Thoughts on Rdio

Clearly, each of the services get some things right.  I could go into detail about why I like Rdio and chose it over its competitors (Last.fm, Pandora and Slacker), but this post is mainly about why Rdio is right for me and a what would make it better.

The Good
Playlists
I like Rdio mainly because it gives me flexible listening options:

• It lets me have playlists with cherry-picked songs.
• It can generate playlists based on an artist.
• I can queue up entire albums.
• I can listen to songs offline using my android phone.

API
Although they didn't have it when I started my subscription, Rdio have added a public API, which is cool.  This means that developers will create interesting applications that use Rdio (unlike say, Pandora). I've played around with it a bit and it is pretty natural.

Discovery
I absolutely *love* that I can listen to entire albums at once.  Remember that band you heard that one song from once and you meant to go back and check them out?  Only, you had a terrible time finding a decent way to sample all their music and you weren't ready to make the commitment of actually paying for it.  (We have all made that mistake before.)  Rdio solves that problem: queue up their catalog and listen to everything for a day or two.  Then go buy, or not.

Room For Improvement
Offline Content

• I wish the desktop application had offline mode like the mobile app.  
• Managing offline media from the mobile application is cumbersome, especially if you have synced a lot of songs.  
• Managing media from the desktop application is even more difficult.
• It would be awesome if I could create a station based on an artist and then sync those songs (in much the same way I can create a playlist and sync those songs with one action).

Most of my grief with offline songs would be eliminated if there were a way to expire the offline content so I didn't have to manage it myself (like a DVR).  E.g.: keep this song for a [week, month, etc.], delete it after I play it [once, twice, three times, etc.]

Playlists
Rdio does not have "genius mode."  I would like to generate an awesome playlist based on a single song of my choosing (like iTunes).  They have artist-based playlists, but it isn't the same.  Theoretically, an enterprising programmer should be able to create software that exports an iTunes genius playlist (or any iTunes playlist) to an Rdio playlist.  Sounds like a fun weekend project.

I wish I could create multiple queues (e.g.: a "work" queue, a "home" queue, and a "quiet sunday" queue).  I could use playlists for this but I cannot add entire albums to playlist unless I add the songs one at a time.

The Rdio machine learning algorithms could take a lesson from Pandora or Last.fm.  They are not that good.

If you use queues and then go listen to another song, your currently playing queue item (an album) is lost.  This used to bite me a lot and annoyed me until I eventually changed my habits.  This could be resolved if Rdio just remember where I was in the queue when I play something adhoc.

Streaming
It takes too long to go from pushing the play button on my mobile player to actually hearing something.  If this is a problem of pushing bits, maybe Rdio could push some low-quality data (doesn't require as much bandwidth) at first to get some data on the users player quickly, then come in later with the full-quality audio.  If this is a latency problem, my bad.

Rating, Scrobbling and Data
It would be cool to scrobble love/hate from Rdio.  Currently I have to go to the Last.fm website to do it.  Also, it would be nice to rate songs (like iTunes) or tag them as I listen to them.  This is helpful for music discovery at times when I do not really want to be distracted by the process of copying down a song or artist name.

Something to Show For it All
This isn't a deal-breaker (none of it is, after all--I am paying for the service).  It saddens me that if I give Rdio $10 a month for the next 10 years and then stop, I will have nothing to show for it but the memories.  It would be great if I could keep some of the music permanently.

I realize that it is the same value proposition as cable TV and that I would have my cake and eat it too.  But folks--this is music.  I am used to keeping what I pay for.

Summary
I like Rdio.  Out of all the players so far, it works best for me.  It as the most flexible listening options of any streaming music service, but I think there is room for improvement.  I hope they keep up the good work.

Christmas Mix 2009

I've been making  Christmas mixes for my family the last couple years.  It's not your typical Bing Crosby stuff, and requires some digging on my part.  I finally started blogging about it last year and think I'm going to make it a tradition.  So here goes... Christmas with an indie slant.  And I did a better job checking on the lyrics this year for family appropriateness.

