I recently received a voucher for five Pepsi Points included in a order from Amazon. These points roughly translate into one dollar which means I could download one free mp3*.

The pesky asterisk means that not every song is available. Fortunately, my taste in music is as varied as my taste in underwear and a subsequent search led to the enchanting and technically excellent Gopher by Yma Sumac. Her vocal range causes me to shiver with the utmost respect.

The quality of the mp3 encoding is good (>200 vbr), the ID3 tags are perfect and it even includes a 600 pixel image of the album it comes from. I just wish someone would sell the same breadth of songs in lossless format. The company that did would receive a great many thousands in funds from a long night of impassioned purchases. Still, the rare treat of purging something from my “Dark” music collection while enhancing my legal sonics is a welcome occurrence.

For now, I think I’ll just keep myself entertained via Weird Music until the industry catches up with my digital needs.

I really like this movie. For me it is somewhat similar to Napoleon Dynamite in that the director does not feel rushed all the time. I for one can definitely approve of realistic portrayals of life, even if it means you have to sit through some awkward moments.

The Life Aquatic is about a washed up Jaq Cousteau type figure who loses his best friend while filming a documentary. He boldly proclaims that after being a drunkard for one day that he will embark on this quest to kill the thing that got his friend. His oddball team ends up following along with some new members including his recently reunited son, a pack of interns seeking school credit and a pregnant report. Hilarity ensues soon after of course.

There are a lot of mini-memorable moments that I’m sure I’ll be reliving with Parr for the next few days. Plus the Ping Island/Lightning Strike Rescue Op tune by Mark Mothersbough is so infectious I think it will stay with me eternally.

The Life Aquatic is one of those movies that I can see myself championing although I think it would be folly to think that everyone would like it.

It can be slow, demented and awkward but it is very amusing none the less. I give it 4 out of 5 smegs, which um… in this case should be considered good.

Don’t forget to check out The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou site for previews, wallpapers and other goodies. It’s quite the perfect use of flash, video and other yummy technologies.

An hour of searching online for the song turned up nothing but preview clips. Ten seconds (literally!) of searching on DC++ found this audible gem.

I’ve been working on completely legalizing my music collection. Not an easy task but I have made lots of progress since I’ve started. After exhausting new CD sources like Amazon, cdjapan, GameMusic and others I turned to Ebay. I’m very please with all my transactions there so far. It’s really helped my legalize my collection and I can’t beat the prices.

Here are the latest stats on my music collection. Dark green is my unpurchased music.

Music Collection Status

Size

Files

Averaging out the percents of size and files above means that my collection is 71% and 67% legal. Not bad, but I still want to see how high I can get both of those percents before I consider this endeavor a success.

As time goes on its getting harder and harder to make big dents in the remaining dubiously found songs. Most are singles and I refuse to buy a whole CD to get the the one song I am looking for. I also think it would be wrong for me to throw away a song just because I don’t have the original. I keep hoping that AllofMP3 or a similar service will be official endorsed by the music labels. Yeah I know, rather unlikely considering they have a fair and righteous model that lets you get exactly what you want at different price levels. If it did happen (are you listening music execs?) I would gladly drop whatever money it took to legalize my whole collection. If it was 2k, no problem.

I’m willing to spend whatever it takes but I don’t want to buy some lossy, crippled or soon to be outdated format. I want to buy the original music, not a temporary license or some other garbage.

Not all is lost though, there are great places like Magnatunes which let you download songs (not mainstream though) in formats such as MP3, OGG and even FLAC for 100% perfect copies. Me like. In fact I’ve bought an album from them already and have been very pleased. I highly recommend them if your looking for a new source of music that is fair to both artists and consumers.

Consumers will ultimately win of course, just have to keep voting with your dollars in the right places.

Happy shopping!