ckunte.com » Music

Lady Antebellum

Chyetanya Kunte — Sun, 16 Nov 2008 19:20:48 +0000

This last couple of weeks, I am hooked to Lady Antebellum’s track Love Don’t Live Here. And the video’s sound doesn’t do justice. Hear it full blast on your deck. I am now.

High fidelity

Chyetanya Kunte — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 21:07:11 +0000

Back in the 90s finding a perfect home music system was easy. You could walk into a media store and pick one of those big, black mean looking Sony decks, which had the ability to blow your neighborhood’s night away.

And then iPod came along.

Looking back now, it would have been hard to imagine the kind of impact this little device would have on our lives back then. I mean this little pocket-y thing made music personal again.

It did something else too. It made enjoying music a lonesome activity. Now I don’t know about you, but my household has always been about playing music in the living, even if we didn’t really like each other’s taste for music. My father would much put up with Michael Jackson in the same way I would listen to M. S. Subbulakshmi.

While the digital music trashed all my tapes, and much of our vinyl records, the iPod went a step further. It nearly trashed all our music CDs.

But we are not fashion bots. We are just people caught in this gadget frenzy world that is churning out new devices with a vengeance. While the iPod brought about a change in the way we’d listen and organize our music, it also brought a few challenges. Isolation. The need to convert, index and re-label. And after many such, we’re like “Oh bother.”

And so in this choice of conversion v. convenience, the latter won—that we’d play our CDs (conventional, and compressed) as compiled. We found a system that could play conventional media, as well as play from a generation of new devices.

It’s a simple media player. It can take audio input from any device via a simple 3.5mm (male to male) stereo cable. (We use it for Sneha’s iPod Nano, as well as for enhancing our home theater experience.) It can play MP3, WMA music files from a data CD, in addition to playing conventional music CDs. (So I get to keep my CDs.) It comes with a digital radio AM/FM tuner. (I’m a radio guy.) The best of course is the USB memory input. Stick a USB drive with your music files, or the iPod Shuffle, and it can just play music files right off it; and you get to control the selection through its IR remote. All this at a fraction of the cost of some of the choices (below), which we discarded in the end:

Airport Express—for streaming music. (Oh bother.)
Mac mini, together with a subwoofer speaker set. (Perhaps an overkill, since we already have a DVD player; a cable, and a satellite system for our television.)
Bose Sound Dock. (Can’t play CDs, and can’t play from my iPod Shuffle; and way too expensive for a speaker. Oh bother.)

Weekend country favs

Chyetanya Kunte — Sat, 13 Sep 2008 09:52:47 +0000

Playing LeAnn Rimes’s Something’s gotta give, and Sara Evans’s foot-tapping Suds in the bucket.

ISPs now with record companies

Chyetanya Kunte — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 17:56:20 +0000

Cory Doctorow (Guardian): “The law is for ‘minor crimes’ like rape and murder — when it comes to serious crimes like downloading songs, we need a ’streamlined process’ that makes the War on Terror look like a slow-moving, cautious thing.”

Lifehouse

Chyetanya Kunte — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 19:05:13 +0000

I am a huge fan of Lifehouse. They begin to get my foot tapping with amazing tracks like You and me, and Hanging by a moment. First time is another such great that I subconsciously begin to air-drum.

Sky Radio via the internet

Chyetanya Kunte — Sun, 01 Jun 2008 10:38:17 +0000

My car stereo is tuned to it, and now via the internet, Sky Radio finds a place in my list of radios on Rhythmbox.

Jodhaa Akbar

Chyetanya Kunte — Sun, 17 Feb 2008 20:25:07 +0000

For an emperor who attained his inner peace, and who went on to float Din-i-Ilahi, Khwaja mere khwaja portrays his passion well. Hritik Roshan as Akbar is flawless. I do not know much about Jodhaa Bai—history hasn’t been vocal about her. But the noise and protests about her identity—happening in parts of India, and elsewhere, following the release of this film—is idiotic at best.

We enjoyed watching Jodhaa Akbar at Pathe on Friday among a packed audience.

Bollywood music, iPod and Windows ME

Chyetanya Kunte — Fri, 28 Dec 2007 05:47:40 +0000

There’s some funky new bollywood music that I am absolutely enjoying these days. Here’s my list of favorites this December:

Bhool Bhulaiyaa - Niraj Sridhar (OST: Bhool Bhulaiyaa)
Chak De India - Sukhwinder Singh, Salim Merchant and Marianne D Cruz (OST: Chak De India)
Mumbai Salsa - Adnan Sami and Alisha Chinai (OST: Mumbai Salsa)
Saawariya - Shail Hada (OST: Saawariya)
Taare Zameen Par - Shankar Mahadevan, Dominique, Viviene (OST: Taare Zameen Par)
Baadal Pe Paon Hain - Hema Sardesai (OST: Chak De India)
Jab Se Tere Nainaa - Shaan (OST: Saawariya)
You’re my love (OST: Partner)
Ek Hockey Doongi Rakh Ke - Shah Rukh Khan, KK and the Hockey Team (OST: Chak De India)
Om Shanti Om (OST: Om Shanti Om)
Aaja Nachle - Sunidhi Chauhan (OST: Aaja Nachle)
Hum Toh Aise Hain Bhaiyaa - Sunidhi Chauhan, Shreya Ghoshal, Swanand Kirkire and Pranab Biswas (OST: Laaga Chunari Mein Daag)

While the mix CD I picked up was good for the car stereo, I had trouble transferring this foot-tapping music to my iPod shuffle. Couple of reasons, One: The latest iTunes version is only available for XP and Vista—not available for Windows ME, my parents’ OS; and two: the computer failed to recognize the iPod.

Plan-B (that worked for me): Installed the USB storage driver for Windows 98, and rebooted. Windows ME recognized my iPod and designated a drive letter to it. Next, I downloaded and executed YamiPod; through its simple interface I selected the assigned iPod drive letter and iPod type. YamiPod then pulled up my current list of music from the player. I was able to delete some tracks—I no longer wished to listen to—and then dragged and dropped the new music files into it; and my iPod was ready for the road again.

Better sound through research

Chyetanya Kunte — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 22:39:29 +0000

Back in my undergraduate days, engineering better sound for our lousy Walkmans or for our cheap car stereos was one of hostel’s most popular hack. With pockets near empty at the end of each month after spending over movie tickets, cigarettes, drawing sheets, an occasional nice dinner at a decent restaurant, there would be just enough money left to buy a cheap worn out secondhand radio amplifier, a pair of speaker cords and a couple of nice round well seasoned terracotta pots from the weekend market.

We’d put them together, place those Walkman speakers or those demagnetized used car speakers in those pots. (Terracotta pot selection tip: We’d try them drumming to see if they’d give out a clear ringing sound.) The resulting sound was exceptionally good, satisfying and of a quality we could dance through the night waking up the drowsy crowd.

Today when I see iPod speakers being sold at an arm and a leg, I snicker, and remember those good old hostel hacks. They work, of course, even today—whether you had a Walkman then or have an iPod now.