jameswharris

Music Lovers Nirvana

I don’t know why all my music loving friends aren’t subscribers to Rhapsody Music. This morning I picked up the 8/8/8 edition of Entertainment Weekly and read the five reviews of new albums in their Music Review section. I then logged into Rhapsody and played each of those albums. Rhapsody had five for five. I can listen to these albums anytime I want and it’s completely legal and all I pay is $119 a year for the service. The albums were:

Conor Oberst by Conor Oberst
Fragile Future by Hawthorne Heights
Lessons in Love by Lloyd
Harps and Angels by Randy Newman
Scars on Broadway by Scars on Broadway

Just to see how good Rhapsody is I grabbed the latest issue, and found six more reviews. Rhapsody had five of the six – missing out on Ra Ra Riot’s The Rhumb Line, but they had their EP, so that one might show up soon.

If I was paying by the song like most people, I would have already racked up $40 worth of songs this morning. And these are five albums I never would have bought if I had been flipping through CDs at a record store. And there have been tons of albums I’ve bought that I’ve liked much less than these albums. So far I like Hawthorne Heights and Conor Oberst best. I’m going through these online albums looking for standout songs – songs I will want to come back and listen to again.

That’s one of Rhapsody’s weaknesses – you have access to so much music that it’s overwhelming. I wished they had some kind of system to help me remember all these new artists. If they had a little scale that showed up while each song was playing I could rate them: _Forgettable _Good _Great _Fantastic, it would be easy to track them down later.

Rhapsody is better at providing new music than it is old music. I just got Rolling Stone: Cover to Cover 1967-2007 on DVD, complete digital editions of the magazines, over a thousand issues. I started with the first issue looking for albums that I’ve never heard of and never remembered at all. Rhapsody is not the place to find them. Back then albums came out on LPs, and most of them never got reprinted as CDs, much less brought forward to the digital age. However, if an old album is re-mastered on CD and sold today there’s a good chance it will show up on Rhapsody.

I show Rhapsody to my friends, and I write about it every so often, but I know damn few people who use the service. It’s amazing that such a great deal is ignored. I know young people prefer to steal their music, but Rhapsody is so cheap I can’t believe more kids don’t want to be legal.

The real drawback of Rhapsody is it doesn’t play on iPods. And for some reason Steve Jobs doesn’t want Apple to get into the subscription music business. I don’t put music on my iPod, but I do play music on my iPod touch through the Pandora app. Pandora is free, but random. I imagine that if I played Pandora long enough I’d eventually hear everything I can get on Rhapsody. I can’t believe Pandora isn’t more famous too. It’s a marvelous invention allowing Internet listeners build their own radio stations by starting each with a seed song and rating subsequent songs selected by Pandora.

Pandora’s Music Genome Project is technology designed to analyze what you like and give you more of it. I have a jazz station started with “Blue Rondo A Lo Turk” and a Dylanesque station seeded with “Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” and a 60s San Francisco sound station seeded with Quicksilver Messenger Service and a new alternative station started with Broken Social Scene. Pandora is a FANTASTIC system for discovering new tunes to love. Right now it’s playing David Bromberg’s live “Mr. Bojangles” on my Bryds station – now that’s a wonderful blast from the past.

And then there’s Deezer.com – free on demand music. I checked, and the David Bromberg song is there to play for free. Also, I check and three of the five albums from Entertainment Weekly mentioned above are available to play for free (Fragile Future, Scars on Broadway and Harps and Angels).

How can the music industry offer all this free music? Why does anyone buy songs? I don’t know. Over at Fantasy & Science Fiction, Gordon Van Gelder is asking the same questions about free short stories on the web. Maybe I’m out of touch because I actually pay for Rhapsody music and buy magazines with short stories. Will I be buying next year or the year after that?

There is no reason to buy music or short stories any more, not if you don’t want to, because there’s a wealth of great free material on the web. How is that going to change things? My wife and I paid $39 each to sit in the cheap seats at an outdoor Crosby, Stills and Nash concert a couple weeks ago. That’s more money than I ever spent on their LPs. We saw Jewel at the same place and prices, but that’s the two concerts I’ll go to this year. Susie also went to Dave Matthews and plans to see a couple more concerts. Can the music industry survive off of such sporadic support?

This is a great age for music lovers, but what kind of age is it for music creators?

Jim

iPod touch eReader eBook

I just bought an iPod touch 8gb for $199 refurbished at the Apple Store. I’ve been wanting a carry around Internet device and the iPod touch is very elegant. It took nothing to set up – just typed in my Wi-Fi code and I was connected. I immediately upgraded it to the new 2.0 software so I could have the Exchange client. That also worked smoothly.

