Category: music

SXSW 2019 and streaming music

I’m not paying a lot of attention to SXSW this year, but I’ve run across a few references to it. NPR has a good bit of coverage, which can be found here, along with their Austin 100 playlist. They used to make that available for download as a big file of MP3s, but this year, it’s just out there as a streaming playlist, on Spotify or Apple Music or a couple of other streaming services. I’m a little disappointed by that, but I guess that’s the way things are going lately. Back in 2005, you could download 750 MP3s from SXSW, via BitTorrent (legally).

Also, I think it was called “South by Southwest” back then, and SXSW was just an acronym, but I guess now it’s officially just SXSW? I’m getting too old to keep up with this stuff. Anyway, there’s some good music coming out of that. Today is the last day.

I’m still a holdout on this whole $10/month streaming music thing, but it’s getting harder to stick to my guns on that. Spotify has a new deal where you can get a free Hulu subscription with Spotify for $10/month, though it’s the ad-supported Hulu option, not the ad-free one. And honestly there’s enough stuff in my Netflix and Amazon Prime Video queues to keep me busy for years, so I don’t really need another streaming video option. But it’s tempting.

I’m seeing some interesting things, like this Austin 100 playlist, that are only being made available as Spotify and/or Apple Music playlists lately. It seems like the assumption is that everybody is subscribing to one of these services now.

My own tastes, right now, are leaning more towards stuff that can be found on Bandcamp though, and they’re still going with the old-fashioned “give us money and we give you MP3 files and/or a CD” model. (Though they also let you stream anything you buy from them. And, technically, they let you stream almost anything on their site, even if you don’t buy it.)

I do listen to Amazon Prime Music sometimes, and there’s some good stuff on there, but that’s part of the overall Prime subscription, which I’d probably pay for even without the music. So I guess I can still hold off on giving Spotify (or Apple Music or whatever) ten bucks a month for streaming music.

 

Illegitimi non carborundum

Here’s an oddball digression for a rainy Sunday morning: Somehow or other, the phrase “don’t let the bastards get you down” came into my head this morning. I vaguely remember my dad using it in a letter he wrote me when I was in college. Or possibly seeing it used in a Kurt Vonnegut novel. Anyway, in the old days, this would have been a passing thought, but the internet exists now, so a passing thought can become an hour-long trip down the internet rabbit hole…

I first found a song titled Don’t Let The Bastards Get You Down by Kris Kristofferson. That’s clearly not where I first heard it, but it’s not a bad little song. Then I found a reference to Illegitimi non carborundum, a “mock Latin” phrase that’s meant to mean “Don’t let the bastards grind you down.” I remember seeing that Latin phrase before, probably in a book, though I still can’t find a reference to it in a Vonnegut book. (And reading the Wikipedia page for it, I see that John Boehner is apparently fond of the phrase, so that’s kind of disappointing.)

Searching further, I found a song by The Toasters called Don’t Let the Bastards Grind You Down, which is very different from the aforementioned Kris Kristofferson song, but still a pretty good song, if you like late-90s ska. And also definitely not where I first encountered the phrase.

And after even more searching, I found a reference to Nolite te Bastardes Carborundorum, which is apparently an alternate version of the phrase, used in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. I did read that book in college, so I might remember it from there. And the phrase is used prominently in the season 2 finale of The Handmaid’s Tale TV show, so that explains it’s recent popularity as a tattoo. I haven’t watched that show, and I’m so far behind with TV that I probably won’t be watching it any time soon, but I’m curious about it.

So anyway, that was my internet digression for this morning. I’m not sure I learned anything useful, but it was kind of fun. The sun is up now, so I should probably brush my teeth and find something useful to do.

Happy Thanksgiving

My Thanksgiving day this year is off to a rough start. They play Christmas music on Main St here in Somerville now, normally from noon to 8pm, but something threw off the timer a couple of weeks ago, so we’ve had a few instances of overnight Christmas music recently. And last night, it played all night.

It all started after the big snowstorm a week ago. (You might say that it wasn’t that much of a snowstorm, but as the linked article points out, it was “the biggest one-day November snowfall in 136 years.”) That night, the music didn’t end at 8pm, and kept playing until around midnight. My guess is there was a brief power interruption that screwed up the timer. So that wasn’t too bad. Either the timer stopped it at midnight or someone managed to turn it off.

