After living with thwarted technolust since last June, I finally got myself an iPhone on Monday. Verdict: amazing, beautiful, world-historical. I quickly got tired of the generic wallpaper, so I poked around in my files and found a scan of a gorgeous music score by the avant garde American composer George Crumb, whom I posted about two years ago. I spent a few minutes turning the score into a 320x480 graphic, and now it greets me each time I pick up my phone. Even though it’s too small for the details to be visible, it still looks super-cool on the high-res iPhone screen. (I’ve uploaded a much bigger copy of this score so you can see it in all its glory; you can view it here.)

You can download this and use it on your own phone:

This is funny: Apple has adapted their classic John Hodgman commercials for the Japanese market. I discovered this through John’s blog:

At the end of the night on Wednesday, after drinking here with this person and this person and this person, among others, I worked my way to the 14th Street 1/2/3 stop to wait for the train to take me uptown. After peering south down the express track and seeing no evidence of an approaching train, I reached into my man purse for my iPod … and it promptly slipped from my fingers and down onto the tracks:

I wasn’t about to jump down to retrieve it without being absolutely sure I’d be able to get back up again very quickly. I’ve seen the occasional news stories about New Yorkers who’ve jumped down to the tracks to fetch a dropped cellphone only to be crushed by several thousand tons of high-speed metal. I don’t want the end of my life to serve as a cautionary tale about modern man’s dangerously misguided worship of technology. I just like listening to music on my iPod.

So I stood there for a few minutes pondering what to do. I decided I’d wait until right after the next express train left the station and then recruit a couple of strong men to spot me as I jumped down. I waited five minutes, then ten, before realizing that all express trains were apparently being routed to the local track. And then I spotted my opportunity: A very tall man, maybe six-foot-six, walked by with a burly friend. I approached them and sheepishly asked if they’d help me up from the tracks after I’d retrieved my iPod. But without any prompting from me, the tall guy simply jumped down to the tracks, grabbed the iPod, and hoisted himself back up. I thanked him, and as he and his friend started to walk away, I pulled out my wallet so I could give him a twenty or something. But he refused. Thanks, iPod Man, whoever you are.

Linotype has just released FontExplorer X, an iTunes-inspired font management program for “font sorting, font shopping and font discovery.” I haven’t had a chance to install it yet, but the concept looks great.

[via one of my favorite sites, Design Observer.]

Zachary Vex is a music engineer and electronics fetishist whose unique effects pedals and tiny amps have earned him the adulation of discerning music-gear fanatics around the world. His little company, the Minneapolis-based Z. Vex, is best known for its hand-assembled and hand-painted effects pedals, many of which are designed to produce beautifully sick low-fi sounds. A year or two ago Z. Vex expanded into the world of amplifiers with the Nano Head, the world’s smallest tube guitar amp, which fits in the palm of your hand. When coupled with a speaker cabinet, the Nano Head is capable of some excellent AC/DC-style crunch.

Now Z. Vex has announced its latest product: the iMP AMP, a stereo vacuum-tube power amplifier “intended for studio use, or with small sound sources such as iPods, mini-disc/cd players and laptops to power passive monitors. Perfect for your office or recording environment—you can put the iMP AMP right on your desk with bookshelf speakers and have a mini tube hi-fi setup for your iPod.”

Unless you have lots of disposable income, you probably won’t be buying an iMP AMP anytime soon: The retail price is $525. But I’m sure it sounds great, and the retro-futuristic design is beautiful. It almost looks like a discarded prop from the set of Terry Gilliam’s Brazil.

Here are some more details from the e-mail Zachary Vex sent out last week:

It’s a hi-fidelity stereo vacuum tube power amplifier designed to power passive speakers (like old-fashioned bookshelf speakers or studio monitors like Yamaha NS-10s or JBL L100s, or even high-end audiophile speakers.) It’s one watt per side, with RCA input connectors, barrier-strip output speaker terminals, and adjustable sensitivity so the iMP is compatible with any standard level, from +4dB (studio level) to -20dB (consumer gear like the iPod.) It’s slightly smaller than the Nano head because it doesn’t have a fan. […] Its frequency response is nothing short of amazing, at +0dB/-2dB from 10 Hz to 22kHz.

I’m really thrilled with this amp. I use it at my desk, where it takes up very little space and is plenty loud to fill my office with sound. I have another one driving my old JBLs at my lab bench, where we listen to all of the CDs we receive from players using our products! There’s one more in my living room with a Clearaudio Basic phono preamp feeding it, driving my Monitor Audio Golds. It makes my old Zep records sound just like 1971, man.

My favorite Z. Vex pedal is the Seek Wah, which functions like an array of sequencer-triggered wah-wah pedals. If you have no idea what that might mean, or you just want to see the Seek Wah in action, there is a video demo on the Z. Vex site, complete with charmingly geeky commentary from Zachary Vex himself. It’s an amazingly cool gadget.

At a joint press conference yesterday at 666 Broadway, Apple C.E.O. Steve Jobs and Harper’s editor Lewis H. Lapham announced a historic collaboration between their two companies: the iPod Harper’s Special Edition.

