Quarter Life Crisis

Music Fun¶

866 words on Music

I recently got a friend’s old – yet large – external hard drive. And with that dared to make the difficult step of moving my itunes Library to it as the music was filling quite a lot of the internal drive and I just had to spend too much time deciding what to keep and what to dump. So now there’s plenty of space on the iBook and I can only use iTunes while I’m at home. That’s not ideal, but I hope I can compensate it with the help of the iPod and the last.fm player.

The iTunes Library

Having the iTunes library on a large drive means that I could finally fill all the gaps that had been left in there and rip many of my CDs which hadn’t made it onto the computer so far. That’s great. And as a consequency many of my special playlists such as the one going around the world or up the numbers have grown considerably.

Questions I observed to be surprisingly difficult to answer in this context would be. Order from East to West:

1. Prague
2. Berlin
3. Rome
4. Venice

(if you thought that was easy, add Tripoli and Luanda…) or, for our friends who know their way around better on the other side of the world, I’d offer ordering:

1. Saint Louis
2. Memphis
3. New Orleans
4. Tupelo

(with bonus points for adding places called Jackson (MS) and Jacksonville (IL) to the game). File under ‘things we wouldn’t bother to find out without Google Earth’.

One nice thing of filling up the iTunes library was that I could finally feed it with my whole Glenn Gould obsession which can look quite pretty with CoverFlow.

last.fm

As was recommended to me by several people I tried out last.fm’s (I thought audioscrobbler was a more fun name, btw) streaming service when having a network connection but not my iTunes library around. It’s quite nice. Although I have the impression that it can be a bit repetitive after a while and that – like most of modern technology – it isn’t too good when dealing with non-pop music. When listening to similar artists to Glenn Gould, say, you’ll have many things coming up which just don’t fit in. Not many new things to discover in that area, unfortunately, and no reasonably consistent flow of music for working coming from it either.

One other thing I found a bit irritating on last.fm is that when looking at the details of your neighbour list you’ll see numbers indicating how good the match of your tastes is. And even for people with which I have fairly much in common – mostly seventeen year old Dutch girls – that value is much lower for me than it is for other neighbours of theirs.

Which in turn probably means that it’ll be quite hard for me to become anyone’s (except Dan’s) visible musical neighbour. And my variance in music taste isn’t excessive, it’s just that I like listening to classical music when working. So this looks a bit like the broader your taste is, the less likely it will be that people get to see it. So to be ‘successful’ at last.fm you’d best have a very focused taste in your profile. Which is a shame, because it makes me think that you’ll probably not find the people in your neighbour list which you’d consider to be the most interesting.

Podcasts

I never quite got the hang of Podcasts. I mostly fail to see the point. And for those where I can see a point, I forget to listen to them and then see that there’s a lot of stuff to ‘catch up with’ weeks later. That isn’t fun and possibly not even entertaining. I still subscribe to a podcast or three just in case…

The first one I liked was Buzz’ now-defunct delicious based podcast. It had good music and rare posts… both points which I appreciated. This was the only podcast I actually listened to for a while but the novelty has worn off by now and I was too lazy to go for the new URL. Then there was the Tocotronic podcast for the release of their best of album. While there was quite a bit of crap in there (most musicians or music publishers just shouldn’t talk… it tends to be disappointing) it was a nice review of the band’s history in a dozen or so five minute episodes. A cool idea, fun, and short.

Hm, and then I discovered the stereogum website with their podcast. Which is good as they link to loads of amazing stuff. But somehow the texts and text links they have are interesting enough to read the posts anyway… thus rendering the whole podcasting effort a bit redundant. [Grab a little Automator action for downloading all MP3s from Safari’s current page.]

I highly recommend this post with its numerous links to music – a non-trivial fraction of which is good. As I indicated before, I essentially have the music taste of a seventeen year old girl, so it’ll come as no surprise that I really like the Be your own Pet song Fire Department in there.

April 21, 2006, 1:28

Tagged as music.