And I’ve already gotten my first App, the eReader, which lets me read ebooks on the iPod touch. The eReader allowed me to log into my Fictionwise.com account and access my Bookshelf there. That’s the great thing about Fictionwise, it remembers your purchases and will let you download any book again, even in a new format. I’ve had ebooks I bought from Fictionwise on a eBookwise 1150, Kindle and now the iPod touch.

The eReader on the iPod touch offers crystal clear type, but small, so it’s not as comfortable to read on as the Kindle. However, after buying the Kindle I discovered I’m not much of a book reader any more, and that I’m really an audio bookworm instead. It’s extremely easy from within the eReader program to jump to sites like Manybooks.net, to find free or commercial ebooks. eReader has it’s own URL entry box to take you to places that provides PDB formatted books.

From inspiration to reading, it only took me about a minute to find and download “The House of Mirth” by Edith Wharton. That’s the next audio book I plan to listen to, so I thought it might be fun to read it while I listen to it.

Even though I’m primarily an audio book person, it will still be nice to have visual books on the iPod touch for times when I’m at loose ends somewhere away from home and want to read, but that brings up the next issue.

Carrying Around the Internet

The advent of smart phones inspired me to want a way to carry around the Internet for 24×7 instant access to information, but I never could stomach the idea of paying their large monthly bills. I’m currently on a pay-as-you-go plan with T-Mobile and I add $50 worth of minutes about every 4-5 months. It’s wonderful not having a cell phone bill. When small mobile Wi-Fi Internet devices showed up on the market, I thought they were a good compromise – not perfect, but pretty good. So I started researching. I finally decided on the iPod touch when I saw it for $199 refurbished. I like it, but I’ve got to learn how to carry it around.

I currently carry a 2nd generation iPod Nano in my shirt pocket. The iPod touch might be too heavy to put there. I carry my cell phone in my left front pants pocket, so the iPod touch could go on the right side, but I worry about it getting damaged, so I’m thinking about a small iPhone holster for my belt, but my pants are already overburdened with keys, wallet, phone, change, handkerchief, and sometimes voice recorder, so that I’m constantly hitching them up. Carrying around another device is going to be annoying. An iPhone would have been ideal because one device would replace two.

The obvious solution would be to start carrying a purse, but I think a bandolier would be better, although my wife already thinks seeing my white iPod headphones permanently hanging around my neck is nerdy enough. I wouldn’t be bothered by any statement my carrying a purse would make, but so far I haven’t seen one I really liked. I’d want something like a small sleek messenger bag made of leather, but if I’m going to start carrying a purse, why not plan to throw a few more items in, like a camera or a Eee PC, which means I’d want a bigger bag.

Also, I haven’t decided if the iPod touch is the perfect portable Internet device. I can browse the net fairly easy with it, with some sites a lot more readable than others. The iPod touch provides a convenient way to read and delete old emails, but it’s primary function would be to look up data, like movie times, weather info, or trivia, and listening to audio books. I’ve wondered if I jumped up in size to the 7″ Eee PC if it wouldn’t make a substantially better carry around Internet device.

You don’t realize how important a keyboard is as a human-machine interface until you hunt and peck on the iPod touch. The iPod touch certainly does a lot with it’s 3.5 inch 480 x 320 pixels screen. I think it will take me weeks to truly explore the potential of this device. Sooner or later I will want broadband access, because I figure in five years everyone will carry around the Internet. I just don’t know what the device we will carry will look like.

Part 2: Further Adventures of eReader on the iPod touch

Jim

Revealing Your Personality With Science Fiction

Rusty Keele over at BestScienceFictionStories.com has invited blogging friends over to write about their favorite SF short story, and I’m one of the contributors. My post is queued up for tomorrow. I picked “The Star Pit” by Samuel R. Delany from 1967. Be sure and stop by and read all the posts this week. Jason Sanford discusses his love of Ray Bradbury’s “There Will Come Soft Rains” from 1950 and John DeNardo picks “The Cold Equations” by Tom Godwin from 1954, after sneaking in a plea for “Diamond Dogs” by Alastair Reynolds from 2003.

It’s revealing to see what other fans like in the way of short stories, especially when you only get to pick one. If had mentioned two, I might have included “The Menace From Earth” by Robert A. Heinlein from 1957.

To help refresh your memory of great short stories, look at these lists:

Are you a long time fan of science fiction? If you study these lists, even in a casual way, they will bring back a flood of memories. There have been hundreds, if not thousands, of great science fiction stories. Our pitiful little minds just can’t hold them all our bio-RAM. I wouldn’t have picked a different story if I had read these lists before I wrote my essay for Rusty, but reading them now makes me realize how hard it would be to pick story #2.

