Sébastien Tellier, “Divine”

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If you dug out your old Casio keyboard out of your parent’s basement, flipped the switch to the “Chord” setting and hit a few keys, you would be on track to make a song like this one. That may sound like an insult to the song, but do you remember the first time you hit the one-fingered-chord buttons on a Casio? It sounded incredible, and you were amazed at how easy it was to play keyboards and you couldn’t get enough.

There’s just a little bit more to “Divine” than that. There’s the repeating rhythmic vocal that’s irresistible, and when the song calms in the middle, it sets up the moment at 2:30 when the rhythm comes back in that recreates the thrill of the that first fun Casio moment.

In short (though that first paragraph was a single sentence, so really, it was already in short), Muxtape has become my favorite social and music stop.  But while one of its most attractive features is its simplicity, that doesn’t mean I can’t have a wish list for features for them to add in:

• An activity meter of muxes you’re a fan of. Muxtape has been adding in tons of new features, but they’re missing the one they crucially need: something like the Facebook’s news feed.  It’s all fine and well to add muxes that you’re a fan of, but you need some way to know when they’ve been updated besides subscribing to individual rss feeds.  It also needs something on each muxtape that says when it was last updated.  I’ve set up a Twitterfeed for my Muxtape so it should start showing up in Twitter and Friendfeed, but there needs to be a better way to see Muxtape activity.
• Speaking of, there’s a fantastic tool called Muxtape Stumbler that does exactly what Muxtape should do: give the top Muxtape and allow you to search on band or song, finding exactly the mixes that you’re looking for.  Just since I heard about Muxtape Stumbler, I’ve found a number of songs by searching or looking at the top songs and artists that I never would have found simply by clicking around Muxtapes.  It needs to be on the site itself.
• Muxtape needs an improvement in the uploading process.  It’s all fine and well to go one at a time, but they need to add in at least the ability to choose and upload more than one at a time, and preferably drag and drop uploading. Plus, it would be nice to delete one song and add another on the same screen instead of having to go back and forth.
• Better controls.  Yeah, it’s great to just have play and stop, but it would be really nice to have volume control and the ability to scan through a song.  I think that it would be possible to add in better control while not giving up the simplicity.

There’s tons of other social music stuff out there, and if I had a little more time, I’d start up a blog examining more of these technologies that tread the line between music and the social web.

• Hype Machine.  Most people already know about Hype Machine, an aggragator of music blogs that’s pretty much the first stop (maybe only MySpace is in competition) when there’s a band you’re curious about.
• favtape.com. It’s looks like a ripoff of Muxtape, but it’s actually a little more like Hype Machine, scouring the web and getting full versions of songs.  It’s a great place to hear songs you’re curious about from beginning to end, especially if you’re curious to hear whatever’s on iTunes top 100.
• last.fm. It’s by far and away my favorite social music network, though it has a number of its own flaws. The software that sends what you’re playing from your iTunes to the network isn’t the easiest thing in the world to update, and it doesn’t always send every song to your profile.  Still, it’s a great way to see what your friends are listening to.
• imeem.com. I’ve never really had the patience to get into Imeem, but it’s one of the fastest-growing social networks.  You can hear plenty of songs and create a robust profile of your own, but it seems to require a lot of patience to get it up and running, and I ran into a lot of frustration in that you can listen to full songs on the site, but only embed 30-second sound samples on a website.  Sometimes.  It’s frustrating.
• iLike.com.  It’s a lot like last.fm, but I just haven’t warmed to it as much.  It does allow you to publish your iTunes playlists to webpages, but they really need to get better control over what playlists to show and what not to.

All these things are a lot like blogs: I wish everyone did them, so I could know what everyone is listening to.

Any social music sites you’re into?  If you’re on any of these sites, add me as a friend.  You can probably figure out my username.

It’s both surprising and completely unsurprising that the re-recording is usually a letdown. You imagine that the band is really happy with it, having spent the last X months cringing at the mistakes of the first one, but to the fans, it pales in comparison. As a result of the number of times that I’ve been disappointed with a new version of an older favorite, I usually cringe when I see that a song’s been re-recorded.

