I made some misguided decision that I wasn’t going to use this space to review things. But clearly I’ve enjoyed writing about the things I love (or the case of Peter Travers, hate) so I might as well get around to doing a post about my single favorite gadget. I bought this sweet little drop of awesome way back in September and the intervening months have been enough to convince me that Imade the right decision. Enough so to enforce my opinions in blog form at least.

What you need to know about the Zune HD as far as statistics and specifications are concerned can be found on the Zune website. I’ve got the 32GB model, because the 64GB wasn’t out at the time and they don’t make 128GB. Thoughts follow:

By means of background, I’ll have you know that I once owned this thing:

The Diamond Rio PMP300: It’s the “fake Holy Grail from Last Crusade
that killed a guy” of MP3 players.

I had this bad boy back in the sixth grade (1999 for those unfamiliar with my biography). It could fit ten songs, provided they all held their breath and behaved themselves in the back seat. The display only told you the song number. It connected to the computer via a parallel port. It was bigger than an iPod. I loved it to death.

I went on to own an iRiver, a Rio Volt MP3CD player, a Creative Zen Touch, and finally an iPod (Video, maybe?). So I’ve seen the lows and supposed highs of the portable media player market. I also have a music collection that, as of this writing, is just about to hit 120GB, a surprisingly large portion of which came from legitimate sources.

So after all that, I can say unequivocally that the Zune HD is the best music player I’ve ever used.

Now I stress “music player” because while the Zune HD also does video, pictures, radio, podcasts, internet and apps, 95 percent of my usage is music and music is what it does best. The reason it does music best is because it has the Zune Pass, and that’s the sort of “Game, Bitches!” feature that Microsoft should be pushing front and center of any marketing campaign involving the entire range of Zune products. Because it isn’t, let me explain:

For $15 a month, I get unlimited music.

Before I bought it my inner naysayer assumed that I would never be able to find the music I wanted (Metal) on the service. I told myself that I’d return it and buy an iPod Touch the next day if they didn’t have any good metal available. They did, so I didn’t.

(A shortlist of bands I’ve found and fallen in love with since September: Between the Buried and Me, Pig Destroyer, Arsis, Keelhaul, Nachtmystium, Katatonia, the aforementioned/pictured Bison B.C., Woe of Tyrants, and whatever else Decibel features each month.)

I say this not to label it as a satanic hellforge from which spews forth the rumblings of the dark one unto this mortal plane (feel free to use that though Microsoft!), but to illuminate that if I could find all the metal I wanted on there, imagine how much of whatever lame bullshit you listen to that you can find. That $15 also gets you 10 downloads that you can keep forever each month. I assume that this is how the Zune Pass has always worked but again, Microsoft never pushed the Zune strongly enough as an infinite music box from the get go, relying instead on a brown finish that they’ll never live down and a “Hey guys, us too!” social feature.

Part of that could also be that until the Zune HD, it wasn’t an “infinite music box.” Because until the HD came out, you could not, in fact, download infinite music from the box. And that’s called a transition, which I’ll use to brings us to the Wi-Fi.

With Wi-Fi, you can connect to a network and search through the marketplace from the player.  Which means you don’t need to sync the player to add music. Which means I’ll be able to download Nachtmystium’s new album Addicts: Black Meddle Part 2 (June 8th) and listen to it while taking a shit. Technology rules.

In addition, whenever you download any music, it automatically pulls in artist photos that show up as backgrounds, as well as a biography (usually from allmusic.com), both of which you can view offline. That sounds lamer than it actually is, but trust me that it does improve the overall experience.

You can also download apps straight to the player. And for those of you who couldn’t see the dismissive wanking motion I was making as I typed that, let me explain: The Zune apps feature is a joke. I don’t even want to count, but I think there’s 12. Twelve Apps. That’s more than the number of wins Jamarcus Russell got as a starter in Oakland, it’s also less than the number of donuts he ate in the time it took me to come up with this joke.

There are a couple of apps worth having. Audiosurf Tilt is a fun one that generates a tilt-sensitive game that’s a cross between Rainbow Road and Guitar Hero out of any song (which is especially fun with Napalm Death’s “You Suffer.”) There’s also a bowling game, and Project Gotham Ferrari. And a calculator that does standard and scientific modes! (Seriously, my forearm is killing me.) The Twitter, Facebook and Weather apps are ok if you have wi-fi available, but useless without.