The links this year are coming at you from Lala by way of Google.  Message me if things stop working.  (This blog post has turned out much like my Christmas shopping: it gets sloppy towards the end.)

1.  "Holiday Road" by Matt Pond PA.  This is the only repeat from last years list.  I love this song because the vacation movies still connect with me at a level I am entirely uncomfortable with. 

2.  "Blue Christmas" by Dread Zeppelin.  Believe it or not, there is a nice smattering of Christmas to choose from with these guys. Where else can you get Elvis, Led Zeppelin, Reggae and Christmas in one track?

3.  "Christmas is Going to the Dogs" by Eels.  Hard choice between this and "Everything's Gonna Be Cool This Christmas".

4.  "I Wish It Was Christmas Today"  by Julian Casablancas.  This one is for the kids.  I wish that I could still feel the way I did when I was a young boy after Thanksgiving.  Christmas, although only four weeks away, seemed like it sat on the other side of eternity.  As an adult, it comes and goes so fast I barely have time to enjoy it.  Message to kids: enjoy it while you can.  Responsibility steals the fun from Christmas!

5.  "Christmas Time is Here Again (Bring Out the Joy!)" by My Morning Jacket.  Peaceful.  I'll let you google for this one.  It's a live take from a radio broadcast.

6.  "Listening to Otis Redding at Home During Christmas" by Okkervil River.  Not a traditional Christmas tune, but a good one to follow MMJ, if only for the indie vibe.  This song reminds me of "New Slang" by The Shins, but with less jade and desperation.  Slightly more hopeful. :)

7.  "X-Mas Card" by MU330.  Not my normal thing, but the instrumental intro with the horns is fun.

8.  "Yule Shoot Your Eye Out" by Fall Out Boy.  If you haven't checked out "Can You See Santa From the Southside," now is the time to skedaddle over to Amazon and do so.

9.  "Baby, It's Cold Outside (Mulato Beat Remix)" by Louis Armstrong and Velma Middleton.  Shopko gave away a Christmas sampler in 2004 and this was on it.  This is, by far, the Christmas album that gets play in our house (not the one this song links to).  It comes on while we're preparing meals and we find ourselves breaking frequently to get our grooves on.  No kidding.  Six people from 2 to 35 shaking a leg in the kitchen.

10. "O Come All Ye Faithful" by Weezer.  Traditional Christmas tune done right by a modern band.

And some bonus songs from last years mix:

Bonus 1:  "Fairytale of New York" by the Pogues.  This one is definitely not for the kids and is a guilty pleasure of mine.  Who can resist: "You're a bum, you're a punk / You're an old slut on junk."  Ahh, the holidays.

Bonus 2:  "Frosty the Snowman" by the Cocteau Twins.  Year after year, my favorite Frosty rendition.

I don't blog about music as much as I would like.  I used to do it a lot.

I listen to music all day, just about every day.  I subscribe to *a lot* of music blogs.  So much that I decided to create my own blog aggregator to help me keep track of things (Tagfriendly.com, for those of you who haven't been there yet.  You can create music-related RSS feeds based on your own search criteria.).

So the problem is not that I have little to say about new music, or the music scene in general, but that I have *so much* to say.  If I didn't have to make a living doing Other Things, I could write about music (not that anybody would care to read it) all day, every day.  Watching the indie scene blossom over the last five or six years with the help of the Internet has been a special thing for me.  I listen to more music now than I ever have.  And hey, record executives: I buy more music than I ever did too (my wife will attest).  Even so, I know that I am just moving slowly across one facet of a very large musical stone.  And that is a good thing--I won't be getting bored any time soon.

To that end, I have decided to carve out a few minutes each day and devote them to writing about music.  Some of it will end up on this here blog, hopefully as entries about new music, or music that is at least new to me.

Let's get started...

