Category: tunes

Music. Bands. Songs. Concerts.

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play-by-play hyperbolized-realism


First off: Yes, the James story was fiction. I couldn’t think of anything to write, so I decided to tell a story. Thanks to those who mentioned enjoying it. Somehow, though, I don’t think storytelling is my thing – so I stick to the regular play-by-play hyperbolized-realism I seem to be better at.

Ready for an abbreviated weekend report? OK:

Friday: Anthony calls me around 10am to say he may have an extra ticket to this big ol’ rock show going down in the city. Asks me, if it becomes available, would I want to go. I say “yup.” Noon, the ticket is mine, and I’m to be at his house by 3pm. We arrive in San Francisco sometime around 6pm and stand in line in the freezing cold with eight-thousand other mods-‘n’-rockers to get in. It was a packed bill at six bands. I was excited to see Modest Mouse and Spoon, but the entire show ending up being quite enjoyable. Anthony and I even braved the very young crowd to crush right up into the guts of the floor by Modest Mouse’s set. Home by 2am.

Saturday: Used the morning to catch up on three days of little sleep, woke up at 10:30am. Took a shower, pulled on some jeans, and made the conscious decision to not don a shirt. I intended to remain shirtless the entire day. Sharaun went on a Christmas shopping odyssey and was gone all day, stopping home only briefly around 5pm to bring in a take-and-bake pizza, cook it, eat a slice and head back out. I spent most of the day playing with Keaton and taking picture of CDs I’m selling on Ebay. Never did put on a shirt, either. Not even when a friend dropped by unannounced later in the evening on the way between two bars. I stood there in the living room and had a half-hour conversation barefoot, barechested, and bedenimed. A great lazy day spent being daddy.

Sunday: Church. Driving there we saw a bum on the offramp holding a ridiculously small scrap of cardboard, on which I assume a standard plea for assistance. You know, something boilerplate bum-verbiage, including go-tos like “God bless,” “Vietnam vet,” “anything helps,” and “hungry.” The little piece of cardboard was so tiny, though, that we had no chance of reading it. I jokingly said, “You need a bigger piece of cardboard, buddy.” Sharaun made some comment about him needing one of those big spinny arrows or placards like the sign-people on the corner use to bring in potential homebuyers or lure people to the Cheesesteak joint. Sounded like a brilliant idea to me. I predict panhandlers will soon turn to this more animated form of begging. After church I repaired some of the faux-stonework that has fallen off the front of our house. The fallen pieces stayed where they fell for years now, and the guys were giving me crap about it the other day. So yeah, Sunday I made fun of bums and did home repair.

For some reason the other day, Sharaun had Keaton’s old bouncer out from storage. She took a picture of Keaton sitting in it, and I thought it would be fun to compare that with a picture of her in it when she really used to use it. So, for a lark, here’s three months and twenty-two months. Pretty sure she’s over the weight limit in that second one…

Moving on…

Back some time ago, I made the decision to digitize (convert to MP3) my entire CD collection. After which I sold off all my then-redundant physical discs for profit. If you’ve been with me for a while, you’ll remember that the plan took a long time, but was ultimately wildly successful. I ended up selling ~600 CDs, making a little money in the process. Not bad. In fact, it financed a bit of my Lasik surgery, so it was well worth it. When I sold my discs, though, I held onto all my prized Beatles bootlegs (as well as some other prized bootlegs from various other artists). I knew that, one day, I’d start selling them off too –but I hung onto them partly because of my strong attachment to them, and also because I figured they could fetch more if sold properly (“marketed” as sufficiently rare, etc. – which they indeed are). Anyway, I wrote this whole mess because I wanted to share some statistics:

Selling non-bootleg CDs, I made a somewhat respectable amount per CD. Bootlegs, however, have proven to be much more lucrative. Over the past couple weeks, I’ve been slowly but surely offloading my entire Beatles bootleg collection online. What’s amazing is that, on average, I’ve been making more than ten times what I made selling my “commercial” discs. Not to mention I’ve got another pile of bootlegs from artists who aren’t the Beatles, which I’m hoping will pull just as much dough. As an example of this insanity, while packing up one nine-CD set for sale, I happened upon my original purchase invoice from back in the mid 1990s. Right now, it looks like it’s actually going to make money over that cost, meaning the dang thing actually appreciated while I owned it. Unbelievable.

As you can imagine, I’m working frantically to get all the discs up for sale, as I suspect this is the season where I’ll realize the highest profit on them, capitalizing on Christmas gifts for collectors. It’s bittersweet, selling them off. It feels good to make money, but those things were such a big part of my life at one point. It was such fun acquiring and hearing them for the first time. Scouring obscure record bins for high-priced “imports,” dealing with shady mail-order joints advertised in the back of Goldmine, ordering from “contacts” in Japan and Europe… it was all a big game of cloak-and-dagger where the reward was untold joy at getting to hear Beatles stuff I’d never before heard. It’s sad to see them go, but it’s not that sad… I still have the music, after all.

