Insanity Part 2.0

In case anyone was wondering, that song used in the background of the Choke trailer is “Satan Said Dance – Clap Your Hands and Say Yeah.”

Just noticed that “The Crane Wife” is on sale at Amazon.com MP3 Store.

For those who don’t know, Crane Wife is an awesome album and I recommend it, as I would recommend any other The Decemberists songs.

As for the Amazon MP3 store, I personally prefer iTunes but I appreciate Amazon’s aggressive pricing strategy. I also really don’t like that labels are giving preferential treatment to Amazon (and inhibiting consumer choice) because they carry a huge grudge against iTunes. I don’t like it when consumers are being used as pawns in this fight.

XM Radio Channel Guide for AOL Radio – AOL Music

XM Radio’s standard AOL Radio lineup is back again. During November and December they took off a bunch of channels for all the holiday-themed ones (e.g. XM Holly, etc.) but now things are back to normal. Notably, XM 47 Ethel’s back

For those of you who don’t know, AOL Radio streams various XM Radio channels for free if you’re on Windows or Mac. It’s pretty nice, and can’t beat the price.

From the fine print in the back of the Decemberists “the Crane Wife” album:

This recording and artwork are protected by copyright law. Using Internet services to distribute copyrighted music, giving away illegal copies of discs or lending discs to others for them to copy is illegal and does not support those involved in making this piece of music – especially the artist. By carrying out any of these actions it has the same effect as stealing music.

I was impressed with their usage of “the same effect as,” which is a subtly different statement than simply “you are stealing music.” I would contend that the only difference between file sharing and actually stealing music is that file sharing still doesn’t involve stealing a physical CD.

Minus points for them implying that the artist still benefits the most from a CD purchase.

I still buy CDs cause I like having my lossless, physical copy

Think Secret – Think Secret launches “Secret Notes”

As many of the news tips on Secret Notes will be works-in-progress that are not yet ready for the front page of Think Secret, they should be read with more skepticism than regular stories.

I love how this implies Think Secret has had any accuracy within the past year and half to begin with. How long’s that “true video iPod” been in the works guys?

Is still a pig… I don’t see how this is any different from the current “PlaysforSure” sansa and “PlaysforSure” Rhapsody to Go. If there’s an integration problem because of the WM/PFS component, adding a different brand isn’t going to help.

• Goo Goo Dolls/Counting Crows
• SF Symphony
• Thievery Corporation
• Rusted Root
• Death Cab for Cutie/Spoon
• DJ BT (Apple WWDC)

It’s been a fun (and expensive) summer

• Come on feel the Illinoise! – Sufjan Stevens (iTunes)
  This is certainly an interesting album. Not a favorite off the top but it does grow on you after a couple of initial listens. The “Come on feel the Illinoise” track is really nice to listen to.
• You Could Have It So Much Better – Franz Ferdinand (iTunes)
  Despite a friend mentioning to me that this was an amazing album I have to say that I’m not really impressed with the album after a bit of time. I really like the opening track and one of the last few, but that’s about it. The rest just feel like meh to me.
• Plans – Death Cab for Cutie (iTunes)
  Despite their flavor-of-the-past-few-months status, I like this album. A couple catchy tracks on this one. “Marching Bands of Manhattan,” “Soul Meets Body,” “Crooked Teeth.” The lyrics to the last one caught me off guard at first.
• Twin Cinema – The New Pornographers (iTunes)
  Electric Version – The New Pornographers
  I like both of these albums, but for some reason I’m enjoying Electric Version more than Twin Cinema.
• The Antidote – Morcheeba (iTunes)
  This is a fantastic album, quickly became one of my favorites. Lots of catchy tracks: “Everybody loves a loser,” “Wonders Never Cease,” “Lighten Up.”
• My two favorite individual tracks for various reasons are probably Everything I Try to Do, Nothing Seems to Come Out Right – The Decemberists and This Year – the Mountain Goats.

Oh, sorry if iTunes isn’t your cup of tea. I tried using Amazon links but they were being stupid and not coming out right. Those of you at Cornell should know how to find these on Napster if you want.

