Music (in no particular order, only because I don’t want to think about it that much):

• Future of the Left – Curses
• Les Savy Fav – Let’s Stay Friends
• Kanye West – Graduation
• Coliseum – No Salvation
• 1990s – Cookies
• The White Stripes – Icky Thump
• Spank Rock and Benny Blanco – Bangers & Cash
• The Rakes – Ten New Messages
• Pissed Jeans – Hope for Men
• Good Shoes – Think Before You Speak

Movies (again in no particular order, because although I watched over 150 movies in 2007, only about a dozen were from that year… this list should prove that.)

• Death Proof
• Sicko
• Zodiac
• Atonement
• Blades of Glory
• Superbad
• Helvetica
• Ratatouille
• Vacancy
• 1408

There you have it. Your mileage may vary, particularly with the small movie sample size.

The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There’s also a negative side.

- Hunter S. Thompson

In my continuing quest to tag my music with metadata to create better playlists, I tried adding beats per minute (BPM) data into my mp3s. Seeing that I have more than 15k songs, I knew I was going to have to find a program that would do it automatically, so I looked around and chose beaTunes. Using the default mix of quality vs. speed, it took at least 36 hours of processing time to do my entire library.

While beaTunes other major feature is the ability to create mixes and song suggestions based on that BPM data, my point was to see if it would be useful in iTunes because that is my preferred application. Through some preliminary testing, I’m not finding that much good out of it. Creating a playlist strictly by BPM, I’m finding that a mix of incorrect BPM analysis (songs tagged at 80 BPM are really probably 160 BPM) and genre hopping (going from rap to rock to soul to metal) is causing the experience to not be as amazing as I had hoped.

There are times when a few songs really do match up well, but you would still really have to either a) know which songs have a wrong BPM and fix them, or b) really know your library enough to spot obvious mismatches and shuffle things accordingly. With over 15,000 songs I don’t think I can do either, so my options are to either find a better BPM tagger, or go back to not caring.

Any suggestions, or recommendations of other BPM taggers?

The answer is TuneSleeve if you use Windows. You can tell from the background that Pascal writes on the TuneSleeve page that he had great goals and alot of experienced thinking around it. He probably tried all of the other terrible artwork downloading “programs” just like I did. It hit every mark on the list: full albums, artwork choices, optional external search per album, optional playlist selection (which is handy for the first time you run it and happen to have 16k songs like myself), and the option to append, overwrite, or exclude albums with existing artwork. If you’re anal about your album artwork like I am, be sure to give it a try.

Not that I plan to add a 2mb WAV file to the bottom of all my emails like a PGP sig, but I was instantly intrigued by the iTunes Signature Maker, which analyzes your iTunes library and spits out a mixed and edited sampling of your music (or more specifically, you, if you want to get all music-nerdy.) I, of course, ran through the system a few times to check it out and test the differences, but I also thought it would be interesting to post mine and hopefully hear what the dear readers of Magnetbox sound like. So, here is mine:

itsm_magnetbox.wav

I will post the song contents in the comments, but if you can name more than 3 songs from this sampler, consider yourself incredible. For comparison purposes, here are the settings I used: 20 songs, no song repeat limits, based on ratings, 2.0 seconds, 3 layers.) Add yours into the comments!

There is something afoot at the various places that produce promos for football games on television. A couple weeks ago, I noticed that in the intro/bumper graphics for something, they actually displayed “loading…” text along with a progress clock. Huh?! Then just this Sunday, I heard the intro for “Salad Days” by Minor Threat used as the background music for a quick cut-to-commercial video segment. Hell has officially frozen over.

So, after three years of using Audioscrobbler, I decided (and acted) on a whim to reset my stats on my account at last.fm. It kind of hurts to see all that “work” go away, but it was to the point that it wasn’t moving fast enough for me (I check it a lot), and now that I have my music ratings and taggings in a better place than before, I felt it will be much more accurate than in the past. My biggest pet peeve, which Last.fm can’t really help much, is how artists with more songs recorded get higher rankings than artists who have fewer songs in existance but are more favored. Hopefully with the right ranking system and party shuffle, things should even out.

