Introducing a new feature to my blog where I post 3 mp3’s. Here is the first batch from a few albums I have been enjoying lately…
Silver Lining, by Rilo Kiley
From their album, 
Melody Day, by Caribou
From their album,
Small Town Crew, by The Brunettes
From their album, Structure & Cosmetics
I have a bootleg (at least I think it is a bootleg) of a Simon and Garfunkel concert from New York in 1966. The sound quality isn’t that great and you can get a much better recording of the same songs at practically the same time period commercially. The problem with the commercial release, although it is superb, is that it edits out some of Paul and Art’s dialogue between songs. Most notably is the intro to Sparrow. On the commercial release the songs starts with Paul saying “relative to nothing, this song is called Sparrow.” It kind of makes sense I guess, but it makes more sense when you realize what was edited out. Paul tells a story about how he was “digging” his reflection in a window only to have his daydream rudely interrupted by a bird. Well, he tells it better than I can, so for your enjoyment I have ripped the full intro so you can hear it for yourself. Paul Simon’s accent cracks me up, too.
I am already dreading a summer without the hit show on NBC, Heroes. For the past couple weeks I have found myself listening to my iPod and thinking, “Man, that would be a great song for Heroes.” There probably isn’t an official Heroes soundtrack, so I decided to make a mixtape of “heroish” songs. These are actually all really great songs, so don’t feel like you need to watch Heroes’ to appreciate them. Here’s the playlist and the lyrics that seemed appropriate. Hopefully it will help get you through to next season…
1. Now. Now., by St. Vincent
“I’m not your mother’s favorite dog. I’m not the carpet you walk on. I’m not one small atomic bomb. I’m not anything at all.” (With lyrics like that, it makes me wonder if St. Vincent was watching Heroes when she penned this great song.)
2. Eyes, by Rogue Wave
This is the only song on my list that was actually used on the show. A great song by one of my favorite bands.
3. Start A War, by The National
“Walk away now, and you’re gonna start a war.”
4. To the Sky, by Maps
“These things I know… They get into your mind. I guess you know the signs. Can only feel this way when silence comes.”
5. Last Stop: This Town, by the Eels
“Why don’t we take a ride way up high through the neighborhood, up over the billboards and the factories and smoke. I’m gonna fly on down for the last stop to this town.”
6. Strange Powers, by The Magnetic Fields
“In Las Vegas where the electric bills are staggering, the decor hog wild and the entertainment sachrin. What a golden age. What a time or right and reason… cause you got strange powers.”
7. Phenomena, by the Yeah, Yeah, Yeahs
“Something like a phenomena.”
8. I Believe, by Simian Mobile Disco
“I believe you can be what I need to believe.”
9. When it Flows, by Great Lake Swimmers
“When it flows from the fingers and turns to stone it shatters with the touch… Looked into your eyes and into your mind. You were laughing like a statue called to life.
10. Waitin’ For Superman, by The Flaming Lips
“Tell everybody waiting for Superman that they should try do hold on the best they can.”
11. The Greatest, by Cat Power
“Once I wanted to be the greatest.”
12. Nothing At All, by The Shins
“You gotta know what you want to be, but there’s no number to call… You cut your eyes so you can finally see, but there’s nothing at all. There must be a flaw in this fatal eye.”
13. Race For the Prize, by The Flaming Lips
“Two scientists were racing for the good of all mankind… They’re just humans with wives and children.”
14. The Sun is Burning, by Simon & Garfunkel
“Now the sun has come to dissappeared. All is darkness anger pain and fear. Twisted, sightless wrecks of men go groping on their knees and cry in pain.”
15. We Will Become Silhouettes, by The Postal Service
“And that’s when we’ll explode and it won’t be a pretty sight. And we’ll become silhouettes when our bodies finally go.”
For your convenience I bundled the entire playlist into a .zip file that you can download here. I hope you like it!
