It'll Never Fly

Only reason I brought up the KMFDM post was because I’m in the process of cleaning up my bedroom. You might remember a picture from a while back about the mountain of DVDs that were piling up in the middle of the room. Unfortunately, I didn’t take a more recent picture, but it really was in danger of seriously injuring small children or animals had it toppled (it was well over the top of my head, and I’m 6′ tall). Well, that’s been moved into some recently vacated space around the perimeter of the room, and the stuff that was there is now packed up in boxes. Now the only real problem is the 28″ TV that’s still sitting in the middle of the floor, but I think I’ve worked out a plan (which I’ll leave for another post).

Long story short, one of the areas I’ve been cleaning up is my bookcase that had a stack of CDs buried at the back. These are the CDs I bought just to have a single song, or sometimes because I heard the artist on a compilation CD and thought I’d like their other songs (without having heard them first), or sometimes because it’s a soundtrack and I think it’ll have the song I heard during the movie. And sometimes, as was the case with the stack of ten or so I have sitting here next to me, none of those scenarios apply because (a) the song you thought was on there wasn’t, (b) the compilation CD was a fluke, and all their other stuff is crap in my mind, or (c) the soundtrack has every song except the one you were hoping for. There’s one other scenario, and that when it’s a freebie.

For the ones I bought just to have one song, I’ll get rid of the CD and buy the song on the iTunes Music Store if I ever need or want it.

So here they are (in no particular order):

1. KMFDM / Symbols
2. Soundtrack / Men In Black: The Album
3. Spin Doctors / Pocket Full of Kryptonite
4. Soundtrack / Starship Troopers
5. Counting Crows / August and Everything After
6. The Dead Milkmen / Chaos Rules: Live at the Trocadero
7. Soundtrack / DragonHeart
8. Compilation / Big Shiny Tunes 2
9. The Tannahill Weavers / The Mermaid’s Song
10. Soundtrack / The Cable Guy
11. Primus / Pork Soda

Now don’t take that to mean I think all those are equal in quality (or crapitudity). Really, only Pork Soda do I think is utter crap, but apparently people either love it or hate it. Spin Doctors and Counting Crows were alright, but my tastes had changed and there was only one song on each that I wanted. As for the soundtracks, I don’t know what I was thinking.

Just a reminder for myself. I saw this video on MuchMusic many years ago, but had forgotten the name of the song. Now I know: “Son of a Gun” by KMFDM (Wikipedia).

I have an audible.com account. This is just a quick note for myself to remind me that there is always an endless supply of material to have read to me by complete strangers and celebrities.

Technorati Tags: audible, books, scifi

I’m feeling a bit nostalgic as I listen to some of my Euro-Techno and Electronica that I bought on CD between 1999 and 2001, but wouldn’t have bought if there weren’t great services out there like MongoMusic at the time. That was during the peak of Napster, before it became the pale shadow of its former self it is today. That’s right. The amount of CDs I bought went up tenfold during that period. I was finding new artists I had never heard of from all over the world. They had developed technology that could analyze a song and categorize it based on beats per minute, tempo, and all that other stuff. You could do searches based on similar song, similar artist, or even similar album. And you could listen to 30 second streams to get a pretty good idea whether you’d like the CD or not. What was the best part of it all? It actually worked. That was, until Microsoft bought them out and locked me out.

I haven’t bought a non-Anime or non-Game soundtrack since. I simply don’t know what’s out there. I created an AudioScrobbler (a.k.a. Last.fm) account when they were brand new, but I wasn’t getting good enough recommendations on their system, as I didn’t have my songs properly rated on my own system to do so (which has since been alleviated). Plus they were always going down. It looks like they’ve corrected most of their problems, and their similar artists actually seem fairly similar, so I will likely start up again fairly soon. I’ve also tried MusicBrainz, but somehow Kenny G and Bon Jovi don’t seem all that similar to me. And my music I tried with their tagging software didn’t give me very accurate results. Again, maybe that has changed since I tried it a year or so ago.

Long story short: bring back MongoMusic! For the time being, I can probably get buy with AudioScrobbler and iTMS.

Technorati Tags: audioscrobbler, music, itunes, recommendations

Third time’s the charm

Originally uploaded by maguirer.

Finally found Sentry Box after three times of looking for it in as many years. If I was into trading cards and the like I’d probably spend all my time (and likely all my money) there. Thankfully, I’m not. The extra money did come in handy when I found their anime DVD section, though.