A few free classical on Amie

Amie street has a couple of dozen free classical albums right now, check the new classical album upload page.   As an aside, the link can be saved as a bookmark – as can all the browsing views – should you wish to.  I’m not sure where these albums have arrived from.  There seems to have been another flood of new European house and indie, so it might be the same label doing the whole lot.  There are a few identifable named pieces (Mozart Quintets and Quartet for Oboe, a Strauss sonata, and a Tchaikovsky trio), and also a few ‘various artist’ type compilations (here and here).  Get in quick to collect up some civilised dinner party music.

WHAT I’M LISTENING TO: I just came across the Gaslight Anthem in my wanderings.  Think Springsteen doing modern indie rock.  Think a touch of Dylan’s voice and – to a degree – his esoteric poetry.  Officially punk, but its not really.  Absolutely stunning rough-edged rock.  There’s an EP on Amie Street or emusic, as you prefer, and two full-length albums on emusic (here and here).  These are the kind of albums you can listen to straight through, rather than picking and choosing good tracks, but if you must, try ‘Say I Won’t (Recognize)’ from the EP, or ‘The ‘59 Sound’ from the album of the same name.

Backups

Since the last few posts have been more on a ‘managing music libraries’ theme than a ‘getting good free music’ one, I thought I’d keep that going for one more day.

Backups.

You do something, right?  Because even if you can redownload all your music, it would be a big hassle.  Think how long it would take.  Think how much clicking.  And the can is a big ask.  Do you remember every single indie label whose store you ever bought a single from?  Do you want to re-rip all those CDs.  And with the iTunes store, you’re plain out of luck.  They make it very clear backups are your responsibility – remember that nag screen when you purchase a whole album?  Amie Street and emusic let you redownload (as iTunes should) but even they can’t help much if the album has since been removed from the store.  And this happens, take a look at the emusic message boards.

So make sure you back up.

You could use a commercial backup utility, or your OS’s native one, but in a sense there’s not much point.  Zipping or otherwise compressing a mp3 file doesn’t make any difference to the the size – its already compressed.  It might even make the mp3 file bigger – the zip algorithm has its own overhead to manage. (Yes, linux people could tarball, but that’s an aside, we’re firmly in windows-world here).  Once you bundle everything up into a given format or another, you need access to that format to undo it again.  And again, with mp3s, there’s no point – compressed, they don’t get smaller.  There is a utility in iTunes to manage incremental backups, but it only works with burns to CD and DVD, not copying to hard disk, and 80 gig of music is a lot of DVDs.   Besides, I’d rather be able to watch and check the backup is going right – I’m just paranoid enough not to trust iTunes that far – and a lot of my music isn’t in iTunes anyway – classical music, for example, doesn’t lend itself as well to track-by-track management, and at any point there’s a lot of free music I haven’t yet listened to thoroughly and decided I’m keeping.

Just for the record, as I said, CDs or DVDs take a lot of disks. External hard drives are better for sets of files as big as a decent-sized music library, and managing incremental backups is easier onto hard drives.  Two separate drives that is – two complete backups plus wherever your master copies are.  Sounds paranoid, but a 120GB or 160GB drive costs the same as three or four new CDs, and the time cost is small if you do what I outline here.  Two complete and separate sets of backups means you can keep one off-site, and you’re covered against even very unlikely simultaneous failures.  Your music’s important to you, right?  There’s a lot of your time invested in your library.  That crap you work on all day at the office is backed up at least this well, and I kinda think my music is at least that important.

So, two backup drives and a batch file script.

I use robocopy to do the actual copying.  Its an old Windows add-on, and a very good one.  Get it in the Windows Resource Kits, or as a small download, as part of this Technet example download.  The key thing about robocopy is that its reliable.  Just to be clear, xcopy isn’t.  Clear on that?  Xcopy is not reliable under XP, especially not over UNC paths.  For various unexplained (by Microsoft) reasons, its doesn’t always copy all the files in 80 GB of music.  Use it if you will, but check the final files against the master set and after a couple of runs you’re pretty much guaranteed to find some double-ups or files missing.  Then have hours of fun with your favourite windows diff tool.  Robocopy is reliable.  For something like backups, its worth finding and using, to be safe.  Robocopy manages directory trees – you give it a master set of files, and an existing set of backup files you want to sync, and robocopy adds and deletes the backup set until it matches the master set.  This saves a lot of time doing massive music backups – only the changed files are actually copied.