It’s too bad reprint rights are so expensive because it would be huge fun to create my own personal anthology of favorites and publish it at Lulu.com. Imagine a fad of publishing personal anthologies of short stories, where you wrote forwards and afterwards for each story. Wouldn’t that make a unique way to communicate with new friends? In the old days you’d introduce yourself to people and leave your calling card. Imaging leaving your anthology.

Could you define your inner core personality with 12 short stories? I think “The Star Pit” comes close to revealing a lot of my personal programming. Picking the next 11 stories would be difficult, but I think I’ll start going through the above lists and make a try of it. Certainly, it will make a nice blog entry.

Jim

17,081 Songs

I finally finished ripping my CD collection, a task I’ve been meaning to do for years. I put it off, time and again, but I finally made up my mind that it had to be done, and when I did, it only took a few weeks. What I did was set up two old computers to be a ripping factory. The results were 17,081 songs contained in 125 gigabytes. I immediately copied them to a USB hard drive and took it to work and backed up the library to my office computer. I figured after that effort I didn’t want to loose my new digital music library to a crashed or stolen computer. The question now: How do I maximize the use of my song collection.

As I write this I keep an iTunes window open with a single long listing of my songs sorted by artist. My collection represents decades of collecting covering centuries of music history. One lesson from holding every CD I’ve bought while putting them into the burner is learning how many I’ve forgotten I owned. On CBS Sunday Morning today they profiled Shelby Lynne, and I checked and found I had six of her CDs, but not the one they talked about that I wanted to hear the most – damn! Just now I noticed I have four CDs of John Lee Hooker and clicked on Chill Out to play as I type.

Other than just random gazing at my list I have no real idea of what’s in my collection. I can remember my favorites to a degree, but I’ve discovered its easy to find forgotten favorites, albums I played regularly years ago that I’ve since forgotten I even loved, much less owned. Can you name all the movies you got excited about during the 1980s? Susan, my wife, told me to go through all 17,081 and rate them. Sure thing, Susie. iTunes tells me I have 48.3 days of 24×7 listening. I wished iTunes, Windows Media Player, or Firefly Media Server would tell me how many albums I owned.

Since I started this project I’ve been playing music a lot more and loving the rediscovery of old friends, but I’ve also been bummed by how many songs I own that I just don’t dig – not in the least. Some songs were filler to begin with, but in other cases I guess I’ve just changed.

How To Be My Own Disc Jockey

What I need to do is organize the playing of the best songs and musical genres in a way that educates me about my own collection. The traditional way to organize playing digital music is playlists, but that assumes you know what you want on your list before you build them.

Another option is shuffle play. The random jumping between 17,081 songs can lead to some weird song combinations, but it does get me to hear songs I would never try from just memory. And it can be surprisingly surprising. “Sleeping in the Devil’s Bed” by Daniel Lanois just started playing. Hell, I didn’t even know I had a Daniel Lanois CD, but it’s from a soundtrack to movie called Until the End of the World, a film I only vaguely remember. The next song is “Sunflakes Fall, Snowrays Call” by Janis Ian, which is just as good. I knew I had several Janis Ian CDs, but never remember even hearing this song, but I’ve played the album several times I know. The next song is “No Surrender” by Bruce Springsteen, from the Live 1975-85 album. Again, another song I like but didn’t remember. Either I have a terrible memory or most music is not very memorable.

So far, I can say that random play succeeds the best to teach me about my own record collection. However, I just discovered I can’t rate the songs as I hear them because I’m using the Firefly Media Server on a separate computer server to feed them through iTunes, and to rate the songs would require my library being in iTunes on my Vista machine. This brings up another huge problem for having a digital music library.

Where Do I Keep the Master Library?

Right now my collection is on an old Dell server, ripped and stored under Windows Media Player, but distributed throughout the house by the Firefly Media Server. I can play songs through iTunes on any machine, or I can play songs through my stereo using a Roku SoundBridge M1001. I can remotely manage the SoundBridge with VisualMR, so I can use my laptop to select which songs to play on my stereo. Supposedly, I can use Windows Media Connect to share songs between any Windows Media Player on any of my machines, or use Windows Media Center to distribute songs throughout my house with Windows Media extender devices like the Xbox, but I haven’t figured out how to use them yet, and I don’t own an Xbox. The Roku maybe an extender, but I haven’t explored that angle either.

