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.

The point of it all

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.

Jamendo

I just came across Jamendo by random wikipedia-style link procrastinating.  It’s a Creative Commons based music distribution site, everything free to download and mostly CC licenced, and some of it rather good.  Easy to be cynical about free redistribution sites, but occasionally talent turns up on them – Serena Matthews on downloads.com, for example – certainly the potential for a lot of chaff, but there’s some real talent around too.  Jamendo seems to be primarily European music.  A lot of the music (and the album descriptions) aren’t in English, which makes it a little hard to tell who’s doing what.  But hey, if you can always work out the lyrics you’re not listening properly.

The best of the bunch after a quick browse is Zero’s Les suicidés, a rich distortion-laden synth-pop EP.  Almost synth-pop, maybe just electronica rock.  You work it out.  Unlike Amie St, I assume they’ll be free there forever, so no hurry going to grab it.

Looking good on Amie St today is Kray van Kirk, traditional acoustic folk, just a guy singing and playing his guitar.  Very low key and low fi.  Kray was the middle link that led me to Jamendo.  His website says he doesn’t cut CDs any more because the world already has too much consumer stuff in it, instead he just plays live shows and gives away music on his website.

Did anyone else notice Amie St’s half-price credit sale is back, but its not half price any more?  Twenty-five percent is all now.  I presume this is good in general, since it must mean they’re doing better, but here I was assuming half-price Wednesdays were going to be a permanent bimonthly thing after the first few so I didn’t stock up as much as I should have.

WHAT I’M LISTENING TO: Kray van Kirk obviously, a random trail through Jamendo, and the new Carla Bruni (who is also the new Mrs Sarkozy, and first lady of France, if you didn’t know) – now $8.98 on Amie St, but still worth a listen.  Not often a national leader’s partner records an album.  At least, not one you’d want to listen to.

Hello world!

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).