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50 Songs for 50 States

On the Fourth of July, 89.3 The Current did a special, 50 Songs for 50 States, from 2pm until midnight.

Our timing driving back from Milwaukee was perfect, as the Rochester signal came in about quarter to 2, and we listened to it for the last few hours of the drive home, and I listened to it over the web for most of the night after that.

What a great mix of music – picking anywhere from 1-3 songs per state, either with the state’s name in the song / title, or an artist known for that state (like the Ramones for New York). It wasn’t just one song – it was over 150 songs, including some deep dives into specific cities in the U.S., including Athens, GA, Minneapolis, Chicago, Austin, New York and Detroit.

You can see and listen to the entire playlist (by hour) here.

Trent Reznor gets it

Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails gets it. It being the remix culture.

Mr. Reznor has released the second single, Only to be remixed. The Hand That Feeds was the first single released, in Garage Band format only at the time.

This time around, it’s been released in 4 different file formats, including Acid Express and Garage Band so Windows users have a shot at remixing this time. I have a copy of the former around somewhere, and the latter on my Mini. I might try my hand at it this time.

It’s very cool of NIN to give back to the community. I downloaded a few of the remixes for The Hand That Feeds last time, and some were pretty good.

BurnIt Club

How cool is this – the Burn It club?

I came across Kymberlie McGuire via her Flickr site.

The Burn It Club looks very cool – every quarter she picks a theme, past themes have included driving music, remixes, and school, and you email her to join a group. She puts you in a group of 4, and you make 5 mix CDs (all different artists and songs, just follow the theme), one to keep, one to send to Kymberlie and each person in your group, and you get one in return.

I’ve bookmarked the site and definitely want to join in on that the next time it comes around. What a cool idea.

Podcasting now in iTunes

Sheesh, I mention the other day how I’ve gotten in to podcasting in a big way, and then Apple goes and makes it mainstream just to copy me (no, really!).

Apple’s iTunes 4.9 now has Podcasting support. Windows users can download Apple’s iTunes 4.9 here. Suppose I should fire up the old Mac Mini and take a look.

And for the record, I’ve been downloading podcasts for the last year intermittently, and burning them to CD for long car rides. Just hadn’t done the whole automated thing.

Joining the revolution



podcasting, originally uploaded by silwenae.

I’ve joined the podcasting revolution, and am now downloading podcasts like a madman. Shown here are iPodder on Ubuntu, and the new Monopod, a much more simpler and user friendly podcasting client. Both are running on Ubuntu Hoary.

I had a really tough time last weekend trying to get Monopod 0.2 to work, and this is 0.3 (I had to install a bunch of dev stuff). iPodder was ok, it’s the latest release that came out this week, but you have to chmod one file before it will work.

My two favorite podcasts so far are:

Acts of Volition and MAKE Magazine’s Podcast.

More to come, and a rant about my MP3 player.

This week's purchases

A bunch of good stuff this week:

Books:

  • The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood. A cow-orker lent me this to read last week and it was fantastic. A must read, review coming soon.
  • Survivor, Invisible Monsters, and Stranger than Fiction; all by Chuck Palahniuk. Author of Fight Club, Mr. Palahniuk’s writing style is very unique, and Stranger than Fiction are some non-fiction stories from his time on the road.
  • A Spell for Chameleon, by Piers Anthony. An author near and dear to my heart from my childhood. Last year I picked up the Incarnations series and Bio of a Space Tyrant series from my favorite used book store. A Spell For Chameleon is the first Xanth novel, published in 1977. I’m going to re-read it and see if Alex is ready for the series.

Music:

  • Gorillaz, Demon Days: Special Editon. From one half of the team formerly known as Blur, Gorillaz’ Demon Days is a fantastic alternative rock album flavored with a bit of hip-hop.
  • Audioslave, Out of Exile. The sophomore effort from Chris Cornell and the former bandmembers of Rage Against The Machine.

Movies:

  • In Good Company. Topher Grace is Dennis Quaid’s boss, and tries to date his employee’s daughter as well.
  • The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. Wes Anderson’s (Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums) third film, with an ensemble cast. I think the Royal Tenenbaums was one of the final straws for my friends in movies I recommended and made them watch that they hated.

Liz Phair Discography

Trying to track down a track list for the copy of Liz Phair’s bootleg album, Girlysounds, I came across a local guy’s Liz Phair discography site. Probably the most complete site I’ve seen yet, if you’re a Liz Phair fan.

Unfortunately, my copy of Girlysounds doesn’t sync up with any of the ones he has listed, but he has all the lyrics linked in the songs, so should be able to figure it out, just have to take the time to listen to the album. Which I won’t mind doing at all. 🙂

This week in music

This week’s purchases:

  • DVD:
  • The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (I dig Wes Anderson of Rushmore / Royal Tennenbaums directing fame)

  • In Good Company

  • Music:

  • New Order: NO (Was out of stock last week, but they had it this week)
  • Weezer: Make Believe (Great album, listened to it 3 times already – much more similar to their first disc, than their last disc, Maladroit)
  • Depeche Mode: The Singles (25-30 & 31-36). Released a year or two ago, the follow-up to the box sets released 10 years ago. They have multiple (sometimes up to 7) versions of the same songs from their 7″ and 12″ singles releases, with unreleased remixes and live tracks. A must for the collector, though they break the bank. Unfortunately, I got home and realized I don’t have 19-24. Grrr.

Yahoo Music Service Launches

Via Slashdot:

Betanews has the story that Yahoo has launched their music service to compete with Napster & iTunes. Yahoo has quite an interesting strategy in the music business. With pricing 60% less than Napster & Rhapsody ($4.99 / mo with an annual fee), 79 cent downloads (99 cents if you’re not a monthly subscriber) (and at 192k WMA!), a media player that integrates with other Yahoo services with support for other formats, and support for Janus portable players just like Napster2Go.

The first user post on the Betanews story, is a link to one of the developers’ blog, who has a ton of information on the Yahoo service and player.

What’s interesting to me about Yahoo right now is their focus on their users. Including their acquisition of Flickr, the launch of Yahoo 360, and now music, they’re very focused on tying these services together, and user communication between members (look at your friends music list for suggestions, or Flickr tags and friends lists). While Google is focusing on web and desktop services applications, Yahoo is going in a different direction in creating communities, and tools for these communities to share and grow closer together.

Now if only their music engine / services worked on Linux…dammit, I’d buy music online if I could.

Music Updates

The music server is still coming along. I’m almost done ripping my CD collection, with less than 100 CDs to go. I have about 50 CDs I need to check the tags on that I ripped this weekend that I haven’t updated yet.

From there, I move them on to the backup box, get all the file directories set up correctly (that’s going to take a while), check all the tags one more time, and put them on the web server.

I’ve been ripping my CDs in Ubuntu, with the MP3 debs. Sound Juicer doesn’t have quality settings, so I used GooBox to rip to MP3 at 192k. I use Easytag to update the tags, specifically the year and genre. GooBox unfortunately doesn’t capture the year from CDDB when it rips, and the genre’s are never right.

For whatever reason, whether it’s my DVD-RW is too sensitive, the OS, or the application, some CDs won’t rip, even with minor scratches. Even after burning copies of the CD, and using the burn to attempt the rip, it was no joy. Using my Windows box, I used CDex to rip, and didn’t have any issues, so I have a handful of those to rip as well.

The good news is I’m almost done. The bad news (for the music) is we completed the electrical in the basement this weekend (yay!). Once we pass inspection this week, then it’s a lot of manual labor to get all the insulation up in the ceiling. I’m in Seattle two weekends from now, so the goal is to get that all done this weekend. Fun.