Digital Alterity

Yesterday, I examined a means of using iTunes smart playlists with your iPod to create a fresh new mix of music that allowed for a fresh stream of new music blended with old standby favorites. However, what do you do when you have a relatively small iPod or an iPod Mini that doesn’t have room for all the songs in your music collection? Are you damned to either trust iTunes to randomly select your music or manage it yourself manually? Not a chance. iTunes smart playlists can again save the day by providing you an enjoyable listening experience—all with relatively little work.

Allyson had the mixed fortune to inherit my old 10 GB iPod when I upgraded to a spiffy third-generation 40 GB model. On one hand, she got a fully functional iPod that had enough space to play over a week of music continuously. On the other hand, the fact that we own over 350 CDs means that we have more music than she can currently hold on the iPod—the main reason why I wanted to purchase a new iPod in the first place. The strategies outlined in this article are the strategies I eventually implemented in Allyson’s iTunes profile to help her get the most out of her smaller iPod.

When compared with me, Allyson has some key differences with regard to her interaction with iTunes that are important to note. For starters, Allyson isn’t nearly as anal about rating her songs in iTunes. Rating over four thousand songs is a hefty undertaking when you’re starting with nothing—a fact which is further complicated by the fact that she depends on my Powerbook to sync her iPod and lacks the spiffy on-the-go rating that the third-generation and later iPods offer. As a result, the playlists on her iPod needed to account for the fact that she didn’t have a lot of ratings while still providing her with the tools to find and rate unrated songs.

Essentially, we’re going to manage Allyson’s music using a series of three base playlists. We’re also going to create an Unrated smart playlist that accounts for just the music she currently has on her iPod so that she can find unrated tunes when the bug strikes her to start rating music.

Must Haves Playlist

There are certain albums/songs that you just can’t live without. If you’re a huge Puffy Amiyumi fan, you want to make sure that you’ve always got your copy of An Illustrated History handy for those times when you need an afternoon pick-me-up. It’s important that we account for these songs when considering a small iPod. One of the quickest ways to become irritated with your smaller iPod is to find yourself missing your favorite music. Since we don’t have a whole lot of ratings, we also don’t have a programmatic way to draw in those important songs automatically.

To accommodate that, we’re going to create a normal playlist called simply “Must Haves”. In this playlist, you’ll drop all of the albums, songs, and artists that you just can’t live without on a daily basis. Just drag and drop your required songs onto the playlist and let it keep track of them for you. Once you’ve put all of your necessary songs into the playlist, notice the file size of the songs on your playlist by looking at the bottom of your iTunes window. You might want to write this value down.

Top 50 Most Played Playlist

In the absence of ratings, Play Count is a handy criterion to watch for. After all, if you’re listening to songs a fair bit, it tends to indicate that at the very least you don’t mind listening to them. In that vein, let’s tweak the included the Top 25 Most Played smart playlist to make it a little deeper.

Enter the following into a new iTunes smart playlist. We aren’t concerned with any criteria, so de-select the “Match the following condition” check box. Limit the playlist to 50 songs selected by most often played. This gives us a list of the songs you’ve listened to most often.

Random Selection Playlist

Now that we’ve grabbed our got-to-have songs paired with the songs that we listen to most frequently, we need to fill up the rest of the iPod with music. We’re going to use a smart playlist to accomplish this in an intelligent manner.

Enter the following criteria into a new iTunes playlist: Playlist is not Must Haves, Playlist is not Top 50 Most Played, My Rating is not 1, and My Rating is not 2. Limit the playlist by file size selected by random. How big should you make the file size? Well, you’ll need to account for the size of your iPod and the amount of music you have on your Must Haves list. In Allyson’s case, she has nearly 4 GB of music that she wants to have always at her disposal. Given that her iPod holds just over 9 GB when formatted, I set the limit on her Random Selection playlist to 5 GB. Mainly you’re interested in setting the highest value that still allows you to sync your iPod.

You’ll notice that the list excludes songs rated 1 or 2. This means that if you find a song on your iPod that you don’t want to hear on your space-limited iPod ever again, just rate the song with a one- or two-star rating, and iTunes will dutifully keep it off for you. By excluding music already on our other two playlists, we can ensure that we’re maximizing the amount of different music on the iPod after syncing.

Bringing It All Together

Our next task is to create a convenient summary playlist that contains all of the music we’ll have on our iPod after each sync. Smart playlists make it as simple as creating a smart playlist that brings in the other playlists.