A quick tip if writing the scripts yourself: in the batch file I use subst to shorten the paths.  Some mp3 albums have very long titles, which translates to long path names.  I do this as a habit going back to the xcopy days.  Xcopy would give its infamous “insufficient memory” error if the file path was greater than 256 characters. (Note this has nothing to do with memory, free memory, or the total size of the copy – as you’ll be told all over the web.  This error is only ever about the length of the file path at the point of the error.  Its just a badly written error message.)  Now, I don’t know if robocopy has this problem – but I don’t know it doesn’t, so why take chances to save a couple of lines in a script?  I don’t want to find out that much.

So, something like this:

subst x: c:\music

subst y: “f:\backups\music”

[subst the two folders as drives, if need be, use quotes for long file paths, e.g. "c:\documents and settings... etc"]

robocopy x: y: /mir /copyall /xo /TEE /LOG+:”C:\backuplog.txt” /NP

[do the copy - remember robocopy copies directories, not files like xcopy, so \* is implicit.  /xo means don't copy older files over newer, /TEE and /NP are formatting, and /LOG+ appends to a log file.  Note that /mir means mirror - it will delete files from the backup set to match deletions from the master set.  Read the documentation if you don't want this - but I move files around sometimes and want mirror copies, not ever increasing duplicated backup directories.]

robocopy “C:\Documents and Settings\ … \My Music\iTunes” *.itl F:\backups\iTunes /copyall /xo
robocopy “C:\Documents and Settings\ … \My Music\iTunes” *.xml F:\backups\iTunes /copyall /xo
robocopy “C:\Documents and Settings\ … \Application Data\Apple Computer\iTunes” iTunesPrefs.xml F:\backups\iTunes /copyall /xo

[You should also backup the iTunes xml and preference files, and probably your other data while you're at it.  These are other robocopy lines for the iTunes settings files (with robocopy you add the actual filenames or wildcards after the copy to and from paths)]

subst y: /d
subst x: /d

[delete the subst's]

pause

[I like to add a pause so I can leave the backup running then come back and glance at the screen and check it finished without going into the logs].

So the final script:

subst x: c:\music

subst y: f:\backups\music

robocopy x: y: /mir /copyall /xo /TEE /LOG+:”C:\backuplog.txt” /NP

robocopy “C:\Documents and Settings\ … \My Music\iTunes” *.itl F:\backups\iTunes /copyall /xo
robocopy “C:\Documents and Settings\ … \My Music\iTunes” *.xml F:\backups\iTunes /copyall /xo
robocopy “C:\Documents and Settings\ … \Application Data\Apple Computer\iTunes” iTunesPrefs.xml F:\backups\iTunes /copyall /xo

subst y: /d
subst x: /d

pause

If you’re using two drives, use two scripts.  If you set the drive letters in the XP Computer Management’s Disk Management panel, they should stay put even after you swap them around.

With two drives, store one off-site.  That’s the point of this exercise – swap them over once a week or so.  That way, the one at home is current with everything, up to today, and the one at work or a friend’s house is only a week old if your house burns down and you lost your computer and the daily backups.

That’s all.  If you don’t do this, do something – even mass CD burns.  This is important!

WHAT I’M LISTENING TO: Piebald (on Amie Street here), melodic and slightly mournful indie pop that runs the gauntlet from Dylan-esque folk ponderings to something that’s almost like show tunes.  No longer free, when I just checked, but still only 9c or 13c a track and worth a listen just to see if its your kind of thing.

CDex on a slow-down

Strange thing on the new laptop, ripping with CDex has slowed down a lot.  At first I assumed it was just a nasty cheap laptop DVD drive – except the old machine was a nasty laptop too.  Then I suspected some speed limiter thing – maybe the new drive dated back to when the music biz thought mp3s were evil and were pressuring manufacturers to fiddle their drives so they didn’t rip fast.  Then I realised CDex is only slow if its error-checking while it rips.  The problem is a setting in CDex which, strangely, was never a problem on the older, slower, computer, but is on the new one’s drive.  So its just poor design, presumably, nothing more sinister.  The drive in question is a TSST TS-L632H.  A bit flimsy, apparently with firmware that used to cause iTunes burning errors until the manufacturer stopped ostriching and fixed it, but no worse than any other laptop drive.

