Dispatches from the Creation Wars

Youtube Gems: 80s Music Edition

Posted by Ed Brayton on December 29, 2006
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Whoever came up with the idea of Youtube deserves a Congressional Medal of Honor. And if you’ve never heard of the Democracy Player, you need to get that too. It allows you to search for youtube and Google videos and then download them and save them on your harddrive. It’s also open source and free, so even better. Anyway, here are some links to cool and obscure stuff I’ve found on Youtube lately.

Here’s a classic early 80s video, Toronto’s Your Daddy Don’t Know.

Another classic music video by one of my favorite 80s bands, The Fixx – Stand or Fall.

Wall of Voodoo’s Mexican Radio.

One of my all time favorites, David and David’s Welcome to the Boomtown.

Devo’s Whip It.

The Proclaimers – 500 Miles.

One of INXS’ more obscure songs, but one of my favorites – Don’t Change.

One of the hits from Yes’ Trevor Rabin phase, Love Will Find a Way. And here’s a live version of Hold On. The 90125 album was THE album of my last two years of high school.

Elvis Costello – Pump It Up (featured in the classic movie PCU).

Queensryche’s classic I Don’t Believe in Love, from Operation: Mindcrime (the follow up that came out last year was so bad I couldn’t finish listening to it).

Don’t Stand So Close to Me, one of the best songs the Police ever put out.

The amazing Peter Gabriel – Shock the Monkey.

Last but not least, my favorite Dire Straights song ever, and I think their best video as well. Money for Nothing got all the attention, but this video, all done in sketch animation, is better and perfect for the song – Brothers in Arms.

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Comments

  1. #1 Doug
    December 29, 2006

    Dire Straits, Ed.

    The Spelling Police

  2. #2 Glenn
    December 29, 2006

    http://tinyurl.com/y5jzj6

    Open the door!
    Get on the floor!
    Everybody
    Walk the Dinosaur!

    Hahahaha… I am an agent of CHAOS!

  3. #3 Lettuce
    December 29, 2006

    FWIW, on the Macintosh you can download, say, a YouTube video directly from Safari.

    Just go Window –> Activity Viewer in the menu and, when you’re on the video page at YouTube the largest file listed will be the video. Double-click it. It will download.

    I leave it to you to find the many freeware and shareware solutions for ripping that file to iTunes compatibale format.

  4. #4 DuWayne
    December 29, 2006

    Lettuce –

    I was under the impression that iPods cannot play files that do not have licensing, yet you insinuate that one can convert files to be iTunes compatible. Am I mistaken? Not that it matters, I don’t like other things about iPods and plan on getting a different MP3 player anyhow – just curious.

  5. #5 Lettuce
    December 29, 2006

    iPods can play non-licensed content, but that wouldn’t affect iTunes in any case.

    Indeed, the cast majority of content on any iPod would be non-licensed. You can rip CDs, download mp3s, whatever.

    You can’t play Windows Media (but you can convert it) or either of MS’ DRM formats, but non DRM? Have at it.

  6. #6 DuWayne
    December 29, 2006

    Lettuce –
    Thanks, I didn’t know that. I assumed that if they are ripped from CD, they had whatever iPod needs to identify the license.

    I still don’t like them because you can’t upload music from an iPod to another computer. The reason I have licensing issues is that the site I get downloads from, claims to be legal – with a five cent charge per download. Yet some of the files that I download are unlicensed. This is only a problem when they are in wma format – WMA will only play licensed material in that format – or at least that is the case on my computer.

    I also discovered that the MP3 player I got my son’s mom plays every format we have loaded on it, wma’s, RealPlayer songs and of course MP3s.

  7. #7 Lettuce
    December 29, 2006

    For what it’s worth, current iPods are compatible with at least these formats

    JPG , JPEG, BMP, GIF, TIF, TIFF, PSD, SGI, and PNG will work. BMP works, JPG2000 works PICT works.

    Uncompressed WAV, AIFF, AAC, Audible, MP3

    H.264 and MPEG-4, mov, mp4, m4v

    iTunes will convert many formats to one of these as well

  8. #8 Glenn
    December 29, 2006

    FWIW, Winamp has two different extensions for iPod support, and the current incarnations of them are fairly glitch-free. Their primary advantage is allowing content to be transferred from the iPod to any host computer that has Winamp and the iPod extension installed. I find this setup very useful for transferring newly ripped content from my home CD collection to my computer at work. I don’t use iTunes at all.

  9. #9 NBarnes
    December 29, 2006

    First person I’ve ever seen describe (I’m Gonna Be) 500 Miles as either cool or obscure. I like it, too, mind.

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