There’s exceptions, though.

Black Kids, “I’m Not Gonna Teach Your Boyfriend How To Dance With You”

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When the music blogs jumped all over this song last fall, I fell for it, but not too hard. It was irresistable and fun and stuck in my head whether I wanted it there or not, but it was also pretty sloppy and sounded like what it was: a band pretty new to recording. But still, there was an engaging energy to it, it certainly didn’t lack hooks, and it had one of the best song titles of recent memory.

When I first heard the album last week, I put it immediately to this song and…couldn’t tell whether it was re-recorded or not. It was almost exactly the same length and started similarly, but it was just slightly different. All of the flaws were polished off in a way that might make a skeptic suspect Pro Tools, but it appears to just be a re-recording, but one that keeps all of the original version’s qualities while getting rid of its, um, unrequested quirks.

The full album from Black Kids is out on Tuesday, and it’s the party album of the year. Not that there’s a lot of competition for that title.

My most valuable digital possession, though, is my music library. There’s all sorts of rationalizing that I could do about losing it. I could tell myself that I’d just sigh and that it’d be fun to start over, but really, it makes my palms sweat. It’s not just the files: it’s the play counts, the ratings and the playlists that I spent years tweaking and going through. I bought another external hard drive, but backing it up was kind of a pain, and besides: if there was a fire or robbery and my computer was taken/burned, it stands to reason that the external drive would go as well.

So I figured that it was worth it to spend $5 a month to back it all up. The storage space market is just now opening up, and I think there’ll be a whole lot of services showing up, so I’m guessing that, in about a year from now, I’ll plenty of other choices and will have only spent $60. It’s worth it.

Trouble is, my music library now stands at over well over 21,000 songs and 121 GB. Which means that the initial backup is going to take a lonnnnng time. I’ve had the backup going for almost a week now, and because it encrypts the files before sending, it’s still only done about a fifth of the total. It’s going to take a while.

Of course, if it takes that long to backup all of the files, it’s going to take that long to restore it as well. You can have them send you DVDs of your files to restore from, but that would cost me somewhere in the range of $90. If something happened to all my files and I had to either spend a couple weeks completely restoring my library or spend $90 to get it all back the way it was before, it’d be worth it. Just saying that it’s not as though you hit a button and you get everything back, as it would be with an external drive.

In a smaller thought, I’m completely off of Thunderbird. It just got to be too annoying to deal with. Yes, it’s highly configurable, but I felt like that’s about all I was doing: configuring. If I was having connectivity problems or opened it up when I was offline, I’d get at least two warnings for each account that I had, and the Web Mail extension that I used to check my Hotmail was really bad at it. Finally, I just gave up, imported my addresses into gmail and just use the gmail client now. And I love it.

On a similar note, the gmail notifier for Mac stomps all over the gmail notifier for the PC. It’s kind of a mystery why it would be so much better. In the PC version, all you get an option to which browser it opens up in. That’s it. The Mac comes with options for configuring the notification popup and the ability to use gmail to compose messages. That may not seem like much, but considering how much less of a market share Mac is, and how big Google is, it’s pretty surprising that the Mac client is better than the PC.

I honestly believe that the main reason that a lot of people complain about blogs is because it’s nicely and easily wrapped up with a word: “blogs”. Pearls Before Swine is the opinions of one person broadcast widely, and so is the comic strip Non Sequiter (which has also done a number of “bloggers are self-obsessed” strips), and so is anything written by David Sedaris and every newspaper column ever written by anyone ever. The difference is that those people all make money expressing their opinions and telling their stories, and that, coupled with their inability to be conveniently captured under one single one-syllable term that greatly speeds up the generalization process, is why they’re critiqued individually instead of as a categorized whole.

The thing is, I don’t write blogs because I’m self-obsessed. I write blogs because I think everyone should. There’s a tremendous amount of knowledge out in the world, and I love that people are sharing it more and more. I’ve learned an incredible amount as people share the articles that they’re reading, and I love the status messages on Facebook that keep me up to date with people that I haven’t seen in years. I wish everyone I knew wrote a music blog or a simple journal-type blog that makes so many people so mad.