The CDex setting is Enable Jitter Correction on the CD Drive tab of the Options screen.  Turning this off speeds up ripping a lot, but the software’s author suggest this is a very bad idea unless you have a top-quality drive.  Its a lot slower – maybe 30-35 minutes a CD rather than 7-10, but you really don’t want to be re-ripping everything because weeks later you notice a problem.  I just rip steadily, a few discs at a time, while I’m away from the computer doing something else (so the waiting doesn’t aggravate me).

If you haven’t met CDex, its an open source CD ripper (and other things like line-in recording, should you want it).  Available here.  There’s a terrifying number of settings to fiddle with, most fairly well documented.  Just for reference, I’ve never managed to find a copy of the winaspi.dll file (Nero seem to have pulled it from their website), so I just don’t bother, just use the native NT one, and it doesn’t seem to make much of a difference.  The main reason to use CDex is it faster and has better error recovery than most other rippers, including the iTunes and WMP ones.  I’d give a link for that statement, but I read it somewhere on the web way back when I first started using CDex and can’t find it now, so I’ll just have to call it my opinion.

There are some useful non-default settings for CDex 1.50 on XP (tweaked over the years and based on comments in various blogs and sites, most of which – with apologies to the original authors – I’ve since lost track of).  These are just what works for me, but have a try and see what you think yourself (these are all in the options screen’s tabs):

Generic Tab: Change ID3 Tag version to ID3-V2 (which stores more info) and Track number format to 0N (leading zero – 0TN does track x of y format).

Filename Tab: as you prefer for locations and so forth.  This is the other reason to prefer CDex to iTunes.  I buy a lot of junk in sales which I want to listen to before formally and permanently adding it to my library.  Its easier to keep a separate file of ripped CDs which may or may not soon be deleted.

CD Drive Tab: I tend to set ripping method to Paranoia, Full (more info here, but it runs faster than the standard algorithm and sidesteps the need for the slower Jitter Correction option).  I also tick Eject CD (to save looking at the computer all the time – the screen saver goes on but there’s an audible click when the CD ejects).  With the TS-L632H, using the Auto-Detect algorithm seemed to improve the speed somewhat.  Basically, let it run and pick a line that says Passed.  I have absolutely no idea what the different numbers mean, and arbitrarily chose the top line.  If you have a winaspi.dll file, untick the Use Native NT SCSI library box.

Encoder Tab: I tend to use LAME, rip at 256 kbps (space is cheap but quality is a diminishing return thing against size).  I use VBR-default (which may mean the bitrate settings are irrelevant, but I’m not sure so I leave both on).  I also turn J-stereo on because someone, somewhere on the web said it improved quality.

In the CDDB settings tabs, put your real email address in the box on the Remote CDDB Tab.  The freedb people don’t spam, and if you ever submit track names they may need to contact you if there’s a problem.  Tick autoconnect to remote CDDB to save clicking the button each time.

That’s all about CDex.

Finally, remember the ‘Songs for Tibet’ album I mentioned the other day.  Well it turns out the Chinese have decided to block iTunes because it carries the album.  All of iTunes, the entire store.  Presumably just to show Apple what for.  Isn’t spite cute in a major government?

WHAT I’M LISTENING TO: Andrea Hamilton’s new album on Amie Street (acoustic rock sung by a woman with an extraordinary, powerful voice), Hraun (Icelandic folk, some in English, some in what I assume is Icelandic, with big amped-up guitar solos), and Nikki Williams (rock with a lot of punk and a hint of blues, and at the moment, still free).

Moving iTunes from one computer to another

I just bought a new computer – I’m using it now. The old one was a bit flaky.  It had one small problem – it was made by HP. Not trying to be nasty, but Compaq used to be a great brand, then HP bought it and now its not. Overpriced, shoddy quality control, and half the time they just don’t work. Of course, HP also used to be a good brand and now HP are also overpriced, shoddy, and don’t work, so that’s what you get. Anyway, I got sick of those problems and got a new machine – the brand of which I won’t mention as this is intended purely as negative product placement, not endorsement.

Thing is, with a new computer, I need to move my iTunes library. All of it.

