Category: music

Rhapsody MP3 store

Rhapsody has just opened an MP3 store, in beta. If you sign up for it now, you can get a $10 credit to your account, which is enough to buy Perception, a 90-track box set of pretty much everything The Doors ever released. And if you want to spend another dollar, you can get The Herbie Hancock Box, which is a 34-track collection. I’m honestly not sure if either of these box sets is at these prices purposely or due to a pricing mix-up, but either way it’s a good deal.

Unfortunately, the store itself is a bit of a mess. I had a lot of trouble downloading the Doors set. The download manager they provide just didn’t work, so I switched to an option that allowed you to download the tracks in zip files. That got me 81 out of the 90 tracks, but the remaining 9 tracks came down in a corrupt zip file. I had to go through a customer service chat session to get them to credit me for the missing tracks and allow me to re-download them. On the Herbie Hancock set, I found that I could use the download manager if I manually downloaded one track at a time. Queuing up multiple tracks didn’t work. So, basically I had to sit in front of my computer and, click on a track, wait for it to download, then go back and click on the next, and so on.

I don’t think I’ll be ordering much more from them until they get the download manager working well. Still, it’s nice to see another outlet for legitimate MP3 downloads!

summer stuff

Is it time to start thinking about summer concerts yet? I just took at look at the Central Park SummerStage and River To River pages. Someone mentioned to me today that Sonic Youth are playing on July 4th as part of River to River. That sounds good, but will probably be pretty crowded. I see Vampire Weekend on the SummerStage schedule on June 14, and Junot Diaz doing a reading on July 17. I’m curious as to how a reading would work at the SummerStage venue. It just doesn’t seem like the kind of space that would work well for something like that. It might be interesting to go to, if only to see if it works.

LaLa.com

I hadn’t used LaLa in quite a while, and I don’t recall getting any e-mail messages from them either, so it was a bit of a surprise when Donald Fagen’s “Nightfly” showed up in my mailbox yesterday, in a LaLa envelope. I guess the ship notice must have gone into my spam folder or something. I hadn’t shipped out anything myself since February, and I hadn’t received anything since May 2007, almost a whole year ago.

This got me interested in updating my lists on LaLa, and seeing if there was anything I could ship out. I wound up shipping three CDs out. A little while after I did that, I got a notice that another CD was on its way to me: Mazzy Star’s “So Tonight That I Might See”. Cool.

Poking around on the site a bit, it does look like it’s still an ongoing concern, with a modest amount of trading going on. There’s talk in the forums about the impending release of LaLa 3.0, but not a lot of solid information that I can find about exactly when this will come out, or what it’ll offer. And there are indications in some forum messages that new members aren’t currently allowed to trade CDs, just use the other aspects of the site. Weird. There used to be a corporate blog where Bill Nguyen would talk about the site, but that seems to have disappeared, so I guess you have to root through the forums to figure out what’s going on.

Happy New Year

I didn’t do much today, aside from watching football. I’m not making any major resolutions this year either. I did make all the arrangements to go to WonderCon today though. As usual, I wasn’t really sure I wanted to go this year, but a few things convinced me to go again. Basically, a good guest lineup, plus a general desire to get out of New Jersey for a few days. And a chance to see the Chinese New Year Parade again!

I haven’t really done much reflection on 2007. Normally, I would get kind of reflective on New Year’s Day, but I haven’t really been in that frame of mind. Well, just for the heck of it, here are some things I’ve done in 2007:

Books and comics I’ve read and liked:

  • Absolute Watchmen
  • Nextwave
  • David Allen’s Getting Things Done and Ready for Anything (though I haven’t finished RFA yet)
  • the first two Jasper Fforde “Thursday Next” novels
  • a couple of Jim Butcher “Harry Dresden” novels

Movies & TV shows I’ve enjoyed:

  • Paprika (my favorite movie of the year, for whatever that’s worth)
  • Once
  • Ratatouille
  • The Simpsons Movie
  • Rise: Blood Hunter (okay, not exactly high-brow, but fun)
  • Torchwood
  • Life on Mars
  • Heroes

Music I’ve liked:

  • Wilco – Sky Blue Sky
  • Ryan Adams – Easy Tiger
  • Paul McCartney – Memory Almost Full
  • Pizzicato Five – Made in USA (from 1994, but I’d never heard it until this year)
  • Derek and the Dominoes – Layla (I only just got around to buying this CD in 2007)

Pointless stuff I’ve spent money on:

  • new couch
  • iPod Touch
  • TomTom One LE GPS
  • Dell Inspiron laptop
  • MacBook
  • Microsoft Office 2007
  • Motorola SLVR
  • 19″ widescreen LG monitor
  • Toshiba HD-DVD player

Things I didn’t get around to doing:

  • buying a new car (the old one’s still working, but maybe not for much longer)
  • checking out the new Greek and Roman galleries at the Met
  • visiting the new Morimoto restaurant in NYC

Well, that’s just a bunch of random lists off the top of my head. I guess the two big things that happened in 2007 for me were the office move my company did (from Edison to Somerset), and my mostly successful implementation of GTD.

Life on Mars playlist

Life on Mars is a great little show on the BBC. I think season two is supposed to air on BBC America soon. They use a lot of great old 70s rock on the show, so, since I’ve been messing around with iMixes, I decided to try and create an iMix with all the music from season one. I used the episode guide on the BBC site to get the names of all the songs they used — there’s about 50 songs, over just eight episodes. Some are well-known, like “Baba O’Riley” and “White Room”, some are a bit more obscure. I managed to create an iMix with 45 of the songs. Here it is:

(Or rather, here it was. Embedding iTunes mixes doesn’t seem to work anymore.)

I only had about 5 of these songs in my collection already. I used up the last of my iTunes credit to buy a few more of them, and I’ll probably buy the rest by cashing in some American Express points for a new iTunes credit.

Listening to some of this stuff, I’ve definitely gained some new respect for bands like Thin Lizzy, T-Rex, and Deep Purple. Go ahead, laugh all you want, but this stuff is fun to listen to!