I think that there’s been a whole lot of knowledge and of interest that’s been held back due to a fear of being seen as self-obsessed. Opinions, discoveries and stories that are could really enrich the lives of other people are swallowed up out of fear that no one is going to be interested. There’s an enormous amount that I’ve both learned and passed on due simply to not shutting up.

I always feel like there’s never nothing to talk about; never a reason for long, awkward silences. We all spend our entire lives as only ourselves, and dammit: I want to know what it’s like living another life, because mine is the only one I’ll know. I want to know what other people are thinking and doing and listening to (especially what they’re listening to). If that strikes you (or any number of comic strip writers) as self-obsessed, then…I honestly pity that. There’s an incredible wealth of experience out there in every single person that can be incredibly illuminating, and the introduction of the internet–of the ability to give everyone with a computer the ability to publish whatever they want–is an absolutely incredible thing.

Now, I don’t want to listen to someone rattle on in self-absorption, of course. I like dialogue and I’m perfectly aware that plenty of people in the world are boring. But this is why blogs are perfect and why I don’t understand why so many people still have such a problem with them: first of all, they are dialogue in that a comment can be left by anyone, and secondly, they’re completely ignorable, something that I can’t say about a comic strip that appears in the paper that I read ever day.

Bonnie “Prince” Billy, “So Everyone”

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My theory on the reason why Bonnie “Prince” Billy is mostly only loved in music geek circles is because, if you don’t have it on a high enough volume, it ends up sounding almost ambient, just floats by without really registering. Turn it up and pay attention, though, and it’s pretty rewarding.

Not to say that it isn’t a little weird, because it is. There’s some bizarre arrangements, cracking and meandering vocals and other things that would make some people say, “What the hell are we listening to?!” It adds up to something that has both character and beauty.

And all of that adds up to this song: “So Everyone” starts with something that on the surface is fairly nondescript, but deeper listening reveals a fantastic opening line (”I know my way around the world, it’s a circle and it starts and ends”), before it flowers into a gorgeous chorus with a harmony that varies when the chorus comes around again. And what seem to be really, really smutty lyrics.

Added to my library in the last couple weeks:

• Simple Minds, Live In The City of Light, which I finally ripped for reasons that will become clear sometime soon.
• The Avett Brothers, Emotionalism, on the recommendation from my friend Rebecca.
• Wolf Parade, At Mount Zoomer. Sounds better each time it turns up. Which is a surprise.
• A Certain Ratio, Early. I finally find it in mp3 form, though they’re not great quality. But I’d been looking for a while.

And you?

One, everyone needs to know that Bluetooth is not just a headset for a mobile phone that assholes wear even when they’re not talking on the phone. It’s a type of technology that allows things to be wireless. It’s possible (and likely) that more and more gadgets will be bluetooth run: your mouse, keyboard, printer, external hard drive, etc. I’m just often surprised at how many people aren’t aware of this.

Two, can we make it standard practice to write a message to people that you haven’t seen in years when adding them on Facebook? Jordan Baker wrote about this other day, and it’s true: it’s really annoying. I don’t have the problem that I’m being added by people I don’t remember, but when I haven’t seen someone in years (decades, sometimes) and they add me…I could use a little hello, at least to make me feel like I’m not just being added in to pad someone’s friend numbers. It’s something that needs to become standard practice.

Also…

There were a couple articles this week that set my mind down the free vs. pay path again.  The first was in this article on Lifehacker about Mozy vs. Carbonite, where a Carbonite rep explained why they didn’t offer a free version like Mozy does because, “they don’t want their paying users to have to fund the freeloaders.” First off, that rep is a genius.  That’s one of the most creative sales spins I’ve ever heard: make everyone think that they’re paying because they’re not one of those lazy freeloaders that needs to leech off of those people who are noble enough to pay.

It’s total bullshit, of course.  The reason that companies offer free versions is as a trial, and then they try to upgrade you.  The reason they don’t is because they always want you to pay, as well as because it’s a difficult process to put a free version in place. 

