Checksum Arcanius

I’m not sure if I’ve ever posted to the effect, but I was turned off to the iTunes music store as soon as they upgraded their DRM, breaking the tool I was using that allowed me to continue using my music player of preference, foobar2000.

In conversations since then, I have always maintained that I would become a music consumer once again as soon as I found a store that would sell me the music I wanted without the stupid (breakable) strings attached that came with other services. For example, it would have been easy enough to burn my iTunes music to a CD, and then rip it using EAC and encode it with LAME, but that required work that I didn’t have to do if I just typed a name into eMule and downloaded the song in a few minutes.

I am happy to announce that I have recently discovered the store that I was looking for, and to find it I didn’t have to go very far. Local retail powerhouse Amazon.com has introduced high-quality DRM-free MP3s at a reasonable price at the Amazon MP3 Store. I am once again a music consumer. See, music industry, that wasn’t so hard, was it?

Last night, in yet another sign that the music industry establishment is in its death throes, I went into the music production business. Local artist Daniel Moretti decided to cash in a four-year-old coupon to hold a studio session at Chez McElroy. The result of about five hours of work is a four-minute-long song that is a quite impressive piece of music, although I still need to do a little production work on it. Entitled “Over and Over,” download it below for a listen!

Daniel Moretti - Over and Over

Linkin Park has been my favorite band every since I personally discovered them sometime in 2002. Just about everything they did over three and a half albums (I count Reanimation as a full offering; Live in Texas gets the 1/2 tag) was golden to me. Although I did enjoy songs such as Papercut and One Step Closer, it was the more varied and softer songs that retained edge that really did it for me — Crawling, Easier to Run, My December, Pushing Me Away (Remixed).

Then something happened; I’m not sure what. Linkin Park mashed with Jay-Z in Collision Course and produced a bunch of music that had no real substance despite a few offerings having some catch. But I’ve already complained about that offering, so I will move on. Mike Shinoda made it clear that he still has what it takes to make compelling music with his Fort Minor work. So, I thought maybe Linkin Park would be back on track when they finally got around to releasing their latest album, Minutes to Midnight.

In case you haven’t guessed by the title, the album sucks. It is serious, hard core complete drivel. The first song I heard from it, What I’ve Done is dull and hopelessly boring (though I will admit that it was just a bit catchy after I listened to it a few times). Still, I knew it was not going to be a song to ever infiltrate my favorites list, which is significant because 90% of Linkin Park’s tracks are in my favorites. What makes this all so much worse is that What I’ve Done, from what I’ve been able to hear, is in fact the best song on the entire album. Linkin Park has completely lost its way. This is terribly disappointing because they are capable of making music that works with me on so many levels — more so than any other band ever — and they were able to do this in so many ways, from haunting start of Crawling to the screaming end of Faint. I fear they will never make it back there. I hope I am wrong.

Previously, I listed my favorite bands based on the number of songs they had in my “Favorites” playlist. A highly correlated yet uniquely distinct measurement is a listing (by last.fm) of the songs I’ve listened to. Having been a member for a couple of weeks now, I figure the sample might be apporaching statistical significance, so it must be time to write about it. I say that this list highly correlated because I generally randomly play songs from my favorites list, so of course bands more frequently on this list will show up more often, on average. However, I have been known to want to listen to specific songs as well, which seems to be the reason behind the disporporionately high ranking of Harvey Danger, among others…

Key:
Rank Band Plays

1 Linkin Park 85
2 Evanescence 38
3 Harvey Danger 29
4 Metallica 22
5 Burkhard Dallwitz & Philip Glass 18
6 U2 17
7 Silverchair 16
7 Collective Soul 16
9 The Smashing Pumpkins 15
9 Screaming Trees 15
11 Santana 14
11 Alice in Chains 14
11 The String Quartet Tribute To Linkin Park 14
11 WMEA (Washington Music Educator’s Association — All State!) 14
15 Stone Temple Pilots 12

Yeah, yeah, I know… Linkin Park shows up twice. So sue me.