“This merging of two iconic designs is exactly the sort of innovation that has made Steve Jobs the most dynamic businessman of his generation,” said Lapham. “From the tasteful use of the Goudy Old Style typeface to the reproduction of my signature on the back, this gadget perfectly captures the essence of the Harper’s brand—and the sound quality is nothing short of Brahms-worthy. I am thrilled to lend the magazine’s name to this ingenious device.”

“The iPod Harper’s Special Edition is a perfect combination of form, function, literary merit, and antiplutocratic politics,” said Jobs. “The massive hard drive and crisp full-color screen are ideal for storing and displaying photographs, and each unit comes preloaded with high-resolution photos of every writer whose work has appeared in the magazine during Lewis’s long tenure: Thomas Frank, Barbara Ehrenreich, David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Franzen—even Christopher Hitchens, though you can easily delete that one if you want to.”

“Total storage space on the iPod Harper’s Special Edition, in gigabytes: 60,” said Lapham. “Amount each one will cost: $399.”

“Number of media legends who came together to create this exciting new Apple product: 2,” said Jobs. “Chance that literary-minded American consumers will find this new iPod impossible to resist: 1 in 1.”

At the moment, my iTunes collection contains 12,383 songs culled from 949 albums by 413 artists. I listen to perhaps 50 of these albums regularly, and maybe another 50 somewhat less regularly. There are hundreds of albums in my collection that I listen to rarely, if ever. Because the Main Library window in iTunes has a built-in bias toward songs, as opposed to albums, I’m always having to scroll past dozens or hundreds of tracks I rarely listen to but nevertheless want to keep in my permanent iTunes collection. For example, I own five Frank Sinatra albums from his classic mid-to-late-1950s period. I love those albums, but I don’t listen to them much—and yet I often have to scroll past two screens’ worth of them when I’m poking around iTunes to figure out what I want to listen to next. Likewise with the albums I do listen to a lot: Why should I always be forced to scroll through a screen and a half of Fountains of Wayne songs when I always have those tracks turned on and synced with my iPod? I’d rather just activate all my Fountains of Wayne songs and forget about them.

I could lessen the load on my Main Library window by visiting Doug’s AppleScripts for iTunes and plunking down $5 for iTunes Library Manager, a shareware program that allows you to maintain several separate iTunes libraries. There are lots of excellent free iTunes scripts at Doug’s iTunes site, including several that do batch edits of song titles to get rid of awkward capitalizations, extraneous song data, and the like. But I don’t want to have to chop my iTunes collection into parts to make it manageable. I want to keep everything in the same place. So iTunes Library Manager is not the answer to my dilemma.

Fortunately, there’s a simple and elegant solution to the problem of the unwieldy iTunes collection, if only Apple would implement it: iTunes should allow you to collapse an entire album or an artist’s entire oeuvre into one line in the Main Library window, and it should put a checkbox next to each line allowing you to activate or deactive the contents of that line with one click. What if you could control-click on any song in the Main Library and pull up a menu like this, which is a Photoshop-altered version of the actual control-click menu in iTunes 4.7:

[Continue reading "Drowning in mp3s"...]

Listening stations in record stores are a fine concept, but they have at least one major drawback: the communal headphones. Who wants to wear headphones that have just been clamped against the ears of any number of music fans, no matter how recently those people have showered or, I don’t know, de-liced themselves? The potential for icky gunk in music store cans is too disturbing to contemplate, and it’s the main reason I rarely sample music at places like Tower or Virgin, even though I often want to. The Internet has made it much easier to check out bands without exposing yourself to other people’s bodily secretions, but sometimes a few 30-second clips at the iTunes Music Store aren’t enough to go on. A lot of albums aren’t even offered there anyway. And finding and downloading pirated music with Limewire or Acquisition can be a hassle.

So here’s an idea: Record stores should retrofit their listening stations with 1/8" headphone jacks so owners of iPods and other portable music players can plug in their own headphones. A significant percentage of iPod owners probably carry their iPods with them wherever they go, and so do many owners of CD Walkmans and other portable players. I’m guessing that many of those people would be more likely to check out a few artists on a listening station if they could simply pull out their own earbuds and plug them in. We’re living in the era of the iPod; why not take advantage of that? I can’t be the only person grossed out by the notion of exposing my ears and head to the ears and heads of the great unwashed masses. The installation of headphone jacks would probably lead to an increase in the use of listening stations, and perhaps to an increase in album sales, however small. It would also—bonus!—have the side benefit of lessening the wear and tear on the stores’ own headphones, which are so cheaply made that a single Metallica song can be enough to break them (and then they sit there, a sad, tangled mess of plastic and rubber and metal, for days or weeks or months until the store finally gets around to fixing them).

Of course, being an American consumer means doing daily battle with the hobgoblins of bad hygiene. I bought the DVD of the original Manchurian Candidate (on sale for ten bucks!) at the Virgin Megastore in Times Square today, and the young cashier abruptly sneezed right before he reached into the cash register for my change. He did the polite thing and sneezed into his hands, but then, without so much as a quick wipe of his hands on his shirt, he pulled my coins out of the register and handed them to me. What’re you gonna do?