fling93 loves fishies

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My 2005 Mix CD

I think there are three kinds of music listeners. There are people who just shuffle their entire CD collection, people who create tailor-made playlists for every kind of circumstance and occasion, and people who listen to Michael Bolton because they like his hair. I happen to fall into the first category. When I use Windows, I use an old Winamp weighted-shuffler plugin RoboDJ (alas, no longer being maintained, but it still works fine). Similarly, when I use Macs, I use smart playlists to create a Do-It-Yourself Smart Radio Station. And if it happens to be 4:20 (which seems to be fairly often for some reason), I generally turn on the G-Force visualization (although, now that I have a new PC that can handle it, I’m giving Milkdrop a try).

Anyway, this was always reflected when I made mix CDs or tapes. I’d just pick a bunch of my favorite songs, mostly alternating the slow and fast ones to provide for a more shuffle-like variety. I never really put too much thought into the order or picking songs specifically to fit with each other, and I had no idea there was a whole art to that. And I suppose this showed on My 2004 Mix CD (although it still single-handedly propelled Howie Day’s “Collide” and the Killers’ “Mr. Brightside” into big hits).

Songs about Breathing

This past week was the week from hell. I got a terrible flu or something — fever up to 103.5 — starting last Thursday night and running through the weekend, spoiling two planned social events as well as killing the time I had planned to work on my mountain of homework for my Statistics class as well as study for my final in that and in my Microeconomics class and write up that long blog post I haven’t finished yet (shyeah, right!).

And of course, that was topped by the fact that, despite still running a fever of 102, I was going to try and tackle some of the homework on Sunday when I found out that our home PC didn’t boot anymore. Instead, I heard the hard drive doing this:

“scritch scritch scritch scritch”

(pause)

“scritch scritch scritch scritch”

(pause)

This repeated over and over again before I finally got a message that Windows couldn’t boot because some important file was missing or corrupted. Not good. And a Windows XP reinstall (which I performed despite a temperature of 102) only worked temporarily before I got the same problem again (yeah, it’s gotta be a bad drive).

So… no, it was not a good weekend at all. But still, there was a bright side.

Free Jazz (and Tibet too, while you're at it)

So, as I mentioned earlier, one of my most memorable experiences in Montreal (and indeed, ever) involved an atonal avant-garde-like free jazz improvisation at Hugh’s. I met up with Hugh for the first time when I vacationed in Montreal. I still plan on recounting my experiences there at my LiveJournal account. Sorry it’s been taking so long (don’t worry, I’ll be sure to link to them when I put them up), but as I said, I’ve been keeping myself occupied.

And as I said earlier, one of the things I’ve been spending time with is music, which I think is partly because of the free jazz experience. It all started as a dinner party at Christine and Hugh’s to celebrate his good friend Devlin’s birthday. They had a nice piano, and so I was tinkering on it for a while, playing some show tunes and pop songs (e.g. “On My Own” from Les Miserables and snippets of “Linus and Lucy” from Peanuts).

Eventually, I ran out of things to play, and went outside to smoke a cigarette, and when I came in later, Devlin and his partner, Alisha, were picking at the piano, and Hugh’s fiancee, Christine, handed me an accordion. I’ve never ever touched one in my life, but I was game to try, and I twiddled around with it a bit, mostly exploring what the different buttons did, but sometimes trying to play off of what Devlin and Alisha were playing. Eventually, my shoulders got tired (man, that thing is a workout!), and I handed the accordion off to my sister, Alvina, to take over.

I got promptly sat down at the piano next to Alisha, and she simply said to me the following four words:

The RoboDJ Weighted Shuffler for Winamp

Somebody noticed that I use the RoboDJ weighted shuffler plugin for Winamp. They also used it regularly but had lost it after a Windows reinstall. Since the robodj.org page is no longer up, they asked if I had a copy that I could send them. I responded that I did, but by that time they had found it online, albeit on a page that doesn’t turn up when you Google for it.

Since I have a somewhat decent Google PageRank for reasons that will forever be a mystery to me, let me see if I can rectify this matter by linking to Burnap’s excellent RoboDJ for Winamp plugin as many times as possible. Alas, he’s no longer maintaining RoboDJ, but he does have the source code available if anybody out there wants to take a crack at it. And of course you can still download and install RoboDJ.

Basically, RoboDJ is a weighted-shuffler plugin for the Winamp MP3 player for Windows. It’s ideal for those of you who don’t like building lots of playlists and prefer just to put your entire music collection on random shuffle. The weighted part means that if you assign a song a higher weight, RoboDJ will give it a higher probability of selection. Pretty handy for automatically listening your favorite songs and artists more often than the other songs that you have. And did I mention that it’s free (although donations are welcome)?

Yeah, I know the Mac crowd will say that iTunes already does this with the Party Shuffle, but for those of us who do our music listening at work and have to compile on our machines, the slim and trim Winamp is far preferable to iTunes. And I like that RoboDJ gives you finer control than iTunes’s four-star system, which doesn’t let you specify how much more often it plays a four-star song than a three-star song. To be sure RoboDJ’s user interface isn’t great, but it does the job. You can always change weights manually by editing a text file.

Anyway, even if you don’t weight any of your songs, RoboDJ is still indispensible because, let’s face it, the shuffle feature for most MP3 players sucks ass. Most of them are not very random at all, and some of them are just downright weird. For example, I’ve noticed that my Nomad Jukebox 3 will choose a lot of songs from artists alphabetically close to each other and then jump to somewhere else in the alphabet and stay there for a while, etc. This often results in several songs in a row of the same artist which I find quite annoying. RoboDJ’s shuffle algorithm is superior and doesn’t have that problem. Indeed, I’d even taken to creating randomized playlists with RoboDJ and loading them onto the Nomad (even though it kinda defeats the purpose of having your entire music collection on a portable player).

Anyhow, enough of my ramblings (I’d go on to talk about my other music listening habits, but then I might dilute the PageRank by linking to other sites). If you use Winamp, give RoboDJ a try!

My 2004 Mix CD

Update 2/15/06: My 2005 Mix CD is here. Also, some of you are coming here looking for the title of Avril Lavigne’s second album, which is Under My Skin. A good reference site to answer questions like these is AMG (formerly known as the All Music Guide). By the way, I have mixed feelings about “Collide” and “Mr. Brightside” becoming big hits. On the one hand, I guess it’s me being ahead of the curve again. On the other hand, this means I essentially wasted two tracks on this CD, since the recipients would’ve heard those songs anyway without me. Oh well.

I decided to try my hand at Rich Thomas’s End of the Year Mix CD Challenge. However, I haven’t added a whole lot of music to my library this past year due to running low on disk space at work (where I do most of my listening — thank goodness we’re due for new machines any day now). Rather than put some fringe new stuff, like Britney Spears or Lindsay Lohan, I figured I’d throw in some of my all-time favorites.

Which meant I couldn’t think of a unifying theme for this mix, nor a snappy title, merely calling it “fling93’s 2004 mix.” However, I was able to create a nice collage for the CD cover, as you can see (click for larger image). In case you don’t know who’s who, the cover from left to right: first row is Avril Lavigne, Tori Amos, Vanessa Carlton, second row is Peter Gabriel, Jill Sobule, Dar Williams, and Death Cab for Cutie. Last row is The Flaming Lips, Keane, and Howie Day. On the CD itself (ignoring artists that were already on the cover) from the top clockwise is R.E.M. (with muppets), The Killers, Shawn Colvin, Brand New, Hedwig (aka John Cameron Mitchell), and the Dresden Dolls. Man, I just realized I completely left out a picture of Rasputina. Well, maybe I’ll redress that if I burn a second copy.

I could delve into the role that mix CDs will play in this new Long Tail distribution model, but I think I’ll save that for a later post. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, check out Chris Anderson’s Wired article and his blog. And until I get my post written, you can see some of my “Long Tail” thoughts in a lengthy discussion with Stirling Newberry (in particular, my last comment in that thread).

But for now, let me just talk a bit about the songs.

This Land Was Made for You to Sue

Well, you have to be living in a cave if you haven’t seen this yet, and if you’re living in a cave, you’re probably not going to be reading this site. Nevertheless, just in case you’re the last souls in the country to miss this, you definitely have to check out JibJab’s absolutely hilarious parody of Dubya and Kerry to the tune of the late Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land.” If you haven’t seen it, check it out. You’ll enjoy it no matter which side of the aisle you’re on.

Of course, this being America, the copyright owner of “This Land Is Your Land” (The Richmond Organization) is suing JibJab, and according to Eugene Volokh, they have a strong case.

iTunes visualizations & G-Force

One of the cool things about iTunes is the truly trippy visualizations, especially in full-screen mode (and the “Tripping Hard” effect, of course). Some music-snob purists might object to needing any visual accompaniment for music, but I personally find it easier to concentrate on the music when viewing a visualizer, since I’m otherwise easily distracted by other things (the visualization, on the other hand, reinforces the music). Plus, it’s just way cool.

You may or may not be aware that it responds to keyboard input. While the visualization is running, you can hit ‘H’ to bring up the Help menu, from which you have a surprising number of options. The important ones involve the various configurations, namely the waveforms, effects, and color schemes (the combination of which make up what you see). You can use keys to cycle through them manually or switch to a different random configuration. Plus, if you see a particularly interesting combination, you can map it to a key to call it up later. Several cheat-sheets for all these options are available here and a more updated one here.

But there’s more to the story than that.

My Stunning Rendition of "Ordinary Day"

Well, Return of the King for the PS2 didn’t take as long as I thought it would. I was a bit disappointed by the game, but I’ll save that for my full review.

Meanwhile, I’ve still been fiddling around with GarageBand, but now with my new toys: a Tascam US-122 USB Audio/MIDI Interface combined with a Shure SM57 dynamic microphone. The SM57 is supposedly pretty legendary and ubiquitous in recording studios (now I recognize them sometimes in music videos) and is, of course, the microphone that even the President uses. It also got a pretty good review from mojo pie’s Steve Langer. They also have a neat article from Dan Richards about building a mic cabinet which says it’s a pretty good microphone to start out with — and it costs less than $100 (see what I mean by lowered barriers to entry?). Eventually I’ll probably add a low-end condenser microphone.

As for the $200 Tascam US-122, there are cheaper audio to USB interfaces out there, but one of the real draws for me was that it had phantom power XLR inputs required by condenser mics. Plus several people on the forums seemed to have good experiences with it, including Ben Whitehouse, who also has an excellent piece on building a home studio. And plus, the local Guitar Center had a returned model for $40 cheaper.

My First GarageBand Experience

Well, right after writing my SF Giants post on Sunday morning, I eagerly fired up GarageBand and spent the whole rest of the day (and Monday and Tuesday evening) playing around with it. I’ve been itching to try my hand at songwriting for the longest time, even going so far as grabbing a copy of CakeWalk Home Studio several years ago (I think this was before Windows 95, actually), but I never really got going. The most I ever did was merely transcribe the theme to Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.

So needless to say, I was looking forward to this, and let me tell you, it did not disappoint. This is definitely a great program to get started with, no matter what your level of musical expertise (or lack thereof). It comes with a large selection of loops where you can drag onto your song. Even more, it’ll automatically transpose a loop to match the key of the song so that it’ll sound right. Loops are actually pretty useful for the musically inclined who intend to record every single track manually, in that they can quickly kick start a song by being a placeholder that gives you a good idea of what the final song will sound like pretty early in the process (which actually did come in handy in the song that I wrote, which I’ll provide at the end). And it also comes with a large assortment of professional sounding software instruments that you can play using the virtual keyboard or your own external MIDI instrument (MIDI-to-USB interface is not included, but can be found inexpensively at most music stores).