If this link hasn’t made it to your computer yet you need to check it out. There are 7 tracks for download from a mysterious “Dylan Hears a Who” album. Is it really Dylan’s lost record? No, but it might as well be. This is probably the best parody site you will ever see. Whoever they got to do the vocals has his Bob Dylan impersonation down to a science. The seven mash-up tracks take some obscure dylan songs (I can’t pin it down) over which the Dylan imposter sings Dr. Seuss lyrics. The production is seamless and I bet you could fool 99% of the people who hear this that they are actually listening to the actual Dylan. Whoever did this went all out with two tracks that last well over ten minutes! The amazing thing is that this music actually works! Dr. Suess has never sounded more profound. It almost makes you wish that this were real, and maybe, just maybe Dylan could have actually pulled this off.
If the music itself isn’t convincing enough there is cover art, an insert, and a cd label to go with it. The attention to detail on the design is as amazing as the music. This is as authentic as you could get without it being real. Simply amazing.
You may know that I write for a graphic design blog called Be A Design Group. One of the dying features of that site is the “Recommended Music” section in the sidebar. It started out as full music reviews and then when I lost the ambition to write entire articles it became a link to the reviews on Amazon. In anticipation of the next version of Be A Design Group where music will no longer be a part of the site, I have moved all my posts onto Adrian3. You can view the entire “I Like This Music” archive here. Hopefully I can get back into writing some music reviews and sharing the music I am listening too.
As I look back at the reviews I wrote, most of the albums are still in my regular rotation. If you haven’t checked out the following, I recommend the highly:
In the Reins, by Calexico and Iron and Wine
Blinking Lights and Other Revelations, by The Eels
Songs For Silverman, By Ben Folds
Woman King, by Iron and Wine
Out of the Shadow, by Rogue Wave
Chutes Too Narrow, by The Shins
Rubber Factory, by The Black Keys
Next time you’re out shopping for records or tapes — watch for pirates. Not the kind with skull and crossbones and rusty cutlasses - watch for music pirates. There are plenty of them around and, like their 18th Century colleagues, they’re breaking the law, to the tune of $200 million a year.
The modern pirates’ racket is duplicating and selling sound recordings that don’t belong to them, usually as a tape cassette or an eight-track cartridge. Their income goes right into their own pockets. While many recording artists have actively engaged in promoting the fight against antipiracy by appearing before state legislatures and acting as witnesses in court cases, Jerry Lee Lewis has taken the bull by the horns.
Here is a list of music that I really enjoyed in 2006:
Begin to Hope, by Regina Spektor
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Wincing the Night Away, by the Shins
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Magic Potion, by The Black Keys
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Ben Kweller, by Ben Kweller
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The Information, by Beck
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Wolfmother
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Sunlandic Twins, by Of Montreal
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Electric President
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Gulag Orkestar, by Beirut
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Garden Ruin, by Calexico
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End of Love, by Clem Snide
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i, by The Magnetic Fields
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Deep Cuts, by The Knife
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I already made my list of the best albums of 2006, but what really stands out last year wasn’t the music, but how technology changed the way I listen to music. Here are some of the best things to happen to music in 2006:
MP3 blogs
Finally there is a “legal” way to download music. When I was using Kazaa and similar file sharing sites to get music I was constantly discovering great bands that I had never heard of. When I went straight and kicked the file-sharing habit, I lost my link to new music. Then I found a handful of MP3 blogs that talk about new music and let you sample MP3’s of the artists. Here are the MP3 blogs that I follow regularly:
Gorilla vs. Bear
I Guess I’m Floating
I Am Fuel, You Are Friends
The Yellow Stereo
Hype Machine
With all the MP3 blogs all over the place, there is a good chance there are some free MP3’s out there of that band you just heard about. Hype Machine is kind of like a search engine for helping you find tracks from bands you like. It indexes the MP3 blogs and tells you what the blogs are talking about. A slick feature is the ability to create an rss feed for any band. For example if I wanted to keep track of every time an MP3 blog posts a file by the Shins, Hype Machine allows me to create that rss feed. Amazing.
