Facebook Meme time - 25 albums

Yeah, I don't post here much anymore. I tend to spend most of my time on Facebook anyway. This is going to end up getting posted there anyway, so why not make it public.

No, I'm not going to tag anybody. But there is this "25 Albums" meme. The "25 random things about me" meme wasn't my style, although reading others was interesting. Anyway... here goes...

Think of 25 albums that had such a profound effect on you they changed your life or the way you looked at it. They sucked you in and took you over for days, weeks, months, years. These are the albums that you can use to identify time, places, people, emotions. These are the albums that no matter what they were thought of musically shaped your world.

Rush - Moving Pictures
Rage Against the Machine (self-titled)
Pink Floyd - The Wall
Soundgarden - Superunknown
Nirvana - Nevermind
Pearl Jam - Ten
Air - 10,000Hz Legend
Modest Mouse - We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank
Smashing Pumpkins - Siamese Dream
Sting - Soul Cages Concert
Tool - Ænima
Elton John - Good Bye Yellow Brick Road
Type O Negative - World Coming Down
Zero 7 - Simple Things
A Tribe Called Quest - The Low End Theory
The Prodigy - The Fat of the Land
The Police - Regatta de Blanc
Morcheeba - Big Calm
The Dust Brothers - Fight Club Soundtrack
DJ Z-Trip & DJ P - Uneasy Listening, Volume 1
Beastie Boys - Ill Communication
The Chemical Brothers - Brother's Gonna Work It Out
The Crystal Method - Vegas
Daft Punk - Discovery
Nine Inch Nails - Head Like a Hole

Diagrammatical

There's a Visio diagram about a quarter of the way down for It Was a Good Day that was just too awesome.

Rap Represented in Mathematical Charts and Graphs

Last night - Blue Man Group

Good show. 12th row, in the aisle, at Key Arena...

My iTunes Obsession

The image above represents just the music I have in my iTunes library. I've seen larger, but I keep stuff I will actual listen to. My goal is to listen to every song at least once a year.

I have completed a huge project with my iTunes library. Last year, I was loaned a full iTunes library from a friend. Rougly 150GB of content to go through and pillage. A lot of it was just garbage. I ended up keeping only about 6GB of music from it. Keep in mind that it contained both music and videos and I only kept music.

The iTunes folder, when I started the project on 7/26/06, had roughly 5000 or 6000 subfolders to go through. I just finished it today, almost a year later.

I ended up adding about 1140 new songs from this library to mine. I'm very anal about adding music to my collection. Everything has tags that are as accurate as the data on allmusic.com. If album artwork exists, I add it to the track.

I feel a certain sense of accomplishment now. Ahhh...

Busted!

A short while ago, I was caught air drumming by some of my coworkers.

The song I was air drumming to.

Wait for it...



"Don't You Forget About Me" by Simple Minds.

Rad.

I love to eat my cereal when I'm watching my cartoons.

Every now and then I hear something that immediately gets 5 stars in iTunes. This is one such thing.

Disintegration

Disintegrating an iTunes music library that has 13,000+ items can be a chore. It can also be a little emotionally draining as I deleted around 5500 items that were hers leaving me with around 7600 of my own.

And I deleted her account off of the main computer tonight. That's also a biggie. I can't say I'm not a little down right now, but I'll get over it.

She'll be moving most of her stuff out this Friday.

Best feature in iTunes 6.0.2

The best feature in iTunes, apart from the mini-store (ha ha), is multiple-speaker support. This means I can have my built-in speakers on my computer and my Airport Express all playing at the same time.

And somehow, they're perfectly synchronized, so I've got one source playing music in multiple rooms in my house. I could add more Airport Expresses around my house to get every room filled with music.

It'd be cool if someone created an all-weather Airtunes speaker set so I could have this outside the house, or in the shower.

If only you could rate some songs with 6 stars.

I love this song. It had the perfect tempo for me to keep in-step with the music, on my walk to the bus stop after work today.

(Alright)
I am the new
For reasons I can never explain
I speak the truth
I put an end to all your pain
I want guilt, I want to drag you right through your past
I'm on a roll
And I'm moving way too fast

(Alright)
Aren't we always looking over our shoulders
Aren't we always drawing guns from our holsters

I'm at the start to check every hour of the day
I stand well above
And mould you with my clay
Out of the depth, every soul can pay a fee
Those who are kept
I'm gonna set you free

(Alright)
Aren't we always looking over our shoulders
Aren't we always drawing guns from our holsters

I'll shed light
Tear apart all you believe
One of us
Grateful for all you receive
Make it up, do you find it hard to contain
Pray in God, can you hold it all inside your brain

(Alright)
Aren't you always getting scared of the future
Aren't you always thinking someone will shoot you
Aren't we always looking over our shoulders
Aren't we always drawing guns from our holsters

Shoulder Holster, by Morcheeba

How big is yours?

Did the subject get you to look?

My iTunes Library size:
8479 songs - 27 days, 20 minutes, and 2 seconds - 37.77 GB

1346 tracks added in the last month alone. (Blame Nicole for most of those.)

