interrobang (‽)

After three or four years of pretty much daily usage, I finally ran out of space on my first iPod. This was one of the old (but not oldest) 60gb models, and I’d already taken the precaution of not ripping all of my CDs to it - leaving off dozens of Zappa bootlegs, but recently I’d run out off space and had to start removing stuff I just don’t listen to that often, such as all of my Orb CDs, and my early Stone Roses B-sides. But then of course I’d get a real hankering to listen to something that […]

Fans of Apple tend to be pretty, well, fanatical, hailing everything Apple Inc. do (at least with Steve Jobs at the helm) as the greatest thing since sliced white bread.  The Mac is better than the PC; the iPod is better than the Zune; apples are better than oranges; and so on, and so on, ad nauseam.  In some respects they’re right: certainly Apple’s designers have flair and their hardware products sure look good, but I’m not entirely convinced of their supremacy on the software side of things.  Specifically, iTunes (the software that ships with iPods) is just horrible.
I was […]

In a post a year ago I described a recently-published chart of ‘best ever’ albums that claimed to be the most accurate as it was based on historical sales.  I posited that a chart based on what people were actually listening to would be better, although this would be impossible to obtain. In that post, I hazarded a guess (by way of example) that the 10 albums I listened to the most were:

Radiohead OK Computer
Desaperacidos Read Music Speak Spanish
Bob Dylan, Highway 61 Revisited
Jesus and Mary Chain Darklands
At The Drive In Relationship of Command
Pleasure Forever Alter
Oasis Definitely Maybe
Suede Dog Man Star
Nick Cave Let […]

Ever since I got my iPod I’ve wanted to find a way to list my ‘recently played’ tracks on this Blogsite.  There are a few WordPress plugins and widgets that claim to do this, but they all seemed overly-complicated, requiring additional e-mail accounts, modified server permissions, and god knows what else.  So what with having a life to live and all, I never found the time to dig into them and get any of them working properly.
Then last week a buddy responded to a post of mine in the Music category, mentioning Last.fm which he said tracked people’s listening habits.  […]

Another month, another 10 free downloads from the iTunes Store courtesy of Belgacom.  Last month I went for building the perfect compilation from my youth.  This month I took a diffferent approach.
Regular readers will know that I listen to 3wk Internet Radio quite a lot.  Whenever I hear something I really like, I make a note of it on my handheld, and then whenever I’m next in a record store or on Amazon.com and stuck for something to spend my hard-earned moolah on, I’ll whip out the list and pick something from it. 
Sometimes I hear a couple of things from the […]

Although I’m an iPod owner, and an avid iTunes user, until this morning I’d never downloaded a song from the Apple Music Store (or anywhere else for that matter).  Call me old-school, but I like having the CDs.  I do have all of my CDs ripped to my iPod, and some I’ve never even heard straight off the plastic, but I still feel happier having the physical backup.
A couple of days ago I read a buddy’s ‘blog entry describing how he’d recreated a vinyl-only compilation from yesteryear by purchasing the individual tracks online.  Co-oncidentally, at the same time, my service provider […]

OK, now I know my iPod is screwing with me.  I have it on ’shuffle everything’ mode, and it just played All I Really Want To Do by Bob Dylan (from the 1968 album Another Side Of Bob Dylan), immediately followed by World Party’s version of the same song (from the 1986 album Private Revolution). [Out of interest, Dylan does it better…]
Now, I know there is a 1-in-7,807 chance of this happening - small but plausible - so I could accept it, but yesterday it played The Mission’s version of Like A Hurricane (from The First Chapter, 1987) followed Neil […]

Now this is why I love technology.  This weekend I picked up an Apple AirPort.    This is handy little gadget that lets you connect your PC to your stereo wirelessly. It’s a pretty good device, and in theory very simple to set up - it will effectively set up a home wireless network for you just by plugging it in. Unfortunately I already have a wireless network, which kind of confused it, and my wireless network is achieved though the use of a wireless router and not a wireless card in my PC itself (big difference, apparently). The instructions that […]

A couple of weeks ago I received a pre-release copy of the eponymously-titled debut album by new band Dead Heart Bloom. I’ve had it on heavy-rotation ever since, and a mighty fine album it is, too. Dead Heart Bloom is the latest musical vehicle for the implausibly-talented Boris Skalsky. This is the same Skalsky who was one of the leading lights in Phaser, the DC-based band who released one great album (Sway) before unfortunately imploding under the combined weights of commercial and artistic pressures.
Phaser are usually categorized as ‘post-shoegazing’ (you tell me…) whereas Dead Heart Bloom are effectively uncategorizable, with […]

This Christmas I (and around 14 million others, if the figures are to believed) bit the bullet and joined the ipod bandwagon.  I’d resisted for a long time, reasoning that I could play MP3s on my all-singing-all-dancing HP iPaq 4700, but the 4Gb card in my iPaq was full, and an 8GB card costs more than an actual ipod.
Naturally, I plumped for the top of the range model - a 60gb ipod video (in black - you never really get over Goth!). I really can’t see myself watching videos on it, but the color screen does display the album art […]