Year: 2006

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.

I wasn’t always a Radiohead fan

Hard to believe, I know, considering that Radiohead recently valted to the top of my last.fm profile and that the band has consistently been in the top 5 in my iTunes library in terms of number of songs, average ratings and total play counts.

But it’s true, I was late to the Radiohead party. For about five years after they band hit with Creep, I was unimpressed. At the time of that song’s release, I didn’t expect to hear much from the band after its popularity died down.

So I was mildly surprised when the group re-emerged with The Bends to favorable buzz. My own opinion hadn’t changed in the intervening years. When Fake Plastic Trees was released as the first single, I renewed my dislike for the band and vowed to continue indignantly ignoring them. I liked that song even less than Creep. That indignation only grew as Radiohead became more popular, as musical popularity tends to be a sign of mediocrity.

You see, I’m pretty open to musical experimentation; I think you’d pretty much have to be to build a library the size of mine. But once I make up my mind, I’m rarely apt to change it. There’s just so much good music, that it’s generally not worth the time to continuously devote the time and effort to re-evaluating things I’ve already passed on. That’s what makes my Radiohead turnaround remarkable; it almost never happens and never to this degree. I’ve been known to soften my criticisms of a band, but I’ve never gone from abject dislike to unchecked adoration like I did with Radiohead.

I credit my transformation with three coinciding factors.

First, it was fall/winter 1997. Radiohead’s popularity had metastasized with the release of OK Computer. The album, of course, had been a runaway success for six months or so, which meant increased exposure to the band’s music. I was intrigued to find that I wasn’t all that offended by Paranoid Android. So my interest was piqued.

At the same time, Dan, a friend and musical compatriot, had been relentlessly imploring me to reconsider my stance.

But what really turned it around for me was the video for Just. I don’t recall exactly where or when I saw it, but that video was so brilliant that it instantly turned me from wary of to excited about Radiohead. It didn’t hurt that the song completely rocks.

I suddenly couldn’t get enough of the band and quickly obtained all their albums plus several singles. I even changed my opinion of Creep (five stars in iTunes), though Fake Plastic Trees still ranks as one of my least favorite songs.

All these years later, I’ve still not seen the band perform live, which I understand is a transcendental experience. To help make up for that though, I’ve collected a fair amount of the band’s music, more than 250 songs and counting in my library, consisting of albums, singles, bootlegs and live recordings. Hopefully one day soon, they’ll swing through my town and I’ll be able to get some tickets…

The video that made me a Radiohead fan:

It’s a continuing mystery what the guys says, but I’m pretty sure it’s "Check it out. Radiohead is playing in that apartment up there."

Supreme Beings of Leisure: Overlords of Recreation

supreme leisure

The Supreme Beings of Leisure debut has the distinction of being one of two albums that I’ve ever purchased after hearing less than a minute of music from it. The other is The Dandy Warhols Come Down. I bought it shortly after listening to snippets of a couple of songs at a Barnes & Noble kiosk. Incidentally, it’s entirely possible that themodernista sold the cd to me about six months before we officially met.

For a time, I was enthusiastic about it and the record received a lot of play. That was five years ago.

I can truthfully say that, despite the enthusiastic start, the album hasn’t aged very well. Perhaps it’s because it has this kind of big-budget Propellerheads-meets-Portishead slickness to it that comes across as formulaic. Like a Michael Bay film, the Beings produce a superficially appealing work that can’t help but come across as cold and calculated from the start.

Granted, the album’s retro-lounge-spybreak sensibilities do sound good and the music is not unpleasant to listen to. I just can’t escape the feeling that each song was deliberately designed to be used as the establishing background music for trendy night clubs on TV or in as many commercials as possible.

In the end, I think I’ll hang on to it (for a lark), but I won’t respect myself for it.

On iTunes
Supreme Beings of Leisure
Dandy Warhols
Propellerhead
Portishead