Just got done sorting all of the new Nine Inch Nails stuff that got added, and then promptly went and bought most of it (used, of course).

Nicole and I share the iTunes library on a disk with permissions disabled. This allows us to both add music to the library and see it in our own separate user accounts (Mac OS X 10.3, by the way). The iTunes Library is shared, but we have our own preferences for the iTunes app itself. We use the grouping feature to separate tracks by username. It works pretty well, but the downside is that only one of us can really rate music. And, since I already rate everything, Nicole misses out.

Breaking it down a little bit further (I'm a bit obsessive about this, can't you tell?) yields these stats:

38 1-star songs
594 2-star songs
2225 3-star songs
1790 4-star songs
678 5-star songs

5199 AAC encoded tracks
3279 MP3 encoded tracks
1 Audible encoded track

692 tracks purchased from the iTunes Music Store (mostly by me)

251 songs have been played in the last day
2358 songs have been played in the last month

Smart playlists are cool.

Songs not to drive to.

So who'd a thunk it? Ride of the Valkyries ranks as the number one song not to drive to, according to this AP story.

Of interest to me was that I have all of the songs not to drive to, but only one of the songs to drive to - Gary Jules's Mad World (which is a beautiful song, by the way). Watch out when you see me coming; this must mean I'm at risk, or something ;-)

Great songs in commercials

So after reading one of SamTheButcher's journal entries and a comment of his regarding Bill Withers's Lovely Day being used in a Gap ad, I thought a little bit more about some of my favorite songs that have made it into ads in recent years.

Gap -- Busy Child, by The Crystal Method

Mercedes -- Whoever You Are, by Geggy Tah

Honda -- Bossa Per Due, by Nicola Conte

Apple -- Rock Star (Jason Nevins Mix), by N.E.R.D.

Apple -- Hey Mama, by Black Eyed Peas

Mitsubishi -- Days Go By, by Dirty Vegas

Mitsubishi -- Start the Commotion, by The Wiseguys


I don't watch a lot of ads these days thanks to the TiVo, so I might be missing out on more interesting music. Any suggestions?

Songs to listen to death...

Ever notice how bad pop music is these days?

Ok, I'll stop being so obvious.

Anyway, the reason I mention this is because I was flipping through the channels on the boob tube a week or so ago and noticed a very interesting song on MTV2, called Freetime by Kenna. If you haven't seen the video, I'd highly recommend it. Quite entertaining, and the song is one of those songs I can just play over and over again. It's not often that I find a new artist with a song that allows me to do that.

Thanks to the magic of iTunes, I have a list of my 100 most played tunes. These are the songs that I can usually listen to over and over again. Here's my top 10. Try not to laugh too hard :-)

1. Radian - Air
   
2. High Roller - The Crystal Method
   
3. Enjoy the Silence - Depeche Mode
   
4. H. - Tool
   
5. Something About You - Level 42
   
6. Rock With You - Michael Jackson
   
7. Running - Stereo MC's
   
8. Ricky's Theme - Beastie Boys
   
9. Around the World - Daft Punk
   
10. The Message - Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five
    

So, what songs could you listen to over and over and over again and not get sick of?

Lollapablahblah

Saturday, Nicole and I went to the White River Ampitheatre for the newly reincarnated Lollapalooza. Not a bad show, but I have to echo some complaints I've seen:

• No staggered seating, which creates horrible sightlines to the stage.
  
• Pretty abysmal sound (although if you wear earplugs, it's almost bearable)
  
• Uncomfortable seating. Take a cue from Safeco Field in Seattle, and aim for the seats they use.
  
• Long lines at the bathroom. In fact, so bad, we saw a line of guys pissing behind one of the restrooms.
  
• Who wants to go to a covered ampitheatre?? I mean, c'mon, that totally fucked the sound up.
  
• Not very diverse food choices. After waiting in line for ten minutes, a woman came out and informed everybody that this was the beer line. Oh great, thanks for putting up a sign!
  
• Pretty bad traffic before and after. When leaving the ampitheatre, we couldn't turn left (west) to get back to Seattle, so we had to drive east past the long line of cars and then turn around. It was pretty funny to see a Canadian getting handcuffed after failing a field sobriety test, though. I'm glad I didn't drink.
  
• It faces away from the sun, which is actually a disadvantage. Seeing a concert in front of a beautiful sunset was one of the nice things about going to the Gorge.
  
• No view! One of the things about the Gorge is kicking back on the lawn, sunning yourself and catching the view of the Columbia. But at White River, you get a little bit of Mt. Rainier through the Seattle haze, and that's it. Oh, there are some trees off in the distance. Woo.
  

Apart from that, the show was good. Audioslave rocked my ass off, and Jane's Addiction brought a little tear to me eye when they played Jane Says.

Oh, I don't know if this has anything to do with the urinators, but at about 9:30pm, we noticed the smell of manure wafting its way through the ampitheatre. Yeah, so the ampitheatre's out in the middle of farmland, but it was pretty foul.

