It'll Never Fly

Four videos for your viewing pleasure (in the same vein as the Back Dorm Boys and Gary Brolsma). Two girls goofing around in front of a karaoke station for a TV show. I’d love to know if someone could fill me in on the details: name and purpose of the show, names of the girls, names of the songs/artists, etc…

Update: It’s a shame you don’t see that kind of stuff on this side of the world. I think people here are just way too reserved to let loose. They seem to need to get drunk to get silly, which might explain why you’ll never really see this sort of thing here in great numbers. And that’s sad.

Witches – There She Is

Yu Chae Young – Emotion

Maybe the Pats should use this rendition to empty the arena quickly at the end of their games. They often use the original Final Countdown during fights.

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.

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

Update: I’ve noticed that I still get a few hits a month to this entry. Everything still works as of iTunes 7.0.2, except the tip about setting upcoming songs to 0 (zero). It would appear that in version 7, Apple broke that ability and now Party Shuffle stops playing if upcoming is set to 0. I’ve sent in a bug report and suggest you do the same. For the time being, I set upcoming to 5, the next smallest number. We now return you to your regularly scheduled blog post.

Update (6 Sep 2007): Eureka! It would appear that as of version 7.4, the Party Shuffle bug I mentioned above has been fixed! Yippee!

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I’ve been using iTunes since 1.0. Before that, I was using SoundJam MP. I thought I had learned it all. What I’m about to say next may seem obvious to some of you, but I sure didn’t think of it until a few weeks ago.

I have several thousand songs. I also like to have all my songs rated. The problem is I still have a few thousand that aren’t rated. When Smart Playlists came out, I thought I had the perfect solution: make a live-updating smart playlist of all unrated songs (or the ones I want to rate for the time being), let it play in the background, and rate the songs as I listen to them. If you’ve tried it, you know it’s a sound idea, but it just doesn’t work. As soon as you rate it, iTunes removes it from the playlist and proceeds to stop playing the song. Another problem is if you slip up and apply the wrong rating; iTunes makes it pretty damn hard to find the song to undo it.

So I chalked it up to something that would likely never get fixed (e.g. is it even a bug that needs fixing?) and relegated myself to updating the playlist manually every so often.

Then Party Shuffle came out. I thought, “How quaint. That’ll come in handy once I finish rating all my songs,” and never used it after that except to show it off as a feature that some other players don’t have (omitting the fact that I don’t use the darn feature myself). I don’t remember what triggered the flash of inspiration, but I was talking with a co-worker, comparing music players of different platforms, saying iTunes does pretty much everything I want, but it had this one annoying behaviour that I wished they could fix.

It occurred to me that Party Shuffle can save a short list of previous played songs, as well as upcoming songs. What would happen with my Unrated smart playlist? Later that night I tried it out, and set Party Shuffle’s source to my smart playlist. Voila! That was the solution to my problems. When I rate the song, it gets removed from the smart playlist, but not from Party Shuffle, and the song continues to play. Plus I can go back a fix any misapplied ratings. It does exactly what I’ve been wanting to do for ages, and it was just sitting there unused.

For maximum effect, set upcoming songs to 0. More than that and you could get duplicates once the source playlist gets small enough.

Now if only they could do the whole Ogg thing natively.

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Update (22 May 2007): I just saw on The Unofficial Apple Weblog an entry about a program called AutoRate that attempts to automatically rate your songs based on how many times the song has been played and how often it’s skipped. Might be handy for those of you out there that are either too busy or too lazy to rate your songs by hand. I’d be interested to know people’s results. I still prefer my method, though (but I’ll admit it does take time).