Harvey Danger’s latest album, Little by Little is excellent — and its free! Go get it now, and listen to the first song. If you don’t like it, you’re weird. :-D

Wine, women and song: I tried them all
it did not take me long to figure I’d unlock the door to happiness
I figured wrong (with a capital R)
All the baggage I brought wouldn’t fit in a mid-size car

Recent favortes
Weezer - Beverly Hills
DHT - Listen to Your Heart - both the dance mix and the slow mix
Michael Andrews ft Gary Jules - Mad World (From the Donnie Darko soundtrack)

In other news, the parents are trapped in Atlanta for the night due to a delayed flight due to bad weather. And writing that just now made me say, “Oh crap,” because I had yet to make arrangements for them to be picked up - since I will be at work when they arrive tomorrow. Fortunately, I have good friends and they put up with me calling them at 11:30.

It looks like it will be a late night doing my Chem E homework. Here’s a sampler of why I think I’m going to hate this class before too long (somehow, it hasn’t gotten there yet):

A 150-lbm astronaut took his bathroom scale (a spring scale) and a beam scale (compares masses) to the moon where the local gravity is 5.48 ft/s². Determine how much he will weigh (a) on the spring scale and (b) on the beam scale.

Disregarding the gender-stereotypical astronaut for now, here was my response:

I strongly object to the term “weigh” being used to refer to comparing masses as with the beam scale. This seems sloppy and terribly imprecise, even if it is colloquial terminology.

I then went on to solve the problem, which, in case you were wondering:
(a) 25.5-lbf
(b) 150-lbm (even though the book states that the answer is 150-lbf, this is wrong, as I explained above)

For music playback, I prefer Foobar 2000, a feature rich, highly customizable, minimalist music player. Eschewing crap like skinnability for useful features like total customization of the local and global shortcuts (ie system wide shortcuts, even when the program is not foreground), Foobar 2000 is the champion’s choice for music playback. It supports all of the major formats out-of-the-box, has a clean and minimalist UI with two main branches (default and columns), and has a nearly limitless plugin architecture. As for myself, I use the default layout with a heavily modified displayname settings that hearken back to my WinAmp 2 days in the format of:
(Composer) Artist - Album - Track - Title
My display string checks for and conditionally displays each of these fields, so in the case it is missing (as in a downloaded piece of music), the display doesn’t look bad, but intelligently shrinks. For example, if the composer is missing or is the same as the artist, it is omitted along with its parentheses. So instead of looking like
() Screaming Trees - Dust - 01 - Halo of Ashes
It is much more pleasant and looks like:
Screaming Trees - Dust - 01 - Halo of Ashes

Also built into Foobar 2000 are an intuitive single-file ID3 tag editor and a powerful script-based “Masstagger,” a ridiculously useful tool for adding ID3 tags from filenames, changing filenames based on ID3 tags, and other such fancy things. But the kicker comes back to the fact that every command available can have a shortcut. Because I am a WinAmp 2 junkie (may its soul rest in peace), I use the keys z, x, c, and v to control the playback. Z goes back, X starts and pauses the player, C moves forward, and V stops playback. Also like Winamp, I use J to search for a specific song in the playlist.

Since my windows key is so underutilized, I made these same keys global shortcuts, when pressed n combination with my windows keys. So, while doing anything, from word processing to blasting terrorists with an Colt in Counter-Strike, I can start, stop, and navigate through my music without leaving the foreground window. Finally, I implemented the space bar as “jump to random file in current playlist” and made another global shortcut for Win+space. The result is basically total control over all of my music listening without ever interfacing the always-slower GUI.

And, to bring this post full circle: The UI is a simple rectangle. No rounded-corner nonsense; no bright colors. Just a utility that does exactly what it is supposed to, the way it should be done: unobtrusively, and exactly how I tell it to. I guess this is why “I am Debian.”