Robert Fripp to Compose Vista's Soundtrack 362
brainstem writes "Recently, King Crimson founder, guitar master, and all around eccentric musical genius Robert Fripp spent a few days at the MS Campus recording soundscapes for Vista. Fripp, who has been at the forefront of electronic guitar composition for more than 35 years, first using analog tape delays, then with digital effects. He infused his unique brand of Frippertronics on the MS crowd. The Channel 9 site has posted a 25 minute video, chronicalling the event. Now I guess I finally have a reason to leave the default Windows sounds enabled."
Not to bash (Score:3, Interesting)
I've gone through a lot of sound schemes, and while the initial concept is cool most of them get really redundant and annoying after awhile. Also, one of the nicest things about KDE is the ability to set the 'theme sounds volume' accordingly, so that at normal they're a dull whisper, and when I turn up to hear my quiet DVD or VOIP conversation my speakers don't blow up at the next exclamation error sound... (hopefully this might be a Vista feature, as well?). Maybe a few nice strums of the guitar for starting or stopping windows will help, but an all-out guitarfest might be a bit overboard.
Then again, some of the music such as the background during the windows install I found very well indeed... it's just the effects that were a bit annoying.
Re:Meanwhile midi lovers are crying (Score:1, Interesting)
Also, Kings Quest 6 (heir today, gone tomorrow) included a cd quality music track (1992).
Total Annihilation (1997) and Fallout (1997) both had CD quality music as well. In fact, Total Annihilation's score is so good, I still listen to it today. One of the best game scores I've ever heard - right up there with Diablo.
Diablo (1996) also had CD quality music. I do believe composed by Matt Uelmen.
Tomb Raider was not the first to use CD quality music; it was just the first to do it poorly.
Brian Eno (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Fripp? nah, Something with a kick please! (Score:5, Interesting)
Something with a kick?
Perhaps you should listen the latest stuff from King Crimson. Hell, go and check out Red and keep in mind that it was done in the 70's.
Now, I must go back to listening Strapping Young Lad and Opeth....
Re:Interesting choice... (Score:5, Interesting)
The Gates of Paradise? (Score:5, Interesting)
The League of Crafty Guitarists is "the performance wing of Guitar Craft", and Guitar Craft is Robert Fripp's guitar school-thingy. So, the circle is complete.
Anyway. Now at least we know that the sounds in Vista will be nice. That's good. I'm a little worried though, that perhaps the Blue Screen of Death will become Red and "One More Red Nightmare" is blasted out your speakers every time an error/BSOD occurs!
What's scarier is the fact that Robert Fripp's soundscape album from 1997 (not his only soundscape album, no) is so aptly titled "The Gates of Paradise"! amazon link [amazon.com]
And perhaps the song titles of that album can give us a hint as to how Fripp feels about mr. Gates:
"The Outer Darkness"
"Abandonment to Divine Providence"
"In Fear And Trembling Of The Lord"
"Acceptance"
I mean, since Microsoft/Gates does rule the universe, or at least one might think that Fripp believes so, we here have a possible explanation to why he agreed to make this Vista "soundtrack"/soundscape/whatever... The other possible explanation is obvious: Fripp likes money.
Re:In the Court... (Score:3, Interesting)
I mean, I thought he had better taste than that. I've been a Crimson fan for quite some time. I know folks who have studied under Fripp. He strikes me in the third person as very un-windows-user-ish.
But I guess everyone has their price.
I wonder if they'll use another one of Nathan Mhyrvold's shitty pictures for the background picture in Vista? He's a decent photographer, but the background picture for XP was badly interpreted. Freakishly over-saturated...you name it. Looked like crap.
RIAA (Score:2, Interesting)
Warezed? (Score:2, Interesting)
http://slashdot.org/articles/04/11/13/0036243.sht
Yep, but artists lose again. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Microsloth bandwidth (Score:3, Interesting)
MMS [wikipedia.org] is a streaming protocol. Streaming over HTTP is just plain dumb, if you want to skip forward/backward in the stream you have to interrupt communications to issue a new request and the protocol offers no resilience to changes in streaming rate.
Think yourself lucky you can download it at all, on Windows you have to use 3rd party software (that doesn't always work) to save an MMS stream to a file.
I think that is incorrect (Score:3, Interesting)
I am pretty sure that the AHRA actually says "it's still illegal but we agree not to prosecute you". I'll try to find a real reference for that.
not the first time he has "sold out" (Score:5, Interesting)
As a Fripp fan who will probably end up using Vista at some point I'm cautiously optimistic about this. I'm also skeptical that the little noises an OS makes can have any musical quality whatsoever.