Some good music that you're probably not listening to

"Oh My God" by Ida Maria
I thought it was Clap Your Hands Say Yeah at first, but it wasn't.  This is an honest song sung urgently almost desperately, and right on the verge of losing it.  "oh you think I'm in control... oh you think it's all for fun".  Moving and tender ("find a cure for my life... put a price on my soul"), but dishing it out at the same time.  This is the kind of song that makes it hard to stay in my chair.  (wikipedia link)   

"In the Night" by Basia Bulat
That is the sound of an autoharp, if you're wondering.  Organic and edgy, pop-folk for the aughts (what will we call this decade?).  I've been saying for several years now that the best new music is coming out of Scotland and Canada.  Bulat represents the latter, hailing from Ontario.  I like this song because it makes me feel good.  It carries a message about rising up above struggles ("Storm and shadows fall to pieces / to my heart like a comet / carry so that I can / soar like an eagle").  And while it's still possible for struggles to keep us down ("sometimes it takes the night to fall"), it doesn't have to be that way all the time.  (wikipedia link)

"New Moon" by Sambassadeur
When it comes to twee, you can't beat Tweeden.  Er... Sweden.  Sambassadeur are utterly forgettable, but still very pleasant (think: "spring time").  Proof that good music doesn't have to captivate or mesmerize; it just has to not make me throw up in my mouth.  I really don't know much about this band.  I suppose they are few Swedish twenty-somethings who will be around for a few years before moving on to meatier projects.  (wikipedia link)

Hacking the Yahoo! Media Player

I've been using the Yahoo! Media Player to stream Mp3s at Tagfriendly.  Minor glitches aside*, the only real complaints I have is that it isn't skinnable and there is no public API.

About a month ago I started prodding it to see what would make it squeak.  This post documents some of what I've found.

Disclaimer: I skimmed over the YMP terms of service and don't believe I'm breaking any of the rules.  You should also know that YMP is a) beta software, and b) a hosted application.  This means that any code you write or use that relies on specific methods or objects will be brittle and prone to breaking when Yahoo! releases updates.  That said, you're on your own; I didn't make you do anything.

YMP is one of those nifty internet tools you can use by simply embedding a <script> element in your markup.  If the page you've embedded it in contains links to mp3s, or if it links to an XSPF playlist, YMP picks it up and makes those MP3s streamable.  This is powerful if you're a non-technical blogger and want to have an embedded player on your site.

My aim is to leverage all of that, but to take the Yahoo! face off and give it my own.  I use jQuery to manipulate the Tagfriendly DOM, but really, any decent JS toolkit should allow you to get the same results.

The first thing you need to do is know when YMP is finished loading so that you can tell the UI to go away.  Due to the fact that the Javascript you embed includes a bootstrap that downloads other things, you can't count on YMP to be ready when your document is.  This is easily accomplished with a JS timer that polls to check whether or not YAHOO.MediaPlayer.setPlayerViewState is defined.  When it is, call YAHOO.MediaPlayer.setPlayerViewState(YAHOO.mediaplayer.View.DisplayState.HIDDEN); to make the YMP user interface go away.

Now you are in the drivers set to start working with the MediaPlayer object.  Here are some useful methods:

YAHOO.MediaPlayer.getTrackPosition()
     Gets the position offset (in seconds) of the currently playing (or paused) track.

YAHOO.MediaPlayer.getTrackDuration()
     Gets the track duration (in seconds).  YMP appears to grab this from ID3 tags in the mp3, so you can't always count on this piece of data to be there.

YAHOO.MediaPlayer.play()
     Tells the player to play the currently queued song.

YAHOO.MediaPlayer.pause()
     Tells the player to pause the currently playing song.

YAHOO.MediaPlayer.previous()
     Go back to the previous song.

YAHOO.MediaPlayer.controller.EventManager.onNextRequest.fire()
     I found it odd that there was no YAHOO.MediaPlayer.next() method.  This method does what you expect the non-existent next() would.  There are corresponding fire() objects for play, pause and previous as well.

YAHOO.MediaPlayer.getMetaData()   
     Returns an object that describes the currently queued song.  Useful properties there, gathered from ID3 and the XSPF, include 'title' and 'artistName'.  There're more if you care to look.