Enter the following criteria into a new iTunes smart playlist: Playlist is Must Haves, Playlist is Top 50 Most Played, and Playlist is Random Selection. Make sure that the option at the top of the dialog box is set to “Match any of the following conditions” and that the live updating option is set before confirming. Name the playlist something understandable like “iPod Sample Set”.

Now, we’re going to use that iPod Sample Set playlist for any other smart playlists we might want on the iPod. As you rate more music, you can start using some of the playlists from the previous article. Just make sure that you add the criterion “Playlist is iPod Sample Set” to limit your selections to just the music currently on your iPod. Initially, though, we’re going to create an Unrated smart playlist that collects all the songs currently on the iPod which haven’t been rated yet.

Enter the following criteria into a new iTunes smart playlist: Playlist is iPod Sample Set and My Rating is [blank]. Make sure that the playlist is live updating before confirming.

Now that we have a playlist to help us keep track of unrated songs, we can easily listen to a series of unrated songs for easy rating. It’s important to note that the playlists as designed have a slight bias toward eliminating negative songs. If you want to quickly make the biggest difference in the quality of the music on your iPod while using these playlists as described, isolate and negatively rate songs that you have no desire to listen to.

Using these and similar techniques, you can easily tame your music collection and add dramatically to the overall utility of your iPod Mini or smaller iPod. You don’t have to break the bank to have a kick ass portable music player if you know how to use iTunes smart playlists to your advantage.

Apple’s iPod has changed the way that thousands of people relate to their music collections. Gone are the days when you could have, at most, a handful of your CDs for your listening pleasure when outside of your home. No, these days, even if you have over 500 full-length albums, you can easily store all of them in a device that lives happily in your pocket—with space left over for backup of your favorite files as well. Such a change in scope begs a corresponding change in methods. Don’t content yourself with only listening to entire albums or the iPod’s built-in hit-or-miss shuffle. Using smart playlists, you can seize control of your music collection and carry your own private radio station in your pocket that only plays the songs you care about.

Initial Setup

The first step in taking control of your music collection using the techniques outlined in this article is to rate all your music. Depending on your CD collection, you might be looking at a monumental task. In that vein, it might help to create a simple smart playlist that keeps track of all your songs that haven’t been rated. Just create a new playlist by going to File, “New Smart Playlist…” and set the lone condition “My Rating is [blank]”. Make sure the playlist is set for live updating before you confirm your selection. This means that as you rate your songs, they will drop off of your unrated playlist, providing you with a convenient list of all the songs you have yet to rate. As a point of advice, if you’re familiar with an album that you’re ripping into iTunes, go ahead and rate the songs as you import the music into iTunes. Doing so breaks the task into manageable chunks.

If you have a third-generation iPod (row of four buttons above the scroll wheel) or later, you can rate songs directly from your iPod, freeing you from being chained to sitting in front of your computer for this task. Just press the middle selection button while listening to a song. The first time you press this button, you’ll turn the progress bar into a selector bar that allows you to “fast forward” or “rewind” through a track. If you press the selection button a second time, however, you’ll gain access to the rating menu. Just select the star rating you’d like to assign using the scroll wheel and confirm with the middle selection button. When you sync up your iPod, it will automatically move the ratings back into iTunes for you. If you don’t have a third- or fourth-generation iPod, it might help to have a small pad of paper and pen in one of your pockets. That way you can jot down ratings while you’re out of the house and just enter the ratings into iTunes when you return to your computer.

What ratings should you assign? Well, that’s entirely up to you. It’s important that you have a method to the madness though because otherwise your ratings won’t have a standard meaning for you to depend on. I find that the following system works well for me:

1 star. I hate this song. I never want to hear it ever.

2 stars. I don’t like this song. I wouldn’t be upset if I never heard it.

3 stars. I don’t really have a strong opinion about this song. In fact, it’s just kind of there. I don’t mind hearing it really, but likewise, I’m not excited by the idea of having it randomly popping into my playlists all the time either.

4 stars. I like this song. I enjoy hearing it most of the time. This is a song that I want to appear randomly in my playlists.

5 stars. I love this song. I never mind hearing it. The song may have intense personal significance to me. I can rely on this song and other songs with this rating to be songs that I’ll be thrilled to listen to.

