About 13 years ago John Oswald gave us his masterwork of audio collage, Plexure, which wove together minute fragments of the greatest hits of the previous 10 years into a brilliant sound tapestry. Now you almost get to do the same thing in a few moment with your own music collection, at least whatever portion of it you keep in iTunes, thanx to Jason Freeman's iTunes Signature Maker. The Java program asks you a few configuration questions like how many songs you want to include and how big the fragments should be, and then crunches away for a few minutes to give you a little clip that is a brief collage of the songs you've been listening to.
Here's an example: http://detritus.net/steev/mp3s/steev-audio-sig.mp3
One really nice feature of the program is that after it builds the signature, you can look at the "structure" of it. for the example above, we have:
Title
Artist
Album
Starting At
Ending At
Modest Mouse - 3rd planet
0:06.4
0:08.0
Human (Calexico Vocal Mix)
Goldfrapp
Felt Mountain
0:38.0
0:39.2
Senhor F
Os Mutantes
Os Mutantes
2:07.4
2:08.6
Peligro
Mano Negra
Best Of Mano Negra
2:40.4
2:41.5
Woe
Tom Waits
Blood Money
1:15.9
1:17.3
Modest Mouse - gravity rides everything
0:15.6
0:17.3
Pez
Cafe Tacuba
Re
0:02.6
0:04.0
Modest Mouse - I Came As A Rat
1:37.7
1:39.4
Galang
M.I.A.
Arular
0:11.7
0:13.2
Himno Zapatista
Flor Del Fango
Flor Del Fango
2:45.7
2:47.7
Calexico - The Black Light
Calexico
1:37.0
1:38.9
Modest Mouse - Alone Down There
0:48.0
0:49.0
Modest Mouse - Paper Thin Walls
2:45.7
2:47.5
Lima
Entre Rios
Completo
2:15.6
2:17.7
La Faraona
Pérez Prado
Havana 3 A.M.
0:42.9
0:44.8
Lagrimas de Oro
Manu Chao
Clandestino: Esperando La Ultima Ola...
1:20.2
1:23.2
(thanx rabble)
Paul of Mediageek has some interesting commentary on a report by the Council on Information and Library Resources about how over-restrictive copyright laws are making very difficult efforts to preserve and archive old sound recordings.
Paul of Media Geek reports on the recent move by the Grateful Dead to stop free downloads of recordings of Dead shows. He discusses how the Dead became so successful largely because of an open policy toward taping and sharing of their shows, but now that the band basically doesn't exist anymore and there's a way to sell their huge archive of live recordings easily (the Internet), they are starting to clamp down.