I’m sure Flash encoding kills a lot of the fidelity from analog sound, but I still think it sounds great. I haven’t seen a turntable in years but I think I’ll look into getting one now. Kansas: in stereo!

Muxtape started back in March of 2008 and has been growing steadily in popularity since then. To put it simply, Muxtape allowed a user to upload a playlist of songs to its site and then share those playlists with other users. The site was supported by links to Amazon’s music store, where users could purchase songs heard on the site.

Now posted on the site’s homepage, the site “will be unavailable for a brief period while we sort out a problem with the RIAA.”

Stop supporting these dinosaurs. Go to a band’s show. Buy independent. Support the bands, not the leeches.

UPDATE: Word on the street is that Pandora is looking at a possible shutdown. Fantastic.

Now, here’s my little take on the so-called “format wars.”  I’ve always been one to advocate competition in the marketplace and I personally think that the competition between team Sony and team Toshiba has helped to improve both formats.  The downside to this competition that’s been occurring for a couple years now is the pressure of choice upon the consumers.  For average entertainment consumers, its hard to decide between the two; Sony has flaunted its full high definition 1080p resolutions, whereas HD-DVD has equal resolutions itself.  Blu-ray discs themselves support 25 gigabytes per layer (50 gigabytes for a dual-layer disc, concurrently) and HD-DVD discs support 15 gigabytes per layer, 30 gigabytes maximum.  Now, the format wars aren’t simply about disc storage space although more space leads to more area to store digital media, thus less need for compression and higher resolutions, although both discs support 1080p so I would assume that the qualities would be equal when compared.

As the “war” has progressed, however, the formats have evolved in attempt to one-up each other, including Sony’s revision 2.0 of their Blu-ray format already.  Although Sony’s most recent addition to Blu-ray is their “BD-Live” system, where you can connect your player to the Internet to pull live, streaming and interactive content from the Web, adding some handy interactivity and value to the already expansive library of titles.

While its unfortunate to see Toshiba just call it quits on their program, and regardless if they’re still going to sell HD-DVD machines and support the already adapted consumers, it will definitely make it easy for the consumer in the end.  The still common DVD format will probably be supported and embraced for years to come, but I can’t imagine what the market would be like if there was more competition over simple formats.  Oh wait, we already have, and it wasn’t pretty.

Seriously, in this age of the Internet, it just seems tacky. My computer sure as heck doesn’t beep from me hitting the “Publish” button on this page…