Sure you can. If they aren’t in stock (and they often won’t be unless I happen to be passing through town), just give your friendly independent record store proprietor the title and UPC bar code and he or she can happily order it for you. (That’s why we put ’em next to the little shopping cart icon.)

Well we can’t have that!

But easy now. There could be many causes ranging from the sublime to the ridiculous. First of all, you do have speakers, right? You can hear other sounds emanating from your PC, right? Right? 😀

Is Your Web Browser Up To Date?

You should be able to play songs on most common browsers over Windows (IE8 forward, Apple, Google, Firefox and Android type products. If you have a really old computer, you should still be able to play sounds in a clunky way via MP3.

Do You Have An Audio Player That Supports MP3?

Have you listened to other MP3 songs on the Internet? If not, Good Gravy! Get into the twenty first century! Maybe your PC was never set up with a program to properly play MP3 files (the standard file format for downloadable tuneage these days.) If that is indeed the case. If you just emerged from hiding in a cave to find that the Japs lost the war, I recommend the very nice VLC […]

Confession? Get it? Catholic joke.

I was recently screamed at about my selective ethics. About intellectual property no less! For years I have been a subscriber to NetFlix. Love it. Sometimes, I can’t watch the videos when they send ’em to me—I’m out of town or whatever. So I rip ’em. Yep I do. And then, perhaps a month later, I watch ’em. But then I toss ’em. This is bad, if for no other reason that I’m contributing to the toxic waste problem. But more to the point, it’s also a violation of federal law that states that no copying at all is allowed. Tough, I say. It passes the JCHVSEST because at no time do I pass the content on and never do I watch more than once before giving the disc the boot.

And while I’m confessin’ the blues, I’ll tell ya another way I’m a total scofflaw. I got over 800 DVDs at last count. I purchased pretty much every last one of ’em used for […]

…and I ain’t talkin’ about the Sade song which changed me life back in ’81. What I’m talkin’ ’bout is an article by ‘ethicist’ Randy Cohen of the New York Times.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/04/magazine/04FOB-ethicist-t.html

I have problems with this article.

First, his conclusion is that it is somehow ethical to download an illegal copy of any software (aka ‘intellectual property’) if you already own a legal copy. That’s rubbish to me. To me, the problem with all such arguments is that they don’t pass JC’s Hardware v. Software Ethical Smell Test (JCHVSEST®) which, as you already know, says the following:

If it smells fishy for hardware, it’s probably just as ethically cod-like for softwares

Look. You buy a great looking pair of jeans that really make your butt look great. You go on holiday to some totally bitchin’ place. On the first night out you reach for those go-to trousers only to find (to your horror) that you forgot to pack them. Do you…
a) Go to the local shop and purchase another
b) Go to a local […]

You can now find all your fave JCHMusic CDs and MP3s at Amazon. (You can still buy them here directly and at iTunes, of course.)