You gotta know when to hold ‘em, know when to fold ‘em… but how exactly DO you know?  Because if you’re gonna play the game boy, ya gotta learn to play it right. Most of us can recall the lyrics like aces, but if you could become Kenny Rogers for a day, would you really know what to hold and what to fold? For a taste of your whiskey I’ll give you some advice.  Click for larger…

And remember: The secret to survivin’ is knowin what to throw away and knowing what to keep.

Is a record not spun a record not played? Dragging a needle across old, brittle vinyl records or wax cylinders can damage them — not something you want to do with rare historical recordings. At the Library of Congress, researchers have developed a scanner that can extract audio from records by scanning them digitally - no spinning required. Images are analyzed and transformed back into audible sound. “Stuck” records magically become unstuck, while physically broken records can be pieced back together with great results.

How does it sound? “The machine is not adding its own color. It’s not adding anything of its own nature,” says the device’s developer. The samples on the NPR site are low-res internet audio, but the comparisons to the original are impressive, despite a persistent background hiss.

The technology could eventually become available to general consumers, meaning that the daunting task of MP3-encoding piles of vinyl would become way less daunting. It’s a strange and beautiful world.

Thanks Jeb

A friend took his nine-month-old son to the local record store recently, muttering something like “I’ve got to teach him early about the importance of buying music, rather than downloading.” “For copyright reasons or tangibility reasons?,” I asked. “Neither,” he responded, “It’s about getting all the information.” He was talking audio aesthetics — preserving maximum data in the recordings you own, rather than paying for convenience with aesthetically diminished, massively compressed audio. I respect that, but wonder if there will be any CDs left to buy by the time our kids have their own allowances.

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Nick Collier of Sheffield’s psychotic sextet Pink Grease isn’t the first knob twiddler in rock history to wear a strap-on-synth, but dude - his is hand-made. And it’s got no keys.

Apparently Collier got a little build help from Pete Hartley, who also designed the drum kit Def Leppard drummer Rick Allen used after losing his arm. All part of the “fundamental strangeness of Sheffield.”

What really sets Collier’s synth apart is its use of a ribbon controller in place of a keyboard, putting its sonic output somewhere between that of a theremin and Rolf Harris’ Stylophone. Except that Collier’s strap-on has been known to blow amps in a few seconds or less.

Icing on the sawtooth: You can tweak Nick’s knobs yourself, if you’re so inclined.

More:

• Pink grease roller disco
• Terrifying wiring shot
• More of Collier’s synth creations

Photo courtesy Dan Sumption, via Dan Shot Me (Gallery: Pink Grease roller disco)

The Copyright Royalty Board has recently decided to nearly triple the licensing fees for Internet radio sites like Pandora.

The new royalty rates are irrationally high, more than four times what satellite radio pays, and broadcast radio doesn’t pay these at all. Left unchanged, these new royalties will kill every Internet radio site, including Pandora.

savenetradio.org has been created to raise awareness and reverse the tide, before this vital medium is smothered in its crib. Please consider sending email to your congress-critter / reps, encouraging them to stop the madness.

While you were busy not paying attention, the world changed: “Buyers of digital music are purchasing singles over albums by a margin of 19 to 1.” That stat could be a smidge misleading, since an album may consist of, say, 12 songs, and only get counted as a single purchase, but still, “Individual songs account for roughly two-thirds of all music sales volume in the United States.”

We all know that the theory was that digital downloads would let people only purchase the songs they liked, rather than the entire album, but I had no idea the tide had shifted this far already. Me, I’ve bought exactly one single from iTMS in the past few years - a track from Don’t Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me The Pliers, which I needed for a performance piece we were prepping for a friend’s wedding.

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Guitar solos are self-indulgent. The bridge is always boring. Verses are repetitive. Everyone knows four minutes is way too long for a song. What we really want is the hook - the essence. Give me a meaty riff, and ditch the rest. Radio SASS (Short Attention Span System) “creative editing” to the rescue.

Short Attention Span System takes the playlist and musically condenses songs to their essence. Through time compression, you get the memorable heart of each song, with an average length of aproximately two minutes with NO self indulgent guitar solos, NO long intros, NO repetition of choruses again and again. Radio returns to the snappy song length of the 1960s.

In other words, everything long is bad. Because time is an inconvenience, and self-absorbed artists with no respect for your fast-paced lifestyle are wasting it. Ummm… ewwww? So what happens to Hot Rats? Cosmic Charlie? Fool in the Rain? Mothership Connection? Born Under Punches?

But look on the bright side — nobody cares!

Radio SASS starts out with the memorable beginning, followed by the best verses, best chorus and then wraps it up just as you remember … Will listeners object? The answer is no. Several focus groups conducted by Harker Research show that most people don’t even notice.

Also interesting here is the name of the service: “Short Attention Span System.” Since saying that someone has a short attention span is generally considered a bit derogatory, this represents a sea change. SASS must think that people are not only aware of the fact that they have short attention spans, but also don’t think of that as a bad thing. The marketing here is aimed at the heart of what has traditionally been considered a human weakness, or a negative aspect of media snack culture. Kind of like selling potato chips under the name “Obesity Chips.”

And, oh yeah - the new protocol is patented. You can patent butchery?