The other article was over on Blogoscoped that pointed to a blog post by an ex-employee of Google who complained about making free software, saying, “For me, this really does make the project less interesting if people are not willing to pay for it.”

This makes me…I don’t know what. Incredulous? Disgusted? Yes, and so much more. Now, I’m a capitalist as much as the next guy (okay, maybe not as much as the next guy, especially if the next guy is that guy above, but I do believe in capitalism), but really? He has to be working on a product that sells in order to be interested in it?

I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again, and I’ll say it many more times after that: the advantage that free software has over pay software is not the cost: it’s the process. Pay software is like DRM: it requires strict rules on who uses what version, where it’s installed and how easy it is to upgrade. Free software you can get anywhere at any time and on as many computers as you want. Have a problem with one version and you just upgrade to the next.

As an example of this is using the free Google Analytics software vs the very expensive HBX/Site Catalyst web software. The latter is better, but in order to add in a new profile for a new website we had to put in a request to the customer service, pay $150 and worry about whether or not we would go over our page view limits. With Google Analytics, we just put in a new profile without any question or hassle.

As with music and movies, I don’t mind paying…I mind the hassle. People making products for pay need to start getting this through their heads and making the process easier, which may allow for more piracy, but will create a much better product, ultimately creating more customers.

Looking to convert a DVD to play on an iPod for Katie’s upcoming trip around the world, I tried out a couple of different products on my Mac, and it ultimately reminded me what I like about Macs: the freeware and cheap downloads out there just tend to be much higher quality. I tried VLC (which also has a Windows version) and Handbrake (Mac only) and Handbrake blew VLC out of the water. It has a nice iPod conversion preset and took a lot less time than VLC.

Has anyone (especially in the PC world) done any movie ripping and conversion? What do you use?

Contrary to what a lot of people think, the choice to include a partial post is not just to boost traffic numbers. It’s much more about design and knowing that readers would get more out of the post if it was read in the design it was meant to and with the full functionality of the site. Plus, the traffic thing helps gauge whether or not the audience is interested.

Still, I know that a lot of people prefer to do all of their reading without having to leave a reader, which is why I changed my feeds to show the full post. Also, I decided I preferred to operate in relative ignorance of your interest in what I’m writing about.

But I’m curious: what’s your preference? Does it bother you to have to click over to the site, or do you find that you click over anyway? To try and get an accurate count, I put together another one of them Google forms, which I always expect to be cooler than they are. But thoughts are welcome in the comments as well.

Partly to use more of the Google Docs functionality and partly to kind of make my point about how you miss things in RSS feeds, here’s a pie chart of the results:

I have the same problem with music.  I want to listen to everything at once, and in the days when I listened to CDs, I would listen to a minute or two of one song before that reminded me of another song that I wanted to listen to immediately.  I would listen to music for hours, but rarely, if ever, finish a full song.

Things are a little bit different now that I’m totally digital. The fact that iTunes won’t mark a song as played until it’s reached the very end of the song means that I’ll listen to a full song so that I can give it credit, which satisfies the part of me obsessed with stats.

But things are also a little different now in that I can no longer look at a few hundred CDs and decide what to listen to, and no longer have a car with 10 CDs that I never change out, meaning that it’s harder to get to know songs very well.  If I don’t like things right off the bat, I have all of my favorite music right in my iPod to listen to.  It’s too tempting to just switch something off if it doesn’t immediately impress.

I’ve turned to playlists made in iTunes to help me discover and re-discover music and to allow me to be a total glutton, to just open up my ears and let the music slide in.  Now that my library’s over 21,000 songs, I need to be reminded of what I haven’t listened to, and with the speed at which I’m adding stuff, I need something that will force me to re-listen to things; to give them a chance for a while and let them sink in.

