Floozy Speak!

At last... no more hassle finding music with Kazaa.. i've kicked it to the curb! Why? Well let's think about this, where do I find out about new music? Mostly off streaming internet radio stations like SomaFM and most recently DSR..yadda dadda which after a few minutes playing you can always find me writing down about song names within just minutes of it running, the DRS station is just that good. I have post-it after post-it of get this song, and that song etc. Typically the success ratio I have for finding that music in Kazaa is less than say, 30%. So most of my time is wasted, putting the info in Kazaa and continually hitting the "find more" "find again" "find godamnit" buttons... and then when I do get a bead on a track, I have to watch Kazaa like a hawk to make sure it actually downloads the track or else it will sit in infinite "qued, or searching" mode.

No more will I do such downloading, and its not to please to RIAA, its because of Rip Cast. I thought about this last night after another struggle to find many of the DSR tracks I've been looking for. I know they are often rare, not easy finds on Kazaa, most of my collection is like that, I get used to that part. But then I thought about it.. what about those apps that can record streaming radio as it comes in? what about that?

Ok factor in a few things, my range of quality has never equalled the sound itself. I'd rather have a distored semi low quality copy of a song then to never have the song. I'm a simple creature, I need the sound. 128k streams are fine, 80k, not my favorite but i'll take it. If it gets me the sound I wanna hear and I cant tell the difference, gimme.

So in comes Rip Cast. After a bit of searching I find Rip Cast the popular favorite amongst the few out there doing what I wanna do. Heck it can even suck down 8 streams at once. All I wanted was one. So I leave it on last night, listening and cranking away to DRS radio.. after work today I checked out the directory to see how it did. I expected the usual, it may of crashed and I got a few tracks.. I got 742MB worth. LOL Hey now thats awesome! And its not just one huge file, it's smart, it finds the breaks and clips, name, id tags and all yer mp3's.. thats sweet people!

Sure enough those hard to find tracks that Kazaa drove me crazy about came back around and Rip Cast snagged them for me. After seeing the result I registered Rip Cast for a mere 14 bucks. Seemed worth it, considering the time it just saved me in finding new sounds. Music is like water to me, I need it, I always need it. Especially a diverse collection of tunes, techno to drum and bass to blues to acid jazz to classical, I want it all.

I have to say, while writing this I'm sucking down two streams, Groove Salad and DRS yadda yadda.. and its great!! I'll keep you posted on how it goes.

On another news front, Quicktime Player will nag me no more. I'm Pro baby.

Discreet Logic, an empire of savy expensive highly capable post production apps for "the" video house these days, creates some of the greatest programs out there. Combustion is a killer after effects type application, smoke, fire, flame, all incredible.. cleaner.. WTF happened there?!? Ok so we get Cleaner for work, the new super duper, render in the background, multiple batch application that does it all, you want yer raw dv file converted for quicktime, windows media, real player, or pocketpc playback? you need 16x9, with a few dozen streaming resolutions? hordes of options... yet the interface on this app is 1.0 amiga like... now some of you may like the amiga, i do, but this interface is from hell. And for $695 I expected better. Regardless i've endured the looks of it and its alien terminology and have succeeded in getting what i want out of it. Yet, its latest bug, I consider it a bug, is that its so network friendly it even knows if its existing somewhere else in the room on another pc. And of course, thats not nice, bah!!! So the once place i really needed it to work, it doesn't. There's always a work around but I was really ticked at not having a nice simple way to convert files regardless if im on my tablet, one of the dells, my avid box, the email machine, let alone some else needed to do something, I want applications that work in my business as a business, on all my boxes.. i paid the price, now let me play. Discreet wants another fee just to take it to another box?? I believe the term is FUK THAT!

In midst of my anger I happened to come across quicktime movie to play back.. and that nagging Upgrade to Pro sprung up on me. Fine I said, I went to apple and read the skinny on Quicktime Pro, not bad.. and its only $40, I'll give it a whirl. Ya know what... this little up is unrestricted and does nicely to a wide range of formats, granted only quicktime, but mpeg4.. and a large assortment of files are there, ready to compress and go baby go. The more I play with quicktime pro the more I like it.

Very soon you'll see something magical..