I could just move the music files, and re-import it, but a quick hunt of the interwebs tells you this is a bad idea. It seems iTunes may lose your play counts, last played, and other such metadata, which I kind of like having. (One iPod playlist is ‘not played recently’ – shuffling would be too easy – another is ‘purchased and never played’. I need my metadata.)

In short, what I want to do is copy all the music files onto the new computer, then copy all the iTunes metadata, then start iTunes on the new computer without it noticing its been moved.

In addition to the actual music, movies, and so on, iTunes has three metadata files. In Windows, these are usually at:

[user profile]\My Documents\My Music\iTunes\iTunes Library.itl

[user profile]\My Documents\My Music\iTunes\ iTunes Library.xml

[user profile]\Application Data\Apple Computer\iTunes\iTunesPrefs.xml

The iTunes Library files are the actual library – apparently duplicates, iTunes makes one from the other if it only finds one. I had a nasty moment back in the day when I was bad and didn’t have proper backups, and my iTunes Library.xml file got deleted – but iTunes rebuilt it from the .itl file when it was next started, so all was well. The iTunesPrefs.xml file contains, well, preferences. You might need to change some Windows view settings to see the Application Data folder.

The problem is that my music collection on my old computer has grown – and spilled over into an external hard drive.

I could keep using that drive – but why, when I have a shiny new hard disk inside the new computer’s case. I want to consolidate everything into one physical disk without iTunes noticing. Now, sure, I could probably let iTunes do this. Except it would take a long, long time, and I’d rather do things myself than turn any software lose on a large and important (to me) collection of files. I could also try and search and replace one directory string for another inside the iTunes xml file, but I have no idea how consistently this would work and don’t want to pick up the pieces of ten thousand lost songs if something goes wrong.

There’s a much easier way: replicate the old disk structure on the new computer and don’t tell iTunes anything changed. Again, there’s two ways to do this. I could repartition the new hard disk and create the same logical disk structure as was on the old disk. But that takes time and effort – new computers come with everything installed, and I expect to be buying a new, bigger disk in a year, so why make more work if I can kludge it.

Which I can.

The old DOS subst command still lurks beneath Windows XP. (Yep, I got the downgrade rights. I use iTunes – obviously – why do I care about Vista’s slight benefits when its had so much horrendously bad press. I’d almost say Bill, come back, we miss you.)

subst is there. The syntax is subst drive folder. It’s a map network drive in reverse.

So I create a folder on the C: drive to hold all the external drive’s old data. The drive used to be called F:, so imaginatively I’ll call that folder F_drive. I could use a space and quote marks in the subst command, but underscores are that much geekier.

Then I create a batch file called, say, logon.bat. (A batch file is a text file – in Notepad – with the extension .bat rather than .txt). The single line in the batch file is:

subst f: c:\F_drive

Or if you prefer not to underscore, this will also work:

subst f: “c:\F drive”

I want the logon.bat script to run each time Window starts, so I can just put its name in one of the registry keys that Windows uses for this purpose – like autoexec.bat under DOS. Oh yeah, don’t play with the registry, back it up, don’t blame me if this goes wrong, blah blah.

Seriously.

Don’t do this if you don’t know how to use the registry editor. Messing this up can be very bad (although I’m not quite sure how you’d mess up editing a single key – but random deletions due to mistyping would in fact be extraordinarily bad).

One key that will autorun whatever’s stored there – and this is just the one I happen to use, there are others – is:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Windows

The important one of the several values of this key is load. If it isn’t there, just add it as a String value. Put the full path to your logon.bat file in the load value, for example, c:\logon.bat

That’s all. Log out and back in. You should see an F: drive in My Computer.

If you don’t, if you see one of your external drives in place of the fake F: drive you expect, this is because Windows assigns drive letters earlier in the boot process than it runs the logon.bat script. You might need to reassign your drive letters with the Disk Management utility in Administrative Tools – Computer Management.

And after all that I did all the copying. Which took a long, time time.

When I started iTunes everything worked perfectly, completely seamlessly – my local iTunes didn’t seem to notice and still opened onto the last playlist I’d used. I had to log back into the iTunes store – it obviously picked up that this was a different computer – and obviously I also had to authorize my purchases on the new computer, but other that, no problems at all.

Like last time, sorry I’m not more help to Apple people, but I assume you can do something similar – and probably more easily, since you have unix running under the GUI. I assume you can mount the folders in a similar way and iTunes wouldn’t notice, but I couldn’t tell you how to actually do it.

