About 2 weeks ago I purchased Kaskade - Strobelight Seduction from the Amazon MP3 store. Its been a really off year for downtempo dance music. The Aromabar and Supreme Beings of Leisure albums are way too downtempo. This Kaskade album is perfect though.

Also for a nostalgic good time take a listen to the Was Not Was - Boo! album. Its a nice jazzy rock album. There are some great videos up on YouTube from live shows you can check out. With all the 80’s bands putting out new releases - most of which are a miss - these guys bring it back to basics and it works really well.

The new Moby is really good too. I tend to shy away from Moby albums because, while they may have a “theme”, the music is so varied that usually what you want are the choice singles because they come with remixes. This album is all really good though.

Amazon has come out with an update for their Linux downloader.

Ze file: amazonmp3-1.0-3-i686.pkg.tar.gz

Use pacman -U file if you previously installed the other version, pacman -A file if this is your first one.

The Backstory:

I am a huge fan of the Amazon MP3 store. In order to buy complete albums in one go, however, you need to have their Amazon MP3 Downloader application. When they launched the MP3 store they only had Mac and Windows versions of the client.

Shortly after they announced a linux version and I was overjoyed. Well, the linux version has launched and is only officially available for certain versions of certain distributions: Suse 10.3, Debian 4, Fedora 8, and Ubuntu 7.10. Obviously they don’t get the whole linux thing.

After downloading and digging into the different packages I found that really the only issue is that the application uses some Boost libraries. Since different distributions have different versions of the boost libraries as a standard package, and different naming conventions for the libraries on top of that, they need to distribute them specifically for the platforms.

Arch and Ubuntu are currently on the same rev of Boost (1.34.1) but they name the libraries differently. A few symlinks however and the Amazon mp3 application runs just fine. So I whipped up an Arch pacman package for it.

The file:

Right-click, save as:

amazonmp3-1.0-3-i686.pkg.tar.gz

then pacman -A amazonmp3-1.0-3-i686.pkg.tar.gz as root or sudo it.

It will automatically grab Boost and other dependencies as needed.

Updated 3-10-2008 to version 1.0.3

Earlier this year I celebrated my 10 year anniversary with my lovely wife, Jonna.

Groove Armada is also celebrating their 10 year, releasing a new album covering the last decade. Some snippets below courtesy of Columbia Records aka “Sony BMG”:

All I can say is that these are good clips but it also demonstrates how Sony doesn’t get it. Play the whole song, not just what you think the hooks are. And of course these are biased to their latest stuff. The “At the River” clip is really irritating to me because I love that song. Its what got me into Groove Armada in the first place many years ago, and its totally lacking the reason - the vocals. Even sampled, the haunting vocals represent the classic influences that this band draws from and that’s core to the draw.

I know I am in the minority here but I like Underworld’s Ring Road from the latest album.

The first time I heard it, as the song started up I thought “this song is going to be one that hit the skip button for”. The cadence of the vocals was off of the beat. But about a minute into the song, the beat fills in and the cadence matches up - almost like it was intentional and the cadence was matching up with a beat that wasn’t there yet.

The song comes together and is fun. Its one of my favorites from the new album.

Link to album