The playlists you’ll see in this article assume that you’ll be using similar criteria for your ratings, but you can tweak any of them to reflect your personal rating style as well. The most important tip is to make sure there’s some degree of consistency in your ratings. You might understand that you rated the entire Tool catalog a four because you “like Tool”, but the computer won’t know that you didn’t really want to listen to “(-) Ions”. Take each track on its own merits and assign ratings based on your own personal preferences. You don’t have to impress anyone here. It’s your music collection. Make the ratings you want.

The Big Picture

It’s helpful to have a 10,000-foot overview of how this playlist system is going to work. Essentially what we’re doing is creating a number of “feeder” component playlists which will help catch songs that meet varying criteria then we’ll mesh all of those songs together with a master playlist using iTunes 4.2’s playlist criteria.

The reason why we go through this bother is because iTunes doesn’t at present have the capability to nest different logical criteria. You have the option of having it meet all of the given criteria or any number of the given criteria. The ability to nest playlists using the playlist criteria, however, gives us the full range of logical possibilities.

New and Hot Feeder Playlist

If you’re at all like me, when you get a new CD, you’d like to listen to it more frequently than some of the CDs that you purchased five or six years ago. There’s a couple of ways that you can you go about creating the New and Hot smart playlist. If you’d like to have a smart playlist that only treats your music as new for a specific period of time, then you’ll want to use our first option. If you’d rather just have your new-and-hot bias directed toward the 100 most recent songs in your collection, then option two is probably more to your liking.

Option 1. Enter the following criteria into a new smart playlist in iTunes: My rating is in the range of 4 or 5, Last Played is not in the last 1 days, Genre is not Books and Spoken, and Date Added is in the last 2 weeks (or whatever interval fits your CD buying habits). Ensure that the playlist is live updating and confirm your selection.

Option 2. Enter the following criteria into a new smart playlist in iTunes: My rating is in the range of 4 or 5, Last Played is not in the last 1 days, and Genre is not Books and Spoken. Limit the playlist to 100 or 200 songs selected by most recently added. Ensure that the playlist is live updating and confirm your selections.

Essentially, iTunes looks through your music library and gives you all of your recent songs that you either like or love. The stipulation that the music hasn’t been played in the last day makes sure that the songs get removed from your playlist once you’ve listened to them. This becomes important to your final master playlist.

Random Favorites Feeder Playlist

This playlist is the heart of your master mix playlist. It supplies a constant stream of music that you like but haven’t listened to recently. Here’s how it works:

Enter the following criteria into a new smart playlist in iTunes: My rating is in the range 4 or 5, Last Played is not in the last 3 days, and Genre is not Books and Spoken. Limit the playlist to eight hours (or whatever value seems reasonable for your music collection) selected by random. Ensure that the playlist is live updating and confirm your selection.

This playlist served as my primary musical outlet for quite some time by itself. It will always feed you music that you want to hear but haven’t listened to in at least three days. The songs drop off of your playlist as you listen to them but get replaced by other favorites from your library.

Absolute Favorites Feeder Playlist

You’ve presumably rated your songs with the highest rating for a reason. A rating of five stars signifies that a song is part of the upper echelon of your library and, as such, is deserving of special attention in your musical choices. The playlist itself is rather simple.

Enter the following criterion into a new smart playlist in iTunes: My rating is 5. Limit to 25 songs selected by least recently played. Ensure that the playlist is live updating and confirm your selection.

This playlist serves a couple of very important roles. Firstly, it makes certain that your twenty-five least recently played songs with the highest rating will get special listening consideration in your final master playlist. Secondly, it serves as an oversight list for your review. If you notice a song that you haven’t listened to for six months and you find that you still don’t have a particular desire to listen to it, you might want to consider bumping that song down from a five-star rating.

Heavy Rotation Feeder Playlist

Ever find a song while looking through your music collection that you just don’t hear often enough for your liking? Maybe you feel that the song is underplayed (and therefore poorly represented on your Top 25 Most Played list, which is delivered with iTunes). Maybe you’d just like to give a few songs an extra bit of weighting in the final equation. Sure “Ten Minutes” by The Get Up Kids is only rated a four in your collection, but you just don’t hear it often enough for your liking. The key to such arbitrary factors is to have a dedicated playlist for just that sort of thing.