Anyway, dolla-dolla-billz y’all. Dolla-dolla-billz. Can the RIAA send me to Rikers for this?

Goodnight.

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today was a bad day


Today was a bad day.

Work made me mad in the morning, Sharaun made me mad at lunch, and work continued to make me mad after lunch. The sun broke through on two occasions: First, the hour I had with Keaton while Sharaun was at the gym. She sat on my lap for nearly the whole time and we played. She was super huggy and talkative. Second, being able to do some brief listening to the Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band multitracks on my new iPod. I wrote about them before, over here, but getting some time to actually hear them closely makes them seem so much more awesome. They are indeed amazing. I’d recommend you check them out, if you can manage to locate them, that is…

Anyway, it was a long, stressful, and frustrating day. But, I eventually made up with work… choosing to be the bigger man and continue to accept my paycheck in return for the occasional abuse. Incidentally, I also made up with Sharaun… apologizing for yelling at her and stomping around the house in a fit. So, all’s well that ends well, I suppose.

But… this does not end well. Not by a long shot. Later on, at night, I decided to try out a program I’ve heard other audiophiles praise. It’s called MediaMonkey and it’s one-stop music management application, and can even sync with iPods and other portable devices. On a whim, I decided to install it. Unknowingly, I had my brand new iPod Classic plugged in when I installed and launched it. Turns out, the damn piece of software “automatically” sought out my iPod, read the contents, and somehow completely corrupted the iTunesDB file. So, when I fired up iTunes again, I got the familiar heartbreaking message: “iTunes cannot read the contents of iPod…” Sigh, all my music lost. What a waste… I’m so upset. Why can’t I just learn to leave well enough alone?

Right now I’m frantically trying all sorts of recovery methods… and, even as I write this, I’m using a promising piece of software that touts one-click iPod-to-iPod cloning, with support for all generation iPods, including Classic/Touch. The cool thing is, it supposedly also will transfer all the iTunes/library data like “played count,” “rating,” etc. – which is exactly what I was looking for in the first place. If this works, I’ll make a quick writeup and post tomorrow. Wish me luck, OK?

Really sorry about all the iPod talk, but, as if you couldn’t tell, I’m a bit obsessed with this new toy. Hope you’ll understand as I continue to fawn over it. Thanks for sticking it out. Goodnight.

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never long enough…


Still nursing your Turkey hangover? Unfortunately, one of the negative aspects of traveling to family for Thanksgiving is that you often have to return home without having enough time to enjoy a proper amount of leftovers. Half the reason I love Thanksgiving is because a plate of gravy-drenched stuffing almost always tastes better at 10pm the night after Thanksgiving than it ever did at the table the day before. Next time, I’m packing a backpack with dry ice and taking home some turkey, all the trimmings, and a couple slices of pie. But, we did have to leave, and now that we’re back home the trip seems like it really flew by. I guess it’s never long enough when you’re on vacation…

Walking through the airport today, I had a thought: What if I was stopped, just as I was at that moment, and asked to take a detailed for-insurance-purposes-like monetary inventory of the goods I was carrying. Naturally, I started ticking off items in my head. Laptop, two iPods (not typical, but I had them both on this trip), cash, clothes, miscellaneous electronic accessories, gold rings, and the clothes I was wearing. Doing some mental arithmetic, always off by bit at best when I’m the mentalist, I was surprised to come up with a total in the several thousands of dollars. To think that people like me are so blessed that, at any given time, they have thousands of dollars of goods on their person, while there are people in the world who won’t go through that in their lifetime. Not that thousands would necessarily make those folks any more happy, it’s just pretty amazing the amount of material “wealth” we have with us in general. I complain because my laptop bag is heavy and uncomfortable to carry around when it’s got two iPods, a book, my $200 headphones, and a couple AC adapters in it. Guess I should be thankful I’m not on my barefoot way back from the river with a yoke across my neck, two buckets of water hanging from each end.

Let’s change gears now, and talk about iPods again…

I have so much room now, with my new Classic, that I’m having a great time decided what “new” things I can put on my iPod. I’d basically topped off my 60GB with what I thought was pretty much the best limited-to-60GB collection of tunes I could muster. But now, I can expand that collection more than 100%. Worried that I’ll end up putting some “just OK” stuff on there, and potentially pepper the “Shuffle All” feature with bad tracks, I made myself a promise that I’ll prune and manage the quality of the the new device just as diligently as I did on the old one. For starters, I’m going to load the thing up with Beatles bootlegs. Having nearly 32GB of Beatlegs in my collection, I had decided to leave them off the old iPod altogether. But, I’ve always wished I had at least a sampling loaded, as I feel like I now under-listen to what used to be a super-important kind class of albums to me. Problem is, I need to be careful about how I treat Beatles bootlegs, and for that matter, bootleg recordings in general, on the iPod. Because I have so many, I want to make sure that, between the Beatles’ commercial and bootleg releases, my iPod doesn’t get skewed too heavily to the Beatles. So, I’ll do this intelligently.