White River's all shiny and new, and I'm sure there were some deals struck to get acts to come play there, but I'll stick to the Gorge for concerts, where possible. It's just a better venue.

Cool iTunes stuff....

So, since iTunes 4 came out, I've been experimenting a little bit more with smart playlists and converting my lower-quality MP3s to higher-quality AAC files. I found out some cool things yesterday:

1. I created a smart playlist called iPod playlist. I told it to populate the playlist with songs that never had been played before, rated between 3-5 stars, with a maximum playlist size of 4675MB, chosen randomly. Why the size? Simple, for my iPod. That's about as many MP3s I can fit onto it. So, when I play my iPod, the play count for the song will be incremented on the iPod and automagically synched up with my iTunes playlist. Very cool. And because the smart playlist is dynamic, it'll constantly give me new stuff to listen to until I've listed to all of my music. When that happens, I'll configure the playlist to give me stuff I haven't heard in six months or so, keeping it still very fresh.

2. If you're re-ripping CDs to AAC format, replacing the MP3s you have, and the ID3 tags match up with what's already in your library, you'll be given the option to Replace Existing songs. Do it - it preserves the original creation date, play counts, ratings, and any album art you might've added to the file. The only thing it doesn't preserve is the genre, but that's easily fixed.

I'm VERY impressed at how iTunes manages the library. I hope all those Windows users get a good version of iTunes at the end of the year that does all of this stuff.

Legal music downloads a reality for me now.

Today I purchased and legally downloaded a track from Apple's new iTunes Music Store service. I had a LOT of trouble getting to that point, due to the immense amount of traffic the poor service is seeing. And, after managing to make the purchase, I haven't been able to make a connection to buy more music. I'm gonna try again soon.

But, all in all, the purchase went very smoothly and the quality of the AAC-encoded tune (Missy Elliot's Get Ur Freak On) is awesome. I'm going to start encoding everything I buy in AAC as it is the superior codec.

The $0.99 price per track is great. Don't be fooled, though, not all albums are $10. It's up to the labels to set the pricing, as I found out with Audioslave's album - it's a per-track price only. So, you want all 14 tracks? Great, pony up $14. But, for a lot of the albums on the service, you'll pay $10.

Apple, so far, has done a fine job of creating this service. I'm sure it'll become more reliable as the initial hype dies down. I was sad to see that Metallica (har har) and Linkin Park were nowhere to be found on the service. And, doing a search for "Voices Carry" by 'Til Tuesday turned up no results. That's why they've got the request link :-)

Hi-Fi

Some time ago, I was lent an old Dual 1229 turntable by Nicole's parents. It served its purpose pretty well for the time it was in service. When I got it, it had no cartridge and was a mess. I took it into Hawthorne Stereo and had them take a look at it. The guy there said that this particular turntable was his first when he was a teenager, 30 some-odd years ago. I asked him if we could get a cartridge for it, and he pulled out a Grado Black cartridge and proceeded to mount it on the Dual's tonearm.

I took it home and played with it a bit and it sounded pretty damn good. I bought a few records here and there and recorded them into the computer. It did well, until a few days ago. Nicole had bought two new records and the old Dual just couldn't play them very well. The left channel was barely working. When it did, it'd be fine for about a minute, and then cut out, leaving only the right channel to do its thing. Finally, we gave in and bought a Numark TT-1600 DJ turntable at Guitar Center up in Lynnwood.

What an improvement. I don't consider myself too knowledgeable about turntables, but putting this one together was a good learning experience. Today, I managed to get the Grado cartridge mounted successfully, replacing the stock Numark cartridge. I don't really hear much difference between the two, but I figured if I paid $40 for the Grado cartridge, I might as well use it.

Thanksgiving was good. We went up to Nicole's grandmother's house on Camano Island. I'm still waiting to hear from my mom or my sister about my sister's forthcoming first child. Any day now....

New music to listen to...

So I'm sitting in front of my iMac, listening to the new Dave Matthews Band album. Not too shabby. This reminds me of the last DMB concert I went to. My girlfriend was under the impression that there were going to be a lot of hippie-like folk there, a la Grateful Dead. I told her to expect a lot of preppies and yuppies. And I was right. She was bummed, but at least the concert was good. It might have been really cold that night at the The Gorge Ampitheater, but it was nice to finally get to see them play live.

So, this week I made a little trip over to Half.com, to get some music. For anybody who wants to get CDs cheap, this is the way to go. I managed to get Enya-Watermark, NIN-Downward Spiral, NIN-broken, and Live-Mental Jewelry for a whopping $18.55 with shipping charges. Pretty nice, eh?

So far, I've received all of the CDs, except for Mental Jewelry. And, one of the ones I had ordered was canceled. Oh well, there're always other sellers to buy from. I cranked up Enya today and really let the subwoofer have at it. The reports of copius amounts of bass in Watermark were not exaggerated, and I enjoyed the floor-shaking, window rattling sounds of Orinoco Flow and Cursum Perficio.

Well, back to listening. I've got enough MP3s now to fill up another CD. I should really get an iPod.