Grab bag: industry shift

eMusic and Sony: the beginning and end of a beautiful thing

There’s a lot to like about the deal that eMusic cut with Sony today. Sony’s back catalogue (200,000 tracks, from albums two years old and older) will be available on eMusic’s monthly subscription plan.

Sort of.

As a consequence of the deal, eMusic’s per track price is going up across its whole catalogue. My subscription, purchased a while ago, was 90 tracks for $19.99. It had gone up to $24.99 for 90 tracks but I was grandfathered in at the old level. The new deal is $19.99 for 50 tracks. For those playing along, that’s an 80% price increase over my original deal. And I can’t buy a 90-track subscription any more. The highest subscription is 75 tracks for $30.99 a month.

Why else, other than the sudden 80% decrease in value of my subscription, do I have a problem with this? Well, for one thing, not everyone will want to download Sony tracks. So the price for every other track in the catalogue just jumped. Thanks a lot, Sony. I’d argue you just single-handedly made it harder for every indie in the eMusic catalogue to make money.

Which, you might suspect, might be the point. eMusic is practically the only place where indies have a voice where they don’t have to compete with the majors for oxygen. Now Sony will try to choke off the oxygen from the indies in their own pool. Not cool.

The irises of spring

3563704058_78b7d3c02d_o

I always forget how magnificent our irises are when in full bloom. The photos don’t really do them justice. Right now there is a wall of irises rising up between our driveway and our front sidewalk. The bulbs, which come from my grandmother Jarrett via my father, are really in action this spring and have created a spectacular wall of purple.

The wall of iris is reassuring because it’s a risky year for our plantings. We ripped out the remaining “legacy bushes” (big dense evergreens) in front of the house last fall when we redid our front steps. Against all odds the rhododendrons and compact evergreens we planted in their stead survived the winter and are blooming like crazy, but there’s still a lot of empty space to fill with plants. Cue a lot of annuals and perennials purchased and dug in over the past month, and you can understand my relief when the irises simply, reliably, just came up and bloomed.

Also, I built a raised garden bed a few weekends ago. The tomato plants are in, the basil and cilantro haven’t died yet, and the peas and lettuce are just starting to poke their way above the soil.

Finally, we hacked away some of the old growth along our back fence, taking down a nasty thornbush and some subpar “bridal wreath”, and found a big cherry tree hiding among the detritus. Hopefully opening it up will give the cherry the room to breathe and grow that it needs.

Friday listen: In My Tribe, 10,000 Maniacs

I wrote a long time ago about getting my Denon DP-45F turntable fixed up, and shortly thereafter hinted that I was about to start ripping my records en masse. Then… well, life intruded. I ripped some Beowulf, early and not-so-early Virginia Glee Club records, and not a whole lot else.

Why? A few reasons. First, time. Where ripping a CD can be done in much less than the time to listen to it, and in the comfort of an armchair, an LP requires at least as much time to rip as to listen to it. Then there’s taking the file, leveling it, splitting the tracks, importing them to iTunes, and then (because of a bug in Amadeus Pro’s lossless AAC files) reimporting them as AAC. So for one record, it takes the evening. And one unsuccessful rip–there was a lot of surface noise on my copy of Peter Gabriel II–put me off the project for a good long while.

And now? I finally got around to ripping my vinyl of 10,000 Maniacs’ early hit In My Tribe, and it was a revelation. The sound from the ripped vinyl was superb, and the music was superb…er. The opening chords of “What’s the Matter Here” were as gripping as the lyrics are depressing; “Hey Jack Kerouac” and “Like the Weather” were similarly moving and dynamic. Listening to the record took me back to when R.E.M. played a lot of 12 string and when indie meant Guadalcanal Diary and the Connells. The second half of the record lags a bit, but the final song, the unpromisingly named “Verdi Cries,” was moving and insightful.

In these recessionary times, there’s something to be said for rediscovering music through vinyl instead of paying to download it again. Even if it takes an evening to get the music on one’s iPod.

Grab bag: HTML 5 and other phenomena

Fixing a hole: Migrating a site structure with the Redirection plugin

Over the weekend, as previously noted, my hosting provider redirected two old versions of my blog to the new WordPress blog. When that change kicked in, it unleashed a storm of 404s as links pointing into the old site structure hit the new site structure.

There are a number of systematic changes from the old site to the new site:

  • Daily pages from my static site. These URLs look like /yyyy/mm/dd.html, and for whatever reason they weren’t redirecting to /yyyy/mm/dd/.
  • Category links from my dynamic site. This one was a mess, because there were at least two main ways of accessing my old category pages: /newsItems/department/n and /newsItems/viewDepartment$n.
  • RSS links. My old RSS link was at a different location, and apparently a lot of feed readers are still polling there.
  • Print-friendly links. Manila used to have a text-only print-friendly format; URLs with the ?print-friendly=true option were failing.
  • Differing site structures. Some of the changes were simply because I set up the new site differently.

Fortunately, most of the problems are easily solved with the help of regular expressions and the Redirection plug-in for WordPress. The redirect rules for the static date pages and the news item department pages were rewritten as follows:

  • ​/(d*)​/(d*)​/(d*).html –>/$1/$2/$3
  • ​/newsItems​/departments​/([a-zA-Z0-9]*) –> /category/$1/
  • ​/newsItems​/viewDepartment$([a-zA-Z0-9]*) –> /category/$1/

All made nice and straightforward, once you grok the syntax.

Of course, I could have used Apache’s .htaccess and these regex rules, but the big advantage of the Redirection plugin is that it counts how many times each rule is used, and links the 404 log into the rules writing engine in a very clever way. It’s very simple to find a 404, write a rule, test the rule to verify that the filter is working, and then go on your merry way.

I did have to make a decision to turn off some functionality. I don’t have mailto any more, my old sitemap is gone and not coming back, and some other odds & ends are not to return. I’ve enumerated those in my Blog Feature Graveyard.

Grab bag: Dusty tunes, infinite startups

Consolidation time

Just a quick housekeeping note–over the weekend my hosting provider finally consolidated my www, discuss, and wp.jarretthousenorth.com sites onto one machine. You can go ahead and head over to www.jarretthousenorth.com now.

With this consolidation, my Manila blog is finally no more. I cut my blogging teeth on Edit This Page and the other features which at the time were state of the art, but which didn’t move as fast as the revolution they spawned.

Jarrett House North became a WordPress site last year, but the old version of the site lived on at two different web addresses — which didn’t help my Google presence at all. Now, though, you can find me at www, discuss, or wp.jarretthousenorth.com and it will all be the same site.

I have a few broken links to fix, so bear with me. I have to mention in passing that I highly recommend the superb Redirection plugin for finding and fixing 404s on a WordPress site.

Grab bag: Hacks and cracks

Grab bag: iPhone rumors, Wikipedia goes CC