  1. Modify the “genre” tag (the MP3’s ID3 tag) for all my Beatleg albums, making it read “Beatles bootleg”
  2. Using iTunes, sort the music on my iPod by genre, and make sure that all items in the “Beatles bootleg” genre are marked as “Skip when shuffling”
  3. Finally, in case I want to hear a shuffled mix of bootleg Beatles recordings, create a smart playlist which randomly grabs all songs in the “Beatles bootleg” genre
  4. Ta-da! I can now put thousands of illicit Beatles tracks on my ‘Pod, and not have to worry about overdosing on them during a “Shuffle Songs”

Well, sorry about all the iPod-themed entries of late… as you can see I’m having a little bit too good of a time configuring my new 160GB iPod Classic. You’ll forgive me, won’t you?

Thanks, and, see you back here Monday!

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new iPod & i want my old tunes!


Don’t miss the latest updates to this story, click here.

Being in Oregon – the land of no sales tax – I decided there was no better time than now to go ahead and drop the dosh on one of those new-fangled iPod “Classics.” The 160GB-ness of the thing has been taunting me since the things were announced, and I knew it was just a matter of time before I upgraded. And, not only did I save the ~$25 sales tax I would’ve paid in California, but I also took advantage of the Costco price, which is already $10 less than Apple’s suggested retail price (iPod’s are rarely sold under this suggested price, especially by major retailers). So, all in all, I think I made out just about as good as can be. Took the thing home for $339 out the door. May sound expensive to those who could care less about 60GB vs. 160GB, but for musicophiles with platter-busting collections it really is worth it to carry around that much more variety.

So, last night I began trying to figure out just how in the world I was going to get all my music off my old iPod, and subsequently on to my new iPod. See, I manually manage my music on my iPod – I don’t use the iTunes library features to manage my music collection, and that means I also don’t use the “automatically sync” feature to get music on and off my device.

I realize this may put me in a minority of users, but, because 1) I don’t use iTunes to manage my music in general, and 2) my collection is larger than my iPod’s capacity, it’s just more convenient for me to drag-and-drop what I want when I want rather than relying on some selective sync functionality. Don’t get me wrong, I can see the plus-side to using the auto-sync functionality, like not having to completely delete and re-add things in situations where I’ve “updated” an MP3 folder/album on my hard drive, perhaps adding artwork or updating ID3 tags. But still, I prefer to do it manually.

Anyway, back to my problem. Surely someone has faced this before. Say you’re a manual iPod user like me (there has to be more of us out there, right?), and you outgrow your old iPod, or just figure the new one is plain “cooler,” and decide to upgrade to Apple’s latest offering. If you’re like me, you’ve likely spent a lot of time pruning, tending, and shaping the music (and other content) on your iPod, and you probably want to “start” with your new iPod having the same content as your old one, and then add new content from there. In other words, it’d be nice if the “baseline” content on your new iPod was a mirror image, or snapshot, of what all is on your old iPod. Makes sense, right? Think of it as “migrating” the entirety of your old iPod onto your new one.

Note: I’m aware that techniques exist for doing this using both iPods in disk mode, but I’m pretty sure that will only work on two iPod’s of the same generation (or, at the least, having the same database version). Since Apple changed the iTunesDB structure completely (version 25) going to the Touch/Classic sixth generation devices, I don’t think I can get away with doing something as easy as this when moving from a less-than-sixth generation one. But, honestly, I also didn’t give it a try.

Again, before you criticize me in the comments and tell me this would all be “easy as pie” if I just used iTunes to manage my music collection – I know. Trust me, I know. I just don’t want to use iTunes to manage my music, OK? Now that we’re done with that…

Now, even though I still have all the content that’s on my iPod stored on my PC, I don’t exactly know offhand what’s on there and what’s not. I have a general idea, but my collection is huuuge, and the best and easiest way to be sure I get an exact copy of my existing iPod content would be to simply “copy off” everything that’s on there and then move it to my new iPod. Sure, worst case, I could simply re-pick all the right content from my larger collection, but it would likely take me weeks to get just the right items (honestly, you may opt to do this… give yourself a “fresh start” and relive the fun that is filling your iPod with the perfect collection of music for the first time). So, again, we need to do the following things:

  • Copy all the music off my old iPod (and onto the PC, as an intermediary location)
  • Put the resulting music from step one onto the new iPod, ideally retaining the neat track-level metadata like “last played” dates, ratings, play count, etc.

