Month: October 2006

WBFO is here to entertain you

I’m usually opposed to orchestras attempting to play pop/rock music. Those things just never seems to turn out as well as one would expect. But this performace of Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit by Western Branch Freshmen Orchestra is quite nice. As both an orchestra fan and Nirvana fan, I give it great kudos.

The orchestra is based at Western Branch High School (home of the Western Branch Bruins) in Chesapeake, VA.

This video has been making its way around the net pretty quickly, with good cause. It’s remarkable, particularly that string section playing the vocal melody during the verses.

Compilations, Coverflow, Art and Album Artist

coverflow compilations iTunes 7

Dilemma: When using coverflow view in iTunes 7, your albums containing multiple artists (soundtracks, tribute albums, benefit albums, etc) show up with multiple, individual covers. One way to fix that is to set the Compilation tag check box for those albums. But what if, for whatever reason, you don’t want to set an album as a compilation? (They’re your reasons; I won’t question them. For instance, you may not want compilations shunted off into their own little corner of your library.)

An alternate way to bring those multiple covers together provides a worthwhile use to the new and somewhat baffling Album Artist tag. Just put the album/compilation name in Album Artist field and watch as those album covers disappear and consolidate into one.

album artist coverflow field

Ta Da!

iTunes coverflow album artist single

Woohoo to 5 digits, another milestone

With all my excitement surrounding the symphony, I completely over looked the fact that I broke the five digit mark on the tunequest. That’s right, since the first day of the year, I’ve listened to more than 10,000 individual songs.

Hooray for me.

However, things still look a little grim for reaching my admittedly arbitrary goal listening to my entire iTunes library by the end of the year. The graph has consistently shown me performing at a deficit in this regard.

Here’s another way of looking at it: At the time of this writing, I have 4,187 more songs to listen to. It took me 98 days to listen to the previous 4,187 and there are only 87 days left in the year. So if I listen at the same rate, I’ll conclude this project 11 days into 2007.

And if that’s not mind-numbing enough for you here’s one more way to think about it: If I take the actual time of music into account, I’ve run an average of 3 hours of listening per day in the past 98 days. To make it through the rest, I need to average 3.3 hours per day during the next 87.

This is all assuming, of course, that my library’s net size stays basically the same.

A Grand Celestial Music

Quite the musical week here at tunequest. A little more than usual.

First the Ratatat show, now a symphony performance. The Atlanta Symphony put in a wonderful performance of Holst’s Planets. From the raw power of Mars to the ethereal ambiance of Nepture, the orchestra dispatched all seven symphonic poems with passion and exuberance. "Wow", I say "Wow."

Parts of Mercury felt a little bit off, but it could have just been the acoustic of the hall (which honestly aren’t that good; let’s hope the new hall gets built soon). It didn’t matter though; by the end of Mars, I was willing to forgive just about any mis-step. The full force of the orchestra performing only a few feet away literally gave me chills. Man, it was good.

I’m stoked for this ASO season.

RATATATL*

Ratatat ATL

I just got home from Ratatat’s performance at The Earl in East Atlanta. Awesome awesome stuff. This band is phenomenal, from concept to execution, and they kick it ten ways live. I can now add Ratatat to the list of bands I’ve seen more than once. Hoorah.

I would have liked to record the show, but my dinky Maxell voice recorder for iPod was overwhelmed the sheer amount of volume as was themodernista. I got nothing but noise and static from it.

Boo.

Hopefully, I got some decent pics from my cell phone (i doubt they’re that good though), but it’s late now and I’m off to bed.

The show was fronted by Panther and The Envelopes.

* coined by themodernista at the show.