Create a new regular playlist in iTunes and name it something like “Special Consideration” or “Underplayed”. Into this playlist, drag and drop any song that you encounter in your library which you want to give just a little bit more weight in the final equation. Now, enter the following criteria into a new smart playlist: Playlist is the regular playlist you just created and Last Played is not in the last 1 days. Ensure that the playlist is live updating and confirm your selection. Name the playlist Heavy Rotation (or anything else that you prefer).

Why the intermediary smart playlist? In my initial setup, I just used the raw regular playlist as a feeder for my master playlist, but I noticed a small bug. Normally songs would drop off my master playlist as they were listened to, but songs which were on my Heavy Rotation playlist simply stayed right where they were. This messed up the random aspect of the mix list, so I added the consideration about Last Played. Honestly, I wish I could set it to “is not in the last 1 hour”, but iTunes has days as the unit of finest temporal granularity.

Tying It All Together

Now that we’ve got all of our feeder playlists in place, it’s time to collect them all into a master unified playlist that will supply us with many pleasant tunes over the next several months. It’s as easy as creating a new smart playlist.

Enter the following criteria into a new iTunes smart playlist: Playlist is Heavy Rotation, Playlist is Absolute Favorites, Playlist is New and Hot, and Playlist is Random Favorites. Limit this list to however much music you’d like to listen to at any one time selected by random and ensure that the playlist is live updating. It’s also imperative that you change the drop-down list at the top of the dialog box to read “Match any of the following conditions”. Otherwise you’ll pull in very few (if any) songs.

Note that you can tweak the overall balance of music by altering the size of the various playlists. Getting too many random filler songs? Scale back Random Favorites to a smaller size. Want to listen to more of your recently added songs? Fiddle with New and Hot. You’re not going to permanently break anything by playing around. Experiment freely, content in the knowledge that you can always recreate the playlist you had initially using this ever-present article as a guide.

As you’ve undoubtedly caught on if you’ve read this column for any length of time, I am highly annoyed by a great number of small things. In fact, I’m so annoyed that actually write ChangeLog entries about the thing that annoyed me rather than just thinking, “Huh…that’s really annoying,” and going on with my life. Today’s object of annoyance? The damned stickers they put all over every CD and DVD that I buy.

You see, it’s not enough to merely shrinkwrap the plastic case that something comes with. Heavens no! They also have to put little stickers that weld the case shut—as many as three on some DVDs that I’ve bought. I deeply resent having to remove those stickers from a product that I paid for. Sometimes the sticker has such strong glue that it even leaves the surface of the case sticky in some spots.

I hope that there is a Hell. I hope that the concept of a place of eternal burning torment actually exists just so that I can rest content in the knowledge that the asshole who thought, “Stickers sealing media cases shut! Great idea!” will have a place of punishment that fits the nature of his heinous transgression.

I absolutely love my Sennheiser cans. In terms of sound quality, they are the best headphones I have ever had on my ears. In fact, if they could magically have a subwoofer, they would be even better than the 4.1 speaker system I have setup on my desk. Unfortunately, they are heavy, feel bulky as all hell, and have a cord long enough to let me walk comfortably around my cube at work without even paying attention to it. That makes using them with my iPod while walking around a bit of a challenge.

Today, I went to Best Buy and got a pair of Sony’s MDR-EX51LP in-ear buds. These headphones are a little different from your standard ear buds in that they go completely in your ear and form a seal with these comfortable little silicon/rubber pads. When I first tried them out in the car on the way home(1), I wasn’t all that impressed and felt that the sound was way too tinny and flat. I knew from reading about in-ear phones on the net that you’re supposed to put them all the way in your ear, but apparently I wasn’t getting it right.

After Allyson went to work, I finally managed to get them right, and the sound is great. The bass response way more than I expected without being muddy. They do block almost all outside noise out as well. So anyway, I can’t sing these little buds praises enough. If you’re buying an iPod to use while walking around, get a pair of these. And get a decent set of Sennheiser cans for your desk at work!

Footnotes

1. Don’t worry. Allyson was driving.

I’ve been lucky enough to associate with some rather musically interesting folks in my life. Just when I find myself getting bored with mass market popular music, I tend to have a friend like Tyson Platt or Tim Fitzpatrick who introduces me to a whole new world of bands that otherwise wouldn’t have even registered on my radar. If you’re also getting bored with the radio and MTV as a conduit for fresh new sounds, then you might find something in this article that scratches your particular musical itch.

