Metadata goodies

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Not useable metadata goodies, unfortunately, but still, this is good to hear. Apparently, Gracenote — maintainers of the CDDB (which iTunes and many other audio players use to provide track information upon insertion of a CD) have many additional possible data fields that can be used, according to this comment sent to Macintouch (emphasis mine):

Classical music is a difficult problem for almost all digital media players. The rock & pop music world is much different than the Classical world – the data fields are not sufficient for describing Classical music. The Gracenote database has support for Composer, Ensemble, Orchestra, Conductor, and many other fields, but many applications choose not to support these fields. So over the years, the fields have been overloaded in meaning and in data. We recently re-wrote our Classical music standards so that existing applications can begin to be more consistent. But more importantly, Gracenote’s next generation database will fully support Classical music metadata like no other database. We are working to spread these changes out to our application developers, including Apple. Our editorial team is working hard to standardize the existing Classical data as well, partnering with experts in the industry. Look for big changes in 2004 and 2005.

Hopefully these extra fields trickle down to iTunes in a (near) future release!

iTunes: “1st Premonition (DBX)” by Giannelli, Fred from the album Sound of Superstition, The Vol. 5 (1997, 6:08).

Eyes everywhere

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Domino’s Pizza has a “two-for-Tuesday” buy one, get one free deal, so I’ve gotten in the habit of picking up a couple medium pizzas on Tuesday nights. It’s relatively cheap, especially when I can often stretch those two pizzas out for two or three days. What with things like caller ID on the phone systems and computer databases, I’ve gotten very used to whoever takes the order already having my name and address based on my phone number.

Last night when I called, slightly later than usual, the person who answered the phone told me that they were closed. “Already? I thought you guys were open until midnight.” “Well, we’re actually kind of backed up right now, so I’m just taking carry out orders.” “Oh, well, alright….”

Then came the kicker. “Actually, I’ll go ahead and take the order. It looks like you’re a regular customer, and we’d hate to drive you away.” I was only mildly surprised by this — tracking how often a given customer orders is simple enough these days — and it meant that I got my munchies for the night, but it was a little amusing.

Depending on where the various data collection and sharing initiatives and technologies go, though, in the future my little experience could be just the tip of the iceberg…

The government and corporations are aggressively collecting information about your personal life and your habits. They want to track your purchases, your medical records, and even your relationships. The Bush Administration’s policies, coupled with invasive new technologies, could eliminate your right to privacy completely. Please help us protect our privacy rights and prevent the Total Surveillance Society.

(via Tom Negrino)

iTunes: “Higher and Higher (DJ Skribble and Anthony Acid)” by DJ Jurgen from the album Essential Dance 2000 (2000, 7:19).

As the Apple Turns RSS feed

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I’m tossing this up here because until today, I had never, ever, ever seen nor heard of any mention of an RSS feed for everyone’s favorite Apple-flavored soap opera, As the Apple Turns (I even just dug through their help pages and v2.0 FAQ to be sure I wan’t entirely off base — at least, as far as this is concerned). However, in a typically off-the-cuff mention, the heretofore super-secret-ninja-RSS-feed address has been leaked (and leaked by no less august a personage than the AtAT team themselves): http://www.appleturns.com/rss/.

Hey, I thought it was exciting.

Uninspired

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For one reason or another, I just don’t seem to be terribly talkative right at the moment. The usual stuff is going on out in the world, of course, much of which is quite outrage-worthy, but…well, everyone else is doing such a good job covering it all.

I’m sure something will pop up eventually that will kick things off and get me babbling again. For now, though, things might be a wee bit quiet round these parts.

Of course, now that I’ve said that, I’m almost guaranteed to find a good six things that I want to ramble on about. Maybe that’s the point of posting this? ;)

So…as long as I’m a bit lacking at the moment — any questions, curiosity, or comments from the peanut gallery? No particular topic, anything goes. I’m just curious to see what might pop up if anyone actually responds.

iTunes: “Suck (Live)” by Shriekback from the album Dancing Years, The (1990, 4:54).

Oh, snap! It’s getting kind of hectic up in this piece.

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This may be the funniest thing I’ve read lately…

At this point, according to observers, both statesmen decided—by seemingly unspoken mutual consent—to abandon the gutter patois of the common carnival worker and to resort instead to an eminently more quotable (but, to those not versed in the vagaries of hip-hop idiom, more confusing) exchange of viewpoints.

“Oh, it’s like that?” Mr. Cheney queried.

“Whut? Whut?” Mr. Leahy shot back.

“Once again,” Mr. Cheney replied (quite obviously quoting a lyric from Ice Cube’s 1990 album, “AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted”), “it’s on.”

As a quick-thinking senatorial aide switched on the Senate’s public-address system and cued up the infamous “Seven Minutes of Funk” break, Mr. Leahy and Mr. Cheney went head-to-head in what can only be described as a “take no prisoners” freestyle rap battle.

(via kottke)

There’s no such thing as too much music

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My one major accomplishment of the weekend was finally completing a project that I’ve had going on for months now: importing every CD I own into iTunes. Quite a task, when after years of being a complete music junkie (compounded by a few years of DJing), I’ve built up a CD collection of 1,142 albums!

Now that I’m done, though, the final tally…

  • Total songs in my iTunes library: 14,622
  • Total time: 49.6 days (49 days, 15 hours, 8 minutes, 23 seconds)
  • Total space: 65.09 GB

The fact that all that music takes up only 65 GB was a pleasant surprise. When I was using my G3 as my primary computer, I picked up an 80GB drive specifically to hold all my music. At that point, though, encoding my music as 160kbps VBR MP3 files, I couldn’t fit all of my music on that drive! This time, though, I’ve been encoding at 128kbps AAC (not archival quality, but slightly better sound quality than the 160kbps .mp3s even at smaller file sizes), and managed to get all of my music on the ‘puter in 15 GB less space than before.

