The Beatles are releasing the LOVE album both as a stereo CD and a 5.1 mix on Audio DVD. These mixes are amazing… You can see the press release on The Beatles web site. The album will be sold as a CD or a special edition containing the CD and DVD versions of the music. The track list contains nearly all the pieces created for the Cirque du Soliel show at the Mirage in Las Vegas. It even includes the music from the transition moments in the show, and the oft mentioned mash-up of Within You Without You/Tomorrow Never Knows.

While the album is set to be released on November 20th in the states, the Telegraph has a comprehensive review of the album on their site.

“The music is stunning. I think the most amazing thing about it is that you can pull it apart and all the elements carry with it the essence of the entire song,” said Olivia Harrison.

The track list is as follows: (from The Beatles News Letter)

1. Because
2. Get Back
3. Glass Onion
4. Eleanor Rigby/Julia (Transition)
5. I Am The Walrus
6. I Want To Hold Your Hand
7. Drive My Car/The Word/What You’re Doing
8. Gnik Nus
9. Something/Blue Jay Way (Transition)
10. Being For The Benefit of Mr. Kite!/I Want You (She’s So Heavy)/Helter Skelter
11. Help!
12. Blackbird/Yesterday
13. Strawberry Fields Forever
14. Within You Without You/Tomorrow Never Knows
15. Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds
16. Octopus’s Garden
17. Lady Madonna
18. Here Comes The Sun
The Inner Light (Transition)
19. Come Together/Dear Prudence/Cry Baby Cry (Transition)
20. Revolution
21. Back In The U.S.S.R.
22. While My Guitar Gently Weeps
23. A Day In The Life
24. Hey Jude
25. Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (Reprise)
26. All You Need Is Love

Amazon is taking pre-orders for this historic album:
Love (Special Edition CD + Audio DVD)

LAS VEGAS, July 3 PRNewswire — Cirque du Soleil, Apple Corps Ltd. and The Mirage hosted a gala premiere for LOVE with more than 4000 guests invited to an exclusive party after the performance to celebrate LOVE at The Mirage.
The reviews have been good so far. Take at look at these:

Some Multimedia content, including Red Carpet footage and B-Roll can be found at PR News Wire.

So I’m looking for a portable RAID array… After a little searching it seems that there are a lot of choices, but, as usual, my requirements severely limit the playing field.

Here’s what I want:

• 1. Portable, or somewhat portable.
• 2. 4 drives – would like 5
• 3. SATA interface for the drives.
• 4. Firewire interface for the device to the computer
• 5. Able to do Hardware RAID level 5.
• 6. Hot swappable drives.

It’s a tall order. Here’s what I found.

First, it seems that finding a unit with SATA drive interfaces and hardware RAID just doesn’t exist, which is unfortunate. So, IDE interfaces all around.

Micronet Platinum RAID: FireWire800 + USB 2.0 – Looks to be a solid unit. Built on the ARC-5010 (IDE-to-IDE Subsystem) by Areca, then packaged nicely in a chassis that looks to be a Shuttle XPC from a couple of years ago. This unit has all of the above listed items. There is also the NitroAV VANGUARD V from Firewire Direct. The specs look remarkably close to the Micronet unit. This one comes packaged in a brushed aluminum chassis and has the drives mounted horizontally as opposed to the Micronet which mounts them vertically.

LAcie has the “Biggest” series of RAID enclosures. Their wares sport 4-bay arrangements ranging from RAID 1 to 5. Perhaps the most recognized name on the list, these devices look solid as well, and carry a 2 year warranty in the US.

You may be able to find the Micronet on Amazon… it seems to come and go.
MicroNet PR1000U2F 1.0 TB Platinum RAID USB 2.0, FireWire 800
LaCie 1TB Biggest F800 with FW800 and USB2.0

There is a cool new class of digital media players out there that really appeals to me. I have 2 ReplayTV’s and I love them. They are networked with each other and I love the freedom of having my TV in a flexible digital format. I have always wanted to take it with me without the hassle of carrying a laptop, and all the accoutrement that goes with getting picture on a TV screen. Several companies now have digital media players that function like portable (playback only) Tivos, and look a lot like an external USB hard drive.