NPR: All Songs Considered: Death Cab for Cutie and Son Volt

Same as the Decemberists concert. Streamed for free with RealPlayer, and maybe WMP if you have your settings right.

Here’s some of my random impressions of the music services:

Rhapsody

• Rhapsody just seems to have a better collection than everyone else. Take for example, the fact that Neutral Milk Hotel recently became available on Rhapsody for streaming and downloading. I just checked and they’re still not available on Napster yet. For most major label releases most of the music services seem about on-par, but the indies make a difference. (FWIW I’m not yet impressed by NMH, and I don’t quite see where the Decemberists comparisons come from)
• The software has gotten weirder lately. For some reason it seems to perpetually eat 10-20% of my CPU (when idling, which means 600MHz)
• Rhapsody streams songs on their Radio that may not normally be available on digital music services. Take for instance, Dave Matthews Band. On every service they’re marked as “album only,” and no one can stream them. Except on Rhapsody, you can get individual Dave Matthews songs streamed as part of the radio service. You don’t get to choose which songs get streamed obviously, but this is a huge step up from no songs at all. I haven’t checked whether this exists for other groups like the Beatles.
• My Rhapsody is actually kinda cool. It seems to take the music that you listen to through streaming, and makes recommendations based on that. However, its actual function is slightly unclear, as I don’t know if it makes recommendations based on music that you import and/or download through Rhapsody. Its function could definitely be improved if this is the case.

Yahoo also just came out with a music service lately, and it’s also interesting. Caveat: Yahoo actually had the foresight to mark both their software and service as beta, which is a good idea.

There are two parts to Yahoo Music’s strategy: the “music engine” and the Yahoo unlimited music service. So far the main draw is that Yahoo offers a Janus-compatible service at $5/mo if you buy a whole year, which is a lot cheaper than Rhapsody/Napster’s $15/mo.

The music engine is the only way to access the Unlimited service, and is fairly good with features. It’s tied in to Launchcast and Unlimited, and is most useful if you use these, but is capable as a standalone. Most interestingly, it supports MP3, WMA, AAC, and Ogg Vorbis. This means that other than Winamp (and iTunes with a crappy hack), I can have my entire music collection actually available to me in one program. Two problems:

• Loading times are slooooooooooow. Switching between different panels in the program is slowwwwww. Loading anything takes foreverrrrrrr.
• If you say, sort by Artist, it only sorts by artist. It doesn’t then sort by Album and Track number, like iTunes does (making for a very nicely organized list). Actually maybe it does sort by Album after that (I’m too lazy to check) but it certainly doesn’t sort by Track number after that, and that’s pretty unhelpful as far as I’m concerned.
• Mini-mode is a joke. Compared with iTunes’ mini-mode (I swear this was as small as I could get YME to go):
  

The music service itself is ho-hum, without too much that I can say about it except for one thing: Yahoo’s customization options are excellent. Yahoo lets you rate music that you listen to from the service based on Song, Album, or Artist, ranging from don’t-ever-play-it-again (null) to 4 stars. Music that you import from your hard drive can only be rated based by song as far as I can tell, which makes for an interesting disconnect when you own music but can only say you love the album or artist by navigating to their page on the music service (which, as I’ve mentioned already, takes foreverrrrrrrr).

So what do the ratings do? Not much other than control your shuffling (the software’s shuffle control is actually pretty good), and…your Launchcast Station. Unlike Rhapsody, you only get 1 custom station (as opposed to however many you want), but it plays tracks based on your preferences and similarities to your preferences, which works out fairly well. I can’t compare it to My Rhapsody just yet though, as I just discovered that one.

All in all, not bad for a first Yahoo effort. It’s going to take a while (and a big speed improvement) before I put down any actual money for it though.

On that note, Real.com’s running a promotion where you get a 14-day trial on Rhapsody and 50% off for the first 3 months.

I just discovered that some program has decided to re-tag all my songs so that artists like “The Decemberists” are now “Decemberists, The.” It was either Yahoo or Rhapsody. If it was either case, fuck you.