Songbird
MP3 blogs are great, but they require you to visit the sites, look for tracks, download what you think you might like, then sort through the downloaded files to see what you want to add to your permanent collection. It is a bigger job than you can do while working on something else. If only there was a way to have a music application that could sort through the websites you visit regularly, pull out the mp3’s and play them on the fly. That is exactly what Songbird allows you to do! It is a web browser and music player hybrid that creates playlists of all the mp3’s linked on a web page. You can let it play in the background and if you like a song, simply click a button and Songbird will download it for you. Songbird is still a little buggy since it is still in beta testing, but it holds huge potential.
iTunes with Cover Flow
If you are like me, you have used iTunes for years and have never taken the time to add album art to your songs. Then Apple comes out with iPods with colored screens and you realize how awesome it would be to have the album art show up on screen as the song plays. Hopefully you didn’t spend days or weeks manually adding art to thousands of songs because the latest version of iTunes comes with a handy “Get Album Artwork” button. If that weren’t enough, it also came with a smooth as butter feature called Cover Flow which let’s you sort through your library as if it were a jukebox.
Sizzling Keys
The latest version of iTunes is great, but it still has a flaw or two. For example, if I am in Photoshop and I have iTunes playing in the background and I want to pause the current song, I have to find iTunes, hit the pause button, then go back to Photoshop. Sizzling Keys is an application that allows you to control iTunes from anywhere on your computer with simple key combinations. You can customize it however you want, but these are the commands I use:
Control + Spacebar = Play/Pause
Control + Right Arrow = Next Track
Control + Left Arrow = Previous Track
Control + 1-5 = Rank this track with this many stars
MP3 Phone
We are finally breaking through the hype and there are some phones on the market that are actually worth using. I have talked enough about my Sony w810i Walkman phone, but it let me just say that when expanded to 4gb of memory, this is a heck of an mp3 player.
Perhaps it was a stretch to say that the Sony Ericsson 810i Walkman cell phone is an iPod Nano killer, but it is a heck of a gizmo. I have been iPod free for two days and am still pretty impressed with this phone/mp3 player. I have been sorting through my music library trying to widdle my collection down to a 4 gigabyte (* see note below) playlist so I can fill my phone with tunes. Since the phone doesn’t have built-in iTunes integration, organizing your music is just a bit complex. You don’t want to be sorting through 4gb of music by hand. Rather than drag folders of music onto the phone, it would be awesome to be able to simply make an iTunes Playlist that you can sync the to phone with a single click. Believe it or not that is possible, but you won’t find instructions from Apple or Sony. Here is the method I figured out…
How to Sync Your Sony 810i Cell Phone With iTunes
I am using the Sony Ericsson 810i phone for this example, but it will probably work with other phones too, maybe even non-Sony versions. This example is also Mac specific, so if you use a PC you are on your own. I imagine there is a similar way of doing this on a PC, I just can’t tell you how. I barely got it to work on a Mac, so count your blessings.
The first thing to do is to make a playlist of all the songs you want on your phone. I am not going to take the time to explain how to make a playlist, but if you want the script I provided to work without modification, you should name your playlist “Phone Playlist.” This can be a regular playlist or a smart playlist (* * see note below about smart playlists).
Now that you have the playlist containing the songs you want on your Sony 810 phone, we need to figure out a way to get iTunes to automatically copy all the files in that playlist from your music library to your phone. This is possible by using an AppleScript. Download the .zip file below and unzip it.
Sync Sony Phone to iTunes Playlist (* * * see note below about this script)
Put the file called “Sync Sony 810 Phone” in your iTunes Scripts folder. This is located in “user name > Library > iTunes.” If there isn’t a folder named “Scripts” there, create it. Now in iTunes you should see an “S” shaped icon in the top menu bar with an option that says “Sync Sony 810 Phone.” (Don’t select it until we plug the phone in.)
Now all that is left is to Sync the phone with iTunes. Plug the phone into your Mac using the usb cord that came with your phone. Two disk icons should appear on your desktop. One is called “PHONE” and the other is called “PHONE CARD.” If the second one is called anything other than “PHONE CARD” you will have to modify the script I provided (*see note below) or rename the phone card. Now in iTunes go to the script menu and select “Sync Sony 810 Phone.” This will activate the AppleScript and copy all the songs from your playlist into the “MP3” folder on your phone. It will also delete MP3 files from your phone that are not on the playlist. If this is a problem, you can modify the Applescript so that instead of the main MP3 folder the script puts the playlist files into a subfolder that you will only use for iTunes files. It will take a while to transfer 4gb of music onto your phone, so be patient. Monitor the MP3 folder to make sure the transfer is complete before disconnecting your phone. When the script has completed the action, the AppleScript icon will disappear from your dock.
