Ah, what memories………you know that feeling you get when you hear a song that you haven’t heard in years, and you get spanged around the head with nostalgia for the good old days?
I was looking through my CD collection last night (I really do have terrible taste in music!) and saw a CD by The Beautiful South that I used to just love. It was first released around 11 years ago, and when I moved to the US it was one of the CD’s my ex husband and I always used to listen to as we traveled around California getting to know our new country.

The Beautiful South are actually from my hometown of Kingston Upon Hull (it’s not worth looking the place up, the place is a hole) which is in the north of England. The north of England is considered to be less “well off”/poorer than the south of England……we have something called the north/south divide which is an imaginary line between “us” and “them”. But anyway, that’s why they called themselves The Beautiful South because they couldn’t very well be honest, could they?

One I love is Little Blue, purely for the line “you don’t call your plane the Flying Roman, ‘cos the Romans always walked and never flew”, but the tune is very catchy and it has other gems like that in the lyrics.

But my favorite song from the album is Don’t Marry Her which has two versions – the clean, radio version and the naughty album version – it’s just a couple of words here and there in the chorus but the uncensored version is much better! The link here is the clean version

Well, just to start things off on that clean legalese slate: JAMM does not condone piracy. But where do we draw the line here?

Microsoft is starting to lean harder on XDA Devs and requesting that the cooked ROMs on the site (as well as its mirror sites) be removed. Cooked ROMs can either upgrade WinMo firmware or repair certain bugs that have been left in current firmware. Microsoft probably see this as taking away from new device sales, and they’re leaning on technicalities to get the job done. It’s pretty dirty, in my opinion.

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On Wednesday, MobileBurn announced that Nokia launched their new 5030 XpressRadio with a built in FM Antenna. It’s and entry level, inexpensive music phone, and with the built-in FM antenna it means you don’t need a wired headset to listen to the music.

You can read all about it at MobileBurn.com

The pesky thing about all those blasted iPod and other mp3 player storage capacities is that they’re based on relatively crappy song quality. When your music player says it has 4GB of space for music you have to assume you can fit only five hundred songs of decent quality…or 1000 scratchy, echoey (echo-ey?), digital shadows of songs. I exaggerate, of course, but the standard 128 kbps quality of my music library eventually bugged me so much that I took a whole weekend to re-rip my CD’s. I know, I know, you’re thinking “it must be nice…”. I’m going to ask you to stop looking at me like that now, I swear I’m productive on the other weekends.

So what am I getting at here? Well, I read a little piece over on Gizmodo about how Stanford Professor Jonathan Berger conducted some tests on students. They were asked to listen to some music at various bit rates and, apparently, the 128 bit rate was deemed the favourite overall – especially because of that scratchy, staticky sound with lower quality recordings. I’m not saying that music at 128 kbps isn’t music any more, but it certainly does lose out to tracks encoded at 256 kbps or even 192 kbps. It’s definitely a surprise to hear that students (at least at Stanford) like their music this way, but I’ve also always been so puzzled by the fact that so many of my music-loving friends will stick with the standard crappy headphones that come with most music players. 

You can check out the original article from O’Reilly Radar here [news from Gizmodo].

Got an iPhone or an iPod? Just like to use the Apple media player? Well, it’s your day! According to GearDiary Apple has just released iTunes 8.1 and not a bit too soon adding support for its latest generation of iPod Shuffles (4GB 3rd Generation). Along with the hardware support comes an improvement and the ability to rip CDs at 256kbps AAC quality. I guess we PC users are just going to have to wait for the update considering that Apple users tend to feel the love first – I guess I shouldn’t be surprised should I?

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