Then, Saturday night, the music started at midnight, and stopped around 2am. My guess on that is that someone screwed up the AM/PM setting on it. (And I guess someone managed to shut it off after a couple of hours.)

I thought we were over all of that, since it’s been fine the last few days. But last night, again, it started at midnight. And never stopped. The last time this happened was back in 2012. That time, I called the police, but there was nothing they could do about it. And I sent an email to the group that’s responsible for the music, and they apologized, which is nice, but none of that gets me back a lost night of sleep. My best guess as to what happened this time is that somebody tried to change the schedule for Thanksgiving and screwed up the AM/PM setting again.

So I got out of bed at 5am this morning and I’m now eating breakfast and listening to some quiet music by Hugar, just loud enough to drown out the Christmas music. (Which is still playing.) It’s looking to be the coldest Thanksgiving since 1871, according to the NY Times. (It’s 20° right now, with a “feels like” temp of 11°, here in Somerville.) I’ve been trying to talk myself into going into New York today, and the continuing Christmas music assault might be enough to force me out of my apartment, even in 20° weather. I don’t really know what I’d do in NYC today; all the museums are closed. I’d probably go see a few movies, I guess.

I did put earplugs in last night, but they didn’t help much. On one of the previous nights, I also turned on my air cleaner, hoping the white noise would help. (It turns out that the earplugs do a good job of filtering out the air cleaner noise, but don’t help much with the music.)

So now I’m thinking about options for better earplugs, noise cancelling earphones, white noise generators, and stuff like that. Here’s a thread from Hacker News from earlier this week, about brain.fm and similar products/services. I’ve been wondering if I could actually use Max Richter’s eight-hour work Sleep to get through the night. I think I also need to look at some of the stuff in this NY Times article from 2011. Bose makes something called Noise-Masking Sleepbuds that might be good, though they cost $250. That got me thinking about whether or not I could sleep with AirPods in. That led me to a reddit thread; results on that seem to be mixed. (And battery life on the AirPods is only five hours, so they wouldn’t last all night.) I’m not at all sure what will work best. I may go on a bit of an Amazon binge today, ordering a bunch of random earplugs and stuff.

Now, it’s almost 7am, and I’ve moved from Hugar to Relaxation Tape for Solo Space Travel by The National Pool (which is quite good). There’s a lot of good ambient music on Bandcamp, but that’s a subject for another day.

This blog post is probably a bit scattershot, since it’s being written on zero sleep, but writing it has helped me get through breakfast and lower my stress level a bit, so that’s something. I’m hoping the Christmas music will stop at 8am, assuming my theory about the AM/PM screw-up is correct. If that happens, I may just go back to bed. (Though the three cups of coffee I just had might get in the way of that.)

U2 in Newark

I went to see U2 at the Prudential Center in Newark last night. I’ve been a fan of them for a long time, but had never seen them live. It was a little weird, since the friend I was supposed to go with couldn’t make it, so I went by myself. My seat was in the very last row of one of the “nosebleed” sections, basically as far from the stage as you can get. I’m glad I went though. It was a very theatrical show, with a lot of video stuff and big ideas and a loose narrative of sorts. (Maybe a bit of a muddy narrative, but still, points for effort.) Here a link to the set list. Lots of stuff from the new album, and a handful of “greatest hits.” That worked for me: I like the last two albums a lot. And I don’t mind hearing them play the older stuff either.

There’s some stuff in the show that could induce a little eye-rolling, but if you check your cynicism at the door and give them the benefit of the doubt, you can come out of the show feeling pretty good about things. It’s a been a rough week, news-wise, and U2 doesn’t shy away from addressing that in their shows, but it all ends in hope and catharsis, if you let it.

I do feel like this is probably the only time I’m going to see U2. I’m getting old enough that going to a show like this takes a lot out of me. I limited myself to water (no beer), left early so I could catch the 11pm train, and used earplugs, and I’m still feeling a bit messed up today.

Weird Al in Tarrytown

I went to see Weird Al in Tarrytown on Thursday night. This is probably the third or fourth time I’ve seen Weird Al in concert. (I’m not even sure.) Tarrytown would not have been my first choice of venue, but his show at the Apollo was sold out, and he’s only playing relatively small venues on this tour, so it was the closest we could get. (It would have been cool if he’d played the State Theatre in New Brunswick, but no such luck!)

This tour is a little different from Al’s usual. He’s calling it his “ill-advised vanity tour.” He’s playing mostly original songs (not parodies) and he’s just sitting on a stool throughout the show, no funny costumes or sets or anything. Rolling Stone has an interview with him about it. The set list was varied and had a lot of fun stuff in it.