WHAT I’M LISTENING TO: Very little right now as I just finished watching my music copy from one drive to the other.

Random Free Stuff

Some more random freebies and samples available out there on the web:

Amie Street has a free sampler album from Hush Records here.  The tracks by Novi Split, Norfolk & Western, Kaitlyn Ni Donovan, and Reclinerland are especially worth a listen.  All except Kaitlyn Ni Donovan have more material on Amie Street (here, here, and here, respectively) and Kaitlyn’s work is available here, on the Hush Website (click the very small play icon directly under the price to listen).  There’s also a pdf CD booklet here, on the Hush website, if anyone’s interested, and if you like the album you can also donate something at the same time. Okay, so I cheated. If you see it only on Amie Street it’s free, but from Hush its not entirely free, more free-with-guilt, and you didn’t know that until I told you just now, so sorry.  It is a good album.

Emusic also has several sampler albums if you hunt around (a good starting place is searching for ‘various artists’ and then narrowing it to ‘free’). The 2008 Digital Rainbow Quartz Sampler is good, and as far as I know is free-free, not make-you-guilty-but-free.

There’s also a sample track on David Bryne and Brian Eno’s website (remember them?) from a forthcoming album, but you need to register and give a real email address to get it (they email a link to the download).

WHAT I’M LISTENING TO: The Walkmen’s pre-release on Amie Street – grabbed it the other day.  Five dollars, and of it goes to charity.  The album’s out elsewhere in a day or two, Amie Street got it first.

An iTunes bug… um feature

iTunes is a pretty good music library.  Its nice to look at, it seems stabler than some of the other alternatives with very large libraries (sorry WinAmp fans) and its never, in the time I’ve used it, managed to corrupt its databases or lose files or do anything else really nasty.

However, there’s an annoying quirk in the way iTunes handles its ‘add folder to library’ feature that means you can end up with the same file being added multiple times.

Say you have thousands of tracks in your library.  You probably have the ‘copy music to…’ option switched off.  If you don’t, you should – unless you’re buying those tracks from the iTunes Store, adding them to the library will take a lot longer with this option on, as iTunes is physically copying the file when you add it to the library, rather than just adding a reference to an internal database.  This option being on also means your library takes up twice as much disk space since there’s one copy in the iTunes folder and one in the file’s original location.

You have a bunch of folders.  Folders for albums, then for artists, then – in my case – folders for the stores I got the music from.  (I usually organise by the store I bought it from, because that’s the one piece of information a lot of mp3 tags omit and you sometimes really need.  And because with a 60 000 song library you need to stricture it somehow – opening that folder is going to take a lot of time to happen with 10 000 or so albums right there to display.)  So I have an Amie Street folder which contains a bunch of folders named for artists and bands, which in turn contain folders named for albums, which contain mp3s.  All very normal and familiar, right?

So I buy some music, three albums, say.  I want to add the new music to my library and do this the quickest way I can.  I download three new albums and put them in the Amie Street folder.  In iTunes, I go File – Add Folder To Library and iTunes rescans the whole Amie Street folder, picks up those albums, and adds them to the iTunes library and I go and find them in Recently Added (because I’m me, so I’ve forgotten the names in the thirty seconds it takes to do this).  Sounds complicated?  Not really, and it saves time once you have the routine.  I could add the three albums one at a time, as individual album folders, but I don’t, because that takes time, three times as many clicks, and iTunes is perfectly able to scan the entire Amie Street folder and only add those tracks it hasn’t seen before.

Seems like a good idea, right?

Um, no. Unfortunately iTunes sometimes adds tracks more than once.  It picks up the old tracks and adds a second copy.  Sometimes music added to the library months ago, so it takes me a while to notice – usually I don’t see it until I next search for a particular album and play it through and notice the duplicates.  And strangely, it’s usually duplicates, not three or four copies.  This is a strange problem, and its been annoying me for months.  I couldn’t see why it was happening, and couldn’t make the error happen consistently (which, as we should all know, is what makes it a bug and not just a user error).

So, duplicate songs, no apparent reason, making my library all untidy.  This is bad.

