Extra88

April Winchell: Multimedia

This is a great site, this page has a bunch of MP3's of the most horrible, wacky and funny audio ever recorded, most of it was at one time called "music." Bad renditions of songs, along the lines of William Shatner's Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, dominate but there are also TV show outtakes, "original" songs, and various kinds of spoken word pieces.

As you can imagine, I got this link from the April Winchell site.
Bizarre Record Covers

Here are just half of the categories!

I found this article by pudge, Slashdot editor, MacPerl maintainer, and all-round Mac+Perl guy to be interesting. Basically he found that the service iTunes4's sharing creates uses HTTP on port 3689. This does not open up your whole Music folder for browsing but he did find a way to download a track instead of stream it.

Also, iTunes4 adds at least two protocol types (which are really just http assigned to specific apps) to your system, itms: (iTunes Music Store?) and daap: (Digital Audio Access Protocol?). itsm URLs point to specific pages within iTunes Music Store and daap: URLs point to servers providing iTunes sharing. So if my Mac is mac.goofus.com and I turn on sharing in iTunes4, someone can enter daap://mac.goofus.com:3689 in their browser and their iTunes4 will launch and connect to my shared playlists.

Blogspace is certainly abuzz about iTunes4 and the Music Store. This article nicely summarizes how URLs to specific parts of of the Music Store are structured. If you want to see what the URL delivers, just change the "itms" to "http" and your browser will display the returned XML document the best it can (bad in Safari, pretty good in Mozilla and IE). One thing you can do with the XML is copy the URLs which point to the preview files (which are DRM'd AAC files, just like the full tracks) and download the preview files (the URLs are regular http).

[Damn, I need more categories or something.]

Someone mentioned this on Slashdot so I went to see if it was true. You can copy MP3s directly from one Nomad Jukebox 3 (or Nomad Zen) to another over FireWire. That's pretty cool. I know the FireWire spec was written to support device-to-device communications but you so rarely see it used. It does mention, however, that it won't transfer DRM'd WMA files. The Slashdot comment was in response to someone desiring iPod-to-iPod transfers and presumably if Apple made such a thing, they would have similar restrictions on DRM'd files.

I had read in a couple of places that iTunes 4's playlist sharing had a limit of 5 simultaneous clients but I hadn't seen anything definitive. Now I have.

iTunes 4: Idle Users of Shared Music May Be Automatically Disconnected

I hope you're not sick of the super-infectious "Hey Ya" by OutKast because this is a beaut.

A couple of fellows made a music video for the song using nothing but clips from A Charlie Brown Christmas

It looks simple, just tilt the bottle enough so you can see inside the yellow cap. Of course I can't try it because my local grocery store and Kwik-E-Mart still don't have any! Don't mistake the yellow NFL caps for iTunes caps!

This one goes out to the Diva. "Owner of a Lovely Butt" is a mash-up of Yes's "Owner of a Lonely Heart" and Sir Mix-a-Lot's "Baby Got Back." I'm going to have to check out some other tracks from this Lionel Vinyl.