I’m getting too old to drive as far as Tarrytown on a weeknight, so I turned the concert into a two-day vacation, with an overnight stay in Manhattan. I took NJ Transit into NYC on Thursday afternoon and checked into my hotel. I did some random wandering around in NYC, then took a nap in my hotel room, then took the Metro North train to Tarrytown. It was a great show, and everything worked out pretty well. I caught a train back to NYC at around 11:20pm, getting into Grand Central just after midnight. By then, it had started raining, though not as bad as it would get on Friday. I checked out of the hotel Friday morning and went straight home. I had wanted to hang out in Manhattan a bit on Friday, but the rain was getting bad. I’m glad I didn’t stick around, because apparently the rush hour commute home on NJ Transit got VERY bad.

NJ Transit has been getting pretty bad, in general, lately. The trip into the city on Thursday hit a snag, due to a disabled train in the tunnel into Manhattan. That caused a delay of about 30 minutes. That kind of thing is getting to be “the new normal,” it seems. You just have to build an extra hour into your schedule, in case anything happens on the train. I’m hoping that Phil Murphy manages to find some way to spend some money on transportation infrastructure, but I’m not optimistic. He’s at least trying though.

Anyway, this was supposed to be a post about a great Weird Al concert, not a post about how much trouble NJ Transit is in. Weird Al also has a new single out: The Hamilton Polka! I’ve never seen Hamilton, or even heard much of the music from it, but this is a typical Weird Al polka medley. It’s pretty funny, and probably much funnier if you’re familiar with the source material.

 

HomePod reviews

I’ve been reading a bunch of HomePod reviews. Even though I’d already decided not to buy one, I guess I’m still kind of curious about it. Since I bought a Sonos One, I am of course looking to confirm that buying that was the right decision, so I’m paying more attention to negative HomePod reviews than positive ones.

Consumer Reports did some testing, and thinks that Sonos One sounds better. They’re pretty much the only ones though. Every other review thinks HomePod has better sound.

Gizmodo, for what its worth, thinks HomePod is only a little better than Sonos One. And they’ve got issues with the Apple-centric nature of the HomePod. (That complaint is pretty common among the other reviews too.)

I got some use out of my Sonos One over the weekend, since it was a rainy weekend, and I spent a good amount of time sitting in my recliner, reading comics. I was mostly just listening to WQXR, for background music. It works reasonably well for that kind of thing.

Got My Sonos One

I got my Sonos One this week and set it up, so I thought I’d write up a little review. Overall, I like it, but I’m not overwhelmed with it.

The setup experience was pretty bumpy. It’s done through an iPhone app, and it’s probably pretty straightforward if everything works right. For me, though, I couldn’t get it working on my wifi network and had to connect it to my router via an old-fashioned Ethernet cable. The app is pretty determined about trying to get it working on wifi. I wish it would have tried a little less hard, and let me give up and switch to the wired connection earlier. Once I got past that issue, though, it wasn’t bad. (To be clear, the device is on wifi now. Only the setup had to be done wired.) If you’re hooking up third-party services, you may have to do a lot of copying and pasting to log into accounts and authorize everything. That wasn’t too bad for me, since I have 1Password on my phone. If I didn’t have a good password manager on my phone, that part would have been difficult.

After the initial setup was done, I also installed the Mac app for Sonos. That app is a little easier to use than the iOS app, and I wish I could have done the setup with that app instead of the iOS one. (To be fair, maybe I could have, but it didn’t occur to me to try, since the instructions indicated that you should do the setup from your phone.)

As to sound quality, it’s good, but not amazing. I guess it’s pretty impressive for a speaker that size, but I still think my 30-year-old speakers sound better. (Admittedly, there are two of them and they’re much larger than the Sonos One.) I am wondering if the sound would be significantly better if I’d gone for the two-pack and set them up as stereo speakers. (But I’m not curious enough to order a second one to find out.) Last night, I listened to some Christian Tetzlaff, from MP3s that I ripped from a CD, and it sounded pretty good but not perfect. Right now, I’m listening to the same MP3s through my old speakers via Volumio, and I think that sounds better. (I hate to use hi-fi snob words, but it sounds warmer and more natural, I think.)

