New Jess Klein single

Jess Klein has a new single on emusic.  If you don’t know Jess’s music she’s an extraordinary talented singer-songwriter whose music moves from folk to almost-country to acoustic rock to a kind of post-punk pop.  Some of her work is sweet and melodic (try Blood, Sweat, Tears, or City Garden, or Real Live Love, all from the City Garden album, either from emusic or Amie) and some is sharp and funny (Flirting, here on youtube).  These tracks are a good starting point, based on what’s available on the sites I lurk, but all of Jess’s work is interesting, challenging, and definitely worth hearing. Her label’s website has samples here.  There’ a lot of acoustic folk, but if that’s not your thing the single Psalm 29 is stately and moving and beautiful, and her souly-bluesy collaboration with Peter Malik is just gorgeous (the tracks Immigrant and Midsize City Girls here; and as aside Norah Jones is on the same album).  Jess is also a fantastic live singer, one of those who is as good or better in a live recording than a studio.  There’s a live album on both Amie and emusic, should that catch your interest.  Jess also has a blog around these parts (and is indirectly the reason I started this here, rather than another site).  And now I think that’s about a long enough drooly fan-plug.

Amie street has been quiet lately.  There was a spate of Euro dance and metal, then almost nothing at all for the past few days.  However (and possibly related) the great sale price top-up is back: they’re doing 30% off the cost of credits right now, should you need some, but according to their emails, only for today.

WHAT I’M LISTENING TO: old Kings of Leon (for no particular reason) and the new Cold War Kids (here on emusic, if you’re an American). A very different album, strange and lyrical and melodic. Several outstanding tracks (try 1, 2, 4, 5, 8, and 9).  Cryptomnesia, the final track, is staggeringly good.  This is something to listen to straight though, proper album-style, not to chop and change.

And as an aside, the new Mogwai is also on Amie St, again, if you happen to be an American.

iTunes 8.0 (part 2)

Another day, another post.  The iTunes Genius’s analysis ended up taking about fifty minutes to run, with another ten or so of swapping data with the iTunes store. After that it all seems set to go.

One last setting adjustment: If you don’t want iTunes to open in a window (i.e. not full-screen) every time it starts, you’ll also need to right-click the iTunes icon you use to start it.  Either on the Desktop or the Start Menu – select Properties, and change the Run box from Normal Window to Maximised. Instant full-screen.

Couple of other things to note.  First, iTunes takes a lot longer to open now – I assume Genius playlists count as smart playlists, too many of which always slowed it down.  Its not bad, but there’s a noticable delay, perhaps a couple of seconds longer.  Its probably a good idea to leave the Genius panel closed unless you’re specifically using it, otherwise iTunes takes (comparitively) forever to get started and ready, like closing it on the iTunes Store window does.  Related, the time iTunes takes to respond to task switching when your working on something else has also slowed down, now and then there’s a noticable pause.  There was a slight stall once, and a couple of times a slight jitter.  This seemed to coincide with Firefox running flash-heavy webpages, something I’ve noticed is a problem on other, slower systems.  Itunes has always been a resource pig, and it looks like it just got worse.  The question is whether Genius, and reported better performace on larger libraries, makes it worth it.

Second, be aware there’s a couple more files to back up for the Genius playlists, iTunes Library Genius.itdb and iTunes Library Extras.itdb. They’re in the iTunes folder and clearly labelled, so you should catch them automatically if you’re just copying the whole folder.

On to the Genius.  Genius did okay.  The first track I tried, Claire Guerreso’s Matador, got no results.  The second, Uh Huh Her’s Say So, worked pretty well, a list of music from my library and some suggestions from the store.  Presumably Genius is more geared to mainstream music, and perhaps to the traditional boomer iTunes demographic, but it did okay here.  I wonder if the label makes a difference, if there’s a skew towards bigger labels (Uh Huh Her are on Nettwerk, and I think Guerreso might be unsigned – and presumably Genius, at the end of the day a sales tool, is better on tracks the iTunes store carries).  Playing around with some other tracks, Genius usually makes a list which have some connection, and although its not perhaps the one I’d be thinking of, I can see a connection between A and B.  Its not perfect, but its not meant to be.  Its a smarted-up party shuffle.  It gets past the most annoying aspect of shuffling – jarring transitions and randomness – pretty well, while preserving the best aspect of shuffling – randomness.  One interesting thing would be whether different stores give different or better results for people with multiple accounts.  Logically, if different stores have different patterns of use, and the US store is largest, that one might give better suggestions on more obscure artists.