There are a couple downsides to this method. First, it just dumps all the mp3s onto the memory card and doesn’t put them in folders or organize them in any way. The phone somehow automatically sorts them by artist, so it only makes a difference if you want to get a specific album or song off the phone. I should also mention that this won’t allow you to play songs that you purchase from iTunes on your Sony phone due to the DRM. It would also be nice to have a progress bar to check the progress. Obviously this is a hack so it is hard to be too picky. Good luck if you decide to tackle this. Enjoy your phone!
* Expanding the storage capacity from 128mb to 4gb
Expanding the memory capacity of the phone is a simple matter of switching out the included 128mb memory card with a 4gb Sony pro duo memory stick which can be purchased at a Circuit City or Best buy for $150. If you buy it online you can probably get the memory stick for closer to $100 and the cost of memory will undoubtedly go down from the time I write this post. The 4bg card is actually only going to give you 3.75gb of real space, but the same can probably be said about the iPod Nano. Can someone confirm that for me?
* * Note about smart playlists
I would encourage you to learn to use smart playlists if you don’t already know how. For example, I make a smart playlist that contains only songs that are in a “phone” grouping. I adjust my view options to show the “grouping” column in the main window. Now I can simply put any track I want on my phone by putting it in the “phone” grouping Since it is a “smart” playlist it will automatically be updated and will appear on my phone the next time I sync it up.
* * *Note about customizing the script I am providing
The script I provided is available for free with a suggested donation from Doug’s Scripts for iTunes. The script is called “Sync Playlist to Folder.” If my script doesn’t work for you, Doug provides a folder of files that explain the script and help you customize it for your own needs. I take no credit for the script and encourage you to donate to Doug if you find the script helpful.
Forget about the Zune. The Sony 810i is the real iPod killer. IPod Nano, that is. let me tell you why…
I bought an amazing phone this weekend. The Sony Ericsson 810i is a phone, an MP3 player, and a digital camera all in one. Yes, there are several phones with this combo, but none of them compare with the Sony. That is because the MP3 player can be expanded to 4gb and the digital camera is 2 megapixels. With a little work, you can even customize iTunes to let you Sync the 810i with an iTunes playlist. (Watch for a tutorial in the near future if that is something that interests you.) Don’t fall for the hype around the Motorola. What they don’t tell you is that the integrated iTunes on the Motorola Razr only let’s you put 100 songs on the phone regardless of memory capacity. In a head-to-head battle between the iPod Nano and the Sony Ericsson 810i here is how things broke down:
Style: Nano
Storage Capacity: Tie (4gb)
Interface: Nano
Size: Nano
Color Screen: Sony 810i (scratches less than the Nano)
Price: Sony 810i if you shop around (Sony: Free - $99 with plan + $100 - $150 for the 4gb memory card = $100 - $249; Nano: $199)
Features: Sony 810i (it has a camera, cell phone and FM tuner!)
Battery Life: Tie (From what I can tell)
Games: Sony 810i
Headphones: Nano
DRM Free: Sony 810i
Video capabilities: Sony 810i
In a close battle, the Sony wins 6 to 5 by my tally. Obviously some of these things may be more important to you than others. For me the selling point was that the Sony is also a phone and a decent camera. Undoubtedly my vote will change when Apple finally comes out with their phone. For now though, I am very happy with this new toy.
If I have any regular readers, you may remember my list of life upgrades and downgrades. One of the things I mentioned in the “downgrade” list was not having a cell phone or watch. I started wearing my watch again a few months ago, and this weekend I purchased a cell phone. Before you get too disappointed in me, let me tell you how I can rationalize it: I may be adding a phone to my life, I am actually consolidating my camera and MP3 player and watch and adding a phone while I am at it. Not too bad, right?
