Roddy Ricch has the number one album in the country:
Roddy Ricch’s Please Excuse Me for Being Antisocial returns to No. 1 on the Billboard 200 albums chart for a third nonconsecutive week, while Billie Eilish’s When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? vaults back into the top three after Eilish’s big night at the Grammy Awards.
Marco Arment has released a version of his Overcast podcast player with “Voice Boost 2,” if you are interested in the nerdy audio side of this, he’s written up a blog post explaining it:
This is about to get nerdier, but bear with me. (Yes, nerdier than ITU broadcast-loudness standards.)
Given a loudness measurement for the incoming audio, quieter podcasts need to be amplified to reach the target. But perceived loudness isn’t the peak of the incoming audio stream — it’s more of an average. Quiet-sounding audio can still have brief moments of loud peaks.
When increasing the volume of digital audio, the biggest challenge is not “clipping” during the peaks — not having any part of the signal pass above the volume ceiling of 0 dB. (It’s a negative scale. This is also why the LUFS value above, which is closely related to the decibel scale used here, is negative.)
Three Kevin Devine songs have been released on streaming services, one is new.
Hawthorne Heights are once again offering their annual Valentines Day package.
Circa Survive’s Blue Sky Noise is getting a vinyl reissue.
Billie Joe Armstrong, talking to Rolling Stone about “Minority:”
After “Time of Your Life,” I started getting into playing more acoustic guitar, and I really wanted to have more for Warning. And there was also a lot of kind of bad pop punk that was starting to happen, and I wanted to go against that genre. This felt like the next step. I had been getting into listening to more of the Kinks and the Who, who found a lot of power in an acoustic song, and used the guitar almost like a drum. “Pinball Wizard” is so percussive. I wrote this right before the election between George Bush and Al Gore. I started feeling the political wheels starting to turn toward conservatism a little bit. I think that song is sort of about declaring that you’re stepping out of the line, you’re not part of the sheep, and trying to find your own individualism. It felt like we were diving into something that was more conceptual for sure.
I’d like to go back and rerecord that album. It was right when Pro Tools started happening. I want to go back and just do everything more live, because I think “Minority” live is a lot better than it came out on the album. But that’s just one of those things that you think about too much.
Warning is still my favorite Green Day album.
Eve 6 are heading out on a Horrorscope 20-year anniversary tour with Alien Ant Farm.
Frances Quinlan’s new album, Likewise, is streaming over at NPR.
Eminem has the number one album in the country this week:
Eminem notches his historic 10th No. 1 album on the Billboard 200 chart with his latest release, Music to Be Murdered By. The set debuts atop the tally with 279,000 equivalent album units earned in the U.S. in the week ending Jan. 23, according to Nielsen Music.
The Grammy awards were last night. You can find the list of winners here and all the performances below.
One of my favorite features every year is Federico Viticci’s “Must-Have Apps” over at MacStories. I always end up finding something I didn’t know about and put into my workflow. This year I’ll be looking into moving my bookmarks over into Raindrop.io because the current state of native apps for Pinboard is awful.
This entire story features a collection of the 50 apps I consider my must-haves on the iPhone and iPad, organized in seven categories; whenever possible, I included links to original reviews and past coverage on MacStories.
If you’re looking for great new apps, this is a must read.
Hayley Williams interview with Annie Mac on BBC Radio 1 is now up for your listening pleasure.
The Interrupters will be heading into the studio with Tim Armstrong in February to record a new album:
While touring we’ve also been writing non-stop. That means we have a lot of material to get down. We can’t wait to bring everything together to complete the puzzle.
Ben Sisario, writing for the New York Times:
Deborah Dugan, the suspended chief of the Recording Academy, the organization behind the Grammy Awards, said in a complaint to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission on Tuesday that she had been removed as retaliation for uncovering a range of misconduct at the academy, including sexual harassment, improper voting procedures and conflicts of interest among academy board members.
And:
According to the complaint, the nominating committee, when finalizing the ballot for the 2019 award for song of the year, for example, chose as one of its eight final nominees a song that had initially ranked 18 out of 20. The artist behind that song, the complaint alleges, was allowed to sit on the committee and was also represented by a board member.
The complaint also says that the committees can add artists to the ballot who had not first been chosen by the general voting pool. For this year’s awards, it says, 30 such artists were “added to the possible nomination list.”
And:
The document, filed with the E.E.O.C.’s Los Angeles office and technically called a charge of discrimination, alleges that Ms. Dugan’s predecessor, Neil Portnow, had been accused of rape by an artist, and that the academy’s board had been scheduled to vote for a bonus for him even though all of its members had not been told about the accusation. The complaint has little detail about the accusation, but said that a psychiatrist had said that the encounter was “likely not consensual.”
It also says that Ms. Dugan herself had received unwanted sexual advances from Joel Katz, a powerful industry lawyer who represents the Grammys.
Pete Wentz and Patrick Stump of Fall Out Boy were on yesterday’s episode of The Price is Right.