I could put a copy of the library on each computer I own, and on my iPods, but what if I decide to delete a song, I’d have to go to each machine and delete the file to keep all the libraries in sync. That would be messy. Ditto for adding new songs. I could buy a 160gb iPod and make it my master library, but that means being tied to iTunes.

I’m thinking about buying a larger hard drive for my main Vista machine and putting the library there and installing Firefly Music Server on the same machine and taking down my extra machine. Why burn watts on two machines with work that could be done by one? This would also allow me to backup my library with Mozy.com, which I can restore to my work machine occasionally – so work and home will stay in sync.

Now that I have a master library, I want to clean it up and delete all the songs and albums I don’t like. And with the master library on one machine I can catalog it in both Windows Media Player and iTunes because I have yet to decide which I like best for browsing songs and making playlists. And if I ever get a Windows Media Center extender I could browse album covers from my HDTV and play songs on my living room stereo. Both Windows Media Center and iTunes have the nice cover flow browsing feature. Let’s hope in the future that cover flow can be expanded to include all the CD jacket data and editorial content.

Another advantage of having a single master library is collecting ratings. If the files are on the same machine I can rate songs in both iTunes and Windows Media Player. I have no idea how this information is stored, or whether it migrates well to new computers and new operating system upgrades.

Yet, another advantage to saving my music library on my main home computer is when I buy new songs. They will be added immediately to the master library.

Where To Play Music?

Most people think the iPod is the sole venue for playing digital music but I don’t. I maybe an old fuddy-duddy because I don’t like separating myself from the world by plugging the white buds into my ears. I have nice speakers on my computers at work and home, and I also have a nice stereo system in the den with comfy La-Z-Boys for truly devoted music meditation. Sure I have iPods to carry around, but strangely, I prefer to listen to audio books on the go. My wife does like playing music in the car on her commutes, but it’s easy to sync songs to her iPod and play them through the car’s stereo.

I share my music collection with my wife. We can play music in the den that’s heard well in the kitchen and breakfast room, meaning we can do dishes and groove at the same time. Eventually I think I might like to pipe my music library into my bedroom too.

Ripping music to MP3 has made it easy to play songs anywhere without the hassle of finding CDs and filing them back afterwards. The key will be maintaining the master library. It will be annoying if I delete a hated song one day and then be listening to music the next and that deleted song pop up again somewhere else. Or conversely, if I buy a song at home but can’t find it on my work computer later.

Buying New Music

Now that I have my nice digital music library and my CDs are all filed alphabetically away, how do I add new music? Over the past few years I have occasionally bought digital songs that are now trapped in ancient DRMs and stuck on the computers on which they were purchased, and in some cases lost on dead computers. So no more buying DRM shackled music.

If CDs are about the same price as digital downloads, should I get CDs or files? I’m tempted to get CDs, but digital downloads are a better deal for the environment. As long as I keep my master library backed up and migrate it from new computer to new computer digital files should be safe. If my house burns down I have my backup on Mozy and my work computer.

Yet, it depresses me to think that I’m limited to the sonic quality of 256kbps rips. With CDs I could re-rip my collection to a new standard in the future, or even rip them to a loss-less format when I have enough main storage. The Shelby Lynne CD I referred to above is $9.49 as a download and $9.97 as a CD at Amazon. Which would you buy? Of course I can listen to it for free on Rhapsody.

I am a subscriber to Rhapsody Subscription Music and I don’t have to buy new music for the most part since I rent. However, if a CD goes out of print it disappears from Rhapsody. I have Shelby Lynne CDs that Rhapsody doesn’t offer. Strangely it seems for a service that offers unlimited plays from an almost unlimited library that you’d think once they offer a song it would never be deleted. But it appears if it isn’t for sale somewhere it gets dropped by Rhapsody. That’s why I ripped my large CD collection. I have many out-of-print CDs that aren’t always on Rhapsody.

If Rhapsody offered everything, and promised to be a business that would last forever, I would have just packed away my CDs without ripping them and lived by Rhapsody alone. It’s easy to play Rhapsody music from any machine attached to the Internet, and I can send Rhapsody music to my stereo via the SoundBridge, and if I owned a certified player, I could carry it around too. But right now, Rhapsody is only good for new music – the kind you can buy from Amazon.

I’ve been playing 17,081 songs on shuffle play all afternoon and through the evening and I’m delighted by what it brings me. Taking the time to rip my music is paying off fast, I should have done it long ago. It’s like having the most eclectic radio station ever.

Jim

Being the Peacock

It is the male peacock that wears the fancy dress and struts his finery to attract the less flashy lady peahens. In the animal world it generally appears to be the male that gets all dolled up to catch the female, so why in our species are the females the disciples of Vogue? With animal courtship the males do all kinds of crazy things to show off because it’s the females who get to make the final decision. Human females also get to make our final decisions on mating, but it also appears they get to do all the gaudy displaying too? Or is that true?