WHAT I’M LISTENING TO: Genius playlists, for now.  I won’t duplicate whole lists since half of the tracks are CDs and others are from the iTunes store, so I can’t do the usual links to labels and indie online stores.

iTunes 8.0 (part 1)

Well, I was going to hold off on this a while – especially after reading some of the bad press on the web – but I cracked.   Yeah, I wanted to play with the Genius thing, I admit it.  According to reports, iTunes 8 and Vista might not play nice.  Very not nice.  There’s commentary all over the web, including the Apple message boards, about obscure – apparently HP related – software conflicts that cause BSOD crashes in Vista when you plug in an iPod.  I’m on XP, which is why I’m risking it, and for reference, no crashes and iTunes did find the iPods when they were plugged in.

First thing about the installation is it behaves – mostly.  The installer gives you the option of leaving automatic updates and the like off, and seems to preserve your options, although you will need to go into the XP Software Installer and turn Quicktime’s autorun off again - like you always have to.   The installer didn’t crash.  It didn’t take too long.  Everything else went fine.  No nightmare scenarios.

Don’t assume that, though. Back up your library files (in your user profile, iTunes Music Library or similar .xml and .itl) and your preference file (in your user profile, Application Data/Apple Computer/Itunes/iTunesPrefs.xml)

Second thing is some of the options have moved.  If lost, Google will provide the answer, though in short, the import options are now on the General tab, and the backup and export options are on a submenu called Library on the File menu.  Settings appear to be preserved across the upgrade, as are the logged-in and authorisation status on your iTunes store account – I seem to remember the last upgrade didn’t and you needed to reauthorise the computer, which meant remembering to ask your partner for her password again, which was a bit tiresome.

When you start iTunes it’ll spend a while checking album art.  This seems to be converting the existing art for the new grid view, not redownloading.  Don’t panic – it isn’t copying over the corrections you already made.  After that its done, although if you turn on the genius function (which you are obviously nagged to do), it then spends a long time analysing your library.  The genius thing obviously sends data to Apple.  If you care about privacy blah blah – although if you’re worried you should probably care more about Google than Apple.

When Genius has done its thing, the last little piece of housekeeping is to turn those annoying arrow things that point to the store back off.  They get turned on by default, and the option to turn them off is disabled.  Odd, since these seem especially redundant in light of the genius function.

To get rid of these, on a PC, close iTunes and open your prefs file in a proper text editor (not notepad, a programmer’s editor like EditPad Lite).  This is in your XP user profile, in Application Data/Apple Computer/Itunes/iTunesPrefs.xml.  This file should look odd, full of blocks of As and things.  Search for User Preferences and go to the place in the file that looks like:

<key>User Preferences</key>
<dict>

Beneath that add the text:

<key>show-store-arrow-links</key>
<data>
AA==
</data>

On a mac, open your terminal and do:

defaults write com.apple.iTunes show-store-arrow-links -bool FALSE

Be aware that apparently on a Mac, in iTunes 7, you could swap functionality between these arrows linking to the store and to your local library, a functionality which has gone in iTunes 8.  Something to consider before you upgrade if that sounds appealing.  In a similar vein, the other missing option is turning off the genre list in the browser view.  I don’t, but people seem to be missing this.

On a mac, in the terminal, do:

defaults write com.apple.itunes show-genre-when-browsing -bool FALSE

On a PC, add the following below the text you just added above, same place in the file:

<key>show-genre-when-browsing</key>
<data>
AA==
</data>

Both of these with thanks to Rodalpho.

Back to Genius.  I’m writing this while iTunes does its analysis thing.  Its been forty minutes and it looks to be two-thirds complete.  I’ll post this now and leave it to it, then make some comments about Genius tomorrow.

WHAT I’M LISTENING TO: All India Radio (mentioned yesterday). Downtempo trip-hop, reminiscent of Portishead, especially the album The Fall.  Although since Portishead don’t like being called trip-hop, maybe these guys don’t either, but its hard to explain without using the words, if you see what I mean.

