No Soup For You

September 3, 2003

I recently bought Soulive's latest album, an eponymous release which was recorded live during late 2002. The album itself is excellent. Unlike the group's prior Blue Note albums, Soulive accurately captures the trio's groove and doesn't sound stilted.

I bought the album on CD, rather than as an iTunes download, so that I could access the "special features" on the Enhanced CD. In the liner notes, the "System requirements for enhanced CD content" are listed as "MAC G3 or better with DVD-ROM drive and QuickTime 5.0.2." I am still very surprised to find that the enhanced content will only play in OS 9, not natively in OS X or even in Classic. This seems ironic considering that all the music on the album was recorded using a Mac G4 running OS X.

Thanks Macromedia and Blue Note. Even though the system requirements note that "certain computers may not be able to access the multimedia portion of this disc," I didn't realize that certain computers may not be able to because they're too new. Fortunately, the music is great.

The liner note brings up another pet peeve I can address: the unnecessary and improper use of all capital letters ("MAC") when referring to the Macintosh computing system and the Mac OS. Mac is an abbreviated form and not an acronym. As such, it should use the normal capitalization for a proper noun, just like when using the nickname "Andy."