Category: Music

I am not a big music fan. My music tastes are far from developed and original. But still once in a while I feel like sharing a tune. This category is mostly used for my rare music moments.

Jon Lajoie : Pop Song

I’ve seen quite a few parodies and jokes on the current state of the pop music.  Many of them were funny.  Most of them were pretty accurate.  But I think this music video from Jon Lajoie nails it best.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ijr4rwb2WbE]

Tribute to the blues in Pafos

Ladies and gentlemen, mark you calendars.  Here is the content of the SMS from one of the musicians who will be participating in the event:

Cold Shot are playing a tribute to the blues on the 30th of July at the Velvet Hall.  Doors open at 19:30 and the support band is Zacsuss.  Tickets are 10 EUR and are available at Music Gallery, Elvicom, and Olivers deli. Hope to see you there.

For those of you who haven’t reached your calendar yet, that will be next Friday.  Hints and tips on how to find the Velvet Hall and how to buy tickets are welcome via comments.  I am definitely planning to go, as I’ve heard some of the these guy play before and they are really good.

Update: Thanks to Chris Ergatides, we know have a map with both the event location and tickets shop (click the image for larger view).

Pukkelpop 2010

If there is one place to be on August 19, 20, and 21st this year, it’s Pukkelpop 2010.  Pukkelpop is the largest alternative music festival in Europe, with an amazing list of bands coming to perform this year and without tens of thousands of fans gathering from the whole world.  Here are just some of the bands in the line-up for this August: Placebo, Iron Maiden, The Prodigy, Blink-182, Limp Bizkit, NOFX, Bad Religion, Gogol Bordello …

I’m sure this year it will a party like no other – Pukkelpop is celebrating its 25th year!  Happy birthday, Pukkelpop!

P.S.: Why am I so excited about the music festival somewhere in Belgium?  Because I was there last year and it was quite an experience.  Events of this magnitude don’t happen every year and if you get to attend one – that’s a life-time experience.

P.P.S: No, unfortunately I won’t be able to make it this year.

flac2mp3

I was going through Fedora Planet stream when I noticed this blog post about converting Flac files to mp3 on Linux.   That reminded me of a couple of folders with files that I can’t listen to in my car.  So I thought I’d convert them now, especially that I have the guide handy it only consists of a couple of steps.  I tried and it worked, except that default options used resulted in the mp3 file of 128 kbps, which is a rather low quality.  So I played a bit with it and ended up with the following shell flac2mp3.sh script:

#!/bin/bash

# Convert flac file to mp3 with best quality VBR

for file in *.flac
do
    base=`basename "$file" .flac`
    # Convert flat to wav
    flac -d "$file"
    # Convert wav to mp3 with variable bit rate, best quality
    lame -V 0 "$base".wav "$base".mp3
done

As mentioned in the comments, it creates variable bit rate (VBR) mp3 files with maximum quality.

Update: The moment I finished this blog post I felt weird. It was almost like I did it before. And indeed. I should have searched my own blog before posting. Here is the post I did five years ago which has pretty much the same script in it.