Oddly, while you can download apps and music straight to the player, you can’t download podcasts or videos. I can kind of understand the video, because you actually have to pay for those. But the podcasts I don’t understand. There is sort of a workaround, in that you can wirelessly sync the player with your computer over wi-fi (not bluetooth), but you have to be on the same network to do it. So if you were, say, at work or on vacation you wouldn’t be able to do it.

And last of the media components is that most cutting-edge of technologies, Radio! Yes, Radio: You too can hear voices beamed over the airwaves without any wires. Boy that President Roosevelt sure is swell, isn’t he? But seriously, it does pick up HD radio stations, which means you can double or triple the sadness of a dying medium on a single spectrum. And since Boston has two NPR news stations now, I can get a double dose of liberal entitlement on a daily basis (the two phrases I hate myself most for ever saying are 1.) “I heard a story on NPR this morning about …”  and 2.) “There was an article in the New Yorker about …”).

There’s also an Internet browser, and it does what it does. Occasionally I’ll use it to look up album release dates.

But enough with all that, let’s talk software, and show you all what you really came here to see: Hardware nudity!

First up, this is the homescreen. It really doesn’t come across in the pictures how amazing the OLED screen is. The blacks are blacker than the blackest blacks you’ve ever seen on a device, and the colors come across brilliantly. The font for all of the options is a generous enough that you can read it clearly and tap on the option you want cleanly.

The Homescreen.

Next, one of my favorite features is the music navigation screen. When you go into the music screen you get a list of artists, and you can tap on the heading letters to get to this screen. Tap on any of these letters, and go to that section. It’s so stupidly simple that it’s brilliant, and it works better than the usual “scroll through the letters” functionality of other players.

I don’t know why, but I love the look of this navigation system.

I showed this same screen back at the top, but this version gives you a better sense of the size of the player in reference to my ape mitts.

The “currently playing” screen.

You can see two of the hardware buttons in this one. On the face of the player is the Home button, which takes you back to the homescreen that I showed earlier. On the left side, near my thumb, is the media button, which brings up the screen showed here. This is where you can change the volume, or skip forward/back, and play/pause. I think it’d be nice to have a hardware volume rocker at least, but this isn’t bad at all. (There’s also a power button up top.)

On-screen volume and playback controls.

Another shot of the “Now Playing” screen, this time with the player looking a little more modest in a DLO Action Jacket silicone case. I was a little bothered that the 32GB player only came in silver (unless you want to custom order it) but this renders the point moot. I also picked up a screen protector, as much to improve traction as to protect the screen.

Action Jacket silicone cover.

And modesty is out the window with this shot of the player’s naked backside. You can see the Zune insignia, along with the industrial-looking screws. You can’t see it too well, but the back is all brushed aluminum.

The backside, with Zune insignia.

And finally is a shot of the player in the desktop dock. They do make a dock that will let you play 720p video through a TV, but this is the basic one that just hooks up to my stereo. It also charges the player.

The Dock.

So I think I’ve covered this thing as well as I can for what I use it for. I’d love to talk more about the video playback, but I don’t watch videos on it (I need the space for music). I’ve also said nothing about the social feature, but that’s already more than I want to say about it. Point being: For me it’s perfect. If you’re looking for an amazing music player with some other extra features, it’ll be perfect for you too. If apps are more important, get an iPod Touch. I hate to make it sound that simple, but it really is.

Programming Note: Yes, the previous post wound up being a little too ambitious. I do have a few more gadgets that I’ll be writing about, and we’ll see where it goes from there.

Image via Metalsucks.net

So I took  a couple days off there, but I’m back with the cover art for the upcoming Skeletonwitch Album “Breathing the Fire,” which showed up on MetalSucks the other day. I’d lay more praise upon the band, but I think I already did that plenty a few months back. Besides, I think those guys already summed it up well enough for me.

Which brings me to my next point. I’ve been making that whole Google migration over the last couple of weeks, and I’m pretty damn impressed with all of it so far. In fact, I was completely blown away when I discovered Google Apps. It completely changed my whole concept of what Google has been doing, and frankly, I  think they’re on the right path.

The main idea is to use things like GMail and Google Docs for the Apps concept (basically it’s a way to load these online applications as if they were programs on the hard drive, not online), but Chrome lets you make an App out of anything. For instance, I’ve got the WordPress Dashboard saved to my desktop as an App, so I can launch right into that and post updates any time I want (not that I use it that often, but still).