I was presently surprised to see at least 3 users in my “neighbours” list who used to be there before, when I had 20+ thousand songs in my profile; a fine testament to the last.fm system and algorithms.

I doubt you need much more proof, but after talking about music with some people recently, I realized something that I find extremely nerdy and funny: I listen to my iTunes on Party Shuffle mode, yet thats not quite enough. Not only does it play based on a smart playlist (which is based on several cascading smart playlists), but I actually re-order the tracks as they appear in the queue (of which I have set only at 20 songs), in order to be a total DJ nerdfest. For example, here is a little playlist sampler of how clever I think I am:

• Modest Mouse – Breakthrough
• Skull Kontrol – False Ceilings
• Sadaharu – Memoirs of My Time in Purgatory
• Rainer Maria – CT Catholic
• Tight Bro’s From Way Back When – Make It A Habit

See? That shit is genius. Another stream that happened right after that: (I can’t always connect them since I have such a short queue. This disappoints me greatly.)

• Scene Creamers – Session Man
• The Donnas – Hook It Up
• Beehive and the Barracudas – Dirty Soughts
• Braid – Killing A Camera
• X-Ray Spex – I Am A Poseur
• Harriet the Spy – Sleeping Through the Money Shot
• Thee Headcoatees – Come Into My Mouth
• And You Will Know Us By the Trail of Dead – Days of Being Wild
• The Rondelles – Six O’Clock
• Slint – Good Morning, Captain
• Barry Manilow – Looks Like We Made It

See? That’s really dumb and nerdy that I make up little novellas based on my music playlists. I know noone else is watching (unless they were keeping very close tabs on my last.fm page), so it’s all just for my own enjoyment, but I still do it. Any one else care to fess up that they do this too? Am I the only one?

Dan Hill passed me the
Musical Baton, so I feel obliged, even though I may have just been a sloppy second choice for him. Thanks, Dan.

Total volume of music on my computer

7,360 songs taking up 23.66GB of space. According to iTunes this covers 382 artists, and could last me 16.5 days of continuous listening. Everything is meticulously tagged through Musicbrainz, and rated by hand, so I know these statistics to be terribly accurate.

The last CD I bought

Jonathan Fire*Eater – Tremble Under Boom Lights, purchased used at Amazon. You can always see all my music, because I keep track of such this on the music page of my Web site.

Song playing right now

“You’re Right, I’m Wrong” by Thee Headcoatees, from the album Punk Girls. You can always see every song I’m playing, because I keep track of such things on Audioscrobbler.

Five songs I listen to alot, or that mean a lot to me

I could spend the rest of my life trying to figure out 5 songs that mean a lot to me, so instead I will take the easy, literal route and just look at my iTunes playcount and tell you them in order:

1. Converge – Forsaken (album)
2. Cursive – When Summer’s Over Will We Dream of Spring (album)
3. Descendents – Catalina (album)
4. Excuse 17 – Carson (album)
5. Born Against – Sendero (album)

Like I said, not necessarily the greatest songs, but it’s all weighted through ratings and party shuffle and iTunes’ (seemingly non-random) randomness… although Catalina has a special place in my heart. (This song made we want to learn how to play guitar. I brought this song on tape with my acoustic guitar to my first day to my teacher (who by coincidence was Bob Mould’s first guitar teacher), and we ended up going through and writing out this punk song in dorky acoustic chord tablature.)

Five people to whom I’m passing the baton

I will (try to) pass it on to George Hotelling, Alf Eaton, Irdial Discs, juniorbonner, and Paul Hammond…all of which are in my Audioscrobbler network.

I would like to interrupt your normal non-reading of this blog with a post, stating that the BPI Radar has been launched. Yes, the UK has it’s own version of the RIAA, and thus gets its own tool. It searches the UK version of Amazon and everything, so you get to see what those wacky Brits are listening to, as well as learn about musical genres that other places don’t have (or care about so much.)