Puffy AmiYumi. It is quite simply impossible to listen to an entire album of Puffy AmiYumi’s fun blend of energetic and genki J-Pop and still be in a down mood. Puffy liberally borrows sounds from all sorts of pop bands, leaving you with the sense that you’ve heard one of their songs before. Recommended for…anyone who has ever hummed along with the musical intro to an anime.

Atom and His Package. Words cannot convey the atmosphere of an Atom and His Package album. Atom used to play “traditional” punk rock. The package portion of the duo is Atom’s affectionate moniker for his synthesizer. The melding of the two makes for some of the most fun synth-punk songs that you’ll ever hear. Recommended for…folks who dig They Might Be Giants.

The Mountain Goats. I would easily put John Darnielle, song writer and usually lone musician of The Mountain Goats, in the same level of songwriting competence as Robert Smith from The Cure. At times, his lyrics will quite literally give you shivers and bring wells of tears to your eyes as you listen to his albums quietly in your room. It’s not just the lyrics themselves, however, that will permanently wed your heart to Darnielle’s haunting music. The sublime imperfection and raw emotion of Darnielle’s voice just sells every one of the intelligent and heart-breaking lyrics. Recommended for…anyone who wants hear a true musician, ride an emotional rollercoaster, run away from your life to start again, or any combination thereof.

Neutral Milk Hotel. After introducing me to The Mountain Goats, my friend and former co-worker Tim Fitzpatrick gave me a wonderful mix tape that included a couple of songs from Neutral Milk Hotel’s In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, and I was just blown away. The emotion behind Neutral Milk Hotel’s sort-of-folk offerings will just absolutely command you to listen. Recommended for…someone who enjoys the sound of well-implemented acoustic guitar and/or anyone who heard and loved the Mountain Goats.

Meg Lee Chin. I’m trying to resist the all-too-tempting urge to draw the Garbage/Shirely Manson comparison. Meg Lee Chin’s songs are likewise a wonderful blending of electronic beats/sounds, distorted guitar, and a sweet-and-sour female vocal lead. Beyond all that, her records are just plain solid, and I find myself using her as a default choice when trying to decide what to listen to on my iPod. Recommended for…Garbage fans and anyone who appreciates electronic rock.

The Crüxshadows. Goth music is the last non-theatrical refuge for the pretty voiced male singer. Rogue, lead singer of The Crüxshadows, doesn’t disappoint in this regard, with a range that makes me ashamed that I ever make an attempt to sing. This goth outfit produces excellent records that are musically and lyrically interesting, incorporating a fusion of sounds ranging from 80’s underground pop to an almost Eastern or Celtic sound. They make violins gently weep. They make hearts break with soft tremulous vocals, and they make you want to get off your ass and dance. Recommended for…anyone who has enjoyed Bauhaus or The Cure.

CD shopping in a traditional brick-and-mortar store is usually a very frustrating experience for me. My music tastes are so indie label that I can rarely find anything I’m looking for at Best Buy, Borders, or any of the mass market purveyors of media. Occasionally though I find a gem that I never expected to find in a store.

Something today reminded me of a mix tape my friend and former co-worker Tim Fitzpatrick made for me. I ended up writing Neutral Milk Hotel on my hand in an attempt to remember to put it on my Amazon wishlist. While at Borders buying the latest three Onizuka manga(1), I decided to look for anything by Neutral Milk Hotel. I did this mainly as an exercise in futility so that I’d have a story to tell Allyson, a story that would illustrate how deserving of a chocolate chip cookie I am for being too punk rock to buy my music in the store.

But there it was…In the Aeroplane Over The Sea, the exact album I was looking for. I immediately grabbed it and decided to root around in the music section looking for other unexpected booty. By the time I had left, I had also picked up Indestructible Object, They Might Be Giant’s newest EP, as well as Hair: Debatable, a live collection by Atom and His Package. I’m so stoked with my purchases. I think they made my penis bigger!

Oh, I’m also bleaching my hair blonde. I’ve never dyed by hair before.

Footnotes

1. I realized today that I’ve spent one-hundred seventy dollars pre-tax on just the Onizuka series, and it staggered me a little.

I’m on my way out the door to eat breakfast with my parents soon, but I wanted to take a moment to post a couple of pieces of music before I left.

“Rhythms of Mass Destruction” (Electronic/Dance, 2:40)

I made this little ditty in GarageBand nearly a month ago. I just haven’t gotten around to posting it. It’s actually something of a mini-song. I only post it for posterity.