I’m gonna tell you how I did this, even though it was an imperfect process in the end (meaning, I didn’t exactly meet my own requirements above, as I lost the iTunes/iPod metadata). Ready? Here it is; it’s actually quite simple:

  1. Download SharePod and copy the folder to your old iPod (your iPod must be plugged in, and must be enabled for “disk mode” use).
  2. Run SharePod from your old iPod (if you get an error, make sure you have the .NET framework installed).
  3. Select all your songs from SharePod’s righthand pane, and click the “Copy to PC” button.
  4. Choose your preferred location and foldername/filename structure (make sure you have enough hard drive space to hold what you plan to copy off).
  5. Kick back and relax while SharePod copies every last track off your iPod (if you had a full 60GB model like I did, this can take over an hour, even at USB2.0 speeds).
  6. After SharePod is done, close it out and unplug your old iPod.
  7. Plug in your new iPod.
  8. Fire up iTunes (or, alternately, fire up whatever you normally use to add songs to your iPod), and drop all the extracted tunes on your new iPod.
  9. Relax while iTunes (or whatever you use) copies all your songs onto your new device.
  10. Oh, and remember, if SharePod saved the day for you… go ahead and PayPal the author a few bucks… it was certainly worth it for me!

To be clear, SharePod does create an XML file which you can use via iTunes’ “Import” function. I originally thought that, since this XML file contained the metadata mentioned above, I may be able to preserve things like “play count” and rating, etc. when importing. Turns out, iTunes didn’t “get” the metadata, even when using the import feature and SharePod’s XML file (at least, for me it didn’t). So, the end result is that you’ll effectively reset all that data. You’ll lose play counts, ratings, last played dates, etc. It kinda sucks, but it’s better than nothing. And, as far as I was willing to muck with it, it was the best I could come up with.

There may be other ways to do this, using different software to achieve the same thing (especially since I’m only talking Windows here, and not Mac). But I think it all amounts to the simple process of 1) extracting the data from the old device and 2) putting back on the new device. I would love to find a way to maintain the metadata (I know… you’re going to say, “Use iTunes to manage your music…”), but for now I’m happy enough to have a cloned copy of my old iPod as a starting-point for my new one.

But Dave, what about my playlists?

Look, I know that a lot of people have spent a big amount of time and effort making super-awesome playlists from the content on their iPods. For that reason, I can see why you’d want to make sure your playlists come over to your new iPod intact as well. Unfortunately, I’m not entirely sure how to do this, as I didn’t have any treasured playlists I wanted to bring over for my upgrade. I think, however, that you can use SharePod’s playlist export feature in much the same way as described above for tracks to accomplish the same thing. Export the playlist, which, I believe, amounts to exporting the songs that the playlist contains, and then import the playlist through iTunes using the XML file that SharePod creates.

Well, that’s it. That’s I how managed to transfer all the music from my old iPod onto my new iPod, and start with what’s essentially a carbon-copy of what I already had. Hope it helps someone who may find themselves wanting to do the same thing. Oh, and, by the way, if anyone has any suggestions or tweaks for this process (especially if you know how to do the above while keeping the metadata for the tracks), please leave a comment on this entry and let the world know! Thanks!

Update – 11.27.07

After writing this, I decided to try a bunch of commercially available alternatives to the method I describe above. For what it’s worth, all the software I tried was able to get the MP3s off the device. However, none were able to successfully preserve the iTunes metadata (things like playcounts, preset-EQ, date-added, skipcounts, etc.). My findings:

  • CopyTrans: This application is supposed to copy music from your iPod and into your iTunes library. The webpage advertises full iPod Classic compatibility. Out of the four, CopyTrans got closest to what I want as it was able to import the playcount and date-added metadata into iTunes.
  • iCloner : Part of the CopyTrans suite, this is like Ghost for iPods. It promises to make a “clone” backup of one iPod which can be restored onto another iPod. The functionality is there: I “cloned” my 5G iPod and then restored the image onto my new 6G iPod. However, the 6G with the restored 5G image was still unrecognizable to iTunes, and the music would not play. I also noticed that, in disk view, the post-restoration 6G iPod was truly a “clone” of the 5G (which is a bad thing, since Apple changed the folder and database structure from 5th to 6th generation). Even though the website claims full iPod Classic compatibility, the version of iCloner I used couldn’t do 5G-to-6G. Interestingly, I have to think that iCloner may indeed be a “real” solution to my problem if I was trying to move from one same-generation iPod to another. And even though I haven’t tested it, I would expect iCloner to make a carbon-copy, including all meta-data, if the target iPod is of the same generation as the source.
  • Music Rescue (formerly PodUtil): Music Rescue also successfully exported the raw MP3 files, but was unable to preserve the metadata when importing the tracks iTunes.
  • Amarok (Linux only): Although I didn’t run the test myself, I had a Ubuntu-loving buddy confirm that the latest version of Amorak (at the time of writing, at least) can export MP3s from iPods (all generations), and copy them back onto iPods (all generations). However, when testing specifically to see if the metadata can be preserved, nothing was imported.
  • iTSfv (iTunes Store File Validator): This tiny piece of free and versatile software can do lots of neat things with your iTunes music library, and has an extremely promising tab called “Backup/Restore.” At first glance, this tab appears to contain the holy grail: The ability to export an XML file containing only the not-in-ID3 metadata for your tracks, along with another option to “restore” the data in the resulting XML file back “over top” of another library (iTSfv looks for matching song titles, and writes the saved metadata on a hit). Unfortunately, it looks like iTSfv can only export this data from tracks that already “live” in an established iTunes library, and not directly off of an iPod. Too bad, because it looks nearly perfect for what I want. However, being that iTSfv is open-source, I’m actually tinkering with the idea of modifying it to work directly off the iPod… keep your fingers crossed.

