselves on the iMusic clearing house will result. If an artist prices a song too high, people will still listen to it, but will use their credit from other "buys" to download the song for free. And of course, too low means that unless the song is a phenominal hit with a high buy percentage, not enough money will be recovered.

Songs and their associated advertisement: Each copy of a song on the network is either introduced by the artist, or by users as rogue copies. Rogue copies will be abundant at first, but they will stand out in all seaches as "unknown source". All authenticated copies keep track of the number of times they were bought to the number of times they were traded, giving them a buy ratio as well. The buy ratio along with the trade count gives an indication of the top of the charts as well.

Of course, there will also be associated sites and ratings and chat sections and forums for discussion of the latest in everyone's own queer music tastes. There will be the inevitable "Save this band" promos, so on and so forth.

On the whole iMusic will be a full blown market place, allowing a direct interaction between the artist and the users with a secure, simple and small payment mechanism. It will allow sale and trade - and most importantly treat customers like customers are not thieves.

Bet you've heard this before!
-- ravi

Freedom to Share

The thing about thought process for me, is that it does not go forward unless there is a IO port attached to it. In other words, if I ever had to think a thread through, I need to either be talking or typing or wriggling toes in the language of the three toed sloth.

So, as it happenned, I knew deep down that I felt quite strongly about music, piracy, sharing etc. However, never got to put down ideas, and never realised how much it affected me.

So, we were walking down home after a particularly indifferent movie, and this topic came up. So the thought process ran. When you are faced with having to justify yourself to a particularly sharp and acid person, your brain wakes up cells that were never used to be awake, cleans up cobwebs and cranks up the storage devices. And the results are particularly consistent. Till, you plan on putting things on paper when you start to choke, under self doubt.

But, this is my blog, so what the hell.

Lets start with a question. When HBO tells you, "Say no to piracy" and be HIP and what not - what exactly are they telling you. Are they telling you to stop buying stuff you think is pirated off the vendor on the corner, or are they telling you to stop downloading stuff from the internet, or are they asking you not to watch a movie with your friend. HBO in its clips seems to say the first thing, MPAA in their lawsuits seem to say the second thing, and companies like Microsoft with their DRM ideas seem to say the third.

On the whole, they are pretty confused about it, but ask any one of them, and they will tell you to respect "Intellectual Rights". Granted, I want to respect intellectual rights - but will that mean they will stop treating me as a thief?

That is the crux of my problem with the entire anti-piracy thing. I have already been labelled a thief. Read the small print written by some lawyer on your CD you bought. You did not buy music, you bought some rights to do something with music - like listen to it. And whenever you do anything with the CD you bought, which has not been explicitly okayed by the small print, you are a thief. You go to a friends party and play it in his player loudly - you are a thief. You rip the CD to play in your HD player, flash player, car-mp3 player and a backup copy - you are a thief. And for a CD you supposedly bought, you dont own anything about the CD, not the songs, not the artwork, only the plastic. And unless proven otherwise you are a thief.

I would still consent to being labelled a thief, if music and movies were priced any cheaper. Technology has driven down the cost of music and movies. Songs can now be recorded and mixed at home on a laptop. You no longer need expensive recoding studios and their costly help in making music. But music is still priced the same. Artist costs and their profits are shrinking, but the end price is still the same. And who is getting an increasing slice of the pie - RIAA, MPAA and the rest of them.

One could have argued a decade ago, that these were very important and worth more than their share of cut in on the music prices. They helped artists get launched, the paid for recording up front, they help advertise, they promoted and most importantly they distributed. But today, it is no longer that crucial. The growth of the Internet has put a critical question mark on the reason for the existence of such associations. Downloading costs next to nothing, the Internet looks after advertising and it does a much better job than the RIAA ever could. The Internet breaks even faster, helps artist make money faster, reaches out to all kinds of audiences, does not differentiate between a super-hit or a hit or a moderate hit or a niche hit. It does not differentiate between rock or pop or hip hop or techno. It does not differentiate based on age, religion, region or sex. And the MPAA/RIAA are not happy.

