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Welcome to the David Boles: Human Meme Podcast!

I’m delighted to announce today that my new podcast — David Boles: Human Meme — is now widely available for subscription! The podcast is free, and there’s no advertising, and I’m never going to try to sell you something. You subscribe because you have to make the podcast come to you. The thought behind the method of the podcast is simple: You and me! There’s no production or music or whistles or things that bleep. It’s a quiet conversation. You may listen via iTunes right now!

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The Western Digital My Cloud Review, 4 TB Edition

I’ve purchased a lot of external storage devices over the last 30 years, and the one brand I keep turning back to for future purchases is Western Digital. I’ve had rotten experiences with LaCie and Iomega in the past and, to date, I have yet to experience any sort of hardware failure — or glitch, or even momentary pause — with a Western Digital drive, and I’m hard on my storage devices.  In fact, I’ve never NOT had a LaCie drive either be dead-on-arrive or die within two weeks of setting up the device. I run my HDDs 24/7/365 and I not only expect them to work, but to thrive in all hostile environments.

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Jumping on the Apple TV Bandwagon

Yes, I’m late to the Apple TV bandwagon.  I thought I’d wait out my wanderlust temptation to try the “black box” edition of Apple TV and leap on the concept when it was more fully realized as an embedded meme in an actual Apple TV that included the actual TV, but like losing patience for the phantom iPhone 5S to appear, I decided to give in to my purchase envy and shell out the $99.00USD for the shiny cube.

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12-12-12 The Concert for Sandy Relief Album Review

After the release being delayed a day, you can now finally purchase the “12-12-12 Concert for Sandy Relief” album  on iTunes.  I watched the concert on live television and it’s interesting to see which artists and what songs made the 24 cuts on this memorial hurricane record.

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Will We Ever Own Our iTunes?

I have over 30,000 songs in my iTunes library and many of those songs were directly purchased from iTunes. I’ve scattered that musical library to Amazon and a portion of it to Google. Lately, I’ve been wondering what would happen to all that music if something happened to me. Sure, my wife could grab it, but should I ultimately plan to donate all that music to a school or sell off bits of the collection?

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The Alan Loax Collection: Is iTunes Censoring Musical History?

Last week, I was watching Stephen Colbert interview Elvis Costello, Don Fleming and Emmylou Harris about the historical work of live music performance archivist Alan Lomax.  I immediately leapt onto iTunes and found over 110 Lomax albums available for purchase.  I was happy to have those Lomax gems in my iTunes Match library in the iCloud at 256 kbps.

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The Mastered for iTunes Review

Last week, I was intrigued to read about the new “Mastered for iTunes” albums that are now appearing in the online store:

Enhanced Audio on iTunes: This week, Apple quietly introduced a new section of its iTunes store called Mastered for iTunes, with albums whose sound has been adjusted by engineers “for higher fidelity sound on your computer, stereo and all Apple devices.” Mastering, the fine tuning at the end of the recording process, has long been tailored to specific audio formats, and Apple’s changes come after years of complaints by musicians, including Neil Young, that sound quality suffers from the compression used by digital services to reduce a file’s size.

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