There is the Mediagate MG-25 Multimedia Jukebox, a portable MPEG-4 player, complete with IR remote control. There is a nice review and lots of pictures on Akihabara. This device supports a multitude of video and audio formats, including MPEG 1,2 and 4, Divx, MP3, Ogg, WMA, jpeg. It also has the ability to play back video in VOB containers, the format of choice for DVD’s. This unit comes without a hard drive installed.

Iomega has a device called the Screenplay Multimedia Drive. Just like the Mediagate, it is also capable of playing many popular formats. While I found one review of the ScreenPlay that states that it can read VOB containers, the information on the Iomega site doesn’t mention it. The ScreenPlay comes with a 60Gb hard drive.

UniBrain has the iZak Portable Mediacenter. Mostly the same feature set as the others, but also has the ability to play DVD’s in ISO format, and WAV files. It comes in 40, 80 and 100Gb versions. As the CNet review says, this one is more expensive, and has that annoying “i” in the name, but still a good performer.

Here’s a neat gadget for those of you looking for an easy way to transfer your vinyl to a digital format. Ion now has a turntable with a USB interface called the iTTUSB. (It’s cooler if it starts with a lower case “i”) There are a multitude of titles available on vinyl. Some DJ’s swear by it, and often many of the best tracks are instant sellouts. Here in Vegas, I have had the pleasure of meeting several very good DJ’s, and they typically carry a wide range of media. From milk crates full of vinyl to cd’s and computers to playback, mix, and organize their media.

I’m not really into the club scene, but there have been some really cool products for this market segment in the past couple of years. Many still border on pro-sumer and offer are not a robust as pro gear, but the innovation of the product evolution for a market that is changing very rapidly is impressive.

Take the Scratch Box by Serato (and distributed by Rane) I saw this a couple of years ago at LDI. I don’t personally have any need for it, but I gotta say it it’s a great deal of fun, and in the hands of the right DJ presents a host of possibilities. Scratch Live lets one use turntables (or CD turntables) to control music playback from a PC.

The Scratch LIVE interface connects almost any computer to an ordinary pair of turntables or CD players, and the software faithfully tracks every subtle movement of the stylus on the included control records. The same movement is then instantly applied to any digital audio file in the user’s collection producing a sound and feel that is indistinguishable from vinyl.

If you pick up the needle and drop it the digital file follows. Grabbing the platter and stopping it applies the physics of the motion to the digital file. Moving the needle on the control records produces the same function through the digital file. It’s fun, and allows vinyl like control over digital files.

How about the Pioneer DVJ-X1. Allows control of DVD video in the same manner as a CD turntable. Scratch, rewind, fast-forward, sample, loop, mix digital video and audio. Yet another product that held my attention for longer than it should have.

The Daytime Emmys will announce a new award for video aired on computers, cellphones and video iPods. The New York Times reports:

The National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, best known for handing out the Daytime Emmy Awards, is expected to announce on Tuesday that it has created an award category to recognize original video content for computers, cellphones and other hand-held devices, like the video iPod and PlayStation Portable.

The new award will first be presented during the academy’s Sports Emmys presentation, and ultimately be added as a category for other Emmy presentations as well. The category will not be included in the prime-time Emmy Awards.

Why might I find this interesting? It’s great to see a professional orginazation keeping up with technology, and realizing that new technology leads to new art forms that are equally worthy of award. The Broadway Theatre League still doesn’t recognize sound design as a design element, and thereby sound is not worthy of award. That would be to progressive….

I have written about I, Cringely before. I really like what he has to say about technology, and he’s entertaining to read as well. A few months ago I read something about his efforts to start build a show based around his musings about technology, computers, and opinion. It has finally some to fruition. NerdTV went live yesterday. What is NerdTV?