Not only are they not happy, but they dont want to accept this change. Making costs are dropping, selling costs are dropping, shipping costs are dropping, advertising costs are dropping, reviewing costs are dropping, but the CDs are still priced the same. And all users are thieves.

This is why I dont care for their message against piracy. Of course I respect the artist's rights, of course I want to pay him. But I want to pay only the artist. I want to play a small and reasonable amount. I want to pay for songs I like, not entire albums. I want to share it with friends and when they like it, I want them to fully own the song by paying a similar small and reasonable amount. And most importantly, I dont like people calling me a thief.

Next post - mechanism for such a world.

etc etc long live robin hood
-- ravi

Music

I love Metal. Metal Music. I really dont want to bother about definitions or try to tell you what *I* really think Metal Music is or ought to be. That is not how I work. Rather I will just try to make a little distinction for those of you, who are not necessarily into this kind of music.

The entire scene of Rock and Metal is not really clean. Once you start delving into it, it starts getting murkier and horribly convoluted. The convolution starting with the nomenclature. There are a variety of rocks, metals and other stuff all over the place, each band promoting yet another of its own variety to stand out. I dont have either the patience or the capacity to go into all these. Primarily look at three kinds of music, rock, metal and alternative. And that is more than enough for you to enjoy music in all its glory.

Rock basically stems from the early rock-and-roll bands of the beetles with their amazing (now dated) attitude towards life. It progresses with time becoming more modern and more rich with groups like Rolling Stones, Led Zepplin, Van Halen, AC/DC and peters down at groups like Guns N' Roses. Here you see attitude, a common aspiration set, and musically an increasing dependance on guitar strings, on distortion and a decreasing volume and increasing pitch of vocals. The technology use also increases across this set. The themes are predominantly emotional, with love hanging in big time. "she" is almost always there. So are misunderstandings and broken hearts. Of course you do also find traces of other stuff, like fear, animosity etc. But that is more attitude than anything else. Rock is one of the biggest influences on the lifestyle of a large number of people over a particularly long period of time.

Metal is the big brother of Rock. Whatever Rock can do Metal can, only harder. Metal is the more noisier, faster and more rich cousin of rock, so much that it almost becomes a disincentive to a majority of Rock fans. "GN'R is fine, but I just cannot listen to anything harder". Metal in its numerous hard and noxios forms - hard, trash, neo, industrial, etc. focusses on topics different from the traditional ones. Aliens, Satan, God, the Sandman, fear, anger, jealousy and other more baser and powerful influences are found in plenty. Guitars are particularly caustic, vocals throaty, lyrics explicit and sex being not the only reason. Metallica, Megadeth, Pantera, Slayer and other incredible powerful bands form the line up here reaching bands like Clown, Gwar and others that make words like 'music' a distant stretch of the imagination. Metal is more about making a statement, not to those around you, but to yourself. While rock shaped how people lived, ate, drove and danced, metal shaped the way people thought and felt. "she" and love a mostly missing.

Alternative is all else. In between, in the flanks, all around. Floyd, Linkin Park, Amorphis and so on and so forth. Probably all other forms like Gothic, Grunge, Rap and the lots can be dumped into this couldron. Alternative is what you do when your emotions are too raw and need either a time-out or healing. "she" might hang around, either to be dumped or slaughtered. Alternative is everything from bad-ass to everything sensible about music.

This is good. But the problem is not to tell a Rock fan what I feel about Metal, not to tell an Alternative fan about the stirrings of a Gothic Symphony. Rather, it is to address that mire that thrives in what we call the pop and the classical. Pop is all that rock is not. Infested with sugary femme fatales and boyish kids with neither the originality nor the substance to move from the disco floor to the home, from the lips to the heart. It is not that I am against pop. It is just that I hate it.

Classical is everything pop and rock are not. Classical is what I call all other forms of music, especially indegenous music evolved over the centuries. Music where everything is not just black or white. Music that realises what it really is, and the incredible power it holds over the listener. Music that is single minded in its pursuit to replicate the world in the air waves. Music that told you where to go, not what is or what can be. That is what I refer to as Classical.

