Category: music

Weird Al and Star Trek and other stuff

Fairly soon, I will be heading into NYC for a day of (hopefully) fun. The main purpose of the trip is to see Weird Al at Radio City Music Hall tonight. A secondary purpose is to drop in at the Paley Center and maybe watch a couple of episodes of Star Trek. So, yes, I’m a nerd.

I’ve been working on my migraine problem over the last few weeks. I haven’t actually had a migraine with aura in more than a month, so that’s good. But I’ve been getting (relatively) minor headaches on a somewhat regular basis, and sometimes they’re bad enough and last long enough to be a real nuisance. I’m hoping that I can get through the day today without any problems. But I do have a hotel room booked, so if I get a headache this afternoon, I can always hole up in my hotel room, draw the curtains, and take a nap.

Opera

I recently finished watching all of the Inspector Morse episodes that are available on Netflix, and that’s gotten me off on an opera kick. On the show, Morse is a big fan of opera in general, and Wagner in particular. I’ve never been that interested in opera, and have generally avoided Wagner, as his work seems a bit intimidating at first. But Morse got me curious.

I decided to start with Parsifal and Tristan und Isolde. I was already somewhat familiar with these two, based on having read P. Craig Russell’s adaptations of them, years ago. (Though, now that I’m looking at his opus list, I only see Parsifal. Weird. I could have sworn he did Tristan und Isolde too.) And (for no particular reason) they sounded less intimidating than some of his other operas.

I didn’t want to spend a lot of money, so I initially found copies of them that I could listen to via Amazon Prime Music. That got me started, but the versions I found there didn’t sound that great, so I wanted to actually buy copies of them. That led me down a rabbit whole of searching through Amazon, iTunes, Arkiv Music and various classical/opera web sites to try and figure out which versions of these works to buy. In the end, I settled on buying a $5 performance of Parsifal from iTunes, and a $20 4-CD set of Tristan und Isolde from Amazon. I’m sure there are better versions, but these were affordable and had good reviews.

I’ve been listening to the $5 Parsifal for a couple of days now. I like it a lot, though I don’t know nearly enough about the work to be able to say anything other than “it sounds nice.” The sound quality at some points isn’t great, but I’m not sure if that’s the recording or my crappy earbuds. (I need to listen to it through better headphones or speakers at some point.)

I ripped the Tristan und Isolde CDs last night, but haven’t listened to them yet. The metadata that iTunes pulled in for the CDs is really scattershot, so I want to clean that up, which led me down another rabbit hole, messing around with tools like MusicBrainz Picard and stuff like that. The process of cleaning up the metadata and copying the files over to my Volumio box is going to take a while, so I may not even get around to listening to it until the weekend.

I really need to find video versions of these operas, with subtitles, that I can sit down and watch, so I can actually learn the stories, and get a clue as to what all the yelling (sorry, singing) is about. I couldn’t find any interesting opera material at all on Netflix, though maybe I’m not doing a good job of searching. I found a version of Tristan und Isolde on Amazon Prime Video, but with no subtitles, apparently. And there’s a good bit of opera material on YouTube, though I’m sure some of that is unauthorized.

The Metropolitan Opera has its own streaming service, but it’s not cheap: $15 per month. I can’t imagine watching enough opera to justify that. Medici.tv looks interesting too, but is also expensive ($13/month). So I don’t think I’m going to sign up for either of those. I’ll just stick with what I can get through PBS and other free options for now.

I’m not really sure how long this opera kick is going to last, but I’m finding myself somewhat interested in the new season at the Metropolitan Opera. They’re doing Tristan und Isolde later this month, as their first opera of the season. I’ve never been to an opera, and I’m not getting any younger, so maybe that would be a good thing to try, at least once. On the other hand, sitting still for four hours while people yell (sorry, sing) in German is a lot to ask.

playing with Volumio and organizing my music

Without really intending to, I would up spending a bunch of time today organizing my music collection and copying stuff over to my little Volumio box. I set up Volumio about a year ago, and still haven’t quite finished copying music over to it. But I’m now all the way through to the letter “P”, so that’s pretty good. I don’t use the thing too often, but I use it enough to justify the time I spent setting it up, I think.

My adventures today started out with a desire to listen to the Gorillaz album Plastic Beach last night. I was pretty sure I had it on CD, but I couldn’t find it anywhere, nor did I have it ripped on my Mac or PC. After spending too much time looking around for it this morning, I decided to just buy a new copy of the CD. So I wouldn’t have two copies of exactly the same thing, I bought a used copy of the “experience edition” version on eBay, which should include a bonus DVD. (I’m really not sure if I ever actually had a copy, but I think I did.)

That got me interested in getting back to organizing my MP3s and CDs a bit more, and copying more stuff over to the Volumio box. I got through the letters “O” and “P” today. There’s wasn’t much under “O”, but there was a lot under “P”, including Paul McCartney, Pink Floyd, and Phish!