NerdTV is essentially Charlie Rose for geeks – a one-hour interview show with a single guest from the world of technology.

His first guest is Andy Hertzfeld, who was one of the original Macintosh systems programmers, and now a big proponent of Open Source Software. Upcoming guests include, PayPal co-founder Max Levchin, Apple Computer co-founder Steve Wozniak, Internet publisher Tim O’Reilly, and TCP/IP inventor Bob Kahn. As well as a host of others.

Andy also has a great web site, Folklore.org, that focuses on stories from the original Macintosh development team. It too is a great read. Andy has also just released a book of stories from Folklore called Revolution in The Valley.

Other nerdy aspects of the show include the fact that it is distributed on the internet in a multitude of formats, from mp4 video and audio formats for podcast including ogg vorbis, aac, mp3 and it’s also available as a straight up transcript.

It’s nerdy, and I found it very entertaining.

I, Cringely . NerdTV | PBS

Technorati Tags: Media, Nerd, Computers, PBS

From “For Your Entertainment”: The author, and fellow audio engineer, John Sibley, is my hero. In the midst of a cross country trip, returning to Vegas from a job in Detroit, decided to point his car to the south, and go to Houston instead, to assist the Red Cross with their efforts to help the hurricane victims.

I’m proud to know you…

You can read his account in his Blog:
For Your Entertainment: A Brief Departure From The Funny

I was watching some episodes of Sports Night tonight, and a line stood out to me, again, so I thought I’d post it. It’s worth mentioning.

“If you’re dumb surround yourself with smart people, and if your smart, surround yourself with smart people who disagree with you”

We have to move forward, we have to think about what we’re doing. The notion is not new…

As an aside, Aaron Sorkin is great, I recommend picking up some of his writing, in the form of his television shows and movies.

Aaron Sorkin media…

A couple of years ago when Stephen St. Croix wrote about iTMS in his column in Mix Magazine, The Fast Lane, he expounded on how cool it was to use this new distribution method. It offers those of us who don’t like to wait the opportunity to get a song or and album, NOW. While the lossy encoding is a drawback for pro audio applications, the quality is acceptable (for the most part) for casual listening.

What do you get for your dollar? Compressed, DRM restricted, AAC encoded computer file. You can listen to the song on your iPod or in iTunes, but only one iPod and one copy of iTunes. (although there may be more possibilities, see the ml_iPod post) One gets to see a small jpg of the album art, but not much in the way of liner notes. Let’s assume there are 12 songs on an album. iTMS generally charges $.99 per song or $9.99 for an entire album, which is a small savings if you want the whole album. One selling point is that you don’t have to buy the whole album. You can get just the songs you want, and you can get them now, but you pay a premium for this feature.

That’s great, but what about other things that can add value to the digital music experience. While low bit rate files may be ok for listening by the computer, what if I want higher bit rate versions or CD bit rates for listening on the stereo in the living room. Or even higher bit rate and word length versions for those who care. What about the liner notes, and high quality album art. How about going the extra mile that the DVD has gone, and offer the musical equivalent of “deleted scenes” or the “bloopers reel.” $.99 seem like a lot of money for restricted low bit rate, non-transferable tunes.

Perhaps Nine Inch Nails has hit on something….They are offering the song “Only” for download, as a ProTools session. This is cool. For the audio geek, professional engineer or the basement engineer, you can take their tracks and mix it yourself. Now that’s a Value Added concept. While the “Mix Your Own” concept might be more than most people want, it demonstrates an important concept in digital music distribution, the ability to offer a much wider range of “products” to a wide range of customers. It feels empowering to me. I tend to purchase CD’s. It puts the decision in my hands as to how I want to deal with the music. I can have it any way I want it, from the CD to 48kbps MP3 or anything in between. Being able to download an entire ProTools session of a piece expands the possibilities even further.

Nice work….

ProSoundNews Online Daily – Digidesign & NIN Offer Free Pro Tools Session Download of “Only”