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ITunes 11 and Colors

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Re: ITunes 11 and Colors

#111

Post by flyinRyan »

pseut wrote: post #87
gurkendoktor wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Musicians make money from playing live It might be good advice economically, but IMHO it is also a tendency worth fighting, because it is so obviously unfair and limiting. What about artists (or genres!) that suck at giving live concerts? How do I vote with my wallet if I have no time for concerts - but listen to music all day? Bizarrely, soundtracks seem to have come to my rescue (for some genres) - where artists…

>How do I vote with my wallet if I have no time for concerts - but listen to music all day? Buy t-shirts, etc

I hate this line of thought with a passion. So if your talent happens to be musical you're only hope for a remotely related career is to be a loss leader for niche retail?

Plus if you're just taking stock shirt and putting your bands name on them then you're little better than a pan handler begging for money. People are only buying your outrageously priced shirts to keep you playing music. Why can't we just pay artists for their contribution to society instead of "pretend buying" their overpriced t-shirts?

Re: ITunes 11 and Colors

#112

Post by flyinRyan »

joeguilmette wrote: post #88
untog wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know that if I had talent I could create and distribute an album on my laptop and distribute it globally. We used to pay record labels for this. Now we pay them to stand in the way of artists and their fans. Not just that, though. They also do promotion. How am I going to find out about your album?

YouTube, Soundcloud, activity sharing on streaming services, live shows, music blogs, your friends. Do you really decide what bands you like from ads and the radio?

You talk as if your way is fundamentally different. In both cases someone is curating what kind of music you hear for you because there are far too many bands to hear them all. The question is just who is making the selection for you.

Re: ITunes 11 and Colors

#113

Post by crag »

forrestthewoods wrote: post #34
joeguilmette wrote: post #20

Until just recently I was an iTunes power user. I have a 15 year old 80gb collection of pirated music - all full albums, all with pristine metadata and personalized genres. I do not have cover art tho, but I don't really care - until now. iTunes 11 makes a big deal about cover art - their UI is nearly exclusively dependent on it. I don't like thumbnails. When I look at my music, I want a big sortable list. I don't wa…

I hope you don't really think that $10 is "bit high, but fair". Spotify is horrible for artists and pays them next to nothing. Assuming you fully own the rights to your music it takes 232,000 plays per month just to make minimum wage for a single artist [1]. Now consider that Spotify, and similar streaming services, are losing money hand over fist and it's obvious this model can not last [2]. Personally I put Spotify…

Spotify is good for popular music. But try being classical/opera fan and using Spotify. Though I hear it's getting better.

I have a 120GB music library in iTunes. And most of it was ripped from CD's. I'm not happy about iTunes 11 due to Cover Flow an DJ being dropped (I liked both) and - I don't know, maybe I'll give Spotify another go.

Re: ITunes 11 and Colors

#114

Post by crag »

nextstep wrote: post #24
ry0ohki wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love that $10 for monthly access to basically every album ever on demand is "a bit high". I remember dropping $16 a pop on CDs/Tapes at Tower Records back in the day, probably bought at least two a month... In terms of your issue with iTunes cover art, didn't they announce some thing where you pay a flat fee and is basically matches all of your illegal music with legal one when iCloud was introduced (I never tried…

You're recalling iTunes Match, the service which allows you to upload/match your iTunes library and access it across multiple devices. This service is $25/year. However, you can have iTunes download album art (even for albums you've imported and haven't bought through iTunes) for free. You can just select every song in your library and the right-click and choose "Get Album Artwork" or something like that. It works de…

"Again, this fails for a lot of electronic music though."

It also fails for classical music. But since I ripped CD's I just scanned in the cover and added the art. Trust me, it was time consuming. But there is hope, iTunes has added much more classical/opera recently. So changes are, if I had to do this all over - a lot of the art would be available from iTunes.

Re: ITunes 11 and Colors

#115

Post by Karunamon »

yardie wrote: post #102
icebraining wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We don't demand this of any other profession yet musicians should have a day job and make music for the love of it? Nobody is demanding anything of artists; it's artists (well, mostly labels, but also some artists) that are demanding monopolies from society.

¿Que? I'm not even sure how to interpret this statement. Monopolies of what exactly?

The ridiculous copyright extensions pushed for by the mafiAA? Ridiculous suits against network printers, computer illiterate grandmas, and children, sometimes for more than the GDP of the entire world?

Re: ITunes 11 and Colors

#116

Post by Karunamon »

ghshephard wrote: post #33
joeguilmette wrote: post #20

Until just recently I was an iTunes power user. I have a 15 year old 80gb collection of pirated music - all full albums, all with pristine metadata and personalized genres. I do not have cover art tho, but I don't really care - until now. iTunes 11 makes a big deal about cover art - their UI is nearly exclusively dependent on it. I don't like thumbnails. When I look at my music, I want a big sortable list. I don't wa…

I don't what's worse about your comment - that you seem to think that there is nothing wrong with having pirated music, that you admit to having done so in a public forum, or that you are so blasé about it that you did so with your (presumably) real name. I wonder where people like you draw the line at such behavior. Why is music any different than TV Shows? Or Movies? Or eBooks? Would you feel comfortable "pirating"…

>I often wonder, under what moral authority, other than "It was really easy and I wasn't caught and/or punished for doing it" people feel comfortable "pirating" other people's intellectual property.