The general consensus seems to be that the Sonos One has noticeably better sound than the Amazon Echo, but it’s not nearly as good as the HomePod. (The Echo is on sale for $85 right now, and is probably a perfectly good speaker for most people.) I’m fine owning a Sonos One instead of a HomePod. I don’t much like the $350 price on the HomePod or the fact that it’s pretty much locked into Apple’s ecosystem.

Getting back to the Sonos, I like the fact that it works with a wide array of music services. I’ve got my Amazon Music, Bandcamp, Google Play, and Slacker accounts set up on it. I’ve only got the free versions of the Amazon, Google, and Slacker services right now. The Amazon service is useful for all the music they make available to Prime members (and access to anything you’ve bought from them too of course). The Google Play service is useful, since I’ve got their Music Manager installed on my desktop PC, which automatically monitors my iTunes library and makes all of my MP3s available in the cloud. So, with that, I can stream pretty much any music I own. (And I still kind of like Slacker, even though I’m not paying for it anymore, so I don’t get it ad-free now.)

Sonos uses TuneIn to allow you to listen to radio stations on the device. You don’t need to actually set up an account with TuneIn, which is nice. I currently have about a dozen stations set up, including WNYC, WXPN, KCRW, KEXP, and several others. The quality varies; some stations have a pretty solid internet stream and some aren’t so good. Many years ago, I was in the habit of listening to XPN every morning while I was eating breakfast. I stopped doing that when I started having too much trouble picking them up. I’m giving that another try now, via the Sonos.

NTS is interesting, in that they have their own integration with the Sonos. It’s nothing fancy; it just gives you access to NTS 1 and NTS 2. I do listen to those stations quite a bit, so it’s nice to have, even though you can also find NTS 1 & 2 in TuneIn.

There are plenty of other integrated services, including Apple Music and Spotify, so all the “big guns” are covered. All these integrations are the main reason to chose a Sonos over a HomePod, I think.

I’ve also pointed the speaker at the UNC path to my Volumio, and it hasn’t had any problems seeing that as a NAS and playing the MP3s from it. I’m pretty sure AAC files work fine too. (I need to try some FLACs and see if they also work. They should.)

Speaking of the Volumio box, while I do still like it, and will probably still use it on its own occasionally, I think it’s probably going to become mostly just a NAS feeding the Sonos now. The Sonos seems to be better than the Volumio for most stuff. Volumio only integrates with Spotify and not any of the other music services (and I don’t use Spotify). And while Volumio supports streaming radio, I haven’t been able to get many stations to work with it. (All of which is perfectly reasonable for a little open source project running on a Raspberry Pi, of course. I’m not knocking Volumio.)

Sonos One also, of course, comes with Alexa. I honestly haven’t done much with that yet. I’ve been controlling the device mostly through the Mac and iOS apps. I have said “Alexa, play WXPN” to it, and it did indeed play WXPN, so that’s good. And I’ve used it to check the weather. But that’s really not that exciting to me. I’m trying to figure out if there’s anything that’s really worthwhile or interesting to do with Alexa, but haven’t come up with anything yet.

The Sonos apps, for both Mac and iOS, are perfectly workable, but not really that great. It’s easy enough to start playing a radio station, or to find and play an album in my music library, but it’s not as easy as, for instance, iTunes. I’m hoping that they do add AirPlay to the Sonos soon, so I can just route music from iTunes on my Mac to the Sonos. (And I’d also like AirPlay so I can route podcasts from Overcast to the Sonos.)

I guess that, if I’m embracing Sonos, then maybe I’m finally ready to give up on the idea of ever buying a new CD player and going back to listening to my CDs the old-fashioned way. It’s getting increasingly hard to walk into a store and buy a CD these days anyway. According to this article, Best Buy is going to stop selling them entirely, and Target is trying to change their sale terms in a way that might not work well for the music companies, and result in even fewer CDs stocked and sold in their stores. I can still get CDs from Amazon, though, and often for the same price as the MP3s, with free shipping (via Prime) and AutoRip, so I get the MP3s anyway. So I’ll probably keep buying CDs, even if I only ever treat the physical media as a backup for the MP3s.

 

more music organization

Since ordering a Sonos One yesterday, I got to thinking about the state of my music collection. I’ve had a long-running project to rip old CDs and copy MP3s over to my Volumio box, starting back in 2015. I’ve been working my way through stuff, roughly in alphabetical order, with occasional side-trips. The last time I did any major work on that was in September 2017, when I got through to U2. Today, I picked up on that and got the rest of the way through U, then on to V, W, X, Y, and Z. So I’m done with the alphabet at least, though I have a handful of artists I still need to look at separately. (For instance, I have thirteen Chris Whitley CDs and most of them haven’t been ripped yet.) But I felt like I should write a short post to mark the date.