Last night, however, I made this trance song:

“28″ (Electronica/Dance, 5:54)

I’m extremely pleased with how “28″ came out. I posted it on the Friday Night Roll Call over at Apple Addict and got pretty postive feedback on it. Both songs are released under the Creative Commons attribution license. Use them for anything you want as long as you credit me as the creator of the work.

With regard to my grad school pondering my last ChangeLog entry, I sent an email to Mr. Bowers over in CISE, asking how I should proceed to try and get readmitted. It was past normal working hours when I sent it, so hopefully I’ll hear something back from him early next week.

Allyson and I went to the Apple Store in Tampa yesterday to drop off my poor malfunctioning iBook. This gave me an opportunity to compare the relative advantages and disadvantages of the 15-inch Aluminum Powerbook and the Dual 1.8 GHz Power Mac G5. As a test, I had iTunes convert one of its songs to AAC format. Using the same song on each different model of computer, I noticed the following top speeds:

Powerbook 15-inch (1.25 GHz G4/512MB of RAM): 13.5x
Power Mac (Dual 1.8 GHz G5/512MB of RAM): 38.0x
Power Mac (Dual 2.0 GHz G5/512MB of RAM): 39.0x

If I were going on pure speed, then I would obviously be getting the G5, but I’m still not so sure. I’m sort of leaning toward the Powerbook at the moment because I’m using ranger, my old 14-inch iBook, and really digging the increased screen size. Nothing is certain though.

I also got to play with GarageBand. I fell in love with it to the point that I couldn’t leave the mall without buying the latest version iLife so that I could have it. Upon arriving at home for the evening, I sat down and started trying to make some electronic music. I’m really happy with the end result, which is kind of a cross between trance, goth, and Final Fantasy. I think that Lestat would be proud.

I’ve called it “Savage Nocturne (End of Days)”. Feel free to download and listen to it. Let me know what you think too because I’m a vain creature. I’ll probably post more stuff in the coming weeks because the software is just that much fun to play with.

One of the little things that you might not now about me is that I’m an avid amateur musician. I got started with music back when I took six months of piano lessons—abruptly ended by the accident that left me with a severed left thumb. I learned to play trumpet in the school band back in middle school and held the first chair position right up until I got tired of the school band and decided to just sit around playing improv jazz and blues all by myself. When Nirvana and Pearl Jam hit the music scene, I became obsessed with rock—an obsession that morphed into a fascination with punk rock once my good friend Tyson Platt exposed me to Crass and some of the other great British punk bands. I taught myself to play the guitar using an old acoustic guitar that my dad found me, bought a crappy electric guitar from one of my friends for twenty-five bucks, and got an absolutely killer Marshall amp for Christmas.

I have written my own songs for years. Though fascinated by music ranging from punk to goth to Johnny Cash, my songs tend to sound rather like folk rock. This is probably has more than a little to do with the fact that I only really play music on my acoustic guitar these days since I don’t think that my neighbors would take to kindly to me firing up my amp and ramping up the distortion.

I’ve also been fascinated by electronic music for a while, and even went so far as to look around at different music creation packages to see what I could buy for my Mac to help me make interesting techno, trance, and hard goth. I was disappointed to see that, while the Windows platform had a series of Acid boxed sets for around a hundred bucks, the Mac platform had no real entry-level music creation software that easily accomplished loops, live recording, and MIDI.

Watching Steve Jobs’ MacWorld keynote today, I was happy to see Apple making the product that I’ve been searching for. GarageBand is the audio/recording killer application that I’ve been searching for over the past year. Better yet, it’s going to be bundled with every Mac that Apple sells after it’s released. Even better, Apple is going to sell an add-on—the GarageBand Jam Pack—that includes even more loops, instruments, and effects.

To top it all off, I have a Christmas gift certificate to the Apple Store for seventy dollars. I need this software.

I have had a little idea in my head for a while that I would try to record a song every week for free download on Bactroid.net just for the love of making music. I even tried using iMovie to mix together some acoustic tracks using my iBook’s built-in mic with woefully tragic results. I’m excited about GarageBand because, at long last, I see the tools I’ve needed to accomplish this exciting musical goal. I’m a guitarist and songwriter. I have no rhythm section. There’s no bassist or drummer in my upstairs office, and I honestly have very little desire to start a band. GarageBand will give me the tools to finally assemble my musical ideas to share with anyone and everyone without running up a world of credit card debt just to get started.

