This is Volume 2 of the Awesome Mix series from Guardians of the Galaxy, again as a custom playlist for Apple Music. You can find Vol. 1 here and Vol. 3 here.
I don’t know what’s happening with the official Disney OSTs for Guardians of the Galaxy, but they keep on disappearing for me. Additionally, the three mix tapes were combined into one huge one. This led me to create my own playlist in Apple Music, linked directly under the title of this post and embedded below.
You can find Vol. 2 here and Vol. 3 here.
Brilliant.
We started watching Season 4 of the excellent Peaky Blinders [Netflix] the other day. The seasons opens with a dramatic and visually stunning prison scene, where the Shelby’s are on their way to the gallows. Shazam couldn’t figure out the accompanying music so I did a little digging.
If you’re not looking for Siri or don’t use HomeKit, there’s a vast array of speakers, which support AirPlay, that could can purchase, from the likes of Devialet, Bose, Bowers & Wilkins, Bang & Olufsen, and more. We’ll need to wait for AirPlay 2 support from competing products (the HomePod doesn’t have it either at the moment), but for people who don’t need a digital assistant and want more versatility (e.g. Spotify), there are many interesting options out there that range from 100 to many thousands of dollars.
I’m mentioning this because ‘everyone’ keeps on saying how the HomePod doesn’t really compete with Amazon’s Echo and Google’s Home, but they fail to include any comparisons or even acknowledge the existence of more traditional solutions to listening to music or audio.
Sometimes, once every few weeks, when night falls and the world goes to sleep, I love to put my headphones on, select a few great songs, and get transported to another dimension.
Tonight, one of those songs is Clubbed to Death.
Dave Wiskus:
You can slice it, package it, or spin it however you like, but the bare fact is that you’re making money off of songs you aren’t paying for. Worse, you’re doing it while perpetuating an air of exclusivity around the concept of making money. All while you’re pretending to be a friend to the little guy. There’s nothing artist-friendly about this approach.
I wrote about NepTunes two days ago — a simple Mac app which scrobbles Last.fm. Well, it was updated to version 1.2 and adds something that I was missing.
I used to have an app named CoverSutra running on my desktop. Not only did it display iTunes artwork in a visually pleasing way, but it also updated my Last.fm account with what I was listening to in iTunes. Unfortunately, Sophie Teutschler stopped development, and found a job at Apple. CoverSutra no longer works properly under OS X El Capitan, and while it ‘kinda works’ with iTunes, it doesn’t support Apple Music at all.
Polish developer Adam Różyński has the answer to my problems. His NepTunes is a simple app1 which lives in the OS X menu bar. All it does is report back to our Last.fm account2, correctly scrobbling the music we are listening to. Although it is not as nice graphically3 as CoverSutra, it gets the job done. The preferences panel also allows the app to integrate with iTunes. This allows to ‘star’ songs with ‘hearts’ on both Apple Music and Last.fm with one keyboard shortcut (which can be customised).
Simple, but it gets the job done. That’s usually enough for me.
Christopher Hooton:
The Martin Guitar Museum has vowed never to loan guitars to movies ever again, after a six-string from the 1870s was smashed to pieces on the set of The Hateful Eight.
I imagined Jim Dalrymple and Merlin Mann shedding a tear upon reading this.
The link in the title will lead you to my Star Wars playlist. It has all the original soundtracks from all the episodes (I through VII) in the proper order, for a total of 142 songs (11 hours and 14 minutes of music). You will need an Apple Music subscription to listen to this.
Brendan Klinkenberg:
iTunes Radio, Apple’s Pandora-style internet radio service, is going behind the $10 per month Apple Music paywall on January 29th.
“We are making Beats 1 the premier free broadcast from Apple and phasing out the ad-supported stations at the end of January,” an Apple spokesperson told BuzzFeed News. “Additionally, with an Apple Music membership, listeners can access dozens of radio stations curated by our team of music experts, covering a range of genres, commercial-free with unlimited skips. The free three-month trial of Apple Music includes radio.”
Radiohead:
Last year we were asked to write a theme tune for the Bond movie Spectre.
Yes we were. It didn’t work out, but became something of our own, which we love very much.
As the year closes we thought you might like to hear it.
Merry Christmas. May the force be with you.
via @karolpaciorek
Unfortunately, it’s not available on Apple Music or any other streaming platform. Not exactly pleased with that, but I’ll buy it anyway.