recordings

The City of Boston tacitly acknowledged today that arresting a man for recording a police officer in public may not exactly have been the wisest -- or most constitutional -- choice.

That acknowledgement comes in the form of a $170,000 payment to Simon Glik, a Boston attorney who was prosecuted under criminal wiretap laws for using his cell phone to record police arresting someone on the Boston Common. They prosecuted the wrong fellow: Glik himself specializes in criminal defense.

A spokeswoman for the Boston Police Department told CNET this afternoon that the city has taken steps to ensure arrests-for-recording … Read more

Here's a message that Spotify and Rhapsody will surely forward to the handlers of Adele, Coldplay, Tom Waits, Paul McCartney, and especially those guys in The Black Keys: Subscription music services saw revenue increase 13.5 percent last year, while the number of the sector's paying customers climbed 18 percent.

That's according to the Recording Industry Association of America, which yesterday released year-end music shipment statistics for 2011. The RIAA reported that subscription revenue went from $212 million in 2010 to $241 million last year. The number of users rose from 1.5 million to 1.8 … Read more

I sold high-end audio in New York City for 16 years before I started writing. Talking one-on-one with my customers taught me a lot about how a broad range of people relate to hi-fi. Those experiences influenced my writing, because I know firsthand that there's not a lot of agreement about what constitutes "good sound." You have to listen for yourself to really know if you love the sound. You might do that at a friend's house, but the best place to compare and learn what you like is in a hi-fi store

I've blogged … Read more

Have you ever really thought about the difference between the way older and present-day recordings affect you? I'm not so much talking about sound quality; older recordings have a very different feel. They have more juice, more soul, more life, and that's why they connect with people in a completely different way than hyperprocessed contemporary music does.

Today, for example, Auto-Tuned vocals are so ubiquitous that my friend, mastering engineer Dave McNair, exclaimed, "The only way to know for sure a vocal hasn't been Auto-Tuned, is an out of tune vocal." So once a new … Read more

The current highest-capacity internal hard drive that you can buy offers 3TB of storage space, which is huge. Soon you'll be able to put even more data on one, thanks toSeagate's recent achievement in data density.

The hard-drive maker announced today that it has become the first company to achieve the milestone storage density of 1 terabit (1 trillion bits) per square inch, promising to double the current hard-drive's capacity before the end of this decade. The company says its new storage technology will also allow hard drives to reach 60TB capacity within the next decade. … Read more

There's so much to talk about with our guest today, Ella Morton. She's a former editor from CNET Australia, so we'll talk to her about her appearances on Planet CNET, a book she co-wrote with the founders of RecordSetter.com, and her visit to Sesame Street with RocketBoom.

Ella is currently working on a guide book to the world's hidden wonders with the team from Atlas Obscura, so she'll also tell us a few of her favorite stories from her research. We'll finish out the show with a chat about Ella's other love: burlesque!

With so much to talk about, we'll definitely have Ella back on the show, but in the meantime be sure to follow her on Twitter and check out her own podcast, Ellipsis.… Read more

NEW YORK--The country's largest Internet service providers haven't given up on the idea of becoming copyright cops.

Last July, Comcast, Cablevision, Verizon, Time Warner Cable and other bandwidth providers announced that they had agreed to adopt policies designed to discourage customers from illegally downloading music, movies and software. Since then, the ISPs have been very quiet about their antipiracy measures.

But during a panel discussion before a gathering of U.S. publishers here today, Cary Sherman, CEO of the Recording Industry Association of America, said most of the participating ISPs are on track to begin implementing the program … Read more

AUSTIN, Texas--Standing out amid the army of startups clamoring for attention at South by Southwest Interactive isn't easy. That is why RecordSetter, a site designed to do just as the name implies, and GroupMe brought in competitive eater Takeru Kobayashi do battle with others at a tent giving away grilled cheeses.

Kobayashi, best known as the former champion of the Nathan Hot Dog eating contest, went at it with fury. In a minute flat, he tossed back 13 grilled cheese sandwiches, complete with 26 slices of bread filled with slices of American cheese. His strategy: he dunked each sandwich … Read more

If you're a fan of America's long and storied history of great engineering, the National Park Service has got something for you.

On Monday, the park service's Historic American Engineering Record (HAER) Autodesk and kubit will announce the technological process of documenting these structures, a process that resulted in a broad collection of 3D imagery of projects like the Space Shuttle Discovery, as well as NASA launching pads, famous bridges, and more. The imagery was used to generate what are known as "point clouds" of data that, together, show a 3D version of the object. … Read more