That's basically it--all you need to subvert the YMP UI and handle things your own way.  This really is a guerrila API hack, as I don't think the YMP designers intended a public API.  You can see the results  on the front page of Tagfriendly.  I went as far as providing a progress bar that gets updated as the song plays.  The Javascript source is freely available too.

In the future I plan on displaying cover art and linking the songs to their Tagfriendly description pages as well as to music stores.



* I suppose not so minor because it really bothers me:  YMP breaks down when you try to use a locally hosted XSPF file or the machine it is hosted on is stuck behind NAT.  Firebug reports that YMP executes a GET with the URI to the XSPF.  The backend of that GET does some data-munging of the XSPF contents.  The results contain a basic JSONified playlist.  The only problem is that if the [development] server that hosts the XSPF is behind NAT, that backend can't fetch anything.

iTMS link generator API

I set about looking for an API that utilizes the iTunes Music Store link maker, thinking they would be all over the place (deep links that is, and includes referral program ids). Five minutes of half-hearted googling didn't get me anywhere I needed to be, so I decided to take matters into my own hands. (Note: either I am a crappy googler, or the Apple legal team keeps these things off the air. Seriously, this code must have already been written 10 or 12 times now.)

A bit of poking around revealed that Apple (edgesuite, linkshare, linksynergy, whoever!) uses GET for their search forms. This makes writing a scraper API as complicated as parsing HTML, which is pretty easy in this day and age. I decided to use python, because I'm learning it by forcing myself to use it for all my extra-curricular projects.

I've released the source code under the code section at my website. The license is, uh... liberal. So don't be afraid to use it if you find it useful. It depends on the excellent BeautifulSoup library to do the heavy HTML lifting.

Here is some iTunes deep-linky goodness for you. These are the top 5 most played songs in my library. Buy them:
1. New Slang, by The Shins
2. Valley Winter Song, by Fountains of Wayne
3. Dreams Anymore, by The Magnetic Fields
4. Trust, by Gravenhurst
5. Saint Simon, by The Shins

BTW, I've resurrected Tagfriendly as the mp3 blog aggregator I've been working on, soon to have iTMS referral links. It isn't much, but I'm adding features all the time.

(Tagfriendly was, at one time, an automatic ID3 editing tool I created that mostly worked.)

Mp3 Blog Aggregator: status and some code

My last post was a lamentation about how the current set of mp3 blog aggregators don't do it for me, and at the same time a declaration that I would do something about it.

I've spent my spare moments this week hacking at the problem and it's starting to bear fruit.

The first of it is a simple id3 reader implemented in python. It simply reaches out over the tubes and grabs the id3 information from an mp3 that is hosted on a server somewhere. Nothing too complicated, except that it can be configured to extract any images that might be embedded in the mp3.

Knowledgeable readers might be asking: "why didn't he use one of the three or four existing python id3 libraries?" The answer is this: I planned on creating a blog crawler (mentioned later) and a website for this idea, and would do it all in python. As a warm-up exercise, I figured it would be good to create a simple id3 reader. I had already done it in Java, so it mainly became an act of seeing how the Java idioms I am currently used to translate over into python. (Note: if you bother to download and read the code, please be gentle. It's the first real python I've written. Feedback is appreciated too.)

The crawler is mostly done. It came together more quickly than I thought, although it still has rough edges. It runs a few times a day, notes new blog posts and gathers what information it finds into a database (postgres).

The website is where the work needs to be done now. I have gotten no further than creating a few simple query+display pages that I've been using to view results from the crawler. I've experimented with different ways to present data (entry-centric vs mp3-centric) and still haven't come up with something I like. I've got time though. And the longer I wait, the more useful data I'll have from the crawler.

I'm still using pylons for the website, although I had second thoughts after spending too much time fighting mako and the way it manhandled my nice unicode mp3 tags.

I have yet to tackle the problem of dynamic RSS generation, but I have some good ideas in my head for that.

MP3 Blog Aggregators

I started this post as a "Dear Lazyweb" but decided against it. I'm actually going to do something about this particular problem.