Then, since iTunes has a special “Grouping” field that can be used for whatever sort of customized sorting options the user wants, I set up four groups for my music. I’ve always prided myself on the fact that the majority of my music is music that I actually own, and I’ve generally only resorted to downloading songs from peer to peer networks such as Napster or the like when I was trying to get really rare tracks that I couldn’t find any other way. I was curious as to just how the numbers worked out, though, so here’s my four groups, and their final results…

  • Copied from friends or downloaded from P2P networks (technically illegal): 610 (4.172%)
  • Original rips (my own mixes, GarageBand creations, or imports from vinyl): 51 (0.349%)
  • Bought from the iTunes Music Store (legally owned, though without the physical CD): 232 (1.587%)
  • Ripped from CDs that I own: 13,729 (93.893%)

Overall, I really don’t think that that’s too bad of a ratio.

And yes. I’m a complete and total music whore. :)

iTunes: “Come What May” by Kidman, Nicole/McGregor, Ewan from the album Moulin Rouge (2001, 4:48).

Up, up and at ’em

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Guess it’s about time I should poke my head up around these parts again, huh?

Been a good weekend — a little too hot and muggy at times, but overall, quite enjoyable. Saturday I took the ferry out to Bainbridge Island for a blogger’s picnic, and sat and chatted with Julie and Ted Leung and their three girls, Anita, Chip, Beth and her new son (all of six weeks old), and Robert and Myriam Scoble for a few hours. I ended up plopping down on a blanket and spending a good amount of time with the Leung’s girls, all of whom were adorable — and since Julie already mentioned Michaela showing me the owie on her middle finger (“Look at what I’ve got!” as I try to keep from laughing too hard as she gives me the bird) than I guess I can too. ;)

Between the heat and not sleeping terribly well for a couple nights, Saturday night became a night of rest, doing very little aside from dinking around on the ‘puter, ordering pizza, and kicking back to watch The Abyss. I really enjoy that movie, especially the extended special edition cut, and that ended up being just the night I needed to recuperate.

I debated heading down to check out the Bite of Seattle festival on Sunday, but decided that it was a bit too muggy outside for me to go traipsing around Seattle, so I wandered down to the theater to see I, Robot instead. Overall, not horrible — but not great, either. Pretty much just standard summer movie fare more than anything else. A few amusing lines here and there, decent special effects, and very pretty to look at (I do enjoy Alex Proyas‘ directing), but aside from the title and the Three Laws of Robotics, any connections to Asimov were few and far between. Character names and a couple situations lifted from the pages of Asimov’s robot short stories, but the spirit of Asimov’s writing definitely wasn’t there. It’s not so bad that I’d recommend staying away, but if there’s another movie you’re more interested in, don’t go out of your way to see I, Robot.

And now the weekends done, the week begins, and I try to catch up with everything else in the world that I missed over the past few days.

Whee!

iTunes: “Toccata and Fugue in D Minor” by Vanessa Mae from the album Violin Player, The (1995, 7:49).

The New York Times posts a Mea Culpa

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It’s always nice to see one of the ‘big boys’ admit that maybe, just maybe, they could have dug a little deeper into the goings-on in the months before we invaded Iraq.

Over the last few months, this page has repeatedly demanded that President Bush acknowledge the mistakes his administration made when it came to the war in Iraq, particularly its role in misleading the American people about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction and links with Al Qaeda. If we want Mr. Bush to be candid about his mistakes, we should be equally open about our own.

…we agreed with the president on one critical point: that Saddam Hussein was concealing a large weapons program that could pose a threat to the United States or its allies. We repeatedly urged the United Nations Security Council to join with Mr. Bush and force Iraq to disarm.

As we’ve noted in several editorials since the fall of Baghdad, we were wrong about the weapons. And we should have been more aggressive in helping our readers understand that there was always a possibility that no large stockpiles existed.

[…]

Saddam Hussein was indisputably a violent and vicious tyrant, but an unprovoked attack that antagonized the Muslim world and fractured the international community of peaceful nations was not the solution. There were, and are, equally brutal and potentially more dangerous dictators in power elsewhere. Saddam Hussein and his rotting army were not a threat even to the region, never mind to the United States.

iTunes: “Don’t Go” by Bypass Unit from the album Reinventing the 80’s (1997, 5:52).

Pictures of Noah

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Kevin just sent me pictures of Noah! At this point, I’m required to do the “proud uncle” thing and display them to the world.

Mom and Noah

Noah Avery Hanscom

You, of course, are required to expound upon how beautiful and perfect he is, even though at this stage, all children pretty much look like Winston Churchill. ;)

iTunes: “Planet Rock (SwordFish)” by Afrika Bambaataa and the Soulsonic Force from the album Planet Rock Remixes (2001, 7:47).

My Depeche Mode collection

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For Rebecca, for comparison purposes, and for Jonas, because he made fun of me for dancing to Strangelove at the Vogue a few months ago. ;)

My final Depeche Mode song count:

  • 217 songs
  • 42 albums (this includes compilations where DM has only one track)
  • 19.3 hours
  • 1.03 Gb

And here’s the full list, in .pdf format, printed straight out of iTunes:

iTunes: “Judas” by Depeche Mode from the album Songs of Faith and Devotion (1993, 5:14).