The recommendation stream from Last.fm today has been incredible. A major highlight was catching Mike Doughty doing some post-Soul Coughing work. Check out this acoustic series. It’s poppy and bouncy, with Doughty’s unmistakable voice. I can see some shopping in my future.

From time to time, I get a warning popping up on my Last.fm profile page:

Some tracks you submitted have not been added to your profile for the following reason: The track you submitted appears to be badly tagged – please check the file’s tags.

That very same message appeared again this morning. The funny part is that I spent all of yesterday listing to Last.fm radio stations¹. If anything was mis-tagged, it was their own fault, or the fault of their player software. Aside from that, I’d made a request in their forum ages ago asking to have the notification box include some information about which track was badly tagged. They had replied that it was in the pipeline. About a year later, no such luck. C’mon guys – get it together.

¹ Radio stations from yesterday: Tagged downtempo, Tagged idm, Tagged mellow, Similar Artist: Mogwai, Similar Artist: Tokyo Police Club

There are a couple songs out there that have become victims of my imagination. The lyrics I hear aren’t the same as what are printed in the liner notes. I’m slowly building a collection of mistakes that I think improve the song¹.

Hot Hot Heat – Middle of Nowhere

She said, “Maybe there’s a bit of me waiting for a bit of you, baby.”

becomes

She said, “Maybe there’s a better me waiting for a better you, baby.”

Matthew Good Band – Strange Days

We’re done lying for a living

becomes

When you’re done dying for a living

¹ It’s a stretch to assume that I could actually improve the song, but it’s still a really cool single line.

It’s dead, Jim.

I was on the bus when it happened. I was listening to Scanalyzer at the time. All of a sudden, there was only the silence of the diesel bus running itself down the hill. The track position indicators had stopped moving, but there were still active controls. Within a moment, even that had stopped. Failure was complete.

Holding select and menu force a reboot of the device. Sad iPod icon.

The first question: replacement or repair. If replacement, the second question: with what? I really should try to have it repaired. I’ve got all my music on my computer anyway, so nothing important was lost. I’m a CD junkie, not an iTunes junkie, so I don’t have a truckload of DRM‘d music that only existed on my iPod.

I guess this is only the first part of a journey. I need my music player back, but I hate being dependent on gadgets. Oh, the conundrum.

I heard on the radio this morning about Apple opening a store for Kiwis. The story mentioned that songs would be available for download as of 7 or 7:30 this morning, at a cost of $1.79. So I tried to create an account to see what was there. Apple has an online store, but iTunes is still listed as not available according to iTunes 7.0.2¹.

Aside from that, I think that $1.79 per song is too much. I was hoping that iTunes would be a cure for the overly-inflated CD prices here. There doesn’t seem to be a remedy, and Apple is not our musical saviour. Even though the shipping costs become negligible, we’re still going to get ripped off for music. emusic is still a very viable option. And for those of us who want some Canadiana, there’s also MapleMusic, offering both CDs and mp3 files.

As for Apple, I’m tempted to say, “don’t go there”, but that would be silly – I can’t get there anyway.

¹ Prompting iTunes to check for updates indicates that it’s up-to-date.

Edit 06–12-2006: After fiddling around with the country settings several times, I finally got New Zealand to appear.

A Jazzberry Ram [1] song was played by the Randomiser™ on the way home from work last night, and ever since then, I’ve been seriously craving some XTC. I’d never thought of a connection between the two, but it’s hard to imagine a band playing poppy music that doesn’t owe a nod to XTC.

¹ While the split up of Jazzberry still saddens me, the final concert is easily one of the best concerts I’ve ever been to.

I was beginning to find it very unlikely that the randomiser in iTunes was actually randomising. The playlist is sorted by track name and accessed by random. However, at the time I noticed, the previous 3 songs had all been from the same band, and even the same album:

• The Tea Party—(Unknown)—Triptych
• The Tea Party—Chimera—Triptych
• The Tea Party—Samsara—Triptych

No less coincidentally, the next few songs followed suit:

• The Tea Party—The Messenger—Triptych
• The Tea Party—Underground—Triptych
• The Tea Party—Haze On The Hills—Splendor Solis
• The Tea Party—In This Time—Splendor Solis

Reverse alphabetical order.

It’s not the first time that iTunes has ignored the random setting and played through in order. It seems to work properly by turning shuffle off and on again, but it’s still quite annoying. If I wanted to listen to playlists in order, I’d say so.

• System Of A Down—Mr. Jack—Steal This Album!
• Sublime—Doin’ Time—Sublime

Enough of that…

There was a hiccup with the shipping company used, but I finally have the CD in hand. I’ve had a couple of listens already, and I’m still very happy with it. I tend to prefer the tracks that are more musical over the tracks that are a bit noisier, but that’s natural. The brain likes pleasant sounds.

In relation to the comment on playlists, there is another sort of playlist that I depend on. There are times when I don’t want to have to worry about skipping a track that I really don’t want to hear, such as when I’m out for a run and I don’t want to have to fumble with controls. This playlist is more or less static, and only changes when I change it by hand.

What I’d like to do is export the playlist to a file, so that I can take snapshots and archive it from time to time. There might not be a hugely practical purpose behind this, but it seems like the right thing to do. Unfortunately, I can’t seem to find a way to export static playlists with iTunes. I can probably do this with gtkpod, but haven’t had much of a chance to play yet.

For a long time, my guitar has been a toy. I’d pick it up, and patterns would come out of my fingers. There was always musicality to it, but nothing original or interesting. Something triggered me to get past that yesterday, and I spent a couple hours with a mixture of technical exercises and actual musical playing. The results were far from spectacular, but the process was fascinating all over again.