US-only status on Amie can change

I noticed last night that All India Radio had a new album up.  I’d forgotten to become a fan of them, so didn’t get the notification, and spotted it after clicking on one of the banner ads.  Then I spotted something else.  All India Radio supposedly only have two albums available for download outside the US, except I’ve got four of their albums and I’m pretty sure I got them from Amie.  Checking my computer, yes I do, and my copies of the albums that are now flagged as US-only are tagged as ‘downloaded from Amie Street’, so the designation must have changed.  Ah, record labels.  Obviously, I can’t download them any more, although I once did.  Another reason to make sure you have good local backups, rather than relying on re-downloads from online stores rant rant blah blah.

There’s also a couple of newish albums up on Amie by noteworthies of the indie rock scene Steve Wynn and The Plastic Constellations. Both stopped being free pretty quickly, but both are still cheaper here than a lot of other places, if you’re interesting in rounding out your collection.

WHAT I’M LISTENING TO: Several great new (and right now still-free albums) from Alice Newton (acoustic folk) Chrissy Angel (a lot of styles, but this particular album is stripped-down gospel and blues), Kristy Thirsk (synth-pop, think Uh Huh Her) and Kate Tucker and the Sons of Sweden (indie rock). All these artists are really good – well worth a dollar or two if you aren’t in time to get them free.  For that matter, well worth full price – just to make that clear!

Punk goes…

An interesting series of albums on Emusic are the Punk goes… albums, here.  The general idea is that a punk label has got their bands to cover a thematically grouped set of songs and put these out as compilation albums, so Punk goes 80s, Punk goes Pop, Punk goes 90s, and so on.

First thing is these covers aren’t all – or even necessarily – punk sounding covers, more a general mix of 90s alternative, post-punk, hard rock, and some just in-betweens. Some of the covers are faithful to the original, some are way off. Second thing is, it might just be me that finds this idea interesting.  I remember a lot of these fondly from back in the day, so more grown-up covers are more than welcome. Last thing, ignore the off-topic negative reviewers.  There’s a few there who seem not to have realised these aren’t karaoke-type numbers. Approach these tracks for themselves, and maybe for a bit of past-good-times reminiscence, nothing more, and you might find something you like.

Punk goes 80s is probably the best album: Manic Monday, Straight Up, Everybody wants to Rule the World, and Video Killed the Radio Star are all worth a try.  Punk goes Metal is also intriguing should you remember the originals – and the original bands’ hair.

WHAT I’M LISTENING TO: Jeremy Jay, electronica, Kirsten Price, extraordinarily good contemporary pop-indie-soul from a woman with an extraordinary voice, and a new Robert Waddington electronic jazz track too (the last one on Zero Gain), all of these still currently free on Amie Street.

Some good free stuff today

I’ve got a bit of a theory that more new material is uploaded to Amie Street mid-week then weekends.  Often the weekends seem a bit dead.   I’m guessing struggling bands trying to emerge are out playing gigs on weekend nights, not finishing off their latest release on their computer and uploading it, but that’s just my theory…

Anyway, there’s been several interesting uploads today (and, to disprove my theory, which is why I mentioned it, over the weekend).   All these releases are still free as I write, and most of them have older albums up you can purchase if you like their sound.

Michael Schmidt does acoustic indie rock and has a new album out. I seem to remember he won a competition on Amie Street a while back and got promoted a little as a result – I have a feeling it was along the lines of the best newcomer, but I can’t find a link now so I’m not certain. Pretty sure it was him, however.

Robert Waddington (electronic jazz) has a new track on his Zero Gain album. Robert’s work is always interesting, often edging towards experimental, often with a laid-back and mellow kind of a vibe. He seems to use his Amie Street page as his official website, so I assume all of his material is up there. There’s a wide variety, and a lot of it, so its worth a quick listen to see what else you like.

Sundial Project do a mix of acoustic and anthemic indie rock. There’s still several free tracks on their album, and if you feel like paying a little something, track 5, Waking Up Tomorrow, is a great cut and well worth the 13c is costs at the moment.

Brad Sweitzer, folk, still free, and intriguingly ‘explicit’ – labelled that is. Don’t often see an actual rating label on Amie.

WHAT I’M LISTENING TO: The above, of course, and right now another recent appearance on Amie Street, Catherine Scholz, haunting and melodic acoustic folk-pop. A wonderful singer with the voice of an angel.