“Songsmith generates musical accompaniment to match a singer’s voice. Just choose a musical style, sing into your PC’s microphone, and Songsmith will create backing music for you.”

Someone decided to run an a cappella lead vocal from Van Halen’s “Runnin’ With The Devil” through Microsoft’s Songsmith. The result is mind-boggling:

http://music.metafilter.com/2943/Runnin-With-The-Songsmith

(Thanks, Phil D.)

I may be the only person out there who still buys CDs, but in case I’m not I’d like to share my recent discovery that Tower.com has great prices on new CDs. I’ve found that their prices are consistently lower than Amazon’s, and if you buy $25 worth and qualify for free shipping, they generally beat even the third-party sellers on Amazon Marketplace. “Songs from the Big Chair” by Tears for Fears for $5.99? Sign me up!

(Since we at Suburban Sprawl Music maintain only the highest of ethical standards, I should mention that I used to work for Tower Records.)

Yesterday I was listening to a couple songs from the M83 album “Before The Dawn Heals Us” on my iPod, and I noticed a lot of annoying click/pop noises over the music. I own a promotional CD copy of the album that I got back in my music writer days, and that’s what I had ripped the songs from. So I grabbed the CD and put it into my MacBook to see if I heard the same clicks and pops when listening to the CD, and sure enough I did. Then I spotted the “Copy Control technology” notice on the back of the CD case. It occurred to me that maybe the clicks and pops were there because my computer was having a hard time with the Copy Control technology. I turned to the Internet and found a couple mp3s of songs from the album, and lo and behold they had the same clicks and pops, so I knew I didn’t just have a bad copy of the album. It seemed that the Copy Control technology might be the culprit here, but then I tried the CD on a “regular” CD player, and the clicks and pops were still there. Copy protection theoretically shouldn’t affect listening to CDs on a traditional CD player, so I started pondering other explanations than just “it’s the copy protection’s fault”. Ultimately I was able to find one place where the songs were free of clicks and pops: last.fm. (Last.fm streams the tracks from this album in full for free.) So I know that these annoying clicks and pops aren’t just something the artist intended.

So, what’s the explanation here? The weird thing is, the mp3s I found on the internet have the exact same clicks and pops as I do (that is, the clicks and pops are in the exact same places in the songs). So it seems that the clicks and pops aren’t just introduced by computers having a hard time dealing with the Copy Control technology, but rather that they’re part of the actual master audio. Were these clicks and pops added to the master audio for the promo CDs to make it just a little too annoying to listen to recreationally, but close enough for a reviewer to be able to do his or her job? Or was the promo run of CDs just a bad pressing? Or can copy protection introduce the exact same digital glitch noises across many copies of the same CD? (I don’t really understand how that stuff works.) If anyone has a non-promo copy of this CD, I’d love to hear it to find out whether this problem is specific to just the promo run. In any event, until I solve this mystery, “Before The Dawn Heals Us” is BANISHED from my iTunes library.

Lately I’ve been frustrated with how much time I waste reading certain websites when I want to get work done. I’ll be sitting at my computer being productive, and then I’ll go “Hey, I would like to read the entire life story of Sarah Palin”, and then three hours later I’ve somehow managed to click my way to the wikipedia article on the ancient civilization of Sumer. (They invented writing!)

After fretting heavily about this over the last few weeks, It occurred to me that it might be possible to block my computer from accessing certain websites, and that this would be a boon to my productivity, not to mention my self-respect. I set about looking for Firefox plug-ins to accomplish this and came across this article on Lifehacker. The author offers two solutions: a Firefox plug-in that allows you to restrict access to certain websites to certain times of the day, and a system-based option to “Block the sites entirely”, which is what I chose. The “Block the sites entirely” method has the benefit of blocking my computer, rather than just Firefox, from accessing the websites I specify; this way I can’t just switch to Safari to seek out a list of the largest cities in China by population. Of course, it’s always possible to unblock the sites, but my hope is that the minor hassle of doing so will be enough to deter me from falling into another link-clicking binge.

Implementing the “Block the sites entirely” option involved editing the “hosts” file on my Mac. Editing the “hosts” file was a little harder than Lifehacker describes; I had to change the ownership/permissions for both the “hosts” file and the folder in which it’s contained to be able to save my changes. But it’s working now, and Wikipedia, Pitchfork and Google News are blocked! Here’s to remaining ignorant about future Sarah Palin developments…

If you ever wanted to know what it sounds like when Zach Curd yells, here’s your answer:

I just discovered that Charlie Rose’s interviews are available for free on Google Video. (I don’t know whether all of them are up, but I’ve found everything I was looking for so far.) Check out wikipedia’s list of the people he has interviewed; it is truly insane. (The president of Syria? I’m impressed.) These interviews are as much as an hour long, and they’re with people you want to hear talk for an hour. So far I’ve watched full interviews with Conan O’Brien, Charles Schulz and Jon Stewart.  Whoops, I just noticed the David Lynch interview. Once again, Will fails to go to bed at a normal time…