I subscribe to quite a few MP3 blogs. As I told a friend recently, "there is no quenching the thirst for new music." It occupies a fair amount of my internet time, but has lead me to good tunes. And good tunes translates to a happy Gary, so it's time well spent.

One of the biggest problems with MP3 blogs as they exist today is that if you come across something good, there is no easy way to say "find me more like this" without doing all the legwork yourself. Sure, the poster might mention "this sounds like X, Y, or Z," but that is just one persons opinion. I've tried a few mp3 blog aggregators and found a decent one, but there is still a lot noise and I'm not very happy with it. It is just that much better than the competition, which is poor to start with.

Social networking to the rescue. Audioscrobbler has silently been rolling out more APIs over the last 12 months, mostly without anybody noticing. They haven't shut off any of the old services that I currently use (the music section on my website), but they are requiring an API key to use the new services. One of the old services that has been reincarnated in the new is the "find simliar" feature, where an artist or song is supplied and related matches are returned. To be fair, Pandora does a better job of this than Last.fm, but Pandora has no API that I can use.

So the project, and I've already started pounding out code, is to scan the music blogs, figure out how they link to MP3s, grab the ID3 tag and then store that information in a database along with a link back to the original post. Several interesting things could be done with that information:

1. Find me posts (and mp3s) of related artists or songs. That isn't terribly interesting, but takes some of the legwork out of doing it manually.

2. Zeitgeist tracking. The difference between the good music blogs and the less-good blogs is that the good ones go out on their own to find new music, artists and information, rather than recycle what is being hashed on other blogs.

3. Search-based aggregate syndication feeds. Imagine being able to create an RSS/ATOM feed based on aritst or artist-similarity. This feed would aggregate all the posts that you find interesting. For example, you could create a feed that would return all posts mentioning Belle & Sebastian, or posts that contain references to artists similar to Belle & Sebastian. Pre-filtered information like this is a great time saver.

That's about it for now. I don't know if this kind of tool would be very useful for many. But it is fun to hack at and I've had a hard time lately finding recreational programming tasks that engage my passions. Also, this one is my first real venture into python, which is turning out to be quite fun. The website is in pylons, the spider is plain python, and they both communicate with the database using SQLAlchemy.

Christmas tunes

My son Jack really gets into music. He has been wanting Christmas music. Last week, I made him a copy of a really neat sampler we got free from Target in 2004. Very danceable Christmas music.

The old mix tape producer in me didn't want to stop there though. I had to go and make a full-on Christmas mix for the kids.

Here's what I came up with.

1. Holiday Road by Matt Pond PA. I can't listen to this song and not think about the original Vacation movie, but it mentions Christmas, so it counts.

2. O Come O Come Emmanual by Belle & Sebastien. It is nice to hear something traditional by a contemporary artist. I would never have expected this from them.

3. Christmas (Baby Please Come Home) by Deathcab for Cutie. A very faithful, if somewhat slower rendition of the original. Not so 50's-like.

4-7 come from A Very Indie Christmas. I need to go back and re-listen to these to make sure I'm not feeding my kids something inappropriate. Amazon has the album tagged as EXPLICIT, and I do remember hearing a few foul words, but not in these songs.

Happy Christmas (War is Over) by The Polyphonic Spree
Christmas at the Zoo by The Flaming Lips
Tyco Racing Set and a Christmas Story Fifteen Times by Kind of Like Spitting
Father Christmas by The Kinks

8. Frosty the Snowman by the Cocteau Twins. Best Frosty cover ever.


9. Oh! What a Christmas by El Perro Del Mar. Pure bubblegum Christmas pop at its best.

10. Fairytale of New York by The Scotland Yard Gospel Choir. The link is to the Pogues' version, which is considerably less clean that the Gospel Choir rendition. I've loved this song for years because it's as catchy an irish tune that you can find. And when the Scotland Yard Gospel Choir sings it, it doesn't conjure up images Shane MacGowan spitting into my ears as he sings it. (There is a time and place for that.)