I would guess that's because me, a good deal of my friends, both online and in real life, and a number of acquaintances (YMMV) consider "intellectual property" to be a rather unintuitive (and by extension, stupid, not deserving of respect, and many other similar terms) concept.

No respect, no "moral authority" required.

The actions of industry lobbies which are acting, ostensibly, at the behest of its members, are not serving to increase that respect. An institution which society at large does not respect is doomed to fail.

See also speed limit laws on any major highway in the USA. Sure there's a law, but it's enforced haphazardly, most people have no respect for it as a law, (indeed, studies would suggest people drive at a comfortable speed for them regardless of what the sign says), and we're a better society for it.

You could make the same argument for piracy, given the use of sampling in the music business, to the revelation that pirates actually buy more media than non pirates, and quite possibly others I could think up were I not fresh out of bed.

Re: ITunes 11 and Colors

#117

Post by technoslut »

crag wrote: post #113
forrestthewoods wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hope you don't really think that $10 is "bit high, but fair". Spotify is horrible for artists and pays them next to nothing. Assuming you fully own the rights to your music it takes 232,000 plays per month just to make minimum wage for a single artist [1]. Now consider that Spotify, and similar streaming services, are losing money hand over fist and it's obvious this model can not last [2]. Personally I put Spotify…

Spotify is good for popular music. But try being classical/opera fan and using Spotify. Though I hear it's getting better. I have a 120GB music library in iTunes. And most of it was ripped from CD's. I'm not happy about iTunes 11 due to Cover Flow an DJ being dropped (I liked both) and - I don't know, maybe I'll give Spotify another go.

To be fair, classical music suffers in general when it comes to availability.

For two months I was looking for 8 CD box set of 'The Budapest String Quartet Plays Beethoven' to be available anywhere as a download. I had to resort to buying the box set, ripping it and fixing the tags myself. I paid far less than I would have but I paid it back in hours of getting everything right.

Re: ITunes 11 and Colors

#118

Post by pseut »

flyinRyan wrote: post #111
pseut wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>How do I vote with my wallet if I have no time for concerts - but listen to music all day? Buy t-shirts, etc

I hate this line of thought with a passion. So if your talent happens to be musical you're only hope for a remotely related career is to be a loss leader for niche retail? Plus if you're just taking stock shirt and putting your bands name on them then you're little better than a pan handler begging for money. People are only buying your outrageously priced shirts to keep you playing music. Why can't we just pay artis…

There are lots of ways that artists could hypothetically be compensated and things will probably change a lot over the next 5-10 years. Right now, though, pretend buying overpriced t-shirts is one way to get money to musicians without going to concerts. Free idea for musicians: I'd pay to subscribe to webcasts of practice sessions.

Re: ITunes 11 and Colors

#119

Post by icebraining »

yardie wrote: post #102
icebraining wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We don't demand this of any other profession yet musicians should have a day job and make music for the love of it? Nobody is demanding anything of artists; it's artists (well, mostly labels, but also some artists) that are demanding monopolies from society.

¿Que? I'm not even sure how to interpret this statement. Monopolies of what exactly?

Monopolies over the creations.

Thomas Jefferson's proposal for the Amendment that granted copyright and patents was:

  Art. 9. Monopolies may be allowed to persons for their own productions
  in literature and their own inventions in the arts for a term
  not exceeding — years but for no longer term and no other purpose.
Madison, on the other hand, wrote:

  Monopolies, though in certain cases useful, ought to be granted with caution,
  and guarded with strictness against abuse. The Constitution of the United
  States has limited them to two cases--the authors of books, and of useful
  inventions (...)

Re: ITunes 11 and Colors

#120

Post by robflynn »

thomaspark wrote: post #109
robflynn wrote: post #7

I do love that feature. I developed something like this a couple years ago for a back office part of a project: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/4p5m4719ehvpohc/GUEHcYecYv I don't have a good example of the project any longer, but I took a few snapshots during the development process. My test page allowed you to upload a logo and have the page dynamically change to match the new logo. The link above is a gallery of a few o…

Very cool. Here's my attempt at it, which uses the JS library Color Thief: http://thomaspark.me/project/expandingalbums/

Very nice! That color thief library would have made my work a lot easier.

Here's the process I did without pasting my embarrassingly hacky code:

* Accepted image from user

* Quantized the image down to 6 main colors (I forget how I arrived at this figure.)

* Slapped it on a canvas

* Generated a color histogram

* Converted RGB to HSB

* Did a border check of the image to determine the background color. Extended the border based on most common background color if needed.

* Looked at the saturation of the colors to determine what might be interesting to use. Picked a primary and secondary color from that.

* From there I converted each of the color to YIQ to determine contrast levels to determine if I needed lighter or darker colors for the text.

* Generated some "accent" colors by modifying lightness levels of some of the primary and secondary colors.

From there I pretty much had the things I needed to make something theme-like.

Thanks for posting this. I enjoyed reading over the code. You also reminded me that I need to ditch my crappy JS tempting library that I wrote and switch to moustache.

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