The other App that I’m big on now is the music player from Lala.com, which is pretty much the greatest site ever with the worst name ever. Basically, my music is almost all on the internet now, so I can listen wherever I want  (without needing the external hard drive to carry all 103 gigabytes). I highly recommend checking it out. I’m basically off of iTunes now, thanks to this. You can even buy web only songs for 10 cents each (I swear I don’t work for them).

Obviously, this isn’t actually that huge. I mean, essentially, it’s just a shortcut. But for some reason, looking at things this way makes so much more sense to me. Like I said, it’s about changing the way I use the internet.

Alright, this has been a pretty scatterbrained post so far. Thanks for bearing with me, but I think I’m just going to close it off here.

Aside from GMail, this is really my first foray into Google’s non-search features. I’ve alway been a little leery of their online based apps, though I honestly couldn’t tell you why. Things I save online are probably safer than on my 4-year-old laptop.

But I’m right in the process of downloading and setting up a lot more google-based software. I’m starting to realize that I might as well get onboard with what everyone else has already started doing.

There are two big reasons for this:

For one, I’m looking for a new computer. I might end up just getting a netbook, in which case I’ll need to rely more on online software and applications for this kind of stuff. Even if I don’t go the mini route, I’d still like to be up to date on what kind of technology is available before I start fresh on a new computer. It might help eliminate some of the unneccesary software that I usually end up downloading or installing.

The other big reason is my new job. We’re working on the fall issue now, and I’ve been fact checking articles that deal with things like “cloud computing” and other social media aspects. Basically, it got me realizing that, for as much as I profess to enjoy technology, I’m pretty much a year or two behind.

So my hope is that, bolstered by the Harvard money I’m going to be making, I can start catching back up with the rest of society on the hardware side. In the meantime I’ll work on picking up the pace with software.

Stay tuned…

I’ve been trying to avoid writing straight up reviews with this site. I generally don’t read them, because I think it’s a boring format, and most of the time they just come down to a number/letter/star rating with some weak justification to explain it, so why bother writing them? However, the lack of interesting things happening in my own life has consistently pushed me towards writing about art/media kinds of issues. So I’ve been trying to offer criticism, rather than just reviewing because I like to write about what the I think about a subject, not just whether or not it’s any good (this is also a minor semantic debate, and it makes me sound like an ass, so consider yourself lucky that you don’t lay awake thinking about these things at night). I think that all art can and should be judged by itself. It’s kind of like that thing about the tree falling in the forest, except I’m more curious about why the tree fell than what it sounded like.

Which, somehow, brings me to Skeletonwitch and their album Beyond the Permafrost. I’m just going to throw that whole last paragraph out and tell you that this band rules. Their name rules. That album art up there rules. If that doesn’t make you want to listen to this band then I’m afraid you’re beyond the kind of help I can give. There’s really not anything I can say that will give you a better idea of what the band sounds like than you could get just by going to their myspace and listening yourself. However, in the interest of writing something interesting, I’ll make an attempt at getting in depth after the jump.

If there was ever a genre of music that needed to be measured solely by its own merits, metal is it. If you compare it to just about any other kind of music, metal’s basically a joke. It tends to come across as a bunch of macho-posturing, with everyone trying to be louder, faster and heavier than everything that came before it. It probably doesn’t help that the only metal that ever gets popular is inevitably the worst representation of the genre (with the possible exception of Guns ‘N’ Roses’ Appetite for Destruction and Metallica’s Black Album). Hair metal, rap metal and nu-metal were pretty much the last examples of metal to go mainstream, and that stuff was awful.

Skeletonwitch probably isn’t an exception to that. There’s a certain suspension of disbelief that you have to adopt in order to really enjoy it. It’s sort of like watching a horror movie. You know that you’re going to be subjected to all kinds of stupidity and unbelievable situations, so you’ve got to just shut off that part of your brain and go with it.

