49 posts with category “Music”
Andrew Bird – Dr. Stringz
Why has everybody taken to spelling his name with a ‘Z,’ when you don’t see it written anywhere in that bit?
This Just In: EMO
It’s short for “emotional.”
“Rubies” Illustration
Okay so the first one could be “Quiet, Ruby, someone’s coming…oh it’s just your precious American underground,” though a subway is kind of a goofy way of depicting that. The second one is probably the “cheap dancers.” Third is “Blessed doctor, cut me open.” Then there’s “Proud Mary said as she lit the fuse,” though I’m not sure what a fire hydrant has to do with anything. And finally of course “Priest says, ‘…I can’t bear her raven tresses caught up in a breeze like that.'”
Hotness 1.6.c.1
Totally warranted subversioning!
My foray into MP3Toys was ultimately short-lived, brought to a halt when I found what people were doing with Single Column Playlist for foobar, particularly the playlist-embedded album art. Back in the foobar saddle, I also gave in and tried out the “official” Play Count component, which I had avoided for so long because it didn’t support %FIRST_PLAYED%, and because I wasn’t sure I wanted my playback statistics only kept in the database — even though writing them to the files posed a lot of trouble as well. Turns out, playback statistics stored by the official component are less sensitive to changes to the files it’s keeping track of than the unofficial one, which means I only have to be a little careful to keep all my stats intact, while being able to play and track files that I’m still seeding.
This, along with the invaluable $cwb_datediff() function provided by Bowron’s new foo_cwb_hooks component, called for a rewrite to the hotness code, which had been stagnating in some marginally compatible 1.5 version since May. After severely trimming the code down and robusting things up, I thought of a new and totally non-arbitrary way to soften the blow hotness scores receive when songs are played. I hated seeing them leap to 100 every time, and this new softening method makes so much sense, utilizing existing baseline calibrations to keep things a lot more interesting. How anybody tolerated the old method is beyond me.
Anyway, here it is.
I also dug up a lot of old screenshots this week and I’m planning a nostalgia-fueled retrospective in the near future.
Weekly Top Album Art
Wow, I can’t believe I was able to do this.
http://www.kilobitspersecond.com/topalbumart.php?user=
Just tack your last.fm username onto the end of that url to generate the cover art for your most listened-to album of last week. Pretty cool.
Bands and albums with ampersands don’t work at the moment. urlencode() doesn’t seem to do the trick. Any theories?
MP3Toys
This will come as a shock to anybody who knows me, but I’ve all but stopped using foobar2000. A couple months ago on the indietorrents forums, somebody mentioned MP3Toys, and I’ve been using it almost exclusively since.
As I mentioned in a previous post, all the chores I was made to do in foobar seemed to keep me from listening to music: I was working for my software, and not vice-versa. My collection of music felt cold and dead and fragile in the hands of foobar, and none of the features I had idealized in my mind were anywhere near fruition (true hotness, similarity-by-mood filters, etc.). I desperately wanted something to get me back in touch with my music, something that delivered music to me in a way that felt as natural as buying a CD and putting it in my stereo. I even considered switching to iTunes.
MP3Toys isn’t for every foobar user; I just got lucky enough that it emulates my ideal behavior in foobar. It’s a living, breathing program, and using it is a humanistic experience. It understands not just that you listen to music, but why you listen to music. Some of its intelligent features include:
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last.fm Weekly Album Chart Feeds
For a long time, last.fm has linked to a purported weekly album chart feed on their web services page. Because I find this much more interesting than the weekly artist and track charts, I was happy to find today that these feeds have finally become active. Just replace “topdownjimmy” with your username in this url:
http://ws.audioscrobbler.com/1.0/user/topdownjimmy/weeklyalbumchart.xml
Unfortunately, this won’t reflect your listening accurately if you’re in the habit of listening to leaked albums. For what are certainly legal issues, last.fm plays dumb that these albums even exist, failing to report them in charts even though the track and artist counts are updated accordingly.
My next step is to use the url embedded in the feed to scrape the Amazonian cover art from each album’s last.fm page. This would be cool to do even for the recent track feed, come to think of it.