eraseandsync: September 2008

2008/09/29

Nintendo choir a cappella

Probably late on this, there are tons of nintendo youtubes, but this one made me chuckle.
Also check out the marching band one

and

Super Mario Bros Theme Song Played with RC Car and Bottles

and
beatboxing flute super mario brothers theme

2008/09/28

The Mystery Jets play a silent disco set with headphones!

Yes, that's right a live set beamed straight to the crowd via headphones. It's an odd experience. I've heard about the Silent Disco before, which gives you the a choice of a couple of DJ's, but this was just one band.
A free drink from the vodka brand sponsoring the night help get the crowd in the mood, and the novelty of chunky headphones creates a bit of a buzz. Barely a few notes in to the first song and I'm fiddling with the volume trying to eek out more volume and bass with no success. Others in the crowd heckle for the headphones to be turned up during a quiet bit. The strangest thing was taking them off to listen to the crowd sing the songs word for word, completely a cappella, even the drums were electric. When the band paused to share their bemusement of the set up with the crowd, the drummer tapped out an improv techno/gabba beat.
The band sounded tight and looked like they enjoyed it for the novelty value as did the mainly student crowd. I felt like I had seen the Mystery Jets, but not really live. Don't get me wrong it was fun, but not the full experience.

itunes and podcast, a match made in hell!

I am sold on podcasts, they are a good source of music, news, videos... really anything. So much to choose from too. Itunes is still unrivalled when it comes to music management, but maybe not podcasts. At one time itunes was ok, it could handle my demands for podcast feeds, but now I have gathered a whole heap of subscriptions and notably more videos like Diggnation. This means larger and more downloads via itunes, which is annoying if the spinning beachball of death hangs about while what you really opened itunes for was to play some music! This is all the more painfull if, like me, you store you library on your external hard drive linked in on a wireless network... in one word: BUFFERING!

So I have tried a few things like, mypodder, which was rubbish (just seems to freeze every time) It sounded good, with it's promise to work on anything, even a usb stick, and download straight to your mp3 player. This means storing the software on you ipod or whatever and running it from. Not sure what i did wrong but it never did that for me. It did work from my laptop hard drive though. The User interface was dodgy, not easy to understand.

I tried Juice, this was quite good. Looks like an old itunes, only thing was it stores the files with odd numberwang prefixes.

The winner for me I think was Pod Nova. You can search, subscribe and dowload feeds. Install the desktop client and it asks for your login details, syncs with your selections online and downloads them. It looks neat and uses a browser access you account offline.

A good companion for this is floola which allows you to load the files on to your mp3 without itunes. Added bonus to this software: It allows video uploads, obviously a must for video podcasts. Only thing is you might have to make playlists for the stuff you want to load first in tunes.