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Apple’s iTunes is great – if you have an iPod.

Which I don’t anymore, since my preschooler daughter accidentally knocked it on to the tile floor. All it does now is show me the “sad iPod” icon which was cute the first time I saw it but now taunts me with its dead eyes.

Sad iPod is sad.

I even took the little guy apart. It wasn’t hard – it’s a 5th-generation iPod with a little hard drive, and I was able to pry it open with my fingernails. I tried to see if it could be fixed by resetting a cable, but no luck. I think the hard drive is toast.

Apple can fix it for $130, plus shipping. Forget it. Instead, I spent $60 on a Sandisk Sansa View. It’s not as elegant as the iPod, its menu system is OK but not what I’m used to and it’s got a lot less memory than the old iPod (eight GB compared to 30).

But it was on sale.

It’s smaller and uses flash memory instead of a little hard drive. And apparently it plays videos too, but I haven’t played around with that feature yet.

Best of all, it lets me put files on through drag-and-drop. Easy. The View automatically organizes files based on the information in the ID tags written into the file, letting me play albums, which is what I prefer.

This works with all the MP3s I’ve made myself, ripping my CDs with Exact Audio Copy. I gave up on iTunes’ built-in ripper ages ago when I found it was creating files with random popping errors. EAC is slower, but no errors. Plus, it tags files with standard ID tags.

Which, apparently, iTunes does not. When I tried to play some of the songs I’d bought with iTunes on my View, the songs showed up in the menu all out of order and the album art was missing. In fact, the art for a lot of my albums was missing, even though I had added it in iTunes.

I guess iTunes must not write the data into the tag, storing it on the computer and on the iPod or something. Whatever. It’s stupid. Stick to industry standards, please!

So, after a few hours with MediaMonkey, I have re-organized my music  and everything is all tagged, embedded with artwork and working properly. I hope I never have to use iTunes again.

I might try to fix my iPod again, but this time I think I’m going to try this method. It just might work:

Did Coldplay copy Joe Satriani?
I would have said no way until I listened to the tracks overlaid in this video. They sync up perfectly, it’s uncanny. Of course, it might be one of those Pink Floyd-Wizard of Oz coincidental synchronicity things but I just think Coldplay and Joe should kiss and make up and release a best-selling duet single.

Good-looking blues

I like a lot of obscure music.

Unfortunately because it’s getting harder and harder to find music I like. So when I hear a good song, I tend to obsess about it and not rest until I find it.

Several years ago, on an episode of Buffy: The Vampire Slayer there was this very cool song that played for a few bars that was haunting, caught my attention and made me seek it out. I was thrilled to find the band, Laika, had made it available and several other of their songs for download.

I recently re-discovered it in my electronic music collection and today, the song isn’t just a cool tune. The lyrics go deep in reflecting a lot of what I’ve been thinking about and struggling with lately.

Unfortunately (there’s that word again) I just checked and the band’s laika.org website is now down. I wonder what happened. Relegated to obscurity, like so much in my music collection, I guess.

It’s because of Beethoven.

Back in the day when the CD format was being developed, Sony and Philips put their collective corporate resources together.

Philips engineers had always based their work on a playing time of an hour, a few minutes longer than a double-sided LP. This meant that the existing repertoire could easily be issued on CD.

But Sony had other ideas.

Sony vice-president Norio Ohga, who was responsible for the project, did not agree. “Let us take the music as the basis,” he said. He hadn’t studied at the Conservatory in Berlin for nothing. Ohga had fond memories of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony (‘Alle Menschen werden Brüder’). That had to fit on the CD. There was room for those few extra minutes, the Philips engineers agreed. The performance by the Berlin Philharmonic, conducted by Herbert von Karajan, lasted for 66 minutes. Just to be quite sure, a check was made with Philips’ subsidiary, PolyGram, to ascertain what other recordings there were. The longest known performance lasted 74 minutes. This was a mono recording made during the Bayreuther Festspiele in 1951 and conducted by Wilhelm Furtwängler. This therefore became the playing time of a CD. A diameter of 12 centimeters was required for this playing time.

I found this fascinating. Of course, now we have CDs capable of recording 80 minutes, but the 74-minute limit set the standard for the 1980s and most of the 1990s. And, like LPs set the standard for artists to produce 45 minutes of music every year, I believe the 74-minute CD set the standard for artists to produce 74 minutes of music every two years. At least, that’s what it looks like to me when I look at my music collection and compare the sheer mass of music Led Zeppelin was cranking out every year compared to the music U2 puts out every two years.

Found the quotes in this article.