Shrunketized

Manhattan Research, Inc.

Lately i've been enjoying a 2 CD set of music by electronic music pioneer Raymond Scott, Manhattan Research, Inc. Scott led a double life as a successful commercial composer and also an inventor, and is apparently credited with inventing the music sequencer. Almost 50 years later his music sounds remarkably fresh (even used for a recent Tic Tac commercial). It's a great blend of the creative experimental nature of other early pioneers, and the catchy melodies of commercial music. The CD's come along with a great book filled with interviews and pictures of him in his enormous basement full of electronic devices. He comes across as sort of a lovable mad genius.

Only recently is he taking a place in music history, as he was incredibly secretive with his inventions. In a letter found in his personal papers he states "...with the passing of years, I guess I regret my secrecy and would like for people to know of what I accomplished." It's good stuff.

accessing your music anywhere

I'm excited about the new mp3tunes Oboe service. It creates an online storage locker for all your iTunes songs, and claims to do it with the click of one button, via a handy iTunes plugin. The service offers a free version which seems to offer a lot, and a paid version with some extra features. I'm especially interested in the "sideloading" concept where you can move songs from a partner website directly into your storage locker without downloading via a special link. After trying to set up an account, i'm a little less excited. The service, at least the Mac version, seems buggy still. After creating my account it brought me to a download page that didn't work–the download link kept taking me to the front page. After finally clicking the download tab in the menu I discovered the links there worked okay.

I downloaded two files, but there was no documentation included so I wasn't sure what to do with them. This is probably ignorance on my part, but the files have to be moved out of the mounted disk image or they won't run properly. I also didn't know how to install the plugin for iTunes–putting it in the iTunes plugin folder seemed to do nothing.

When I ran the syncing program, I entered my account info and clicked the Sync button, and it began syncing, informing me that it would take an hour per 200 songs. Unfortunately that's going to take about 35 hours. I canceled out of that action and clicked the other button, Preferences. That allowed me to choose a specific folder to sync, so I figured I could do a few albums at a time to test things out. After setting the folder, the Sync button became disabled, and I had to re-enter my password to enable the button, even though my password was still there. I selected only a few dozen songs but the syncing was still cranking away so slowly that I eventually gave up.

I have high hopes for the service, but I think i'm going to wait a couple weeks until they've worked out some of the glitches.