Cafe Bucky

From the “oh, not that again!” department …

Ralph Nader is running for President again. We all know how that turned out last time, with the election of Dubya. Gee thanks Ralph.

For the good of the country, I would hope that Ralph sees sense (sooner rather than later), and urges his supporters to cast the “best person capable of beating Bush” vote. Hint: that’s not Mr. “Unsafe At Any Speed”.

It’s a free country, and anyone can run (all mandatory qualifications tossed aside for the moment), but that doesn’t make it a Good Idea. The stakes are too high this time around to let some sideshow distract voters. We need to take the country back from idiots in office, not be subjected to endless snickering from those in the RNC, who would love nothing better than to see the Left fight amongst themselves.

I’ve been Jonesing for a music keyboard for my Mac.

The m-audio Keystation 49e is wildly popular these days. So much so that I can’t find one anywhere. And I really want at least 49 keys.

Time to go one or two levels up, I suppose.

The deal is, in California I always have access to my guitars and our Alesis digital piano. Here in New York I have … a harmonica. It’s just not the same man! Ever play music almost every day, and then suddenly stop for at least a month? Yeah, you know then.

So in my quest to get a music fix, I want to figure out a good keyboard to use with GarageBand.

Any suggestions?

A Followup!

Later that day…

Went to Manny’s Music on 48th Street, and got an Edirol PCR-50. Sweet.

One of my all-time fave sites is imdb.com. More information than you could ever hope to absorb about every movie can be found there. The searching is amazing. My wife and I were able to dredge up a movie based on a vague recollection of where it was shot. I am constantly in awe of this site.

So movies are well covered …

But what about Music?

What qualifies as an Internet Music Database?

Maybe there is something out there that I’m just not aware of, but I doubt it. Amazon.com has a lot of retail information and reviews of music, but it’s not even close to the coverage that imdb.com provides for movies.

What started me thinking about this was a simple example. Take an individual musician, and think of all the work they have done in groups and on their own. Someone like Sting shows up in imdb.com as having been in some movies (Brimstone and Treacle, Dune, Quadrophenia). Over on the music side, there’s his long solo career and work with The Police. Wouldn’t it be great to seamlessly follow a performer through Music space, in the same way we follow an actor, writer, director, etc. through Movies?

So an Internet Music Database should enable you to follow the arc of a musicians career, how they intersected with various bands and recordings at different times, and so on. In the sense that an actor is listed with a movie, a musician is associated with a recording (and by association, lyrics, and links to something like the Apple Music Store)

Go one step further, and think of melding the Movie and Music databases. There’s no compelling reason I can think of to have an arbitrary boundary - almost any movie musical blurs the line as it is.

It’s not hard to imagine adding books and authors into the mix. And other media … The end result becomes a sort of performer information cornucopia.

The user of such a service can really be able to follow someone’s career, no matter what media output is being considered. If they choose to focus on a certain media (such as books by Steve Martin), then that should be easy to navigate,

So what is happening in this space? Are there any grand unified performer/performance databases out theere?