tunequest

When it comes to organizing for iTunes and iPod, classical music is an entirely different beast. Why tie yourself to an inefficient and illogical "album" model when classical works were never meant to be treated that way? iTunes allows you to appreciate individual works as they were conceived and executed: as individual, stand-alone works. :: Example of my tagging structure (click to see full size). I recently ran across ...

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tunequest in review: for the week ending may 27, 2006. stats: 226 songs played over 16 hours. a further 11 were removed and 1 was added, for a net progress of 236 songs, which is a nearly 50% decline from last week's performance. well, it figures that this week's would be lackluster compared to last; i'm nothing if not inconsistent. it's not surprising though. i knew there would ...

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As promised, I dug up the column I once wrote about the legendary Martin Denny's infamous (and highly collectable) Exotic Moog record (1969). It wasn't until after I wrote this that I learned that Denny didn't actually play any of the music on the record. In a 1997 interview with Cool and Strange Music Magazine, he revealed that Liberty, his record label, took control of the project ...

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for the week ending may 20, 2006. stats: a superlative week here at tunequest. 394 songs played over 25 hours and 40 minutes. a further 5 songs were removed from the library for a net progress of 399, a new record. frankly, i'm surprised by the results. an afternoon braves game and a couple of extented meetings cut into my normal office listening time ...

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At times, i really resent owning a car. Yeah they're convenient necessary for getting around, but with the fueling and maintenance and cleaning and well, effort that goes into having one, there are times when I'd just as soon not have one. (Oh, for a more vibrant public transportation system in metro Atlanta.) Don't get me wrong. I've got a '99 saturn sc2 (aka "the cherry bomb"–it's ...

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Happy End of the World is the Pizzicato 5 album, above all others. Yeah, the five by five ep is of course excellent, but this record is among the definitive late-90s shibuya-kei records from the definitive shibuya-kei act. It's chock full of that uptempo cheerfulness that one would expect to come from the bright lights of Tokyo, but it's tempered with just the right amount of ...

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So I recently listened to Louis and Bebe Barron's avant garde and experimental score to the 1956 sci-fi classic Forbidden Planet. This soundtrack was one of the handful of Records That Time Forgot columns that I wrote in a previous life. I reprint it here for your reading enjoyment. In 1956, science fiction as we know it scarcely existed as a genre. Adventures in space were mostly ...

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at 5:19 pm eastern, i officially crossed into 4 digit territory. i now have less than 10,000 songs to go before i complete the tunequest. that is of course if i don't add a lot of new songs to my library... for those who are interested, the lucky song was the first movement from dvorak's symphony no 1 performed by the royal scottish national orchestra. good ...

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Today's I-285 adventure was sponsored by Philip Glass' 1996 "Heroes" Symphony (or Glass' Symphony No 4), a fantastic orchestral suite in 6 parts that's based on but not an orchestral transcription of the Bowie/Eno album of the same name. Unlike some of glass compositions, which can be inaccessable at times, this symphony is very compelling. Yeah, it's full of his trademark cyclicality, but because it is ...

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