So while watching the Simpsons it was the episode of the Stonecutters. At the end they make the comment about “Only two members of this club have special rings” then Bart and Lisa blow these odd whistling rings. This sprang the question of playing a kazoo with farts. So off went a mass text that read.

Wanted: proof that the kazoo can be played with the ass. Anyone know?

Off to 20 people… and because I’m a klutz with my thumbs, it sent twice. Not to worried about it since messages do that sometimes anyhow. Well here’s the answers that I got back.

Try it
Lol… No i dnt knw bt thtd b funny as hel 2 c
I would think a good rip will get you a b flat
LOL OMG hun ur 2 funny. i love ya.
Sorry don’t know anyone that can do that. U gonna try it and let us all know?
How about someone who can kick their own elbow (this person meant lick)
The issue is that the part you blow through is the large side. And you have to hum, not blow.
I don’t have a kazoo but am willing to try.
Duh. You did
*****s pretty good at it (name redacted)
Dnt hav any! hehe
No i dont.
No
No idea

Thankfully I seem to know screwed up people that will amuse me.

Time and time again I get asked about mp3s and how to deal with them. This might have something to do with having a sizable mp3 collection and the fact that I keep it very well maintained and clean. What will happen typically is someone will get a new mp3 player, and not surprisingly want to add music to it. Now I love mp3 players, I really do. I just hate how they deal with media most of the time. For me it has always made sense to organize my mp3s as follows.

\Artist\Cd\Track-Title.mp3 -or-
\Artist\Cd\Track-Artist-Title.mp3

Thats how they’ve always lived on my hard drives, it makes using just about any media application a snap. I can quickly and easily locate and load a cd. Now when it comes to things like iTunes, Windows Media Player, and the newer Winamp you get these nice library functions. This can make for a mess if your mp3s are not organized or were not ripped properly. You see these application rely on the ID3 tag to get info about the file, and (possibly) the file name to some extent. Or course when you throw things on your mp3 player, they like to use the ID3 tag.

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I’ve been asked several times in the last week how to do something that really should be common for people to do. Simply shift the music from a CD to your computer, for free, with no added trouble or mess. Of course we’re going to use some thing free. We’re going to use CDex a nice little app that I’ve used for years. Now back then… hrmm been a good while. You had to add the mp3 encoder too. You’d have to get a copy of LAME and that would be your encoder. LAME is also free, it has been since 2000 when it was compiled cleanly. Kinda nice really.

At that time there was a community driven project known as CDDB. It has sense been bought out and is now Gracenote, but does the same thing. Works great, you hit a button and the whole CD is named and ready to go. Now enough with the history lesson and time to explain how to do it and for that you click to read more.

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It’s sad to think that a fair amount of the influences on my musical tastes come from a handful of people. But it’s a bit scary to think that two very distinct people had a HUGE influence on how digital music took off and worked. One of them has been on the cover of WIRED magazine, yet failed to make a recent list. I’m not sure the other has ever got much of a mention in WIRED.

Ask yourself, where would your mp3’s be without Shawn Fanning. They’d be on someone else’s computer and you’d never had accessed them. This is the guy that originally wrote Napster. Back before it was a pay service. This was the application that brought mp3 sharing to the masses. Suddenly what had been done over other channels was easy enough for the average person to access it and to find the music they wanted. It worked, and it worked so well that the law suits came and down it went. But he was small potatoes compared to the other guy, of course I’m talking about Justin Frankel.

What did this guy do? Very simple, he made Winamp, and later with someone else developed SHOUTcast for streaming music. After all what good are mp3’s if you don’t have a robust player to play them? Eventually he was bought out by the cooperate drones and hired by AOL. It was there that he wrote Gnutella, a step forward in P2P. I’m going to guess you’ve not paid a large amount of attention to the protocols that are used by your applications, but if you’ve ever used Limewire, Bearshare, or iMesh (to name a few). You have used his design.

Maybe I’m wrong. But if it had not been for these two guys, mp3s and file sharing would probably have never taken off like they did. At the same time, had napster never been forced to filter mp3’s someone may not have made a wrapper for it. They may not have decided to develop a new method. Never know. But one thing I do know, had these two not done what they did Apple wouldn’t have a group of people so addicted to digital media that they’ll buy over priced mp3 players.

My reply to TJ’s Rock Music Owes…