Music « ear-fung.us

27Jan/103

Changing The Way I Collect Music

I've amassed a lot of digital music over the years. Lots of times I'd download the entire album even if I just wanted one song... 'cause, you know... there might be some other good music on the album.

Sorry to say, that this wasn't the case in 70%-80% of the music I downloaded. I've always been a pretty fanatical completionist (are you an incrementalist or a completionist?) so I'd keep the bad songs around with the good ones, "because then I have the whole album," or "I might like that sometime in the future."

No More!

You may know about my obsessive iTunes star ratings, so I know what songs I don't really like. However, I'm not going to blindly delete all my 1 and 2-star rated songs. I'm going to delete songs as I come across them during my normal listening schedule for each day. I don't expect to delete any more than 4 or 5 songs a day from my 4,000 song, 20 GB music library.

Do you think I'm going about this the right way? Am I stupid for deleting songs in this age of extremely cheap storage mediums? Let me know. The deleting begins today.

First song to bite the dust and see the inside of my trash bin? "Full Moon" by The Black Ghosts.

Tagged as: delete, iTunes, Music, songs, trash 3 Comments

6Jan/100

Collaborative Songwriting

My friend Jon loves to play the guitar. So the other day he started sending me a few audio files of songs he recorded (small clips).

So what do I do with the files? What any sane person would do: bring 'em into Garage Band and record the lead guitar part with nothing other than my vocal chords.

Here's two songs we collaborated on. I hope you enjoy them.

Dream Theater: The Count of Tuscany

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Muse: Hysteria

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Yeah... they're not that good... mostly because of my horrible hackjob on the vocals, but it was fun

Tagged as: Add new tag, Guitar, Music, Singing No Comments

20Nov/094

Cool Cover Song

I found this cover of Katy Perry's "I Kissed a Girl" that's really cool... techno beat and sung by a metal band male singer.

Check it out.

Tagged as: coversong, grooveshark, metal, Music 4 Comments

18Jun/090

New Music

I'm typically not a fan of country music, but when I'm driving my wife's car, I have to listen to it.

I was amazed at this new song I heard. The vocals are great and the harmony is amazing.

Have a listen (via Groveshark) to Lady Antebellum - "I Run To You"

Tagged as: country, good, grooveshark, listen, Music No Comments

1Oct/080

Awesomely Cool: Building an MP3-decoder

blog.bjrn.se: Let’s build an MP3-decoder!

Even though MP3 is probably the single most well known file format and codec on Earth, it’s not very well understood by most programmers – for many encoders/decoders is in the class of software “other people” write, like standard libraries or operating system kernels. This article will attempt to demystify the decoder, with short top-down primers on signal processing and information theory when necessary. Additionally, a small but not full-featured decoder will be written (in Haskell), suited to play around with.

Interesting stuff there.

Tagged as: mp3, Music, Programming No Comments

16Jun/0810

My Obsessiveness About iTunes

Yesterday at lunch after church with some friends, we started talking about how obsessively I rate songs in iTunes.

My wife thinks it's crazy that I have a smart playlist set up for songs that I haven't rated and even crazier that I take the time to listen to all the songs and rate them based on how I'm feeling at the moment. Yeah, my likes and dislikes change over time, but I have no aversion to changing a song's rating that I feel is no longer appropriate for my tastes or mood.

I actually have a really logical (go figure, I'm a programmer) reason for doing this. I spend far less time organizing my 16.5+ gigabyte music library and finding things I want to listen to by having iTunes do the leg-work for me. I tell iTunes how much I like the song and it knows the last time that particular song was played, skipped, and how many times it has been played.

Here's how my playlists keep music pumping into my ears that I both like and haven't heard in a while. These playlists keep my library rotating in such a fashion that I hear almost the entire gamut of my music. (Note: I name "utility playlists" starting with a "z" so they show up at the end of un-grouped playlist listings. These playlists all know to automatically exclude things like holiday music and audio books.)

My Utility Playlists:

z2_7_Wks: 2-star songs I haven't head in 7 weeks or skipped in 14 weeks
Max: 5 songs selected at random.
z3_6_Wks: 3-star songs I haven't head in 6 weeks or skipped in 12 weeks
Max: 10 songs selected at random.
z4_4_Wks: 4-star songs I haven't head in 4 weeks or skipped in 8 weeks
Max: 10 songs selected at random.
z5_2_Wks: 5-star songs I haven't head in 2 weeks or skipped in 2 weeks
Max: 20 songs selected at random.

These all feed one main playlist: "Clever Mix". Clever Mix then gives me 45 songs selected at random from all 4 playlists.

Ingenious, huh? Maybe I am a bit compulsive about rating my music, but It keeps me from searching for good things to look for in my library. If I don't like the song it gives me, I simply skip it and the playlists exclude it for the specified period of time.

Am I the only person that does things like this? I'm really impressed by iTunes' ability to do this so I want to take advantage of it!

Tagged as: Dana, General News, iTunes, Music, OCD, Programming 10 Comments

24Jun/070