The first playlist is a little complex, but it’s one of my favorites.  I call it Recent Radio, and it’s the substitute for listening to CDs in my car.  It takes everything from the current year, won’t play anything I’ve listened to in the last few days, makes songs move off of the list after two months, but keeps the songs that I’ve rated three songs or above in for four months (to provide a little more of that “this songs reminds me of this year” spice).  The recipe takes three different playlists, thanks to iTunes not allowing for “unless” statements in their playlists.

Playlist One: “Radio all”
Match all of the following rules:

• Year is 2008 (or whatever the current year is, obviously)
• Date Added is in the last 2 months
• Last Played is not in the last 4 days
• Rating is not 2 stars
• Rating is not 1 star (so that I can remove anything from the playlist that I don’t want to hear anymore)

Playlist #2: “Radio Select”
Match all of the following rules:

• Year is 2008
• Rating is greater than two stars
• Last Played is not in the last 4 days
• Date Added is in the last 4 months

Playlist #3: “Recent Radio” (this is the one that combines the two)
Match any of the following rules:

• Playlist is “Radio All”
• Playlist is “Radio Select”

These playlists give me a fantastic stroll through all of the music from the year, forcing me to listen to stuff that I might otherwise ignore.

But what about the thousands of other songs in my library?  There’s tons of stuff in there that I love, but my constant curiosity about new music keeps me from really listening.  For this, I recently came up with my “Random Neglected” playlist:

• Last played is not in the last 12 months
• Rating is not one star
• Rating is not two stars
• Limit to 100 items
• Skip count is in the range 0 to 8
• Last skipped is not in the last 3 months

It’s extremely simple, but even as I listen to it now, I get huge spoonfuls of songs that I haven’t listened to in at least a year.  It takes in my Never Played playlist as well, and gives me an incredible overview of my library, while not taking in some of the stuff that I’ve given more than enough attention to. UPDATE: I found that I was having trouble when, if I skipped over a song, it stayed on the playlist, so I added in the last two conditions, so that if I skip a track, it expires from the playlist and doesn’t show up again for another six months.

Obviously, you could change these playlists to suit your own tastes.  If you aren’t as into new music as I am, you could simply remove the “Year is 2008″ from the Radio playlists and just have a good overview of the music you’ve added in.  You could decrease the time of the neglected playlist to let a little more in.

I’m telling you this only because it’s extremely important and could well save your life one day.  I hope to God you read the whole thing.

Now, pretty much everyone who knows me knows I’m a Mac guy.  I converted back when iPods were still only available for Macs, I really love my MacBook Pro, they’ve done an amazing job with marketing and making a computer that’s a joy to use and upgrade, and I’m planning on buying an iPhone, though I’ve been increasingly hesitant about that.

I learned computers on Macs.  But I switched in the late 90’s to PCs because Macs cost 2 to 3 times as much, didn’t have as much software being made for it, and what software there was didn’t come out until well after the PC version had been released.  It was a no-brainer at the time, and it seemed that way to many people, as Apple almost went bust before the iPod and OSX were released.

A lot has changed: applications are increasingly web-based, which means it doesn’t really matter what OS you’re using, and the software and games are almost always released for both PC and Mac at the same time, which is an argument in favor of Apple being able to stay alive.

But there’s no getting around the fact that Macs, iPods and iPhones are gourmet electronics, and it’s the gourmet things that are the first to go when people need to trim their budgets. You can already get twice the system for the same amount of money (or even less) if you buy a Windows machine over a Mac.  Again, I love my Mac, but I would never recommend to anyone to buy it.  And I think that, as the economy worsens and gas prices go up, it’s going to be harder and harder for people to justify spending that kind of money.

The field is wide open for a hardware maker to compete with Apple.  They need to develop their own, free flavor of Linux that focuses on the same kind of “it just works” ease-of-use that Macs have and then make their money by selling high-quality, good-looking machines.  Do the same thing for mp3 players and phones.  Make millions.

Blogger in Draft
After saying last week that Blogger is well behind Wordpress in terms of features, Blogger goes and releases a bunch of new features for Blogger In Draft, their test version of the blogging software.  And it reminds me why I love Google.  Their products may not be perfect, but you always know that they’re working on it. It makes it a whole lot easier to be happy with the free products that they keep putting out.