Classical music is really a mature form. Evolved over time, it is aware of its potency. It knows what music does to the emotions, and knows how to manipulate them and how to effect them. Only that it is simple. Classical normally deals with music in its elements. I deals with singular, basic emotions. I knows happiness, sadness. It knows peace. But it does not care about higher emotions. Nor does it concern itself with more baser forms of emotions.

Rock and Metal fundamentally differ in this respect. These are considerably richer forms of music. Richer in the amount of emotional content that they can carry. They can tell a story and not just evoke an emotion. They can evoke fear, anger, angst, helplessness, anxiety. They are emotions from one mature intelligence to another. They deal with the adult and not the child.

People are put off from heavier forms of music because it is noisy. Because it will affect the ears and cause deafness. Hey, dont do that! Give Metal a Chance. If it is loudness that concerns you, just turn the volume down. But listen to harder stuff. If you thought noise was not for you, you are sorely mistaken. Nothing can replicate you as powerfully and as completely as metal or rock. While classical can make you yearn for what you are not, metal can show you what you are. Metal is noise, but noise is not bad, or silly or a cause for deafness.

People tell me that Metal really hits them when they are drunk, when their defences are down. If you want more proof that metal talks to your heart and your soul, you probably are better off listening to britney spears talking about how beautiful she is.

Dont discount something just because it is noisier.

Give metal a chance.

Ever wondered what would happen if you were all alone in a city. Everything else existing, but if you were the only living person in the entire city. How would that be.

I am thinking I will write a little fiction in the days to come. Am kinda fed-up with all this serious stuff. The first part of the story coming right up.

~!nrk

Rammstein

And more specifically stripped. Incredible song. Or for that matter kokain. Man those riffs just drive you out of your mind dont they.

Filled up a survey today, about some perception thing, of companies recruiting on campus. Was so totally painful. I dont really understand. Why did I spend so much time filling it up. There was this HUGE matrix, which had to be filled with my opinions. Someone did not tell them things properly. I dont have opinions. Not atleast as many to fill up that monstrous matrix of theirs. Well, I did try, for a while. As i tried to form opinions on the spot and them put them on paper. Do you know how hard it is to form opinions on the spot? It is. And if you are finding it easy, you dont form opinions, you just think you do. Trust me on this. :)

One of the most incredible things is the fact that most people around you dont bother to form opinions. They have a few of their own opinions. You can figure out that this is their own opinion when people can be completely irrational about it and its consequences. But most other opinions you see around are only the sum total of the opinions formed from the positive part of your sphere of perception, that is all.

Okay, enough of rambling. Lets continue with the discussion we were having last. In the last post, we talked about the a number of definitions that led to the definition of the LSI or the linear scale of information. Given any observation, it can be located on this scale. What is an observation. An observation is any representation of a Data Source or DS. A photo is an observation of some reality. A word is an observation of some idea. A poem is an observation of some emotion/idea. A simple sentence also is an observation. So is a complex mathematical model of the universe.

One peculiarity about the LSI should be kept in mind. The LSI stretches from 0 to infinity. It is unbounded on the upper side. This means that a DS lies at infinity, and a completely useless bit of information lies at 0. We define data to lie in the small reaches, closer to 0 on the LSI. Information, relatively is higher on the scale. It represents a higher richness of data about a particular DS. Knowledge tends towards the object itself. A picture, worth a 1000 words, is therefore higher on the LSI with respect to the words it replaces.

This can be extended to any object, idea, thought or any other information content without any modifications. We can therefore use this structure to compare and develop better and higher forms of information management systems. That is what is envisaged as the end objective of this study. This structure can be used to describe any informational content with ease. We will go into details about the implementation of this structure soon, but before that we shall look into the way this method can be used to model interactions.

We define an interaction to be a process that allows for transfer of data between a DS and a DA using a Data Transfer Medium. This is the simplest definition of an interaction. An interaction can give rise to one of the following results. Information will be transferred from the DS to the Data Acquirer. In addition, the DS can change its state due to the interaction of the DS with the DTM (also known as the medium). Further, the interaction between the medium and the DA, will cause changes in the DA. Note that these changes are in addition to the simple transfer of information that can be attributed to the interaction.

