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On today's show, special guest Thomas Dolby drops in to talk with us about the state of the music industry and digital distribution, his new album, and the amazing sounding MMORPG that goes along with it. We're pretty overwhelmed by his brilliance. But we recover a bit for tech news, like Hulu's 1 million paid users (and imminent death), and whether the Droid Bionic can catch up to the Atrix 4G.

U.S. album sales for the first six months of the year grew 1 percent, which may not sound like much but it's the first time the recording industry has seen any gains for the period since 2004.

Research firm Nielsen SoundScan reported today that the total number of albums sold in the U.S. was 155.5 million, an increase of 1 percent from the 153.9 million albums sold during the same period last year.

Digital track sales were also up. More than 660 million units were sold, an increase from last year of 10 percent. These … Read more

To get the visuals it was looking for in L.A. Noire, its new detective game, video game maker Rockstar Games used 3D motion-capture technology called MotionScan.

In this video, GameSpot's Dan Chiappini sits down with Oliver Bao from Depth Analysis, the company that makes MotionScan, to get a deeper look at how the technology was used--and where it can go from here.

Apple's Preview application initially was just a quick viewer for displaying image and PDF files in OS X, but over the years it has acquired a number of features that have turned it into a useful utility, especially since it is much simpler than tools like Photoshop and iPhoto while offering similar basic manipulation options. We recently covered how to use Preview for editing and organizing multipage PDFs, but in addition it can be used to import images from various sources, including locally attached or shared scanners that use Apple's Bonjour print services. Unfortunately, even when scanning relatively … Read more

Google Books has great tools for keeping track of things you've read, are reading, or want to read. However, it can be a cumbersome task to add each book to the virtual bookshelf individually. So instead of spending countless minutes keying in numbers, follow these steps so you can easily scan and add all your books at once:

1. Install Barcode2File from the Android Market.

2. Open the app and press the Scan barcode button to start collecting a list of ISBNs from the books (one list at a time).

3. Once you're finished scanning, press … Read more

E-book aficionados who use Google Books will find a few enhancements waiting for them the next time they open their favorite book.

As of yesterday, Google lets you search for any word that appears in the text of one of your books as well as letting you highlight text to ask for a definition or translation. You can access the new features by opening a book in your Google Books library through any desktop browser. Double-clicking on or dragging your mouse over any piece of text then opens a pop-up menu with a series of choices.… Read more

For all the accomplishments of the video game industry, there are still barriers that interactive entertainment has yet to break. Many games look fantastic and play well, but with few if any exceptions, there remains a stubborn wall between the player/observer and the characters in the game world (sometimes linked to the evolving "Are games art?" debate). There are many symptoms of this phenomenon, from stiff animation to stilted dialogue to unconvincing voiceover work, and the situation now is only marginally better than it was when I started writing about games more than a decade ago (many players can name a handful of choice performances, but these are the rare exception, rather than the rule).

Coming closest, in recent memory at least, to bridging that gap (which is much deeper than the typical explanation of an "uncanny valley" between near-photographic images and reality) is L.A. Noire, a gritty detective story set in 1940s Los Angeles. The combination of careful writing (much rarer in interactive entertainment than it should be), a cast of competent professional actors, and a few bits of new technology, puts the game leaps and bounds past the typical action/adventure experience, where it usually feels like most in-game conversations exist only to push the kind of dull exposition that would make David Mamet's head spin.

I've criticized some of my otherwise favorite games for this very problem, saying of Dragon Age, for example, that the game was buried under uptight, wooden characterizations that come off like the dated, stagy delivery of an old fantasy film. Arguably among recent games the inventive detective thriller Heavy Rain probably came closest to surmounting these obstacles--or at least bravely attempting to.

So, why is effective storytelling, as seen in television programs such as "Mad Men" or "The Wire", such a difficult task for video games, where paradoxically nearly any setting, character, or event imaginable is just a few keyboard strokes away for an able team of programmers and artists? … Read more

Following up what we thought was 2010's best game of the year is no small task, but if there's one developer/publisher powerhouse that can handle the pressure, it's certainly Rockstar Games. From a pairing with Sydney-based developer Team Bondi, L.A. Noire was born, with preproduction dates ranging as far back as 2004.

It's certainly been a long road for the massive title, involving more than 400 actors, more than 20 hours of voice acting, and the invention of a whole new technology to capture realistic facial expressions. Our eyes having been glued to the TV for every waking hour of the past few days, we're ready to share our final thoughts.

First, a little background: L.A. Noire is a crime drama-thriller set in 1940s Los Angeles. Players assume the role of Cole Phelps, a war-hero-turned-cop who is in the process of making his way up in the ranks of the L.A.P.D. In a notoriously violent time in L.A.'s past, Phelps finds himself confronted with an unsettling number of possibly connected murder cases.

Of course, the game borrows its name from the film noir genre, dating back to crime dramas of the '40s and '50s that used stylized cinematography and the high contrast of gritty black and white for dramatic effect. While L.A. Noire is presented in color, players have the option of choosing black and white in the display settings.

Every effort was made to recapture the Los Angeles of 1947, from the painstaking details of a residential kitchen to the historic landmarks on the outskirts of town. Aerial photographs, blueprints, public records--just about every resource available--was consulted in the game's reconstruction of the city and the result is absolutely astonishing.… Read more

QR codes aren't just for boring business marketing. We recently checked out Barcode Gallery, a company that sells QR codes (two-dimensional bar codes that link to messages or Web sites) as wall art. Now you can emblazon those codes on a custom T-shirt for a high-tech fashion statement with ScanMe's shirt-printing service.

ScanMe creates a custom QR code just for you. It links to your Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter profiles and can include your latest status message, a way to e-mail you, or even your phone number.

Anyone who wants a modicum of privacy can control how much information the scan pulls up. That's smart, because the people you want checking out your LinkedIn account usually aren't the same as the people you want to be friends with on Facebook.

These T-shirts offer more of a fashion statement than a mere black and white collection of boxes within a square. Some of the designs veer off into Threadless territory with the bar code buried within a Space Invaders-style illustration or coming from the mouth of a blue Twitter bird.

ScanMe is a United Kingdom company, but it offers free worldwide postage on the shirts. Prices start around $22 and range up to around $35 per shirt.… Read more