reviews

Last.fm

Audioscrobbler was, at first, a curiosity for me. I downloaded a plugin, and it gave me stats about the music I listen to. It could also spit out an RSS file of what I’ve been listening to in the recent past, which was also quite cool.

It suddenly got cooler.

Audioscrobbler has rebranded itself Last.fm, and can now give even more statistics. Click the “recommendations” link, and Last.fm will look at your favorite artists and give you some other artists you might want to check out. (For me, Last.fm suggests The White Stripes, Wilco, Weezer, Badly Drawn Boy, and Ben Folds Five, among others. I’m already a White Stripes fan, but I don’t listen to them much anymore — Last.fm doesn’t know that, though.)

The absolute coolest part of the new Last.fm, though, is the free Last.fm player. Without paying for a premium Last.fm subscription, you can download the player, click the “Start Radio” link, and select “neighbour radio” to listen to music selected from your Last.fm Neighbours, people who share similar musical tastes with you. Plus, the Last.fm Player transmits the songs you’ve heard, so that they count in your own Recent Tracks and get added to your stats. If I thought shuffle play on my iPod was sweet, this kicks it up a notch. BAM!

But wait! There’s more! On certain artists’ Last.fm info pages, you can click a “preview track” button to listen to a stream of 30-second previews of the artists’ songs. Very cool feature, and it saves the time of going and searching for the most popular song by an artist and downloading it and deciding whether it rocks or sucks before downloading (er, I’m sorry, I meant buying) the entire album.

No, I was not paid for this plug. I’ve just enjoyed discovering this new aspect of my cute little Audioscrobbler. I mainly use Audioscrobbler / Last.fm for finding new music, and this makes the process much more streamlined.

There are some bugs with the system, though. The Last.fm Player is still a touch new, and the buffer stutters sometimes, but I haven’t had too much trouble with it and it’s starting to bug me, especially when it totally stops playing and I have to relaunch the app. Also, the Audioscrobbler plugin for iTunes doesn’t upload the play count from my iPod — which is unfortunate, as I listen to most of my music on my iPod these days (several hours at work vs. a couple hours at home).

It’s fun, though. Go sign up. I’ll be your friend, and it’ll be keen.

drumcorps 2 Comments

A Confession

I’m still pissed at myself for my lame rehearsal yesterday. The entire rehearsal wasn’t lame ? the corps made some fairly decent progress overall ? but my own personal performance was sub-par all day. What really gets me is that my poor performance is entirely my fault; I can’t just chalk it up to a bad day. It could have been avoided had I actually practiced during the past two weeks.

It had to be painfully obvious that I hadn’t practiced ? at least, it was obvious to me. My endurance was pathetic. I could barely play by the end of rehearsal, and my lips are still swollen, even today. I tried to admit it and shrug it off at the same time by admitting to my closer corps friends that I’d been working on the website instead of practicing my mellophone.

The truth is, I did neither.

music

Greg Dulli to Release New Album

David Nadelle of Pitchfork: Daily Music News reports:

Former Afghan Whigs frontman and silver-tongued devil Greg Dulli has spent little time in the spotlight since the collapse of his former band. The singer would be the first to admit that rather than cranking out the tunes Ryan Adams-style, he tends to return to past ideas and noodle them into completion. Sometimes it’s deliberate, sometimes fate– following the 2002 loss of a dear friend (director Ted Demme), Dulli turned his back on the album he had been working on, issuing a wholly different record in tribute to Demme. The resulting Twilight Singers album, Blackberry Belle, came out in 2003 on Birdman Records, and now its unreleased older brother, now entitled Amber Headlights, will see release on September 6. The album is the curtain-raiser for Dulli’s Infernal Recordings imprint and contains many friends and past collaborators, most notably multi-instrumentalist Petra Haden. Tracklist:

01 So Tight
02 Cigarettes
03 Domani
04 Early Today (And Later That Night)
05 Golden Boy
06 Black Swan
07 Pussywillow
08 Wicked
09 Get the Wheel

Dulli has also co-written songs with Screaming-Tree-turned-roots-rocker Mark Lanegan in the eventual hope of issuing a record as the Gutter Twins. Until that day comes, the Gutter Twins will manifest themselves solely on two dates with Italian band Afterhours. Meanwhile, Dulli hopes to finish the new Twilight Singers album Powder Burns, and to mount a full-scale tour, both of which have tentative arrival dates of “early 2006”.

randomness

Going Solo

Aaron has just left with Jessie and Kris to go to the lake, leaving me to my own devices for the weekend. This is my chance to tackle some projects I’ve been needing to do, but haven’t been motivated to start in the evenings after work.

Potentially on the agenda for today:

  • Do laundry
  • Wash the dishes (not a major project, but it needs done, and I should take responsibility for my banana pudding mixing bowl)
  • Clean and organize my desk
  • Clean my corner of the bedroom and put my clothes away
  • Work on the LSM website
    (and throw together a trifold brochure like I promised I’d do months ago)
  • Practice my mellophone

I don’t know if I’ll finish all these tasks today, but I’m going to try to avoid getting sidetracked and doing something other than these tasks, anyway.

To start off, I think I’m going to go make myself some lunch and see what’s on PBS while I eat. I ate so much at yesterday’s potluck at work that I never got hungry for dinner, so now I’m starving. o.O