struggling with Radiohead

Radiohead is one of those bands that I never really got into, but I kept hearing good things about them. Eventually, the “good things” reached a critical mass, where so many intelligent people were so passionate about them that I figured I really needed to give them a try. I think I missed the boat on Radiohead largely because I really dislike “Creep”, their first (and, I guess, only) hit single. But that song isn’t really representative of their work, especially their later work.

So, anyway, I’ve been listening to some of their stuff at random on Slacker lately, and enjoying it. I also realized that I had an MP3 copy of their album “In Rainbows” that I’d never really listened to. So I gave that a listen this week, and liked it a lot.

Today, I bought a set of their first five albums from Amazon. So now I have a big chunk of Radiohead to listen to. I’ll probably copy all of them to my iPhone at some point this weekend, and listen to them at work next week. (Skipping past “Creep”, of course.)

Buying that set from Amazon was a bit of a hassle though. First, it wouldn’t let me use the one-click checkout, for no obvious reason. I had to add them to my cart and go through the multi-step checkout. Then, to download them, Amazon encourages you to first download their Amazon Music software, and download the songs using that. So I installed the Amazon Music program, but (again) for no obvious reason, it couldn’t authenticate my account, and wouldn’t let me download anything. So I had to fall back to downloading them the old-fashioned way, which (luckily) they still support. That gave me a big zip file (almost 500 MB), which I managed to import into iTunes. The metadata for the MP3s grouped them all into one 5-disc album, so I did a little work in iTunes to break them up and rename them, so they appear as five individual albums. Tomorrow, I’ll copy them all from my PC to my Mac, then (at some point) sync them down to my iPhone. So, a bunch of busy work, but the end result is a bunch of new music to listen to.

By the way, I still haven’t bought into the idea that I should give up on buying music and just pay $10 a month to stream anything and everything from Apple Music or Spotify or Slacker. (I do pay Slacker $4 a month for their “Slacker Radio Plus” plan, but that mostly just eliminates ads, and lets you cache stations for offline listening. It doesn’t let you listen to whole albums or anything like that.) I don’t buy a lot of music these days (CDs or MP3s), but I do buy a few albums here and there, and I’d rather do that, and “own” my music than just “rent” it from Apple (or Spotify or whoever).

Also, I mostly agree with this blog post: the Amazon Music iOS app is surprisingly good, while the Apple Music iOS app has gotten worse over the years, and is kind of annoying at this point. (But I still sync music down to my phone with iTunes and listen to it with the Apple app. It isn’t so bad that I won’t use it. I just use it and grumble about it.)

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