Today I got annoyed enough to spend an afternoon trying to fix it, and turns out this is what it is: iTunes thinks an mp3 with lyrics or album art added is a different file to the one with no lyrics or art.  So you add a song, add art, rescan the folder, and iTunes sees the file as a different one and re-adds the track again.  You end up with two files, one with the art, one without.  If this is the source of your problems, its easy enough to check – do Find Duplicates in iTunes and see if the only difference in your duplicates is the dates added and presence or absence of art and lyrics.

Oh, and welcome to the nightmare land of Find Duplicates and manual deleting.  iTunes handles this well.  Really well.  Is it so hard to assume the same track on different albums – with different lengths, from different files – aren’t duplicates?  You must have done this sorting game before, going through the list: That one’s a live version, this one’s an actual duplicate.  A thousand times over.  Oh fun.

That’s the problem.  That’s what iTunes was doing.  It was consistent, it was replicable – and it was an absolute monster of a problem because I’ve run the iTunes Get Album Art command and I’ve run an add-on lyrics finder multiple times and I have no idea when.  No idea any more what’s been changed and what hasn’t.

See the problem here?  Any new album I add anywhere on the computer now has to be added manually, only the album folder, because I don’t know where the ‘changed’ mp3 files are.  Or I can go through every so often and fix iTunes’ duplicates after I add art.

Anyway, if you’ve got to this blog from google looking for a fix, sorry, I don’t have one.  No fix, but there is a workaround.  It takes a bit more time than rescanning whole folders, but not as much as manually adding folders one by one.   Instead of letting iTunes add everything and then deleting duplicates, you can add to the library only the folders that contain new music by dragging them.  At least in Windows world.

Go to the music folder.  Add your music – unzipping or copying or whatever.  Write down the names of any artist folders you ‘this file already exists’ errors on.  In the music folder, change the view to Detail view.  Sort by Date Modified – click it twice and the most recent folders will come to the top of the list.  These are the ones with the new music in.  Open iTunes.  Select the new music folders and drag them to iTunes (by dragging down to the iTunes taskbar icon which will open the iTunes window), then dragging to the Library item (the capitalised one at the very top) in the navigation panel on the left.  If you drag to the Library item, the new albums get added to the library.   If you drag to a playlist, the albums get added to the playlist – which may or may not be what you want.  Lastly, go to the artist folders you wrote down earlier and add the individual albums the same way.  These won’t be included among the ones you just added as the folder was created the other day, when you first bought that artists’ work, not today.

That’s the only way I know of to get around this bug/quirk.

This is on a PC, but I assume Macs have much the same options.  Seems to me Apple didn’t think enough before they did this design.  Like maybe iTunes has been far more successful than they ever imagined.  Like maybe they just didn’t think people would have 60 and 100 GB libraries and would have directory hierarchies in place to organise those, and so would always have the ‘copy music to…’ turned on.

Nah.

Hopefully they fix it in iTunes 8.  Here’s hoping.

(On the subject, and as an aside, I shouldn’t need to add that once you’ve imported the song into iTunes you never move it or iTunes will lose track of its location and you’re going to be spending a lot of time clicking on the More Info screen to tell iTunes where it is now.  Just don’t.)

WHAT I’M LISTENING TO: Julie London, actually – beautiful smoky-smooth old-school jazz from way back when.  She’s here on emusic.  The Essential album is a good starting place – its littered with standards, and the first track, Cry Me A River, is probably her best-known song.

A flood of new releases

There’s been a lot of new releases on Amie Street over the last couple of days.  There seems to have been a bit of a flood of European techno and house (guessing from the titles) and a lot of them seem to be quite good – at least they’re getting downloaded.  There’s far to many there to listen to them all.  There’s also been several good new releases by the Boy Bathing (duety folk), Cam Hodges (acoustic folk) and Piebald (mournful indie rock) – all still free at the moment – as well as new singles from Barnicle (not free but still worth it) and Suzy Callahan (also not free but still equally worth it, formerly of Devils Wielding Scimitars).

Amie Street’s 25% off sale seems to have morphed into a permanent 10-20% off.  Ten dollars gets you a dollar free, and fifty gets you ten free.  I’m not sure if this is good (permanent discounts) or bad (no more half price sales).

WHAT I’M LISTENING TO: Those above (obviously) and also this sampler compilation from Arena Rock records.  Some good stuff from people who are now well known from back before they were.

