Tag: music
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Regression Analysis
For the past few years I’ve been running my ‘One-CD-a-Week’ campaign. It started out as a way to limit my music purchases, which were threatening to get out of hand, thanks to all the great music that was being released. But then some weeks last year (2014) I found myself desperately trying to find something that I wanted to buy, when nothing really grabbed my fancy. So in 2015 I decided to just abandon that philosophy and go back to buying what I wanted when I wanted it. Now it’s the end of the year, I’m looking back on what… Read more
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About 30 years and a plastic cover to you, chief!
I’m regressing. For the past several years I have resolutely continued to buy CDs, even though I very rarely play them – I just rip them to my home server and stream them from there (plus load the MP3s to the 128gb removable SD card in my Blackberry (suck it, Crapple fanboys!) so I can listen to them at work). I know I could just buy the MP3s and save myself some money, but I like the tangibility of CDs. I’ve also never bought into the idea of ‘buying’ zeroes and ones that sit on ‘the cloud’ somewhere (here’s a… Read more
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New Adventures In Hi-Fi
Last week, my live-in lover became my live-out lover. After six wonderful months, followed by a couple of distinctly variable ones, we decided that all of us (me, her, my three kids) living together wasn’t in the best interests of our mental health and serenity, so we rolled back to the ‘last working version’, and started living apart again. Traumatic as this was, it did have one bright spot: I got the opportunity to put together a multi-room speaker system for her new house, which is a project I’ve always wanted to undertake (at least until I discovered Sonos and… Read more
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Deck of C(ar)Ds
Last year I once again stuck to my ‘One-CD-a-Week’ campaign, regularly buying one album of (new) music each week of the year. This is my third year of doing this, and although I have picked up 52 new albums (actually, a little more as I didn’t count the handful (armful?) of CDs I picked up in second hand record stores), this year I seem to have purchased less ‘new’ (2014) releases – only 34 of the 52 were ‘new’ this year, although mitigating this, a further 5 were old albums that were reissued in 2014. It’s been noted elsewhere that… Read more
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The Hope of the World
A few months ago, I got a new car (a 2015 Mazda CX-5). Among the many features that it offered through the in-dashboard display was Pandora connectivity. I’d never really bothered with any of the music streaming services, as I like to believe that I have better taste than some computer algorithm, and I have an extensive enough music collection to avoid getting bored with it. I’d already had Sirius satelilte radio installed to save me the horrors of FM radio, and typically spend my (recently doubled) drive time listening to Sirius XMU, which generally plays a pretty decent selection… Read more