So what do you get with skeletonwitch? Well, on the top, you’ve got lyrics about demons, witchcraft and the like, along with song titles like “Sacrifice for the Slaughtergod.” I think, to some extent, nobody is meant to take that stuff seriously. Since Black Sabbath, almost every band in the genre has just been recycling the same themes for their songs, because you couldn’t exactly sing about love and peace over this kind of music. That said, I think there are some moments in this album where they push it to the limit almost for comedic effect. For example, the song “Fire from the Sky” has something to do with demons taking over the earth, and there’s a line that goes “Evil now rains down upon us/with fire from the motherfucking sky.” It’s funny in a Dethklok kind of way. There’s also a point in “Within my Blood” where singer Chance Garnette introduces the guitar solo by saying “Cannot escape what is within my blood. Two, Three, Go!” almost in a demented blues style.

But that, in my opinion, is all pretty much ornamentation. The real focus of the album is the guitar work of Nate Garnette and Scott Hedrick. This album is nothing if not a clinic of metal rhythm guitar. It’s not just the typical palm-muted open E and power chord riffs that most people stick with. There are seamless harmonies all over this album, my personal favorite being the opening of the aforementioned “Within my Blood,” along with intricate, technical rhythm fills that almost upstage the lead work. One refreshing thing about this album is that it’s all guitar, drums and bass, with almost no effects or even downtuning present. When seemingly every other band is bringing in all kinds of synths and tuning down as far as C, it’s nice to hear a straightforward album with just the band playing their asses off.

So yeah, you should really listen to Skeletonwitch. I’m now going to go back to not writing reviews, because this took way too much effort.

Update:
I just found this interview with Metal Hammer and this road blog by guitarist Scott Hedrick from Revolver, so I felt like sharing.

I first saw this over at Metalsucks, where Corey Mitchell called it his sight unseen nominee for best metal DVD for 2009. I’m inclined to agree with him, but I guess we’ll both find out for sure whenever it gets released (Amazon has a book of the same name slated to come on out March 12, 2009. Let’s hope the DVD will follow shortly after.)  Apparently, the movie has been screening at festivals, been nominated for a couple of awards and generated some positive press, but like I said, I only heard about it a few days ago.

Watching the trailer, I honestly thought that this was another Spinal Tap-esque mockumentary at first (I mean, one of the guys is named Robb Reiner, and Anvil is already such a great fake band name), but a quick wikipedia search revealed that no, Anvil is a real band (and I’ve been worried that my site looks bad), and they’ve apparently been pretty productive while languishing in obscurity.

I love music–metal in particular–and I’ve been playing guitar for years, so you can imagine why I’d be interested in seeing a movie about underdogs chasing a dream as rock stars. There are so many bands that fell by the wayside over the years, but it looks like the guys in Anvil are legitimately making a run at relevance in this movie (of course, being Canadian, their only real competition in their homeland is Rush). I’m also glad to see movies about unheralded bands being made. The world really doesn’t need another Some Kind of Monster (There’s a reason why the movie was called Rocky and not Apollo, if you get what I mean).

When I heard about Anvil though, I started to get curious about why there aren’t more good rock movies. This is Spinal Tap and “Metalocalypse” are the only two that come to mind, the former for the same reasons listed in the last paragraph and the latter because it so easily mocks everything about metal and stardom. The thing is, every band out there seems to claim that their lives were no different from Spinal Tap, so I guess maybe filmmakers just don’t see a reason to make them. I think I was trying to hint at this in my “Legend of Master Legend” post, but a lot of rock bands exist in near-fictional worlds or arrested development anyway. We expect them to play music and entertain us, but there are very few bands I would actually want to watch in a film context.

(I hate to keep harping on Metallica, but that movie almost ruined the band for me as much as St. Anger did. I don’t want to watch anybody go through real therapy. I’d much rather watch fictional therapy, where all you have to do is have Robin Williams repeat “it’s not you’re fault” until Matt Damon cries and everything is fine. I don’t want to see a band that writes songs like ‘Seek and Destroy,’ ‘Fight Fire with Fire’ and ‘Harvester of Sorrow’ suddenly start taking themselves so seriously once they get to their 40s. The only good part of that was seeing Dave Mustaine cry. He has to be the only person who makes Lars Ulrich sound reasonable.)

Where was I going with this? Oh yeah. There are, of course exceptions to bands I’d want to see onscreen. Chief among them is Every Time I Die and their “Documentary” DVD Shit Happens. Those guys don’t take themselves seriously at all.

The other movie I really want to see made some day would be an adaptation of Henry Rollins’ Get in the Van. That would be the anti-Spinal Tap. Instead of getting lost behind stage, they’d get beaten by a bunch of skinheads behind stage. Or instead of having Stonehenge be too small, they have the show broken up by police. And instead of talking about amplifiers going to 11, Henry would just talk about how much he hates everyone.