This in fact follows from the defnitions we had seen yesterday. We have already talked about a query that is used by the DA to get information from the DS. Now when the query travels from the DA to the medium, the medium has obtained information. This causes a change in the medium itself. When the query is transported to the DS, the DS undergoes changes because of the informational content in the query. The exact similar process occurs when the DS replies with the answer to the query. The reader may note that no change occurs in the DA during the asking phase of the query, and no change happens in the DS during the reply phase. The DTM undergoes change twice, with both the query and the answer.

Lets see some practical explanations of the entire structure. Any systemic structure can be abstracted using this. In fact, now with the addition of the term interaction, we can now model dynamic changes in systems too.

Mail me, if you think there is some structure that cannot be abstracted using this framework. We will go into more practical considerations using this framework in later posts.

This is the first time that I actually continued a post beyond just one post. That must mean, I dont really think this idea to be crap.

Regards,

~!nrk

long time no C

Listen to a group called "Jars of Clay". If you are one of those that loves ROCK. But dont mind the occasional strings. This is the group that will freak you out. Real kewl music, somewhat yucky but appropriate vocals, and the best of it all, acoustic riffs only. Sometimes a little other strings thrown in. Really good mixture.

What kind of a user are you? What do you use in those innumerable online forms that want you to describe your level of computer usage? Where do you fare on the four point scale - Beginner, Advanced, Expert, Guru. Actually how do you define where you stand? And how do you do that with respect to somethin as abstract as "computer usage"?

You know what I feel. When it comes to computers I think we are living in a dream world. I somehow have the feeling that I will just wake up, and all things that dont make sense to me suddenly wont exist anymore. Here is a sample of what baffles me. "What dont we have an introductory course to computers".

Wait. I know most of you would be really ready to click that small button on the right top corner of your browsers. Hang on for a sec. Think about it, there are no really introductory courses to computers. There are a lot of people out there, people who offer course, people who understand computers, who make the mistake of totally screwing up an introductory course. Who make the mistake of giving content that has little or no meaning to end users. Who dont respect the difference between an end user, and a budding programmer, or an entry level system analyst, or a rooky business administrator.

Most (okay, all the course that I have been exposed to, the most is only a disclaimer) of the courses I have seen suffer from one of the two problems.

• The course has the wrong content for a focussed audience
  
• The course, introduces the end user to the computer, not the computer to the end user

Take a course that is typically floated in academic institutions, CS101 Introduction to Computing. More often than not it will have some bit of electronics, some stuff about decimal and binary systems, then it goes on to programming logic and problem solving and generally end with a project in C. WHY??? The next course would be somewhere in the second year CS204 Fundamentals of OOPS. Again, WHY??? What is this course seeking to achieve. Just tell me how many people are actually enlightened by such a course. I personally dont think anyone would be. If OOP really tiltillated you, you would have read Bjarne Stroustrup anyway. So what is this course doing for you. Of course pedagogy is abysmal. Mostly you have professors who learnt OOPS when it was still an embryo, teaching you that course, who in a nutshell, suck.

Cut. Go to a beginner course in a professional Computer Academy. The course reads like: C/C++. Introduction to RDBMS, Internet technology, JAVA. Hey, hold on. The guy does not know what a bloody computer is for god's sake. What the hell will he use a database for?

Cut. Go to a Introductory seminar in a Corporate Place. C/C++, Word, Excel Functions, Macros... WHY? Hell, darling, your user does not know one error message from another. All errors are the same to him. Word is fine, but he is afraid of the computer dammit.

Cut. An introductory course in a Business Management Institute. Internet, eCommerce, SAP and other tools, Networking, XML, Web Protocols. Gurgle, gurgle aaah. Hey do you know what a nincompoop he is going to prove himself to be. The information you give him will be all that he is ever going to know regarding these topics. And to his dying day, he will assume that he knows computers. Do you have any idea about how much damage you are doing?

Will some course teach someone, who does not yet love computers, to love it. Will some course teach a person that a computer is an extremely logical unit, and that all you need to know is a few principles and everything will make sense to you.Will any one teach users what to expect from a machine and what not to. Will someone tell users the incredible beauty of computing, the power of C, the modular C++, the vastness of the Internet. Will someone break open a computer and show people, that inside it all, you just have some dumb wires. Will someone help the beginner, not feel threatened by the machine. Will someone help the beginner, not feel threatened by anyone who is not an beginner?