So, again, overall it seems like there are a lot of solutions to reclaim your actual MP3 files from an iPod and move them to a new one (regardless of iPod generation). However, based on my research, I cannot find any reliable application to reclaim files and metadata – specifically going from a pre-6G device to a 6G one. So all you people who manually manage your music, and want to upgrade your iPod Photo to an iPod Classic… get ready to lose your metadata.

Again, commentary welcome!

Oh, and hey, before I go… and also iPod related…

On another note, I’m with this poster… I’d love it if Apple allowed you to group the tracks within a playlist by album or artist. This way, you could open a “New Music” playlist and see, not a huge list of songs, but instead, a nice tidy list organized albums or artists, to which you could further drill-down to track level. I know this isn’t useful for most folks who don’t view their music from an album-level of granularity (rather than just a “loose” collection of tracks), but since I tend to listen to music as albums moreso than a string of singles – it would indeed be useful to me. Anyway, would be nice to see in a future firmware… is all I’m sayin’.

Until later, take care.

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my love affair


Monday my friends. An eventful weekend, that I wrote and wrote and wrote about… and then decided, in the eleventh hour, to scrap for this canned entry instead. Don’t discount it just because it’s been written for a while though, I promise it’s still good. As you read it, I’ll be flying north-by-northwise to Oregon for the week, where we’ll be spending Thanksgiving with the family. Wish me well, then, and I’ll hit you with some more words when I’m on the ground. Enjoy.

Often when I write, my memories pull me to things I’ve put down in words before. This entry is an example of that. I’ve written about the history and development of my love for music from multiple angles before, but not centered directly around the “record store” theme. And, that’s what the keyboard called my fingers to do today, write about my then-burgeoning musical fanaticism as related to record stores. Having written in bits and pieces about this already, I figured I’d link you to as much related content as I could query up, just in case you wanted to read the scattered version before the (hopefully better-reading) amassed version. So… links numbers: one, twain, and thrice.

At an early age, my obsession with the “record store” began. I guess the initial seeds were planted when my older cousin turned me on to Depeche Mode, sometime back when I was in the fourth grade. I can remember going into record stores at the mall and asking to see their Depeche Mode cassettes. I didn’t have money to buy them, of course, I just liked turning them over in my hands, looking at the artwork and reading the track titles. And, since, for some odd reason, the store in the mall kept the tapes behind the counter and the records out front, I’m sure I bothered many a clerk by having them retrieve stacks of tapes they were sure “that nine-year-old” wouldn’t buy. Over time, I learned to funnel the wee bit of discretionary income ten-year-old-me got away from Garbage Pail Kids and invested into music on tape. I began a small collection, mostly things like Depeche Mode, A-Ha, Pet Shop Boys, and the like.

Then, one day near the ripe age of twelve, our family went to visit my grandparents at their mountaintop house in Southern California. While there, my Depeche Mode introducing cousin, now himself settling well inside his teenage years, showed me the first “CDs” he had purchased. Apparently, his dad, my uncle had a new-fangled Edison that would play the odd, grooveless, silver discs. He had U2’s War and Joshua Tree, and he raved to me about them; I can still remember the passion in his young voice as he described just how good the music was on those little plastic things. It took me a while to make the conversion from cassettes to CDs though… several more years, in fact. Those buggers were expensive, and I could buy a humongous “brick” of 90min blank Maxells at K-Mart for like $10. Predictably, as I got a little older, and had a little more change in my pockets, my collection began skewing in the “dubbed a friend’s copy” direction. When I met Kyle after we moved to Florida, things exploded. With the influence his dad had on his extremely-mature-for-his-age and varied musical tastes, and the mainline connection to his dad’s collection in Texas (via dubbed cassettes again, but of course), my horde of lovingly hand-labeled 90min Maxells flourished.