11. Thanks For Christmas by XTC. Let's end this with something fun and mellow eh?



Merry Christmas everybody!

When Old Becomes New

My CD collection had grown to just over 200 when I went back to college in 1996. I kept most of them in two CD books, each holding 100 CDs when full. I was already over capacity. (Even though it it is an interesting story [for the geeks], I won't get into the process of how I kept the books alphabetized.)

In the summer of 1997 the first book containing artists A-L was stolen from my apartment. My roommates and I had carelessly left the patio door unlocked. That book of CDs was the only valuable thing in the front room at the time.

I was more sad than angry. The one thing I knew I couldn't get back was the time I had spent putting the collection together.

One of the CDs I never realized I missed so much was the only studio release ever put out by The La's. I'll not lie and say that The La's are an under-appreciated gem of the early 90s scene that was alternative music before grunge took over. They were clearly mediocre, but their music was unpretentious--something I appreciated in a band.

You probably heard The Boo Radleys cover their song There She Goes on the soundtrack for So I Married an Axe Murderer. (For the record, the original version was included on the soundtrack too.) Since then I've heard it in a few other movies and TV commercials. (Six Pence, None the Richer covered it too.)

The album standouts (to me) are Timeless Melody and Way Out (from 1987!). The songs sound completely different, but are very much alike--wistful nobody-loves-me pop music that the British were so good at in the early 90s.

Anyway, enough reminiscing. My new old copy arrived yesterday. I've gone through it seven or eight times now and I feel like I'm 17 again (with less hair and pimples). Definitely worth the $6 I paid.

Todays Playlist

If you know who David J is, you are either a Bauhaus- or Love and Rockets fan. Or maybe you are just into obscure stuff. I'll be Your Chauffeur is timeless for me, and the story of how I first heard is fun to tell.

When I was a boy, (cue up all the "when I was a kid stories"), there was no alternative radio. It was all pop--Madonna, Howard Jones--that sort of thing. However, we did have cable, and thus, MTV. For a while, MTV ran a nightly program during the week called Post Modern MTV. They played songs from Morrissey, The Cure, The Mission UK--stuff not in heavy rotation on the local stations.

But it came on at 12 or 12:30 at night in my time zone (Central).

So I got out the manual and figured out how to program the VCR. Every morning during the week I had 30 minutes of new songs to watch.

And it didn't stop there. I was a electronics geek. I figured out how to get a signal out of my television and into my stereo so that I could record selected songs to tape. Listening to those tapes today is quite a bit of fun for two reasons: 1) they are distinctly lo-fi. Completely monaural. And 2) the television signal introduced a very high-pitched hiss that cast a distinct aura over the whole experience. Some songs caught the tail-end or beginning of an MTV segue (you know, the kind that ends with the MTV logo eating something). To this day, I cannot listen to some songs without the segue popping into my mind.

Those were good days.

That feeling is lost now, in the iPod era. One of these days when I am bored I will hop on Google and see if I can find a horde of the old MTV segue pieces. I'll download and place them randomly in my playlists.

Updates

1. dd-wrt has (since November) released firmware updates for my WHR-G125. I have just installed it and bandwidth monitoring is indeed working. The latest firmware seems to be located here.

2. So much for my sons having good taste in music. A neighbor gave them a CD full of Pokémon songs and that is all they listen to now.

Young Music

I have several posts that are about 75% finished. This is the first of them. As you can tell, I never got motivated to do the other 25%. :)

I started taping Casey Kasem's weekly Top 40 Countdown when I was eight. Then during the week I would listen to the playback and see where Casey had gotten it wrong. (At that age I didn't know that the order of the songs was determined by placement in Billboard, which itself is determined by sales rank.) Analyzing the songs was fun in many ways. Some songs really clicked with me (Prince's Little Red Corvette). Others didn't (titles long forgotten). These were my first mix tapes. The year was 1983. I was well on my way toward becoming the musically sensible person writing this post.