Genres

I suppose this has to be addressed.  Sigh. The whole genre thing is so labelling-y. But yet so useful.

I like music.  Most kinds of music. Lots of people sat that, but really. Classical to hair metal. Mozart to Mott the Hoople, Queen to Eminem – I’m just grabbing names out the air, so – someone to whoever.  I don’t like Brahms, but that’s just me. Don’t get him, but that’s a flault in myself I’ll try and correct one of these days.  Other than that, anything goes.  Suppose that’s why I’m hanging around the disreputable websites that I do.

What I look for first is usually indie rock and folk. Alternative, too, but that’s so broad a label now it doesn’t seem to mean much – kind of like rock. Also classical, pop, acoustic, americana, trance, house… most things. I love gritty heartbreaking folk rock. I love big trance anthems. I love the anger in the sixties rock, the whimsy in indie pop.  Just lately I’ve been having a bit of synthpop thing.  I listen to some Jazz, but I don’t know nearly enough about it that I’m going to start expressing opinions on the interweb. Same goes for blues. I haven’t spent enough time learning what I need to learn to appreciate hip hop, so this blog’s unlikely to help if that’s what you’re after, but if you know of a link to a good intro guide, it’d be great thing to do to drop me a line and let me know about it.

So that’s where we’re at. A bit of skew here towards indie rock, away from rap, but anything else goes. And the rock is indie because that’s what’s available from the websites I use. And some might even say its  better stuff than what the big four record labels are feeding everyone, but I wouldn’t dream of mentioning anything of the sort.

WHAT I’M LISTENING TO: A bunch of fairly random stuff on emusic because I’m going through my saved for later trying to decide what to buy.  Things that make the cut: Klee, Mariee Sioux, this compilation, and do you remember this from back in the day?  There’s a few good new things on Amie Street too, none still free (most were the albums of the day so went up in price fast) but all worth a listen if you’re up for some indie rock (the Ettes and Mock Orange) or electropop (Kyle Andrews).  There’s this, too, got some interesting tracks by some famous artists, and I guess linking to it just got this blog banned in China. Happy Olympic Games day!

Emusic Free Track of the Day

A real quick one.  Emusic has a daily free track of the day here.  You don’t need to sign up, you don’t need to do anything, just go and grab it.  If you’re an emusic member you’ll be nagged to log in.  Using a different browser – one that doesn’t have the emusic cookie – will prevent this.  Remember Safari is an alternative to IE.   If you see errors of the “not available right now” persuasion its probably because you’re not in the US and the free track is a US-only one, or its European and your not, and so on.  You ain’t getting today’s, try again tomorrow.  You’d think emusic would give away a sample everyone could hear, but they often don’t.

WHAT I’M LISTENING TO: Ike Reilly, with and without the Assassination.  Emusic with and without, Amie Street with and without. Junkie Faithful (with) and Poison the Hit Parade (without) are the two big ones. Angry, cynical, intelligent rock sung by a man who could have stolen Dylan’s voice and borrowed his pen.  Cheaper right now on Amie Street than the cost-per-track on the emusic plans.

And speaking of Dylan, there’s a free sample track from his new album on his website.

A couple of freebies

A couple of free samplers lying around on the web:

The Cartier website (the jewellers and such, I assume) has some indie and mainstream pop as free downloads as part of a promotion they’re running.   The indie pop needs to be downloaded a track at a time (ugly, clunky website, you need to hit the download icon in the upper left of the screen to get started), but there’s some good stuff there, recordings otherwise unreleased by some talented people, so its worth a quarter hour or so persevering.  The mainstream pop is in a single zip file (‘download all’ at the bottom of this page).  Thanks to lemoneyes at the emusic message boards for pointing this one out.

Chris Fuller, a talented singer-songwriter with a leaning towards acoustic folk, has a song diary on his website with upwards of fifty tracks on it.  He uploads material in progress as he works on it, and there’s some great tracks there.  He’s also got an album on Amie Street, currently a little over a buck, if you want more.

WHAT I’M LISTENING TO: Two new uploads to Amie Street. Good Night States, an acoustic pop-rock group, have three new singles out, and Wil Maring, acoustic country-folk, has a couple of EPs.  Wil’s a woman.  I hadn’t come across her before, so this wasn’t immediately clear to me either.  Both are still free as I write this.