Shortly thereafter, after I’d become teenage no-good in my own right, a little “record store” (although, there wasn’t a lick of vinyl but for the “DJ” albums in the back) opened up tucked into a corner of our local supermarket-anchored stripmall. Being only a few miles from my house, I used to ride my bike there regularly to peruse the selection. Owned by a middle-aged guy named Roland who had muscular dystrophy, or maybe ALS, I can’t be sure. He walked the store with the aid of those metal hand-gripped “wrist crutch” things, spoke with a thickly-slurred speech, and was actually a pretty ill-tempered guy – from what I could understand. For the most part, though, the store was “run” by a longhair in his early twenties. He was almost always there when I went in, and I used to remember his name, but it’s gone now.

At some point, in an effort, I’m sure, to flog dismal sales, Roland began offering his customers the option of “previewing” CDs. Previewing CDs was a relative new idea at the time, and plenty of stores were busy implementing in-store “listening stations” for the purpose. There was one key difference with Roland’s model, however, he let customers “preview” the discs overnight, for a $3 fee. Nevermind that this practice would be highly frowned-upon by the WEAs and Sonys of the world, it enabled him to make his cost back on the disc with just a couple “previews,” and you agreed to buy the disc if it came back in less-than-pristine state (only happened to me once, with Coil’s Stolen and Contaminated Songs. (If you haven’t heard that album, you likely never tried mushrooms in the 90s, and, unless you plan on trying them now, there’s really no need to hear it at all). Anyway, I “obtained” many an album through this “rent-a-CD” scam, dubbing them off for less than it would’ve cost to buy a cassette new. I used to rent an album a night (you could only do one at a time), Roland would acidly correcting me when I asked to “rent” something – “Issh nah rentihg!,” he’d chew around his tongue, “Issh pree-yooig!”

On a sidenote, that longhair worker and I developed a sort of record store friendship over time. He’s special order things for me, and even recommend new music to me based on what I bought and rented. In fact, he’s the one who first suggested I try out Pulp’s Different Class, which I now hold as one of my absolute favorite albums of the 90s. Kinda cool.

On another side note (the other side, perhaps), I can’t help but think now how a CD “rental” policy would translate for today’s teenagers. At the time, I was renting and dubbing CDs at the rate of one a day. Today’s kids would be renting and ripping or copying digitally, completely lossless. They could then make a torrent of their newly acquired album, and put it on the web almost instantly. I, on the other hand, had to actually purchase all that dubbed music again on compact disc later in life. Oh how times have changed…

Roland’s music store eventually went out of business. In fact, when it did, the guy who owned and operated the music store where I was working at the time bought a lot of his unsold stock. Oh, that’s right, we skipped that part, didn’t we? After graduating highschool, I took my love of the record store to a new level by actually seeking employment at one. I loved working at that store, and my impressive knowledge of music, for a guy of my age, helped make me a successful salesperson. Soon, I was “promoted” to the position of assistant manager. This meant nothing, really. A tiny raise, keys to the store, and being entrusted with counting the day’s take before recording it in the books and dropping it in the floor safe. Other than that it was just more headache: having to deal with upset customers and stupid merchandise return policies, and having to ruin peoples’ weekends by cold-calling them looking for someone to cover a slacker’s deserted shift. But man, I absolutely loved that job… headaches or no. I was around my people all the time, around the music. More than that, I could buy CDs at a buck over cost. I must’ve put half my paycheck right back into the boss’ pocket every single payday. He must’ve loved it. The job also came with “access.” If I wanted some rare Prodigy remix CD5 that was only released in limited quantities in the UK back in ’91, chances are I could page through one of the distributors’ books and put it on backorder. It sometimes never came, sometimes took months, but, more often than not, I’d score the illusive item.

This “access” turned out not to be limited to “legit” rare items, either… nope. One day, I was surprised to see a few CDs marked with neon pink “import” stickers mixed in with the regular stock. I say surprised, because, by then, I was entirely familiar with the kind of CDs mom-and-pop shops tag and sell as “imports.” Yup, bootlegs. Illicit disks that cost as much as a typical CD wholesale, likely due to the shady way they have to be mass-produced, shipped, and advertised, and retail for anywhere from $25 to $30 a pop. I asked the boss about it, and she replied that some guy had come into the store with a list of items he could get, and a trunkfull of items he had on-hand. She called the owner, and got the OK to do some speculative purchasing and see how they sold (the markup was good per disc, earning at least 200% on each, if not more). She took an empty box, accompanied the man to the parking lot, and took off his hands some discs she figured might sell, she also took a copy of his larger inventory list. I immediately asked to see the list, and was delighted to see several Beatles’ bootlegs I’d been after online, some of the original Yellow Dog releases that were already completely out of print. Finding a source like that for bootlegs, and at “cost” (well, his cost, at least), was like a dream come true to me.