These days I have kids of my own. A part of my wants to cultivate the same senses in them, but at the same time leave them free to discover what works and doesn't work. I am torn between sending them down the "right" path (my path of course), and letting them chart their own course. After all, I don't want to end up with a couple of Britney fans at the end of the day.

To that end I have given them a CD player as a Christmas present. And to get their minds thinking, I've made a few mixes that they hopefully will choose to listen to. I've kept mostly to songs I know they'll like--They Might Be Giants, etc. But generously sprinkled in are the likes of All Girl Summer Fun Band, Fountains of Wayne, The Broken West, Guster and others. Here they are:




Update: Both the CD player and the CDs are a hit!

Quickies

Here is a Magnetic Fields show recorded in Toronto, 2004. Old, but if you're a MF fan, it's good stuff. I don't know how I've never come across it before. The sound quality is excellent, by the way.

I'm looking forward to the new record, due out in, umm... 2008.

I ought to post a few updates since this will probably be the only post this month or next.

1. Sadie (I call here "Sadie-my-lady") is doing well. She gets up usually once, sometimes twice a night. It could be worse.
2. Things are going well at the new job. I am uncomfortable with a few things though. If I don't go into details in the future, the big deal is this: At the last job I was one of the sharper pencils in the can. But here, at the new place, I am the dullest. In the long run, if I can hack it, this is probably a good thing for me. I'll come away from it a better person. But in the mean time, it's killing me just to keep up.
3. Garden--dropped off the radar when Sadie was born. I've managed to go out and pick a few tomatoes here and there though. And we've also got a honkin' big pumpkin waiting for Hallow'een.
4. My TV listing data runs out on Saturday unless I find time to upgrade my MythTV system. I've already shelled out for a Schedules Direct account, but haven't managed to put everything together yet.
5. School started and the kids are liking it. I can't wait for soccer season to finish though.

Counting the Days

The Shins new album is expected to be released on 23 January. I've had it on preorder or quite a while now (available on iTunes).

From what I've heard, it is typical Shins stuff, but going in the direction more polished (not Polish). The same thing is going on with Guster these days, and with good results. So I am looking forward to this Shins album.

Guster and my Wife

I had to post this somewhere...

Nicole typically doesn't care for my music, and I don't really care for hers. We try to keep it friendly. But to compensate for this basic imcompatibility, we make little musical jabs at each other when we can. Our favorite way is to pretend the other's musical preferences are so tasteless/meaningless that details aren't worth remembering.

Well, I bought us tickets to an upcoming Guster show, and I've been hearing it from her. These are all direct quotes from the last few weeks:

Her: "How much did the Duster tickets cost?"
Me: "Umm, you mean Guster."
Her: "Yeah, whatever."

Her: "Have you found someone to watch the kids during the Mustard
show?"
Me: "Umm, you mean Guster."
Her: "Yeah, whatever."

Her: "Where do you keep your Buster CDs? I want to know if the show is worth going to."
Me: "Guster! And you can't have them."
Her: "Yeah, whatever."

And it doesn't stop. I'll be getting this treatment until a few days after the show.

Windows Media Player

I don't use Windows Media Player on a daily basis. I prefer to let iTunes manage my library.

When adding new songs from an old CD of burned MP3s, I like to sample them using Windows Media Player (iTunes is ill-suited for this).

Every once in a while I get a complaint from Windows Media Player that the "Format is invalid." Well, today I decided to see what Microsoft help had to say about the problem.

Get a load of this:

C00D0BB8: Cannot play the file
Windows Media Player cannot play the file. You might encounter this error message for the following reason:

You are trying to play an MP3 file that contains compressed ID3 headers. The ID3 header is a portion of the file that stores the song's album information (for example, the song name, artist name, album name, and genre). This information is sometimes called a "tag."
To fix the problem, make a copy of the file and then use a non-Microsoft ID3 tag editing program to remove or reset the file's ID3 headers. After you remove the ID3 headers, Windows Media Player should be able to play the MP3 file.

Attempting to remove ID3 headers might damage the file and make it unplayable. Therefore, always make a copy of the file before you edit it.