This is just the sort of thing that makes me excited to be using a Mac. Even though I know that Apple is really just an evil corporation, I also can’t help feeling that an evil corporation that provides me with the suite of tools necessary to help bring my creative ideas to fruition can’t be all that bad. I can’t wait to give GarageBand a try.

Inspired by an email my friend Jason sent me about his favorite albums of the year, I started thinking about the albums that I listened to this year that I simply couldn’t have lived without. While I did purchase all of these albums this year, not all of them were released this year. Of course, that’s just indicative of how I buy music. I’m usually more intent on discovering new bands that I might have missed than picking up the newest record by a band that I know I like. I buy music in streaks, becoming obsessed with an artist and picking up several of their albums in only a couple of weeks. Judging myself solely against other people’s favorite bands/albums, I apparently have screwy taste. If you’re in the mood for something different, something on this list might find a home in your CD player/iPod.

I have intentionally avoided a numbered list because I’m not prepared to rank these records. I enjoyed all of them pretty equally.

Wishfire by The Crüxshadows. I first heard The Crüxshadows a couple of years ago when my friend Leah got back from Dragon Con in Atlanta. She told me that she went to a show from this goth band that someone who was with her wanted to see and actually had a good time(1). I next heard of The Crüxshadows when we went to Dragon Con to see Leah that next year. Allyson went to get change for a twenty so that we could park our car and ended up getting change from the booth that the band had set up just inside the hotel. I paid an ungodly nineteen bucks for Wishfire primarily because I didn’t want wait for it to be shipped after buying online. For the rest of the year, I’ve been listening to the album several times per week. Crüxshadows never fails to make we want to dance.

Heathen by David Bowie. I initially bought this record because I became obsessed with the song “Slow Burn” after watching a video for it online. I also just absolutely loved the cover. The whole album was pretty solid and was easily worth the cost if only for the cover of The Pixies’ “Cactus”. David Bowie has an absolutely beautiful voice, and this record is easily up to the standards that he has set through the years.

All Hail West Texas by The Mountain Goats. The Mountain Goats consists of just one guy, an acoustic guitar, and occasionally a keyboard. The guitar is fairly decent, but what really makes his music fabulous is his wonderful (often narrative) lyrics. The lyrics on this record are easily on par with the work of Robert Smith(2), and there are times when you’re listening to his songs that you just literally get chills. If you’re not listening to The Mountain Goats, you really should be.

An Illustrated History by Puffy AmiYumi. Not all music has to be serious, earth-shattering, and lyrically intense. Puffy AmiYumi is a J-Pop duo who I originally heard on an online anime radio station. Allyson bought me this record as a late anniversary present, and I we listened to it on repeat for about a month. The only way to describe Puffy’s music is 元気 (”genki”), which means something along the lines of upbeat/peppy/full of energy. If you’re a fan of bands like They Might Be Giants and Cub, then you might also dig listening to Puffy. Most of their songs are in Japanese, but a healthy dose of them are totally in English.

Classic Cash by Johnny Cash. This is actually a collection of Johnny Cash’s big singles and hits that I bought to get a decent portion of his library without having to spend several hundred bucks. Johnny Cash is the ultimate bad ass. “Folsom Prison Blues” is one of the best songs ever written. I love the way that Cash melds street sense, folk/hillbilly, and old fashioned rock and roll into a package that could kick you around any day of the week. If you’ve avoided Johnny Cash because you think you don’t like country music, rest assured that Mr. Cash doesn’t really do twang. He’s the original thug and the purest essence of what it means to be punk rock.

A Gothic-Industrial Tribute to Smashing Pumpkins (Compilation). I’ve been a pretty big fan of Smashing Pumpkins ever since college when two of my best friends were pretty obsessed with their music. When I saw this record in Best Buy, I just had to have it. This album was a refreshing change of pace that helped me fall in love the Pumpkins all over again. You haven’t lived until you’ve heard Bella Morte’s rendition of “Soma” and Rosetta Stone’s version of “Eye”.

Footnotes

1. Incidentally, she had been partying with Pete from Sluggy fame that same evening, and even ended up dancing on stage with a couple of the guys affiliated with Sluggy.
2. …who I incidentally regard to be the greatest lyricist of our time.