I had a few truly enjoyable years in the employee of the record store… but then I had to move away from home and go to “real” college. Not long after, a new friend from my Circuits class introduced me to something called Napster, and, overnight, my love affair with the record store was over. Oh sure, I still enjoy walking into one, the least corporate the better, and perusing the stock. There’s some sort of magic charm those places have for me, I’m drawn to them even more than the traditionally-classic male retail pulls: home improvement, electronics, and books. I’ll always like record stores, I’m sure… it’s just that, for me, they’ve become quite obsolete. The internet is now my preferred music distribution channel. Because, obtained legally or otherwise, they’ve got the record store beat on price and stock.

That’s it. Have a good Monday. Goodnight.

Posted on

maybe get sick on candy


Happy Halloween friends and enemies! Let not your modern-day Protestant church rob you of the good times this holiday affords the world! Forsake that “Harvest Festival” or “Fall Celebration” for some good old trick-or-treating with a scary mask and some fake blood! Maybe get sick on candy like you were a kid again. If not tonight, when else?

Tonight (which is last night as you read this, should you know nothing about when/how I blog) Keaton sat on my lap and watched It’s The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown with me (on DVD, of course, since it’s such a classic). To my surprise, she sat right down with me and truly paid attention. I think it’s because she’s able to recognize so many things: pumpkins, ghosts, the moon, a football, a dog, hats, trees, leaves, and mail – just to name a few. Her sense of recognition and memory impresses me on a daily basis, and her vocabulary, word usage, and phrase-building ability boggles my mind. She says things like “Keeper, out, room!” to the cat; “Daddy, reading, book,” to me; “Mommy, cooking, dinner, hungry, eat,” all together like she’s really trying to make a coherent thought. I know it’s like just the beginning of her “grouping” the words she knows around a single binding action or concept, but it’s still pretty amazing. Pretty much every day she says a word I hadn’t even thought she’d known… it’s pretty impressive.

I went to lunch with a fellow manager from work today, and even though I don’t start back there until Monday, I couldn’t help but use our time to begin gearing my mind for the return. I asked about the usual: what’s going on, how’s morale, how are the politics, who’s doing what, what’s coming up, what happened while I was out, and what of the latest rumors and soap opera goings-on. It was a good conversation, but, in the end, it more than reinforced my dream of winning the lottery Saturday night so I just don’t have to go in at all. I’ve waffled here before about my job – which I truly do enjoy, and feel I’m good at – but also on the other hand wouldn’t mind seeing being swallowed up whole by the Earth in some freak geological event. It’s a fine balance, a knife-edge thing of sorts. I fear, however, that I will be going back… that much, at least, is rather inevitable. And, if I’m to go back and continue to do well – I figured I better start those long-rested hamsters a’running again before I walk in on day-one. Sigh… it begins.

Tonight I watched most (not all, I’ll admit, as it began wearing on me) of the Democratic debate on MSNBC. Ugh… people… we’ve got another whole year of this. I don’t know that I can take it. I’m a fairly well-established social liberal, so I like to think I identify with the general current of thought of these people, their platforms. But man, I’m already weary. Anyone else share in my apathy? I hate how politics can just suck the life of out seemingly everything sometimes. Why, when I watch these people, do I take on such an air of doubt… why do I find it so hard to assume they are being honest? What have you done to me, George W. Bush? You’ve ruined me. You’re such a fucker. You’re a fucker and you’ve made me ashamed of my country’s truckballs-style John Wayne politics on the world stage. Ugh… another year.

Finally, before I go, a snippet from a recent interview with Trent Reznor (Nine Inch Nails frontman and a proponent of various forms of the “new thought” regarding music distribution), where he admits he was an OiNKer (see my earlier entry if the word “OiNKer” means nothing to you), and talks a bit about the former site:

What do you think about OiNK being shut down?

Trent: I’ll admit I had an account there and frequented it quite often. At the end of the day, what made OiNK a great place was that it was like the world’s greatest record store. Pretty much anything you could ever imagine, it was there, and it was there in the format you wanted. If OiNK cost anything, I would certainly have paid, but there isn’t the equivalent of that in the retail space right now. iTunes kind of feels like Sam Goody to me. I don’t feel cool when I go there. I’m tired of seeing John Mayer’s face pop up. I feel like I’m being hustled when I visit there, and I don’t think their product is that great. DRM, low bit rate, etc. Amazon has potential, but none of them get around the issue of pre-release leaks. And that’s what’s such a difficult puzzle at the moment. If your favorite band in the world has a leaked record out, do you listen to it or do you not listen to it? People on those boards, they’re grateful for the person that uploaded it — they’re the hero. They’re not stealing it because they’re going to make money off of it; they’re stealing it because they love the band. I’m not saying that I think OiNK is morally correct, but I do know that it existed because it filled a void of what people want.

Man, that sure sounds like it was a cool website… too bad I never got the chance to check it out. In summary: I was never a member. But, if there was some some bizarro world in which I was – I most certainly would’ve only reveled in the site’s groundbreaking role in digital content distribution, and never partook in it’s tainted wares. I’m to straight and narrow to put my neck out there like that… don’t y’all know me at all?