Males of our species do show off by making money, showing strength, doing dashing deeds, while only using a modest amount of flashy color and huge tail feathers. Hell, suits are in by the young men again. You can’t get less flashy than a suit. Last night I saw a rock band all wearing black coats, white shirts and dark ties. Their looks were dull but they were making a big noise to attract women.

In our species it appears that the males are still the ones that show off, but somehow the role of preening was giving to our ladies. From fashion runways to Vegas shows to Miss America pageants you can see the extremes of female plumage.

I think this biological programming has had a tremendous impact on female behavior and psychology, making women very different from men. Okay, I can hear all the protests now. Yes, I know some men love to show off their costuming and some women don’t. But I think this programming subroutine goes far deeper than outfits. Women are a thousand times more concerned about their looks then men. Why is that?

Let me give an example. Among my lady friends, and I’m mostly talking about women in their fifties, I’m starting to hear the same story repeated independently from all of them that makes me worry. They all hate to see themselves naked. One friend said she holds her hand in front of her eyes when she gets out of the shower to shield her vision from the image of her naked body in the mirror. When she says this I’m thinking I’d loved to see her step out of the shower and towel off, so it’s not that she’s bad looking. But why has she become so hideous to herself that she won’t look at a mirror until she’s dressed and ready to hide her face in makeup?

If this was an isolated comment I wouldn’t have much evidence for my case, but I hear stories like this over and over again. We’ve reached an age where my women friends are horrified by their bodies but I’m not, not by mine or theirs. I still want to look up their dresses and down their blouses to catch whatever glimpses I can. And another common thing I hear from these women are gripes about men wanting younger “firmer” women.

They seemed obsessed with the word “firmer” too, because they say it with such resentment. And no matter how much I tell them I’m still physically attracted to women my age and even a bit older they don’t believe it. They say I’m an oddball and 99% of normal men only want to look at twenty-something women. Sure we like looking at younger women, but I’ve talked to my fellow boomers, and the consensus is older women can be just as hot.

Women may blame their resentment on men, but I’m starting to wonder if the problem isn’t theirs. Sure there are men obsessed with sweet young things, but none of my pals are like that. I think a lot of men have to chase younger women because as they get older the females of their generation stop wanting to be caught, forcing those guys to go further afield to hunt. But this isn’t the point of my story. I want to focus on the psychology of being the peacock.

I think both sexes are cursed by their biological programming. Personally and culturally we’re possessed by the drive to reproduce. This is understandable from a biological point of view, but why doesn’t the sex drive shut off when the baby making years are over? When women go through menopause, why don’t they suddenly wake up and think, “Gee, I feel great. I don’t have to preen anymore for those goddamn males always chasing after me.” And then relax into a new lifestyle. Why should women hate their bodies just because the sign “Great Babies Made Here!” gets turned off?

From the male side of things I wished my thoughts weren’t constantly befuddled by my cells urging me to go make babies. Obviously, the reason why I still want to see fiftyish women get out of the shower is from residual programming to reproduce. I’m already hearing all those people thinking, “Well men can make babies until they die.” Just because we can, and just because we have the drive, doesn’t mean it’s a good thing. Evolution designed us to live long enough to reproduce and then die. Our brains helped us beat those plans and we live much longer than evolution planned. At a certain point in both the lives of men and women we get to an age where babies aren’t wanted. But the damn baby making programming inside of us doesn’t shut off.

Woman feel angst about losing their younger bodies and men feel angst about not getting laid as often. It appears that the women who looked the best in youth hate themselves the most while aging. Of course this is well illustrated by Hollywood starlets pursing plastic surgery till they have faces that look like rigor mortis of death. The nature of women playing the peacock was well illustrated in an old movie I saw the other night, Mr. Skeffington, with Bette Davis as a beauty obsessed woman constantly courting marriage proposals even after she was married.

I feel sorry for my women friends. Why can’t they accept wrinkles and sags? Firm tits and ass are only signs that say, “I Make Babies.” Why can’t old guys understand that the urge to chase young women is your cells tricking you into fatherhood? In the end, I think the burden of the peacock syndrome on women is far harder than left-over horniness in men. I don’t hate my body because I can’t get laid. Being a peacock when the feathers fall out must be painful and pathetic.

I have a long running argument with one of my lady friends. She says who we’re attracted to is mental, and I say it’s biological. Well honey, I think if it’s mental you would be able to rationalize yourself out of the peacock syndrome.

Jim