More Happy; More Bad

Microsoft is using this song on one of the Windows 7 advertisements (More Happy). I think that they've recycled the little Asian girl from a previous ad, too. I hope that those Swedes played their cards right and got a small fortune for licensing. I like the bad cover version better:



This one takes the cake for dreadful, though. I was looking for videos of Roscoe Beck after seeing Leonard Cohen Live in London on PBS last night, again. Roscoe has a really fat tone on that signature bass, and I was impressed. As it turns out, he's from Austin, like these guys. Growing up in the valley, I always thought that Austin was supposed to only have great musical acts. I guess they're good at what they do:

Why I Despise FM

And MTV, for that matter.

The impetus for this was this video:



I get really annoyed by pitch and tempo-shifted songs. I realize that they're doing it to fit the commercials in, but I'd really rather listen to music at the appropriate speed.

Anyhow, I was trying to a friend that it totally changes everything about the feel of the music, and she wasn't quite on the same page with me. Maybe I'm totally neurotic, and 5% isn't a big difference, but it drives me up the wall. I built several mp3s in an attempt to illustrate time-stretch and pitch-shift. You see, the original song runs 00:05:34, and that video version runs 00:03:45; this freaks me out.

Here is the original version(ripped from lp), 00:05:34;
Here is the pitch-shifted version, 00:05:34 (5% higher pitch);
Here is the time-stretched version, 00:05:17 (5% faster tempo);
Here is the re-sampled version, 00:05:18 (5% faster tempo, 5% higher pitch--this is how the radio does it)

Hell, I still had to cut out a minute and a half to get to the length of the video. They'd cut out half of the intro, and, as it turns out, the second verse. The intro edit was easy easy, but chopping that obscene verse out proved to be more difficult (it's probably easier to do the edits before speeding it up). I got down to three and three-quarters by "cheating" and going another 2% faster. I think that it sounds really forced, but I'm totally pleased with the clean edits. Whatever, I was just playing:


Jeremy's Radio Edit

Mel Rocks...and only Fuckin' Ronny will get this.

Some Texas TV advertisements from back in the day: