Rest In Peace, Steve Jobs

I just got the news that Steve Jobs, visionary and founder of Apple, has passed away after losing a battle with cancer. Not surprising that I learned the news while checking my Twitter feed on my iPhone.

I can remember very clearly the first time I used an Apple computer. It was in one of the labs at college in 1985, the business building. While I had been using computers since 1982 in high school (Commodore products), this was the first computer that I had worked on that had the concept of a desktop and a trash can. Very visual. Very intuitive. It was a game changer.

Workout Shuffle (8/16/08)

Another Saturday morning, another hour on the cross-trainer at the YMCA. Here's what popped up randomly on my iPod shuffle during the workout:

Champaign - How About Us
? and the Mysterians - 96 Tears
Hootie and the Blowfish - Sad Caper
Nigel Olsson - Little Bit of Soap
Jimmy Jones - Handy Man
Dean Friedman - Funny Papers
Pat Benatar - Hell Is For Children
Matthew Sweet - Scooby Doo, Where Are You?
Divinyls - I Touch Myself
James Brown - Talkin' Loud and Sayin' Nothing
April Wine - Just Between You and Me
Chuck Berry - Let It Rock
The Clash - This Is England
Bruce Springsteen - the Rising
His Name Is Alive - Wish I Had a Wishing Ring
Bill Withers - Use Me

Cooldown: Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons - My Eyes Adored You

You Can't Always Get What You Want

So, yesterday afternoon I get home from work and plan to do a little music downloading. My monthly subscription of 75 tunes on emusic.com just renewed Tuesday afternoon, so I figured I'd get my notepad out and start to get some items on the list.

First up was to polish off a bit more of the Rolling Stones catalog from the 60's. I type in the artist but nothing comes up. Huh. It says they currently do not have them available at this time. I go and try a few more artists I had written down from last month but didn't get to due to running out of my allotment. Huh. Marianne Faithful, Bobby Rydell, Herman's Hermits, ? and the Mysterians, and a few other folks from the 60's - none of them coming up. What do they and the Stones have in common? All were on the ABKCO label.

Back on April 3rd, emusic.com touted proudly getting the ABKCO catalog on their site. I was very excited. I had listened to a lot of the Rolling Stones by osmosis (ie. my older brother was/is a huge fan and had their entire catalog on vinyl). I liked a lot of the older stuff just fine. So when I saw that they had hit my download service, I was eager to download stuff. I got most of the big hits before my April numbers ran out - so I had kept the later part (mostly covers from their earlier albums, etc.) until my May 14th date.

Turns out I was too late. On May 3rd, emusic.com pulled down all the ABKCO stuff.

At first, I felt hugely bummed. This was high quality recordings from a big label, and I hoped that it would signal good things to come. Maybe they'll still come back. I'm hoping.

Next, I felt good for at least getting what I had gotten. I know I managed to get five or six complete Stones albums from that period, and they were the ones I knew the most. It also put me into a new mindset where if I find something on emusic I'd like to download that I need to get it (if I have downloads left) while the getting is still good. You just never know how long something will be there.

I do have to keep in mind too that, with my subscription rate, I am only paying 27 cents per download. So, if I find three solid albums per month for my $20 and then can get a bunch of handfuls of miscellaneous songs here and there too, I'm still coming out way ahead of buying physical CD's.

So, I'm not mad at emusic.com - they can't control which labels give and then take away stuff. I just have to plan a bit better myself is all.

Saturday Shuffles

In reading the latest Entertainment Weekly that hit my mailbox yesterday, they did a poll of 1000 folks by phone to find out what the average entertainment fan is doing to cope during the Writers' Strike. The numbers showed 44% are watching less TV, 40% are reading more, 39% are watching reruns, 36% are listening to more music, 34% are watching more news programs, 23% are going online more, 19% are watching more on-demand TV shows and movies, 18% are watching more reality TV, 16% are more bored than usual and 9% are having more sex.

I'm definitely one of those people listening to more music, thanks to my iPod. I'm hearing more stuff from CDs that had collected dusted for awhile now, and that's a good thing. I'm rediscovering forgotten gems. My favorite way to listen is in shuffle-mode. It's sort of like Radio Martin, you never know what will come up. Two shuffle examples from yesterday:

Morning workout at the YMCA (40 minutes on the cross-trainer):

The Rolling Stones - Wild Horses
Barry White - Can't Get Enough of Your Love
Chicago - Saturday In the Park
Carly Simon - You Belong To Me
Mark Lindsay - Silver Bird
Kiss - Hard Luck Woman
Sweet - Blockbuster
Yaz - Bad Connection
Earth, Wind & Fire - Kalimba Story
Fun Boy Three - Our Lips Are Sealed

The shuffle of songs before going to sleep (a nightly thing for me):

James Brown - Mother Popcorn, Pt 1
The Cure - Mint Car
Pet Shop Boys - What Have I Done to Deserve This?
Vangelis - Chariots of Fire
Sheila E. - Funky Attitude
Poison - Nothin' But A Good Time
Adam Ant - Strip

Care to share you latest shuffle?

eMusic

I mentioned in my comments to Mike the other day, when talking about my new iPod, that I use eMusic.com for doing downloads. There was a number of reasons why I chose this route to go.

First, the downloads are in MP3 format without any controlling file like iTunes does. So, I can use the download on any MP3 player I chose as it is a standard format. Also, I can put it on as many devices as I like (iTunes controls the number of computers their downloads can reside on to five boxes maximum). I liked the portability aspect.

Second, the price was right. I started out getting 50 free downloads for signing up. Then I could chose my own monthly price level: $9.95 for 25 downloads, $14.95 for 50 downloads, $19.95 for 75 downloads. That seemed like a nice counterpoint to 99 cents per song. Yeah, I'm frugal. The only downside: when your month clicks over, your remaining downloads do not rollover. So, you must use or lose.

Third, eMusic does remember what you've downloaded previously. And as long as your account remains active, you can re-download those songs you downloaded before without any additional cost. So if you accidentally delete the file, you can get it back quick. I like that too.

One negative about eMusic is that it is not supported by the four major record labels. So, you are not likely to find the latest and greatest releases from Sony, Warner, BMG, etc. here. What you will find is a lot of independent label stuff and a lot of older material from smaller labels of the 50's, 60's and 70's. That works well for me - as right now I am filling in holes in the 60's and such for my music library.

I've already eaten up my 50 free downloads and the 50 a month for my first month (I roll over again on the 15th). In the meantime, I'm going through my Billboard Book of Top 40 Hits making my list for the future. I'm only in the middle of the C's and I already have 80 tunes on my to-pull list. I think this will be a nice source for me for quite a few months to come.

6000 and Counting!

For Christmas, both my wife and I got iPod classic 80 gig models. After we got our son the iPod Nano for his birthday in October, we thought they were very cool and wanted ones for ourselves. Now we have them.

Now, to be fair, I have been preparing for this for a few months now. A number of years back I had already made CDs with MP3 files of songs from 1972 to 1983 (one CD per year with songs burned from my CD collection in radio-quality format allowing for a couple hundred per CD). So, I had a nice start to building my iTune library on my laptop computer.

The next step took a bit longer - which was going through all the rest of the CDs in the house and importing those as well. This included a number of years worth of free music CDs that came as part of a magazine called CMJ New Music Monthly which I had subscribed to since January of 1995; each issue came with a CD sampler with 20 or so songs on it of various types.

So, I've now brought in songs ranging from 1960 to today, for a grand total of over 6000 songs. Whew! The artists range from Aaliyah to ZZ Top with many varied performers inbetween. Genres from rock to pop, R&B to country, jazz to ska are represented. I even have holiday tunes, separated to their own play-list for easy access next year.

Needless to say, I love my iPod. Being able to listen to music at night just before bed takes me back to my youth - of lying in the dark with the headphones on listening to the radio. I put the iPod on shuffle and it's just like the radio days gone by. Only difference - the headphones aren't those giant clucky ones that looked like two Princess Leia hair-buns on your ears. LOL.

I love being able to carry my music wherever I go too. For a gift, I also got a car-converter that allows me to tune into my radio and play my iPod while it charges. That'll come in handy for long car trips.

Adventures with iTunes

Last month I mentioned that we got my son an iPod nano for his 12th birthday. He's really enjoying it - takes his music when we go places or visiting family so he can listen to the songs he likes. He's even done some downloading of music from the iTunes Store site with the giftcards he got on his birthday as well.

I had set him up with about 80 or so mp3 files myself from files I had stored on his computer. That computer was my old desktop model which I had used for many years. Still stored on it were fourteen directories filled with mp3 files of songs I pulled from our CD collection. I had them organized by year (1970 through 1983) and I actually had burned a copy of each directory onto CDs for storage purposes.

In setting him up with songs for his iPod, it got me thinking about all those files again after a long time. I took the CD back-ups and put the files onto my laptop. Then I installed the free iTunes software from the Apple site. Now the iTunes software can work independently of an iPod; one can use it really just to organize music files, video files, photograph files, etc. on your computer. It's pretty slick for some free software. Apple's goal, of course, is for you to use their iTunes Store to pay to download music, videos, etc and/or to get an iPod to take those things with you.

I'm mostly playing with it for the music files. One of the fun things you can do is update the details on the music files. You can modify the attributes like artist, song title, and music genre. You can also update the data from which album the song came from. When you do that, you can also click the mouse and have iTunes sync up with the iTunes Store site to download the album artwork, if they have that album on the site. How cool is that? Since the iPod will display an album cover when it plays a song, you can have a visual touch to go with the music. That appeals to me a lot.

Now, I have noticed that some albums aren't there. There tend to be more greatest-hits type collections. I'm really trying to sync my songs with artwork from the albums the songs first appeared on. So that takes a little longer to get the exact album. In fact, I've gotten obcessive over the past few weekends and started to clean up my files. I've updated artist names and albums and then pulled in the album art for many of the songs I had. It's been time consuming but a lot of fun too. One of the other neat features on the iPod is to scroll through the Album Art. It reminds me of flipping through albums on one of those CD jukeboxes.

I also noticed a number of artists, surprisingly, did not have any songs in the iTunes store. Sure, some are one-hit wonders so I would expect those not to be there. But, also, some bigger names: Led Zepplin, AC/DC, Bob Seger - to name but three.

My goal for all this? To have my files set up perfectly for when I get my own iPod. It's on my Christmas list - actually the only thing I'm really interested in getting. We might break down and snag one sooner, just to be sure stores don't sell out too close to the holidays. That's okay though - it has been many many a Christmas since I've had any big surprises under the tree. In any case, I'll be ready to roll with my music collection when the time comes. Yeah, I'm a huge plan-ahead kind of person. Can't you tell? ;)