When I get the Sonos, the plan is going to be to use the Volumio as a NAS that the Sonos can access. Hopefully, the Sonos can do that with no problems. If not, there’s other stuff I can try, to make my MP3s accessible to it, though I’m hoping the Volumio works out.

Sonos One

I had, up until today, resisted the urge to spend any money on a “smart speaker” device. The tech is interesting, of course. Ever since ST:TNG, all good nerds have wanted to be able to just yell “tea, Earl Grey, hot” and have a piping hot mug of tea materialize in front of them. So Amazon Echo and other smart speakers are kind of cool. But, in practice, there’s really not that much you can do with them. You can yell “play AC/DC” and, on a good day, “Back in Black” will start playing from the speaker. If you have some home automation stuff set up, you can yell at it to turn your lights on and off, but that never really seemed too compelling to me. I can just as easily flip a light switch.

And, on the speaker side of things, I don’t think an Echo would compete that well with my big old-fashioned speakers, connected to my old-fashioned tuner. I still have my Raspberry Pi Volumio box hooked up to my tuner, and it works reasonably well, for most stuff. There are a few issues though. When I use it as an AirPlay receiver, it stutters occasionally. (I’m not sure if that’s Volumio’s fault or network problems.) And, for some MP3 files, the sound quality is a little off. Also, while it can play streaming radio, it only supports a limited set of stations. (You need to find a specific kind of streaming URL to use, and not all stations support it.)

So when I think about my current setup, there are definitely limitations. I like listening to old-fashioned FM radio, but the particular area I live in is a bit too far from both New York and Philly to pick up stations from either area reliably. I used to be able to pick up WXPN (Philly) and WNYC (New York) reasonably well, but reception has actually gotten worse over the last few years for some reason, so now I can’t pick up much of anything anymore, except for a few local stations. And I have a good CD collection, but no longer have a working CD player. Volumio was supposed to solve that problem, but I’m not entirely satisfied with it.

Anyway, this all leads me into looking into smart speakers. Apple’s HomePod is interesting. All the reviews I’ve seen indicate that it has great sound quality. But it’s $350 for a single speaker, and it doesn’t work with much other than Apple Music. It’s supposed to support AirPlay 2 at some point, and apparently supports the current version of AirPlay now, so I could always stream to it from my iPhone. But I can already do that with Volumio. It might sound better than Volumio, but it’s still $350.

The Amazon Echo is only $100, and the speaker is probably reasonably good, but most reviews I’ve read would lead me to believe that it’s probably not better than my current speakers. It does support a variety of music services and streaming radio stations, but of course it’s likely happiest with Amazon Music.

The Sonos One seems to fit well into a niche that’s somewhere in between the Echo and the HomePod. It’s $200 for one (or $350 for two, right now). The sound quality should be better than the Echo, but not as good as HomePod. (I haven’t actually heard one yet, but it’s possible that it could actually be better than my current setup, though I’m not convinced about that.) And it supports a wide range of sources, so I should be able to listen to WXPN, WNYC, NTS, and a bunch of other radio stations, if I want to. And it supports playing MP3s from a file share, so I should be able to access all of the MP3s that I already have on my Volumio box. It also has Alexa support, so if I want to yell at it, I can, but I don’t have to. (It’s also got an app I can use instead.)

There are some vexing limitations to the Sonos One though. It’s got no analog input, so I can’t pipe my TV sound output through it. And it doesn’t work as a Bluetooth receiver or (current) AirPlay receiver, so I don’t think I can pipe anything through it that isn’t explicitly supported by Sonos. (That’ll change when they add AirPlay 2 support, assuming they actually do that.)

So, anyway, I ordered one this morning. Sigh. I based my decision in part on this comparison at iMore, which definitely favors the HomePod, in terms of sound quality, but which points out some of its limitations. And on this article at recode, which talks about how Sonos intends to compete against the HomePod. I like Sonos’ approach of trying to support as many services as they can. And I read this review of Sonos One from Sound and Vision, which was very positive about the sound quality of the Sonos One. So I’m getting one, and we’ll see how it works. If it’s no good, I guess I can return it. But I’m hoping I’ll like it.