tunequest

Recently, I've taken to re-encoding some of my favorite CDs, mostly ones that I originally encoded long ago, some as far back as 1999. Hard drive space was at a premium at the time, so I traded acceptable losses in quality for a smaller storage footprint. When the music is coming from a beige G3's internal speaker, 112 kbps and 320 kbps mp3s sound basically the ...

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The vast array of listening information available at Last.fm probably had a great deal to do with CBS's decision to purchase the company. Though I'm wary of the deal, I've not lost all hope for the site. The Audioscrobbler technology behind it is some pretty fascinating stuff and the data it collects is open and available be analyzed, interpreted, shared and displayed in a lot of ...

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One of the lesser-used features of iTunes is its visualizer, the colorful animated display that accompanies any music that's playing. The visuals are a fun little distraction, but once the novelty wears off, the usefulness of the function tends to be limited. Though, in college, a PowerBook and an LCD projector made for a pretty rockin portable party system. Ol' trusty G-Force iTunes, from version 1.0, has shipped ...

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Yesterday, I wrote a detailed article about the new formula I'm using to quantify the overall quality of albums in my iTunes library. It's been working for me, but I realized that everyone rates their music differently. Webomatica, for example, explains in the comments that his song ratings are relative to other songs by the same artist. So I'd like to explain the thought process that goes ...

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I established in the previous article that with all the interesting content out there, it can be quite daunting to listen to all those great podcasts. The ease with which iTunes lets you discover, subscribe to and manage podcasts can quickly lead to an overwhelming number of episodes and timespan to get through. "Podcast Overload" is a very real possibility. I also noted in that article that ...

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Something odd happened to me the other day while listening to my iPod. I was enjoying a bootlegged version of Jerry Goldsmith's magnum opus, the score to the first Star Trek motion picture. One of the tracks is raw recording session featuring two takes of the now-famous main title. The theme was just getting going when, at the 1:26 mark, it just stopped playing. The music went ...

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iTunes 7's built-in artwork finder is a great little enhancement to the program. But it does have it's limitations. It seems to require exacting ID3 tags or it won't return a requested cover. And if a particular song/album isn't sold by the iTunes Music Store, well, you can just forget it. Likewise if you're not running iTunes 7. Cue SlothRadio. SlothRadio.com is a streaming radio site and music ...

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Update: The revised sorting feature/problem in iTunes 7.3 and later renders portions of this advice useless. Some of it still applies for Smart Playlist building, but the segregated sorting no longer works. If you're using a version prior to 7.3, go nuts. If you're using 7.3 or later, be warned. In striving for zen-like simplicity while maintaining and extending the usability of iTunes, please follow me as ...

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Anyone who has been reading the tunequest for a while knows that statistics, numbers, figures and graphs have played a large part in its progress. In fact, it was the discovery that 10% of my songs were responsible for 49% of my total play counts that prompted me to set out on this endeavor in the first place. To this day, I'm still surprised by the lack ...

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