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One of the advantages of living in Seattle is that I get to see great live concerts from my favorite bands. The last week has been a good one for concerts. Last Saturday I got to see The Presidents of the United States of America, who were fantastic, and on Wednesday I saw The Decemberists, who are one of my top 10 favorite bands.

I went to a lot of shows in college, too, and I was even in my own band, which was at the very least loud. After a couple particularly noisy concerts left me feeling uncomfortable about the idea of hearing damage, I (and the rest of my band) picked up some earplugs.

You may have used earplugs like these, foam pellets that block out all noise. These are great for sleeping through construction or operating loud machinery. But using them at a rock concert completely misses the point. Instead, we went to Guitar Center and picked up some earplugs that are designed for musicians.

I bring my pair with me to every concert I go to. They don’t just block out sound, they actually make concerts sound better. First, they reduce the volume to a comfortable level, not quiet but not painful either. More importantly, they filter out a lot of the “shimmery” noise you get in a big crowd - the random static of the crowd yelling, the echoes of the room, and the highest part of distorted guitars. Once you’ve gotten those out of the way, lyrics become understandable, individual instruments pop out of the noise, and bass becomes richer, without as much rattle. It’s really a better way to listen to concerts. And of course you’re protecting your ears from permanent damage. They are definitely a win all around.

Some time ago I came across the RIAA Radar site, which uses Amazon’s E-Commerce Web Service to cross-reference the labels musical albums are published under with known RIAA members. The idea is that you can use the service to help restrict your music purchases to labels that do not affiliate themselves with the RIAA, and by extension the RIAA’s strongarm tactics against music fans. I liked the idea but didn’t want to have to visit the site every time I looked at an album. Fortunately the site had a Greasemonkey script called RIAA Radar that would automatically insert a little icon on the Amazon detail page indicating whether it was from an RIAA label or not. Unfortunately, the script was broken. I went ahead and fixed up the script, as well as optimizing it and expanding its functionality. Since the site’s maintainer never accepted the revised version, so I’ve been maintaining a fork ever since.

Anyway, with the launch of Amazon’s new MP3 Downloads store, I figured I could get RIAA Radar working with that too. It turned out to be pretty easy, and I was able to fix a bad URL in the script while I was at it. So the script should serve music fans even better as they browse the DRM-free music available at Amazon.