Code Retard

Check out London based girl band The Mentalists singing a cover of MGMT’s "Kids" song with just their iPhones. How did they do it without instruments? Simple: the App store. Using a clever mix of the musical apps and more iPhones than band members, the Mentalists are able to recreate a very cool song in a very cool way. We won’t spill the exact details here so you’ll just have to watch the video to see how they do it.

DiskAid is a wonderful freeware program that directly connects to your iPhone’s file system through the USB cable, without requiring you to jailbreak your iPhone, install OpenSSH, connect your iPhone to wifi, figure out your iPhone IP address, and know how to FTP to it. With DiskAid, it’s possible to transfer your own custom ringtones to your iPhone for free without paying Apple’s iTunes store $0.99 and without using even iTunes itself! Read more »

Pretty Cool what you can do with some metal balls and a lot of free time.

The complete Rock Band 2 track list has been known for some time but the ratings have not. IGN has categorized the track listing into each instrument and sorted them according to difficulty. The only list we care about (full band) starts off easy with Survivor’s Eye of the Tiger and ends with Judas Priest’s Painkiller. We’re showing the difficulties based on a full band starting with the easiest, but for the complete list check out IGN. Read more »

If full automatic sync’ing is to be utilized in iTunes, your iPhone or iPod can only be sync’ed with one music library on one computer. This isn’t really a big issue until you upgrade or migrate to another one. What about your painstakingly organized iTunes library? The process is actually pretty painless, especially if you’ve got an arrangement like mine. Read more »

The RIAA has filed a motion to dismiss what may be the most contentious file sharing case to date. In a letter to the judge the RIAA’s lawyers admitted they don’t believe there is any chance they will be able to positively identify the computer used to share the files in question. They’re now confident it was the same PC owned by the plaintiff’s daughter, which she has since gotten rid of. The letter also mentioned that they’ll be filing for court sanctions against the defense for impeding discovery of this evidence earlier.

To say the case of UMG v. Lindor has been hotly contested would be an understatement at best. The defendant, Marie Lindor, owns a computer but has reportedly doesn’t know enough about it to share a file. In fact the plaintiffs’ investigators have officially stated that her computer wasn’t the one involved in the file sharing they reported to the RIAA. Read more »

Go to http://disturbed1xbox.com/

Enter the code 1lfa89

It’ll give you a code you can use on Xbox Live to download the songs.

This article is a great troubleshooting tip based on the “tool of a thousand uses”, the good old tone generator, tone detector. Everyone has (or should have) one of these in the tool bag. They’re typically used to locate cables you forgot to label, labeled incorrectly, or got cut somewhere during house construction.

Next time you have a dead audio path, you can use the toner to work from the audio source component to the final amp, or use the signal generator from the amp and work backwards to the source.

Since we need to make an adaptor for the alligator clips on the end of the tone generator leads to an RCA stye plug, it’s a easy step to add a simple filter/amplitude reducer to make the tone generator signal more amp/preamp friendly.

We all know the “right” way to run cables. Do it before the walls go up, and run every conceivable type of wire from each room to a central location. However, what if you have an older house, and can’t afford to have professionals fish wires through you home? Well, wireless can solve some of your problems, but for the rest, you’re on your own. Still, if you’re thoughtful and creative, you may be able to run more wires, with less effort than you think. 

The Wires
First, what wires do you want to run? For audio, there are speaker wires, and line-level stereo audio cable for source distribution (this is cable with two “hot” leads and a common-shield). Room-to-room video may use coax. Use CAT-6 for Ethernet (unless you prefer wireless). Add in some phone and intercom cable, and you have quite a bundle, perhaps more than an inch thick. Hiding this without tearing up your walls could be quite a trick. Read more »

The RIAA has declared complete victory over the infamous Russian music download store AllofMP3 which was accused of selling tracks but not giving any of the proceeds to the artists or record labels.

At its peak, the site had 6 million users who legally downloaded songs and full albums for cheaper than 1/3 the price of iTunes or Amazon. The RIAA said however that the record labels and the artists were not seeing any of this money and filed complaints to get the WTO to shut the site down. In 2007, the site was shut down and the RIAA praised the decision. However, in October of that year, the site was acquitted of any charges and a district court in Moscow confirmed the innocent verdict after an appeal by the record industry group. Despite being innocent, the site shut down and no longer offers music.

It now appears that this week the RIAA dropped its copyright infringement lawsuit against AllofMP3 and claimed victory.

“The site is now defunct and out of business, the result of a successful anti-piracy initiative,” Jonathan Lamy, an RIAA spokesman said.

That may be true, but following the media AllofMP3 received, almost a dozen similar sites have sprung up and are currently fully operational. Even funnier, the founders of AllofMP3 have started a new site called Mp3Sparks which operates exactly the same as the now “defunct” AllofMP3 did.

Talking about the dropping of the lawsuit, John Crossman, representative of the site’s owner, MediaServices LLC says, “They [RIAA] never correctly commenced the proceeding in the first place…Maybe it was a rare triumph of good sense.”