I sure do hope so. Will put out a 10 important things in a Introductory course soon...

~!nrk

Incredewl = Incredibly kewl

Check out this link at slate.com. And Incredibly it talks about the topic I was talking about in my last post. About how the RIAA is responsible for its own state of affairs.

Just some perspectives first. The MPAAs and the RIAAs of this world are leaders in crying wolf, at each and every change that ever happens. Right from the disbelief filled furore over motion pictures ("Who in his right mind will want to watch a motion picture?") to the RIAA screaming blue murder at audio cassettes and the problem of "home taping" in 1980. The tight monopolistic short-sightedness of these associations is their undoing. Do read the article, it does give a good perspective.

Lets believe we are in front of the Oracle (the geek variety with the predictive powers and not the RDBMS variety). Lets pretend to peep into the future of music and the RIAA. Lets also assume that humans are inherently reasonable intelligent.

The cost of making music is falling. This means that more and more artists would be able to make their kind of music. This will not only proliferate the number of musicians, but will also multiply and mix the various genres and styles. Music will just be music and everyone will have access to an unprecedented variety of it. How would someone control it. Lets see...

Placing controls in the music itself. Ya, but if you are intelligent, so am I. What you can make I can break. Check this article which almost seems to say the same thing. Considering an industry with a great many firms, a great many independants, who will be able to enforce such a format? It is not about the power of the control placed. Too restrictive ones will cost you customers, too loose and it is not a constraint any longer. It is like Icarus flying between the ocean and the sun, and this Icarus is bound to fail. Forget everything, what will you do to music that will prevent a dictaphone from recording the sound that emanates from the speaker?

Okay so you will place controls in the playback system. Huh? Get real. And the same problems will plague the hardware too. You either lose customers or you will lose the entire point of the exercise.

Maybe you will try to control the swapping of music. Did you know the RIAA and the MPAA got permission to hack into networks which allow P2P sharing of services. Look what happenned. ISPs refused to allow the MPAA and the RIAA to attack their customers. Simple. Why would the rest of the world change its priorities just so that the RIAA can make some money? They will not. As long as RIAA is not the God of File Swapping, swapping will go on. For the masses want it. And Capitalism is in the want of the masses.

Why does it seem so bleak and unfair to the RIAA. Because the RIAA has not moved on. The RIAA is stuck in the past and refuses to budge and inch. The government will entertain it as long as it is strong. Once the artists realize that the RIAA is an intermediary, a pain in the ass, a source of inefficiencies and a drain on resources, the RIAA will cease to exist. Atleast the RIAA that exists today.

What will happen then. Lets take another peek onto the Crystal Ball. By the time artists would have eliminated the intermediary, one additional change would have occured. Money as we know it would also have completed its transition to the online world. Distribution and Payment would be online.

Why will people pay. Because people are not thieves by birth. Because if you music is good, you will have fans who care about you. And to live you will not need too many fans (remember the RIAA mammoth is no longer there). And as an artist you will have a global audience and a small fan following. Your music will be exchanged freely. The charts will be the number of times your song is exchanged. The more a song is exchanged the more the excitement it will generate, and more people will want to possess. And a new form of ownership will start. "Original Copies" will become a symbol - of fan-following, of loyalty, of integrity. Swapping networks grade users on their loyalty points, and this will automatically become an incentive. The consumer will spend but will get a lot more, and he will spend even more. Public performances will become a craze, another show of loyalty. And if you are a good artist, you will get money. Independent of which side of the bed your music house or the RIAA woke up today. Independent of which genre is being played by MTV. Independent of whether you have great resources to make songs or not.

What else might happen? Try this. Abstract art will meet with music. CGI and music will become a craze. Videos with music will drive the popularity. Music will come with additional components, like beat information for automatic playback at discos, visualization information, which will automatically be loaded by you winamp and a lot more. This complete entertainment units will replace the mp3 of today.

Of course there will be a time when everyone will see this happening and tom, dick, harry and their friend sally will also want to make music. The swappers will kill them. There will be a great rout, of icons and the newcomers and only the best will survive. And only the best will survive.

