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!

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 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:

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.

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:

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.

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!

Third post, so I’d better explain what I’m trying to do here.

I spend a lot of time trawling the newly added albums on Amie Street.  You know, the free ones.  Some days – to be brutally blunt – there’s utter dreck there.  Some days there’s gems.  The Hush Records upload day a couple of weeks back, for example, and the Naxos uploads the other day.  Other days, where something truely great goes up, something you probably wouldn’t have ever listened to if it wasn’t free, but that you find you like enough to go and buy the back catalogue.

Amie street is a bit chaotic, and that’s the wonderful thing about it.  I do recs from my main account, the one I purchase from, but that has a limited use and only  a limited number of people see it.  You only get recs by spending money, and if you spend a lot of time trawling the pool of new uploads you don’t need to spend that much money.  So recs get rare.  There’s some other reasons too.  Recs are quite limited.  Sometimes you find something good that you don’t personally like, but you want to tell people about.  Recs also have a built-in time pressure, the need to get your rec in before another person hits buy and the price goes up to 9c.  It’s a bit pathetic – especially considering artists are starving and struggling to make those few cents – but its a big bad world out there and you want your rec in before you get downgraded to half-price value.

So the idea here is to talk a bit more, suggest a bit more widely, and hopefully some people out there will get some good music that they wouldn’t have otherwise, and maybe get it cheap or free.

I’ll plug people unashamedly.  Some because I like them, some because they deserve to be liked.  It’ll be arbitary and a bit random – I usually concentrate on the music that’s still free when I log in, and what’s free depends on time zones and who uploads when, that kind of thing.  I’m not an musician, and I’m not promoting anyone who’s a friend – although I’ll probably plug people I meet through the blog, or Amie St, or wherever.  I’ve done this with recs before, and probably will again.

I won’t just be writing about Amie Street.  I’m a user of emusic, cdbaby, and various of the smaller indie-based sites.  Some of the free ones.  Sometimes I buy music directly from the labels sites.  Sometimes I’m even a user of itunes.  Occasionally I even use Amazon to find CDs – but not often.  I’m not in the US, so postage starts to bite on even a second-hand one-dollar CD.

Basically this blog is about getting good music cheap.  I’m not even going to mention the word legal, that should be obvious to anyone who isn’t RIAA lawyer slime.

The name?  That’s because down where I am a local record store used to have a dollar sale table.  They’d buy up old jukebox CDs and dump whole boxes on this table.  Lots of it wasn’t of much interest, but occasionally there was some brilliant stuff, if you hunted.  A jukebox’s cast-offs, so it was music people in pubs would pay to listen to.  Great for backfilling your collection with stuff you remember from back in the day.  Downside was, of course, lots of other people knew about it to, so there was a bit of a race on, even while you were standing at the table.  People blocked each other with elbows, people started looking in the back box so they could lean over the front one and cover it with their bodies.  All very intense.  Lucky Amie Street isn’t quite to zero-sum.  You can get a free track and a dozen other people can too.

First useful tip.  Everyone knows how Amie Street recs work, right?  You rec it when its free, you get the full value of the track in street cred.  You rec it any other time, when its up past 9c, and you get half the improvement.  You always want to rec free stuff, even more than you want to rec the new Alice Cooper when its still sitting at 50c.  That is, you want to rec free stuff if you can be bothered hunting through the new uploads for something good, like a few of us do.

WHAT I’M LISTENING TO: Florence and the Machine’s debut single Kiss With A Fist, thanks to a tip from emusic’s 17 dots blog.  Get it here from emusic if you can, or from their label if you can’t.  I can’t :)  If you grab it from the label you can also get a free sampler EP while you’re there from the Wave Pictures.  Also the Crash Engine on Amie Street, intelligent red-wine rock (so they say), great sounding mix of anthems and acoustic (so I say), and still free as I was writing this if you go right now.

Its just so new programmer retro I had to leave the title as it was.

I just spend three hours fiddling with designs and layouts, and didn’t do any actual writing.  I’m assuming this blog will mostly be what I’m listening to, what I’m liking, what I’m downloading.  As below.  More soon.

WHAT I’M LISTENING TO: Felix McTeigue (Amie St, CD Baby, and EMusic) and Cristophe (who’s currently still free).