On Thursday night I went and saw Nickelback play live (thanks for bringing me along Nate!), with Daughtry as the opening band (along with Puddle of Mud and a band from southern Alberta called State of Shock). We missed the first band (State of Shock), and caught the last few Puddle of Mud songs - they were ok, but nothing special. I was really excited about seeing Daughtry live, because I’m a big fan of his debut CD. I never watched him on American Idol, I just heard the first single and thought it was great. He didn’t disappoint - his band played for about 45 minutes or so, and put on a great show. Chris’ voice was superb, and the band was insanely tight - it was like listening to the CD, only better. About the only complaint I had was that it was so incredibly loud it was hard to appreciate the nuances they were tossing into the songs. I’d definitely see Daughtry again if they came back on their own tour. Nickelback was excellent as well - I caught them last year, and they always put on a good show. It does get very tiresome though to hear them talk non-stop about smoking pot and drinking beer though - nothing changed from their last concert. Musically they were great, and I was especially impressed with Ryan Peake, the guitarist in the band. His vocals were super tight - I never quite realized how often I was hearing him sing on the CD until watching him live and seeing him back Chad Kroeger’s vocals. He also sang lead on the song “Saturday Night” and rocked it out good.

I gambled and took along my small camera (Canon SD800) because the past couple of concerts I’ve been to I’ve seen countless people taking photos and videos, so the old “no cameras” rule doesn’t seem to apply any more. The tickets said “No Cameras” but after watching people around me at the show take picture after picture, with flash, I figured I’d give it a try myself. Not surprisingly, shooting a stage that varies between dimly lit and freakishly bright with a point and shoot 3x optical zoom camera is somewhat of a challenge. Here’s the best photo I could manage:

Yeah, exactly. I thought I’d have better luck with videos, so I ended up taking quite a few - but it was mostly in vain, because the microphone on the Canon SD800 can’t cope with extremely loud noises and most of what I recorded ended up being distorted audio mixed with vaguely musical sounds. Here are three clips that turned out somewhat decently: 50 seconds of a drum solo, a clip of the crowd really getting into the song “Too Bad”, and the big-pyro-explosion ending of the concert.

EDIT: It’s really pathetic that the latest version of WordPress still maims embedded video code. Don’t the developers USE their own product?  I added links above since embedded the videos broke the template.

I’ve had this page linked on up my blog for quite a while, but I’ve never actually posted about it. After updating it with 50+ new album covers that I scanned (there are now over 800 album covers), I figured it was time to give it some publicity. Here’s the write-up about it for those that haven’t visited the page before, and a warning: only do so if you have a fast Internet connection, the page is NOT bandwidth friendly at all (it’s 13 MB in size with all the thumbnails):

“Below you’ll find all of of CD covers from our music collection, including a few generic photos used for singles or indy artists that have no CDs for sale. Why did I want to do this? I really enjoy seeing the album art for my CDs, but I found the 200 x 200 pixel low-resolution, overly compressed junk that Windows Media Player included by default to be completely inadequate (ditto for the equally lame Zune software). I also found the Microsoft method of placing the album art in the music folder to be very short-sighted. When I moved songs to another computer, the songs themselves had no album art. And because FolderShare (a Windows Live service) makes all hidden files un-hidden when it syncs folders, I ended up with thousands of JPEG images scattered through my music folders. Since I often access my music via Windows Explorer rather than the ultra-slow library of Windows Media Player 10 (11 is much better at this), when I’d drag and drop the folder of music the now un-hidden JPEGs would come along for the ride and show up in my playlist and stop the music as they’d display. It was a complete mess. Embedding the JPG album art inside the audio file itself is a much more elegant solution, and it’s one that Microsoft should have implemented by now.

This time consuming project took nearly four months of work, and I couldn’t have completed it without the help of my wonderful wife Ashley (who did the bulk of the scanning). After scanning them at 300 dpi, we cropped and adjusted each of the album covers one by one. This process helped re-introduce me to my CD collection, reminding me of albums so bad I wonder why I purchased them, to albums that are so good I wonder why I stopped listening to them. This project was like looking at my own personal history with music (though I’d have to go back to the remnants of my cassette collection to get true scope).

Because neither Windows Media Player 10 nor 11 will shrink album art to fit the preview window, using the 1500 x 1500 (or thereabouts) pixel original file is impractical. It also causes some media players problems because the header of the file (where the JPEG is stored) becomes too large to process, and the audio file will not play. Thus, these 640 x 640 (or so) versions were exported using Picasa. These covers are the copyright of the respective artists and should only be used in conjunction with music that you legally own. The easiest way to embed the art inside the song itself is to use a tool such as MediaMonkey. I hope you enjoy using these album covers.“

I’ll probably update the page a couple times a year when I’ve bought at least 20 new CDs, so feel free to check back now and then.