Posts Tagged ‘Music’

The ButtKicker LFE Kit just arrived today. All I can say is wow. I’m busy watching all the big blockbuster films with loads of bass. Right now it’s Terminator 3 time. From the very first nuke that goes off, to when Arnold makes his debut, all the way until the truck chase scene. The wow factor does not stop. I’m totally looking forward to watching Band of Brothers tomorrow.

I’ve got a sub in the form of the Boston XB6 but I’ve got the volume down nearly all the way, apartment living and such. The Boston VR3’s go pretty low anyway, the cross over is set to 60Hz but but Boston says 35Hz can be cleanly achieved. The sub and ButtKicker are set to 80Hz. Somehow even at lower volumes it just sounds and feels amazing.

The transducer hits with precision but also rolls extremely well giving big flaming explosions a new sense of realism. Combining that with the great Boston sound and it really makes for an awesome experience.

I’m not sure what else to say beyond that. It’s definitely something that one needs to feel and experience to understand. It’s not gimmicky feeling at all, one person I talked to asked if it was like a phone vibrating, but not at all. It’s far more complicated, smooth and natural.

I haven’t had a chance to test it with music yet. That’s for tomorrow during the day. I will say, it might need some adjusting then, when I first hooked it up I ignored the manual set the thing to 75% volume. I think that was a pretty extreme, it kinda felt like the provided amp was giving the unit /too/ much power. If that’s even possible. Turning it down half way and it’s perfect.

Went down stairs and sure enough, couldn’t really notice any of the vibrations or anything. Not sure about next door though.

That’s the review for now, more tomorrow after music.

Okay, so Comcast has been giving me the runaround with getting my business Internet connection back up and running correctly but one of the upsides of running your own server with DHCP, DNS, Active Directory and all the other overly complicated things is that I can still access all of my own content since it’s local and can write this right now.

I’ve decided to take this time “off the net” to go through and organize the terabyte or so of data I’ve got sitting around including the 500GB+ worth of music. Now there’s this one folder though, that’s only like 60GB but is completely filled with various file formats and bit rates of individual tracks that I eventually wanted to complete and sort.

What an eclectic set of music. It’s got everything, even stuff that I would dare say shouldn’t even be called music. But I love it. I love it all. Even the cheese, since even after only sampling a 30 second clip of the music it brings a smile to my face.

For example I’m listening to We All Die Young from the Rock Star soundtrack, just seconds before I was listening to a Phish cover of the Cheers theme. This random assortment of tracks is totally bringing back to my days of spending all day and night on the Internet and on Messenger just fiddling, talking, and listening to music, and laughing my ass off.

That brings me to listening to the I AM advert song, Kazachok, Protest the Right Way, and all the other gold from back in the day. Sure this stuff is close to trash, but at the right moments it’s also a treasure.

So not really sure where I’m heading with this other than to say I miss the days of having music playing all the time, even while I slept. Music really does get every bit of me, the best and the worst. Right now it’s just putting a huge smile on my face though.

I’m just listening to some random music while getting ready to shift my weight over to the gym. I have to say though, I really wish I had the gym right here in front of my Boston speakers though. Listening to the Boston VR3’s is a total sexual experience for the ears.

Need I say more…

This is a common question on XP and even Vista. If you do a basic search with Google or Live you’ll actually get mixed information with many people (including some Microsoft sources) saying that sharing of networked content is not possible. However let it be known that it is possible and this information is available directly from Microsoft’s own sharing FAQ’s.

If you want to share files in a monitored folder that is located on another computer (for example, a folder on a network share), the remote folder must have the appropriate Windows access permissions assigned to it and the computer that contains the library you want to share has remote content sharing enabled. You can enable remote content sharing by performing the following procedure on the computer that contains the library you are sharing.

1.	Click Start, click Run, type regedit, and then click OK.
2.	In the registry tree (on the left), expand HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE, SOFTWARE, Microsoft, MediaPlayer, and then Preferences.
3.	Right-click HME, point to New, and then click DWORD Value.
4.	Type EnableRemoteContentSharing, and then press ENTER.
5.	Right-click EnableRemoteContentSharing, and then click Modify.
6.	In the Value data text box, type 1, and then click OK. If you later decide to disable remote content sharing, you can repeat this procedure and change the value to 0.

For more information, see Windows Media Player FAQ.

I should also note that typically you need to make sure that WMP is monitoring the network share via the UNC path so \\SERVER\Music, while you can certainly have the share mapped to a network drive this will cause issues in certain cases. So if you add M:\ for example, make sure WMP is monitoring and using \\SERVER\Music instead. Issues that come up include the networked content showing up on first use but not being able to play back, and after the machine starts the content not being up to date. For more info check out this post.

Saw 300 tonight, was totally awesome. If you’ve got an IMAX showing it, see it there. Certainly was cool. Anyway, I heard this one piece of the score and knew for sure I had heard it before. Got home, popped in the Titus DVD, tried not to get pulled in, then sure enough it’s basically the same. Hear for yourself, first the Titus version then 300’s. Then I searched for more info to see if there was some underlying classical music tones similar to Nike’s campaign with The Second Coming and Mozart’s Lacrimosa. You know sometimes this stuff comes from all over. So much sampling and borrowing is done in music today that it’s impossible to really know who’s actually done what. Heck I bet at the heart of it all they do it to make us do just that, try and remember exactly what came from what and it’ll stay with us. So congrats on a job well done.

The search ended up revealing this bit of review:

“Returns a King” brings in the first appearance of the powerful choral pieces Bates wrote for the film, though fans will note similarities to Elliott Goldenthal’s Titus score. The choir cues are impressive, sung in a phonetic language and epic on scale.

Ya think!? I mean “note similarities”? You mean other than the few extra notes and more up to date recording? ROFL. Please. Rather than think that Bates’ is copying Goldenthal’s score as well as using similar musical tactics as Zimmer, I’d rather think or hope I guess, that he’s paying homage to Titus and Gladiator. The former of which I happen to think was an underappreciated yet awesome film.

All that being said, see 300 in a theater, it was great.

UPDATE: Looks like Warner Bros. has released an official statement saying sorry for their knowledge that the music was taken from Elliot’s Titus score… “Warner Bros. Pictures acknowledges and regrets that a number of the music cues for the score of “300″ were derived from music composed by Academy Award winning composer Elliot Goldenthal for the motion picture “Titus.” Warner Bros. Pictures has great respect for Elliot, our longtime collaborator, and is pleased to have amicably resolved this matter.”