My McCartney collection was a little disorganized, so I tried to fix that up. I found that I had exactly one song in there that was a DRM’d iTunes file. I thought I had replaced all of those with the DRM-free versions quite some time ago, but I guess I missed this one somehow. Normally, this wouldn’t bug me at all, since I can listen to it on my Mac, PC, and iPhone, no problem. But Volumio, of course, can’t handle DRM’d files. There’s supposed to be a way now to delete and re-download a track in iTunes, in such a way that you replace the DRM’d file with a DRM-free version. But I couldn’t get that to work. I just kept getting the same DRM’d file. I thought about just buying a new MP3 copy of the song from Amazon for $1.29, but decided to just live with it for now. I get the feeling that it’s going to bug me enough that I’ll eventually do something about it, though I’m not sure what.

And, when I got to Phish, I remembered that I had a copy of the Live Phish 01 two-CD set that got ruined by spending too much time in the trunk of my car. The “Live Phish” series of CDs were packaged in a weird way; the CDs are in a folded plastic page that can be inserted in a binder. It’s kind of nifty, but if you leave it in the heat for too long, the plastic melts a bit and adheres to the CDs, rendering them useless. And I’d never ripped those CDs. So, today, I decided to just go ahead and buy the FLACs for that concert from LivePhish.com. So now I have those CDs back, but in FLAC form. And FLACs play fine through Volumio, so that’s good. (I’m listening to it right now, and it sounds nice.) If I want to listen to it in my car, though, I need to figure out how to press FLACs to CD, or convert them to MP3 or something like that. It’s been a while since I was on a FLAC kick. I did a little research on that, to refresh my memory, but decided that I didn’t want to go too far down that particular rabbit hole today. Maybe tomorrow!

Sir Paul – NY Times

Last weekend’s Paul McCartney concert went well. The commute into (and out of) MetLife Stadium via NJ Transit was a bit of a hassle, but it all worked out. (I stayed in NYC overnight, rather than try to get all the way back home, so that helped.) The show was about three hours long. The set list wasn’t much or a surprise, but there were a few oddball songs thrown in there for weirdos like me who want to hear more than just the greatest hits.

Here’s an article about the show, from the NY Times, with a short McCartney interview.

When you’re an artist who started releasing albums in the 1960s and never stopped, you face a decision when going on tour: How do you select a set list?

Source: Sir Paul on Fans, the Beatles and Himself – The New York Times

Paul McCartney

I’m going to go see Paul McCartney tomorrow night at MetLife Stadium, with a friend. This will be, I think, the fourth time I’ve seen him live. I just went hunting through my blog, email, and Evernote to figure out all the times I’ve seen him previously.

(I might be missing one, but I think that’s it.) I imagine this will probably be the last time I see him live. (Though I probably would have said that about the 2011 show too.) He’s always full of energy and always puts on a great show.

Mixtapes

I Made You A Mixtape — An interesting article by Federico Viticci about the evolution of the ways in which he acquires and listens to music. This is a subject I also think about a lot (probably too much).

I’ve seen Spotify’s Discover Weekly playlist mentioned a few times recently, including in Federico’s article. I’m getting to the point where I’ve almost convinced myself to stop paying for Slacker and switch to Spotify, but I’m not quite there yet.

I miss mix tapes and mix CDs. In particular, I miss Joshua Benton’s old “CD Mix of the Month Club”. There was something about getting a CD in the mail from a complete stranger every month that was pretty cool. (And, likewise, in creating a CD to send off to a complete stranger.)

One of my friends from college used to send out a daily “track of the day” email to a small group. (He’d send out an email with an MP3 file attached.) That was a lot of fun too. He had pretty eclectic taste, and would send out some really interesting stuff.

I’ve been enjoying the Insomnia Radio Daily Dose podcast feed since I decided to subscribe to it a couple of months ago. That’s the closest thing to an old-fashioned mixtape for me right now. Nearly all of the music on the feed is from artists I’ve never heard of, and nearly all of it is good.

scary iTunes bugs

This week, I’ve been following the unfolding saga of the guy who says that iTunes ate his music. There was a lot of FUD being tossed around after his initial blog post. Then there was a good follow-up on iMore, and a second follow-up that probably nailed the issue on the head. I’m still pretty leery of Apple Music, and I’m careful about backing up my iTunes library. (Maybe not as careful as I should be, though.)

For streaming music, I’m a big fan of Slacker Radio, and I subscribe to their $4/month “plus” plan, which allows me to listen offline, with no commercials. Slacker doesn’t seem to get much attention in the media, with most coverage concentrating on Spotify, Apple Music, and maybe Pandora and Tidal. But I don’t think there’s any service as good as Slacker for the price.

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.)