Tiki – Tangaroa

Tiki Taane, best known as the former lead singer of Salmonella Dub, and vocalist on some great tracks such as with Concord Dawn and Rhombus has released his solo album “Past, Present and Future” Unbeknownst to most kiwis, Tiki is like our own homegrown version of Mike Patton; an amazing (and underrated) vocalist, but an even greater talent behind the scenes, and in many ways this is Tiki’s Peeping Tom

What can I say about this album? In pairs or triplets the songs mesh together very well, but from one end of the album to the other it’s apparent that Tiki is drawing on several influences such as traditional Maori, reggae, dub, drum n bass and hip hop – where the album loses a bit of flow in that regard it also gains some depth and character and I think that’s a positive thing; better to have an album with variety rather than what I call the Offspring Syndrome: every damn song sounds the same.

Alone, this is probably not the album for the coming summer – the individual tracks are perfect in their own right but the variety between them makes this a bit disjointed to have a BBQ and some beers with. In conjunction with Salmonella Dub’s Heal Me (keep an ear out for Love Sunshine and Happiness and Watching it Rain), Shapeshifter’s Soulstice, and Concord Dawn’s Chaos by Design, perhaps with the odd Black Seeds track and Recloose’s Mana’s Bounce, a cruisy and progressive playlist could be formed.

This album is definately worth the coin though.

Normally I could give less than a crap about former flatmates, with a few exceptions.

Tijs – has recently proposed to his long time partner Mel, congrats you two.
Nate – and long time partner Leah are expecting their baby any time now, congrats you two.
Steve-o – and long time partner Pete are living with Steve’s girlfriend up in Korokoro, congrats you two.
Karmen – has moved to Hataitai.

All of the rest of them can go die in a fire, except of course for Kris, who with his band sang some immortal lyrics to the tune of Monkey Wrench “I don’t wanna look like Kate: Too much make-up on my face” (in reference to a girl at tech named Kate, who absolutely caked on the make-up and had the hots for Kris.) Now, as much as I loathe myspace, Kris’ ability has come along far enough for me to drop a link. Keep it up bro, loving the vox!

http://myspace.com/krishamiltonmusic

Concord Dawn – Aces High (Featuring State of Mind)

Note1: This was done on a Kubuntu workstation. If you have Windows, you’ll have to find some irritating GUI based application from some nobody company that will install adware on your computer
Note2: You should not use this method to strip copyrighted material. You can use it to get audio from commons material, material you own the copyrights to and have uploaded to youtube (and you know, for whatever reason, want to get a poorer quality audio), or for fair use sampling.

Step one: Install Wireshark. You can do this on practically any computer, for windows, download it and run the installer.
For Kubuntu and its kin
sudo apt-get install wireshark
For FreeBSD and its kin
portinstall wireshark
Step two: Run Wireshark and begin a new capture
Step three: Browse to the Youtube video that you wish to watch, once the page has loaded you can stop the file from playing if you wish
Step four: Stop the Wireshark capture and run an http filter, scroll through the results until you find http://random_host/get_video…
This is to say that you will probably see an entry for http://www.youtube.com/get_video?video_id=string but you can ignore it, as this is simply a load balancer/proxy.

In this example I have looked for http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WGOohBytKTU
which leads to http://www.youtube.com/get_video?video_id=WGOohBytKTU&t=OEgsToPDskIscM8yAteAjLwRuUscQfA2
which leads to http://74.125.15.16/get_video?video_id=WGOohBytKTU

The final result you get will be different each time, it may be an IP as above or it may be something like

http://sjc-v111.sjc.youtube.com/get_video?video_id=zBlwU0MlUSk

See this image for an example of what Wireshark will look like

Step five: wget http://random_host/get_video?video_id=string -O input.flv
eg wget http://74.125.15.16/get_video?video_id=WGOohBytKTU -O input.flv
Step six: ffmpeg -i input.flv -ab 128 -ar 44100 output128.mp3

Basically we are grabbing the flash .flv file from youtube and using ffmpeg to extract the audio to 128kbit mp3 audio. You can use mplayer to extract the audio into its native format, which will probably be something low like 8kbit/22050Hz/mono, but I’ve noticed that it may tend to have timestamp problems whereas ffmpeg does not.

Voila, you have just extracted audio from a youtube video. It’ll be poor quality, showing that if you are indeed trying to rip off copyrighted content, you should just buy it.

Flight of the Conchords, kiwi humour having a crack at the american market

The other day I purchased the new Loop Select DVD to see what all the fuss was about, especially with all the Microsoft propoganda affixed to it. And it turns out there’s some amazing multimedia on it, the one that really caught with me though was Paul McLaney‘s Let Me Count The Ways

You’ve probably heard his voice before, here: Concord Dawn – Man for All Seasons (Featuring Paul Mclaney)

But in Let Me Count The Ways he exercises a lot more vocal range and textures, with a folk/jazz ensemble keeping the groove. There’s a way where his voice variates from smooth to rough, like skipping furiously between folk rock and croon, that just seems to work. The music video is done in the style of A-Ha’s Take On Me which is a very cool and timeless style of multimedia IMHO.

The Loop DVD has a couple of other music vids on it, my favourite being Recloose’s Mana’s Bounce, a wordless track that just makes you yearn for the next kiwi summer.