August 23, 2011

Technology Tuesday: Reviewing Sonos & the new Play:3… plus Giveaway!


If you are like many people, your digital music library continues to grow exponentially. While physical CD sales still eclipse digital downloads, that will not be the case for long. Likewise, the proliferation of music streaming sites like Pandora, Spotify, MOG & Rdio make the ability to move away from physical CD’s even easier.  The problem now for many music lovers is how to enjoy all the music trapped on your hard drive & streaming through the web. Sure, you can listen through headphones, desktop speakers, transfer to a portable music player or listen through your laptop speakers. While all of these are acceptable for background tunes while surfing the web or casual listening, what if you want to fill your house with gut-thumping bass, speaker rattling, wake-the-neighbors-up cranking volume that only your stereo system can give you? Sonos has the answer and they’ll help you in your quest of  “streaming all the music on earth”.




So what is Sonos? How will it help you liberate all your music from your computer? Will it break your bank? Do you need to be a genius to set it up? What’s with this new Play:3 unit that’s being advertised? These are all the questions we’ll answer this week in Technology Tuesday as we explore and evaluate Sonos. Additionally, we’ll answer another great question: HOW CAN YOU GET A SONOS PLAY:3 FOR FREE?

READ ON for a complete guide to Sonos…

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Tour Dates: SCI’s Roots Run Deep

We keep our eyes peeled for new tour dates announcements each week and compile them on Tuesdays for this handy column… While still remaining active over the last few years,

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Hidden Flick: Sea

The water encapsulates so much of all that is life and all that dominates our planet and all that swallows up our existence and makes it pure and deep and real that one can easily forget that the sea is a very lonely place for a reason. Being at the top can have its misgivings as only those who have occupied its desolate throne can attest.


And the water runs through all, encapsulates everything that we are, and hope to be, runs around in circles, bends upwards, twists downwards, explores ‘neath the shallow waves until it stops somewhere for a brief moment before daylight, sunlight, washed-out light beckons from upwards (or is it down?), and life races forth, to replace the bends in the darkness, cradling one’s amnesiac head, searching for the limbs of some weird aura thief. Honey spills from the tree, onto a racing body of water, and it disappears like all life.

Up above on the surface, one dwells in the sense of self-importance, inner ambition, outer rage, in betwixt some sort of answer hiding in many questions. Meanwhile, in the deep blue sea, nothing seems to matter quite like that—as the universe expands outwards, inevitably to disappear, or, quite contrarily, to contract back into the Big Crunch, seeking nothing, pulling all that it once was into a singular focal point—OK Computer wedded with In Rainbows washes ashore to herald a twin-side masterpiece as time marches on—life serves no purpose whatsoever other than to see what can endure…and what cannot.

In Luchino Visconti’s La Terra Trema, a fisherman and his family, are washed ashore by reality, and within its 165 minutes of melancholic sorrow and remorse is the dawning specter of doom. But one would be hard-pressed to see the film as JUST that. And, considering that we are about to hit the end of a season in which every little hidden piece of the human soul has been dissected and tossed out like some giant whale carcass, one can see the light in the darkness, the glimmer of faith in something; indeed, some hope.

READ ON for more on this week’s Hidden Flick – La Terra Trema…

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Sample New Tom Waits / Wilco Tracks

2011 has already been filled with new music from some of our favorite artists and that trend will continue later this year with the release of Wilco’s The Whole Love

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Listen To This Shit: Ween Quebec Demos

Earlier this month, Facebook friends of Mickey “Dean Ween” Melchiondo were shocked to find a status update from the guitarist that contained a two-disc, MP3-only collection called The Caesar Demos. Included were rough takes on tunes Ween recorded from 2001 to 2003 in preparation for what would become the Quebec LP. Only a handful of the songs wound up making the album, which was originally set to be titled Caesar, and most of the tracks in the collection feature only Deaner and Aaron “Gene Ween” Freeman.

[Fan-Made Art via Santa Sangre Redux]


These tracks give an aural look at an important era in the band’s history. They had recently fulfilled their contract with Elektra and were returning to their indie roots. Drummer Claude Coleman Jr. was seriously injured in a car accident during this time, making his future with the band unclear. Deaner explained the backstory in his Facebook post…

well what can i say about this here, lemme see. the first thing that comes to mind is that all the while we were doing this we still had claude coleman on drums, he eventually got into a major car wreck and wasn’t around when it finally came time to make the “real” record. instead the drum duties fell on me, josh freese, and sim cain for a couple of tunes. almost all of this was recorded at our beach house in holgate, nj onto 16 track tape. a tiny bit of it was recorded in the garage behind aaron’s house in pt. pleasant, pa. some of it was recorded in the spare bedroom of my house in new hope. most of the tunes are just me and aaron, with the two of us playing everything, with me on drums. the songs with claude, dave, and glenn are pretty obvious. on just a few tunes we took what you hear here and cleaned them up and had andrew weiss mix them for the record after some overdubs. dave sings on “it’s gonna be a long night”, this was days before he had surgery to remove polyps in his throat and his voice was really rough so we figured he was the guy for the job. This isn’t even all of the tunes that we ended up choosing from, just the ones i happened to burn to cd before we drove home from the beach every week. hope you dig it for what it is.

– Mickey

Once Mickey posted links for fans to download the album, the servers hosting the tracks were bombarded leading Deaner to delete his Facebook posting. Luckily, a number of folks who grabbed the files have reposted them elsewhere. In listening, some of the songs that didn’t make the album are ridiculously good and we’re shocked a few of ’em haven’t turned up live or on future albums. We’re also fans of the mixes from some of the tunes that did eventually make their way onto Quebec such as this version of Happy Colored Marbles…

[audio:https://glidemag.wpengine.com/hiddentrack/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/HappyColoredMarbles.mp3]

Don’t sleep on this folks, here’s download links…

READ ON for the full track list…

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Video: Ashford & Simpson – Solid

Yesterday was a tough day for the music industry as we lost two legendary songwriters in Nick Ashford and Jerry Leiber. Both were part of songwriting teams – Ashford with

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Crooked Fingers Plan Fall Tour

Crooked Fingers is pleased to announce its North American tour in support of new album, Breaks in the Armor. It is Eric Bachmann’s sixth full-length as Crooked Fingers and will

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Eleanor Friedberger: Last Summer

 If the opener “My Mistakes” – which sounds like an early Rosanne Cash fronting The New Pornographers – doesn’t have you moving in your chair, seek help.

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James Michael: Sixx:A.M.

If you think your life is crazy busy, then you haven’t spent a day in the shoes of Sixx:A.M. vocalist James Michael. Not only does he sing, play some guitar and help create songs with fellow bandmates Nikki Sixx and DJ Ashba, but he is also a producer, engineer and songwriter working with numerous other artists.

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