But maybe I’m the only one who wants to see that one…

This is the Gibson Dark Fire Les Paul. Gibson says that it’s the most technologically advanced guitar that they’ve ever built. It features their “Robot Guitar” autotuning technology, as well as the new “Chameleon Tone Technology,” which is supposed to let you get any tone possible with a single guitar.

It’s a sign of how far behind I am on guitar technology that I’ve only just recently heard about this.  I used to keep pretty up to date on the newest stuff, especially when I used to work for a guitar company. First Act came out with some cool stuff while I was there, especially a couple of eco-friendly green guitars, one of which was made largely out of bamboo. Those were still traditional guitars though. This Dark Fire business is something else entirely, and I’m not sure how I feel about it.

A little background: I’ve been playing guitar for about nine years, and I probably own as many guitars. I’ve opened up all of my electrics and customized the wiring and pickups to my liking. I wouldn’t say that I’m an expert, but I know enough about this stuff to get me by.

I have to appreciate this Dark Fire guitar on one level because it’s a true extension of the work Les Paul did with the electric guitar. Paul was one of the biggest innovators in the history of music technology (he invented mutli-track recording, among other things) and I’m sure he appreciates the way Gibson is carrying on his legacy. From a design perspective, I also have to say that the carbon-fiber pickup covers are a nice touch, and you really can’t go wrong with the Les Paul.

The auto-tune technology is also a great idea, as easy as it may make it to joke about kids not being able to tune their guitars. Tuning is just one of those hassles that you learn to deal with, but I definitely can’t say that I wouldn’t be excited about never having to tune my guitar again.

I guess my problem with this is the whole Chamelon Tone Technology business. I can’t find an exact list of the different tones available, or a solid explanation of how it works. All Gibson says is that it “allows you to change your guitar’s tone to match countless environments and to recreate any guitar sound you ever lusted after,” and that doesn’t really say anything. I’m going to assume that most of the tone changes you’d be able to make would involve coil-tapping, series-parallel switching, phase switching and/or pickup blending, combined with some kind of active EQ system. If that’s the case, I guess it’ll be kind of like the old Fender Jaguars, or Gibson’s own Les Paul Recording, which was only in production for two years (although apparently it’s the preferred model of Mr. Paul).

Until I hear and play one for myself (which will probably be a while, seeing as the first run has already been delayed and they’re likely to get snatched up as soon as they become available) I’m treating their claim to get “any guitar sound” as suspect. I’m sure you’ll be able to get a serviceable impersonation of any sound you want, but I can’t think of any way they could completely alter the tone enough to make a Les Paul sound like Strat, Danelectro or hollow body.

With any guitar, the pickups and circuitry are only going to do so much. The construction and design have a lot more to do with the real character and “tone” of the guitar. Take a strat, for instance. The classic sound that’s associated with the guitar is partially from the pickup arrangement and the wiring, but you can put that same wiring into a different guitar and it’ll sound (surprise surprise) completely different. The sound that comes out of the guitar does come from the pickups, but the pickups can only interpret the vibrations of the guitar strings. Everything that affects the string vibrations is going to have some impact, even how you hold the neck and fret the notes, to some extent (hence the phrase “tone is in your fingers”). Since the strings are connected to the body and the neck, the type of wood that each is made out of is going to affect the tone. The type of connection they have to the body is going to affect it. The size and shape of the body are going to affect it. That’s just physics, and there’s not a lot that Gibson can do about it.

Of course, I am a little obsessive about stuff like this. I don’t think the average person is going to care if it doesn’t sound exactly like another guitar. In a typical live situation, you probably wouldn’t be able to tell the difference. All the same, I’d just as soon have a nice Les Paul Standard (or Explorer, Firebird, Telecaster Deluxe, etc.) without all the technology and put the extra cash towards an amp.

But like I said, it is refreshing to see some serious innovation in guitar technology. Relatively little has changed since the first electric guitars were developed, but this has to be one of the few industries where it’s almost impossible for new technology to be widely adopted. There are so many wonky little things about guitars that we stick with just for the sake of tone (vacuum tubes? 60-cycle hum?), but they’re still around because they work. Blame it on Occam’s Razor, but I don’t see this Dark Fire being anything more than a niche market.