You think this will not work? Do you like music? When was the last time you went to a concert? Why did you pay for the ticket, and not just stay outside, salivating, at the gate, listening to music?

Think about it. This is no big deal. This is just a correction being made to the error committed by 2nd wave capitalism - the commoditization of music.

Practicing miniature photography now. My friend got a digi-cam. And that is setting right a great imbalance committed by this world - of not including a camera when I was sent down from the heavens.

gotta go get shot

~!nrk

Milestone

Today we unite in celebration of the fact that my first two blogs have rolled off the "5-blog" limit in the editor. This means that we have really taken off.

The ANN project report, I was talking about yesterday, is complete. See, I am being precise here. The project report is complete. Sadly not the project. Atleast not the part that we had promised mid-way through the evaluation. But it is done and now there are a lot more things on the mind that it is not possible to waste further thought on it.

I wanted to talk about an article I had read over at salon.com, led by slashdot. But I will not. However I want to talk about something that I have been thinking about for sometime now. It is basically because i eyed this article. Basically the article talks about a great number of developments on the CopyRight front. If you are any person who keeps in touch with the happennings on the net, you would have surely heard of the peer-to-peer programs. These programs, (remember the estwhile napster and the latest kazaa, bearshare, limewire and the host of other Gnutella clients?) allow people to share music, programs and other software. The MPAA and the RIAA have been up in arms, entreating the law-makers to do something to protect the "poor artists" from being ripped off their hard earned money.

This discussion will not focus on what the MPAA and the RIAA themselves are a sad representation of. Nor will we talk about the nature of the money in this business, or who actually makes the money, how profits have been increasing regularly, or how most of their claims are hypocritical in their own right.

Instead lets look if the entire concept of CopyRight actually makes sense, in this new world. CopyRights came into being in order to protect the interests of the people, who put in substantial investments to come up with something new. The idea was that the investment that the entity put in, so as to produce the new product/service, has a chance at being redeemed. Hence giving a initial start to the entity, as a monopoly offering the particular service, would allow it to do the same. The two aspects of the idea were that a) there was a quasi-monopoly created and b) the corresponding entity would have time to recover the costs it put in.

What is the difference today? Well, both concepts of monopoly, time and costs are being revised and rewritten. Digitization has ensured that the costs of production and reproduction, have hit the floor. It is possible to create copies of the same original quickly and painlessly. Similarly, it is possible to create new originals, with much greater ease, thanks to digitization. Hence what was seen as a major cost is no longer so great a quantity. The concept of time itself has also been changed. With industries rising in a matter of years, allowing monopolies itself is archaic.

Lets look at this from the point of view of a recording studio. In the past, a recording studio was a big deal. Yeah it is so today too. But computers have made it possible for a small desktop to do a great part of what required incredible hunks of sophisticated machinery. Those were the days when cassettes and CDs had to be mass produced. Thus making a song was not just and idea and a guitar. It involved a lot more people, capital and time. Thus it was reasonable to assume that there was a need to somehow protect the poor guy strumming the guitar, till he and his music studio made some money.

Now things are different. No longer is your setup cost the same. Nor is the cost of distribution so high. You do not always required CD stamping machines or cassettes production units. Also it does not really take years for a song to be really well known all around the world. What then is the CopyRight act protecting here? How exactly is originality defined? Is it just the ability to compile a song? What does a mammoth organization like the RIAA need that they are preventing easy access of songs for the fans? What is the justification for maintaining the MPAAs and the RIAAs of this world, when music no longer is what it used to be? Instead of trying to use the "second wave" tactics to prevent change, should the change itself not be studied? Instead of trying to change the rules of the game, should we not seek to change the game itself?

I think it is time, we stopped using the dated tools and structures of the older era to control the change of the new era. Music is not what is was. It is time we accepted the change and then advocated checks, not vice versa.

Look ahead and you are a dreamer,
look back and you are a laggard,
but if thou thinks you can get away,
by not looking, beware you are a hazard

I know it is sad. About what I could come up at this time of the morning. Methinks me needs to sleep.

Oh, and Jack says hi

~!nrk