Rain Songs

Well, okay. I’ll succumb to another “meme” (but I plan to do another more substantive post tonight on my GarageBand experience, so I’m sure you won’t mind). This one’s an inadvertent one, courtesy of David (via Elkit), who lists his Top 5 songs about rain. But, knowing me, I can never limit my lists to just 5, so instead, here’s my Top 10 favorite rain songs…

Audioscrobbler Update & MusicMobs

I previously blogged on Audioscrobbler in an earlier post. Basically, you download a plugin for your MP3 player, and it automatically keeps track of which songs, artists, and albums you listen to the most. The idea being that you can find other users with similar tastes to discover new artists (and it protects your privacy — you only provide a username, not an e-mail address).

They’ve recently moved to a new server, so there’ve been some hiccups. Not all of the original functionality has been restored (e.g., forums, generated list of users similar to you, searching for artists), but it’s getting there. And shortly after I blogged on them, their server went down for a while, and after they came up, they’d changed the protocol, requiring users to download a new plugin. For a while, I ran into a few issues with the Winamp plugin’s song submissions, but the latest one (v1.1.4, Build 589) seems to be stable. As always, you can see what I’ve been listening to here.

iTunes

Yeah, blogging’s been slow lately, partly because of the holidays, but mostly because of my new iBook, as I warned. I’m still installing utilities and neat things here and there (maybe I’ll post a summary), and I even bought a neat bag for it from WaterField Designs, but I find I spend the bulk of my time enjoying the ability to surf the web from the living room, often while watching TV in the background.

I know I’ve already mentioned in my Chaos Bleeds review that I’m a late adopter of technology, but it’s especially strange in this case because I actually used to work at a wireless LAN company — indeed, before 802.11b came out. So I’ve known about wireless networking for, like seven years, before ever really using it for myself (testing/debugging it doesn’t count). Mostly because laptops are expensive, become obsolete really quickly, and weren’t really that big a value add for me — until I started blogging.

Aside from wirelessly surfing the web for pictures of Winona Ryder, Natalie Portman, and Alicia Witt… um… I mean for important news stories, I’m also spending a lot of time using iTunes. I’d been staying away from them because I don’t have an iPod, but the feature-laden but relatively bulky Creative Nomad Jukebox 3 instead, which doesn’t play AAC format music files. I’m also leaning towards moving my collection away from MP3 and towards Ogg Vorbis, which is an open patent-free format, unlike MP3, or WMA, which is a proprietary format owned by Microsoft, as my brother learned the hard way when he found out he couldn’t play his WMA collection on his new PowerBook. Ogg is also completely free of DRM (security that limits or prevents users from copying and/or burning), unlike AAC and WMA.

Audioscrobbler

Most tools for discovering new music and new artists rely on the user rating a bunch of artists they like and dislike. Well, Audioscrobbler does this for you by keeping track of what you listen to. Using a Winamp plugin (although version 3 was worse than 2, I’ve heard the newly-released version 5 is better), it checks for songs you actually listen to (it makes sure you actually play at least half of the song, thus filtering out songs you decide to skip), and then submits it to Audioscrobbler’s server where statistics are kept on how often you’ve played each artist. You can then use this to discover other users who listen to the same artists.

By the way, this is not a commercial site that will sell your name and preferences. It doesn’t even ask for your e-mail address. The whole thing is open-source. From their “About” page:

There are no popups/adverts or any other crap, Audioscrobbler plugins are all Open Source. Audioscrobbler data is periodically released under a Creative Commons License. We are striving to eliminate any possibilities of Audioscrobbler “doing a GraceNote” by periodically releasing data collected by plugins, and keeping the plugins and protocol open-source.