If this solution does not resolve the problem, the file might be corrupted.

Error ID = 0xC00D0BB8, Condition ID = 0x00000000

Bottom Line: They don't support compressed ID3 tags. This is something that I myself know is simple because I've implemented it myself. Something inside me says they crippled the application so that it can be more secure. But at what point does it become useless?

Too much of a good thing.

I got a new computer at work. I decided to be selective about which songs I load into iTunes--only loading my favorites.

So I'm finding that the "My Rating" feature has become worthless. When they are all 4 or 5 stars, the rating meeans little.

Party Shuffle

Here is a spattering from todays iTunes party shuffle, warts and all. Party Shuffle doesn't seem to be doing a good job today.

Song	Artist
California Stars	Billy Bragg & Wilco
Jane Says	Janes Addiction
Little Soul	Pulp
I'll Tumble for Ya	Culture Club
Respect	Cocteau Twins (with Wolfgang Press)
Side of the road	Lucinda Williams
Lost in the Supermarket (cover)	Afghan Whigs
As Cool As I Am	Dar Williams
Impression That I Get	Mighty Mighty Bosstones
Land Down Under	Men At Work
Regret	New Order
Slow Motion	Blondie
Smoke	Bedhead
Dance With Me	Alphaville
Send Me On My Way	Rusted Root
1979	Smashing Pumkins
Drunken Angel	Lucinda Williams
Stay	Shakespeares Sister
Close to Me	The Cure
Hey Julie	Fountains Of Wayne
Go Your Own Way (Fleetwood Mac)	The Cranberries
Getting Away With It	Electronic
Out Of Control	Oingo Boingo
She's In Fashion	Suede
Sunday Girl	Blondie
You Can't Hurry Love	Dixie Chicks
1979 (acoustic)	Smashing Pumkins
The Romance Of The Telescope	OMD
My Love Life (US version)	Morrissey
The District Sleeps Alone Tonight	The Postal Service
Take On Me	a-ha
Protect Me (live)	James
Alice Everyday	Book of Love
Girl Least Liekly To	Morrissey
Skin Storm	Bradford

Love Monkey

I tuned into CBS last night to watch the premier of Love Monkey. Everything in this entry comes from the perspective of a huge Ed fan. Here is my analysis of where they went right and wrong.

It appears they are at least trying to keep it somewhat quirky. The character Tom retains some of the quixotic ideals of Ed though--and that is fun to watch play out. Life is full of charming compromises for that sort of person.

I wish there was a "Phil" type of character. Hmmm.

CBS seems to have taken the right position of not trying to convince viewers this is a show about romance (it will probably happen later though). That was one of the biggest problems with Ed--the previews overplayed the romance side, which actually turned out to be only a narrow sideband of the shows overall spectrum. Kudos to CBS for getting that right (for now).

Overall, I liked it. I'll tune in next week.

Ironic Note: It struck me as funny that the first episode was about Toms character trying to convince a young musician to join up with a smaller, underdog label. There were many references deploring the state of the music industry and major label records. The person potraying the musician, Wayne, is Teddy Geiger, who wouldn't you know it, has just been signed by Sony. Guess which studio is producing Love Monkey? Right--Sony. I sense a pimping in the works. Or is this the new American Idol?

Elvis has left the building...

I sat today and thought about why I don't feel about music today the same way I did when I was a kid. Here is what I came up with:

I no longer have the time.

I remember days of laying in my bed, either with a pair of headphones on, or a speaker next to each ear, listening to music and doing nothing else. I was able to concentrate on the music, the sounds, the emotions--all of it.

These days I conduct music listening while at work, at the gym, or at home while I am doing other things. The biggest thing is that the element of singular concentration is gone. It is hard to get wrapped up in something when I am already wrapped up in something else (work, dishes, etc.). And I wonder why I don't feel as strongly about any of the music I listen to these days.

I must find time to sit quietly with a pair of headphones--just to listen to a few songs and do nothing else. Time is precious these days, so I will have to choose my songs carefully.