Category: Millionaire’s Holiday

Better than anticipated

Back in the day I’d digitize stuff by taking audio off my receiver and run it into the audio-in on my computer. I was lazy the other day and decided I wanted to try to pull sound directly off the sound card. And that’s how I found Audio-Recorder [1]. It’s easy enough to install and I was able to pull sound directly off the sound card. Nice.

Then I started playing with the Source configuration. It detected all of the expected /dev foo coming off my audio card. Then I noticed it also detected RhythmBox and Spotify as audio sources. I accidentally left it configured to Spotify and wandered off.

This evening I was listening to They Might Be Giants’ Lincoln [2] album on Spotify on my phone. I was rocking out to Mr. Me when I got home so transferred my Spotify session to my workstation downstairs. Bigger and better speakers, the better to share with Elizabeth. That was well and good.

After dinner and then some time sitting out in the rain with my lurvly bride I went down to the Man Cave and started puttering around–listening to the rest of Lincoln on Spotify. I happened to notice out of the corner of my eye that the system tray icon for audio-recorder was glowing. So I opened the app, and lo, it is dutifully recording songs off Spotify as I play them. And stuffing the resulting files full of metadata. And organizing them by track name inside folders for each artist. Didn’t even ask it to do this for me.

Brain asplode! I can own the entire Spotify catalog by doing nothing more than queuing songs up and playing them 24/7. At least until I run out of disk. And now I’m one happy Fezster.

[1] https://launchpad.net/~osmoma/+archive/ubuntu/audio-recorder
[2] http://tmbw.net/wiki/Lincoln

Surprise! It’s your past!

So I there I was, looking for some esoteric track for a mix I’m kind of puttering with, when I came across a blast from the past. Buried in a tarball in a directory in the dark corners of my filesystem was a soundboard recording I made back when I was a DJ at WFHB. It’s not entirely unheard of as I have several different recordings. This one isn’t one I’ve heard in years.

Back in October of 2006 I had an external drive crash. My media drive. Nearly 500GB of audio files including all of my old soundboard recordings. I was able to resurrect a few from other devices but the bulk of them were disappeared that fateful day.

Needless to say I spent the last two hours–give or take a few minutes–reliving a Saturday/Sunday overnight from early February 2006. Now you can too. Presenting The Millionaire’s Holiday–One Year of Crap. Roughly 117MB of mp3 silliness.

The most unwanted song

Vicki [1], of Do-or-DIY [2] fame, filled in for a show on WFMU [3] over Christmas Eve. I’ve been subscribed to the Do-or-DIY podcast feed [4] since I was a wee lad. And now I’ve finally caught up to Christmas in my podcast listening.

All of this to say that about halfway through the show she plays a track called The World’s Most Unwanted Song [5].

An international poll was conducted with 500 respondents asking what people liked most and liked least in a song. Then the results were handed off to conceptual artists Komar and Melamid [6]. From these results they created the world’s most un/wanted songs. From the survey, the most unwanted things in a song include

  • Opera
  • Rap
  • Country ballads
  • Bagpipes
  • Ooompa bands
  • Holiday/Festival/Christmas music
  • Children’s voices

So they took all of this and combined them into a song. The World’s Most Unwanted Song. Which, oddly enough, is completely awesome! Really, if you have a spare 22 minutes, give it a go.

My favorite lyric (at the moment):

Ramadan! Ramadan!
Lots of praying with no breakfast!

It is with a complete lack of surprise that I say that the World’s Most Wanted Song is entirely forgettable.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People_Like_Us_%28musician%29
[2] http://wfmu.org/playlists/pl
[3] http://wfmu.org/
[4] http://wfmu.org/podcast/PL.xml
[5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-gPuH1yeZ08
[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Komar_and_Melamid

Another sign of kids needing to get off my lawn post-haste

The goa mix [1] is 20 years old. I was more ska/jazz/CMJ at the time but this mix was my gateway into the world of electronica. It was a seed that didn’t really sprout for another decade but that fact left me in a place where I could follow the trajectory backward and also launch fully into where various scenes were going.

Trance is, ultimately, okay for me. My preferences run more IDM/cliq-hop/whatever-the-hell box you want to use to contain Richard James. I also like more chill/ambient noise stuff. The goa mix is at the edge of where I want to be in terms of what I’d call a ‘clubby’ feel. It’s also beautifully flawed in a way that a derivative DJ would never allow. BPM is all over the place. Key changes are sometimes abrupt. Yet every transition feels organic and as a whole it stands up against anything put out today.

And if you want to hear it without the commentary (because, frankly, Mr. Oakenfold sounds a bit addled throughout) you can grab that here [2].

[1] http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p01nkgbd
[2] https://soundcloud.com/pauloakenfold/paul-oakenfold-radio-1-1