Goodnight.

Posted on

suddenly rudderless


Back from Hawaii, and today marks the t-minus one-week mark for my waning sabbatical. I gave up trying to post regularly last week, the draw of the beach and the pool and the nothing was just too strong. I wrote some here and there, but nothing good enough nor substantial enough to publish. Hawaii, though… Hawaii was great. Such a relaxing getaway, and a fitting “closer” for my nine week vacation. We all of us had a great time, and I look forward to going back one day. Anyway, I’m back, and the sense of dread about my return to the sawmill is welling within me. One week left means I need to start training my brain to think work again… to care again… to “turn on” again. I don’t think it’ll be hard to do, rather hard-fought to do. To be clear: If there was a way not to, I wouldn’t.

Well then, now that that’s out of the way, I’m going to bore you with a mostly music-related blog. But, before that stuff, I’d like to call your attention to a potentially equally ho-hum bit of news. Acting on a suggestion from one of my real-life readers, I’ve added a “view all comments by this person” feature to sounds familiar. Now, when you look at the comments on any post, you should see a link at the end of (nearly) each one which will allow you to view a page containing all the comments that user has ever made here on the blog. Unfortunately, the feature relies on a commenter’s e-mail address to pull the inclusive list – and we here at sounds familiar have never mandated that commenters include an e-mail address when commenting. But, I’ve worked to fix this retroactively by modifying the existing comments in the database to add e-mail addresses (where known) to existing posts from certain users.

Related: This also introduces another change for comments moving forward: the requirement of filling out the e-mail field. You can put a bogus address if you want, it’ll never be shown/shared anyway, even continue to use multiple usernames/aliases, but you do have to put something (and keep it consistent if you want to go back and re-read all your stuff someday). Anyway, it mostly-works now, and I’ll continue formatting and fixing it if I like it (I don’t like where the “View all…” link is butting right up against the comment end). Show me love if you enjoy. (Oh… and, if you’re curious, Pat has the most… at 98.)

Music. Let’s go.

The past few weeks sure have been an interesting few for online music-lovers. First, the Radiohead release, then, the OiNK takedown, and, finally, the leak of the Sgt. Pepper’s multitracks.

About Radiohead and In Rainbows, it looks like the band does plan to release official sales figures for their online album release – but not until sometime later this year. Estimates citing loose-lipped sources “close to the band” say that the average price paid was around ~$5 per download (including the $0 leechers, apparently), and that the band moved 1.2 million copies in the first 24 hours alone. It’s hard to actually guess at a take with such second-hand, not to mention dubious, data – but I bet the posted numbers will raise more than a few industry eyebrows in the end, especially since we’re talking about a much higher profit ratio than a “traditional” type record release. Should be interesting, stay tuned.

Next, I feel like I should write reams and reams about the takedown of the Pink Palace, but, having never, ever, been a member there, it’s hard for me to fathom the impact of the raid. I imagine that, for people who were unlucky enough to have been involved with the fabled music download site, the loss of such a resource must bring biting pain and a crushing sense of loss. I’d wager that those who illegally used the site to illegally download illegal music likely now feel suddenly rudderless, adrift in a sea of crappy P2P alternatives… with not a sound port to put into. I’m sure however, that something will rise to fill the void for those thieving types sooner or later – the internet is a dark world of crime and hate, afterall. Tsk, tsk, busted OiNKers… when will you learn that the only way to legally enjoy music is to trade money for physical product?

About the Sgt. Pepper’s multitracks, maybe you don’t care… but I do. Of course, for those born after 1967, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was the Beatles crowning achievement, their 8th LP, and, as some believe, the up-until-now pinnacle of rock ‘n’ roll altogether. While recording Pepper, the Beatles’ engineers “bounced down” their layered instrumentation into four separate recorded “tracks,” or tapes. These individual tracks, when played together, “make” the entire song. It’s the old-timey equivalent of today’s modern multi-track recording techniques. Well, somehow, some collector (not a Beatles collector, funnily enough) in England got ahold of the Sgt. Pepper’s four-track multis… and… of course, with the internet and all, they eventually wended their way into the tubes. So then, the isolated four-tracks for some of the songs are now floating around the leaky interweb, and people at home can easily load them into Garage Band or Audacity or CoolEdit and make their own true remixes of actual Beatles songs. It may seem boring, but, for me, being able to hear Ringo’s isolated drums and Paul’s isolated bass from “A Day In The Life” is amazing. I just hope the entire album’s worth of tracks leaks soon…

This week I’m a homebody, so I’ll try and get some pictures uploaded from our trip to Hawaii sooner rather than later, and the blogging should come at more or less its regular cadence again from now on. Thanks for hanging in there while I took my break, and I hope to see you around as we finish out another fine year of writing.

Goodnight.