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| It isn’t often that you are a witness to a technology that truly changes the way people live every day, but rarer still is when you can pinpoint the phenomenon to a single event on a single day. The lighting of Wall Street on Monday, Sept. 4, 1882; “Watson, come in here, I need to see you,” on Friday, March 10, 1876; the vision of 1984 during the Super Bowl on Sunday January 30, 1983 - all of these dates represent not the day the technology was invented, but rather the event which alerted the public at-large that things would never be the same again. You can add one more to that list as far as I am concerned… Friday, June 17, 2005. That is the day I was looking through a major men’s publication and saw an obituary in the form of a three-page ad layout. For the first time ever, I was looking at a print advertisement for radio. That’s right - radio. Not a radio station, not even FM radio… just radio in general. “Tons of artists. Zillions of songs. And oh yeah, it’s free” was the tagline. “Brought to you by America’s 13,000 local radio stations…” was the fine print. The ad should have read something like this: “Ladies and Gentlemen, let us take a moment of silence in fond remembrance of the days when radio was king, because it is all downhill from here.” With the advent of computers the world around us has changed drastically, even down to the most insignificant details of our day… even my toaster has a microchip inside it now. Everything is digital, and so is your music. Sure, this is nothing new. Digital technology crept into the music world in 1971 when Thomas Stockham was the first to record digitally when he recorded the Santa Fe Opera, and digital instruments had been appearing on conventional analog recordings since 1962. But the first commercial release on CD wasn’t until 1982. Now we have satellite radio, MP3, FLAC, digital downloads, DVD audio, etc. This list goes on and on. With all this technology around us, music lovers naturally have used it to their advantage. By discovering ways to use modern conveniences to spread music, people are hearing performances they might not hear any other way. Online record stores, internet-only releases direct from the artists, bonus online content for enhanced CDs… it is all out there if you know what to look for, where to look for it, and how to go about using it. Hittin’ the Note is proud to present a new monthly feature for our website. The Digital Domain is designed to help our readers use technology to get the most for their listening pleasure. Created to be a continuing series, this column will build each month from the information discussed the month before. For reference, we will be keeping an archive of each column available on the website so you can always reference back to previous columns. For the experienced users, the first few columns may seem a bit elementary, but stick with us to help shape the direction on content of future columns. Like all good communities, many hands make for light work, and this column is no different. If you would like to footnote or enhance content with subjects HTN may have missed, please let us know via email. We can always add to previous columns to make them clearer or more complete in their content. For readers that have never ventured into the digital world farther then listening to a CD, feel free to reach us with your questions regarding the subject matter discussed here. Our email is brianshupe@hittinthenote.com. Next month we will begin with the basics of music on your home computer and provide a glossary of terms. Oh yeah… we will also be providing a few unreleased tunes from some of the bands Hittin’ the Note covers as our examples when discussing different techniques of the digital domain. So while you are learning everything from Apple’s iTUNES to how to download music for your Zire handheld, you will be getting new and never before heard music, from the Allman Brothers to Warren Zevon.  |
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