I stumbled across magnatune.com a few days ago (someone mentioned them in a slasdot posting). Magnatune is an open music label that totally rocks! I bought one album by Drop Trio and two more by Kitka. I'm also going to see Kitka at Holy Cross church here in Santa Cruz later this month.




Magnatune's catch phrase is We're a record label, but we're not evil or the shortened form we're not evil. One of their many innovations is that they let you choose how much to pay for an album. Think it is only worth $5? then only pay $5! Think it is worth $12? Then pay $12. Of course with Magnatune you can feel better about paying more than the minimum as 50% of the gross proceeds go to the artist.

Other items of note:

• No DRM on the music files.
• CD quality FLAC files available as well as MP3 and Ogg.
• you can listen to 128k bps MP3 streams of all the music that is for sale as many times as you want before you buy. We're not talking 30 second snippets, we're not talking low quality samples. you can listen to then entire magnatune.com library over and over and over (streamed) for free!

Remember: when you buy from Magnatune you spit in RIAA's eye.

I've been experimenting with hello and picasa in preparation for our trip to Paris later this month. You can see the results of my philosophical experiments by looking at my other blogs (left sidebar under Enough about you).


I continue to work my way through the Audible.com unabridged recordings of Patrick O'Brien's Aubrey/Maturin novels. Right now I'm on The Ionian Mission. Patrick O'Brien is quite a story teller. Right up there with Jane Austen and Charles Dickens!


Amelia and Caitlin went to a concert at the Shoreline Amphetheater. Sting and Annie Lennox were playing. I would love to see a show by these two but I simply can not do the stadium rock thing anymore. So many people in such a small place just isn't worth it.