majority holding premised on infallible dogs

Every once in a while, I try to remember what songs make me feel like crying, and I never can. So I'll just mark it here when I hear one. So far:

Frances Ruffelle / Michael Ball, "A Little Fall of Rain"
Frances Ruffelle, "On My Own"
The Pogues, "Fairy Tale of New York"
Hedwig, "Origin of Love"

I'm not sure I've ever been more ashamed to admit how much I like a song. Groove Coverage's cover of "Poison" is fricking AWESOME. It's a synthed up cover of one of Alice Cooper's poppiest songs, and I LOVE it. You can hear it on the site if you want to listen to it before mocking me.

So, new car, same as the old car. Different color, in a bit worse shape, with more miles, but I got a better deal. Yay.

Anyway, in the old car, there were 5 CDs. 4 of them, I had already ripped off to MP3; the fifth I had only recently bought so it was not yet ripped. Oh well. The problem is, one of the CDs I had already ripped was Brothers in Arms by Dire Straits. The problem with that is that it's my reference CD when I listen to audio equipment. I'm certain it's not a great choice (What do other people use? Do other people even DO this?), but I know exactly what "Money For Nothing" is supposed to sound like. It probably says something nasty about my musical taste that I care whether or not overproduced electric guitar and drums sound good, but there you go. At any rate, even though I rip my MP3s at 168kbps+, it still doesn't seem right to be using a ripped copy to check quality. So I had to go buy another copy of that one, as well.

Which brings me to Best Buy, and my question. Am I the ONLY person in the world who never again wants to hear sound coming out of speakers which are built into my TV? Surely it shouldn't be THAT hard to make a TV without speakers? I always assumed that there was some reason they needed the extra space at the bottom, so hey, may as well put shitty speakers down there, but now they're putting the speakers on the SIDES. What on earth? Is this one of those things where there's, you know, the secret manufacturer that doesn't sell in stores that service proles like me, and you have to know somebody who knows somebody before you get one? I mean, the TV I have right now is ok, and I have no plans to replace it, but it's old, and it may die, and when it does, well, I'll already have this rant out of the way.

Oh, and one last thing - iceberg lettuce sucks, especially when it goes sour and they still put it in your burrito. Freebirds, I'm looking at you, here.

It says something about how badly CDs scale in terms of CD-audio storage (and about how astounding a technology MP3 compression is, which is easy to take for granted) that if I want a copy of a CD right now, it's faster and easier for me to burn it from my MP3s than it is to find it in the CD wallets.

So, as an exercise in stupidity, I wrote a program to help me do a quicksort on my album list. I don't think I'm up to sharing the results, even if I manage to finish. (I made it about a quarter of the way through before realizing that I had written it with a serious memory leak, and that it would probably tank before I finished.) Fortunately, the first pivot point in my list turns out to be "On How Life Is" by Macy Gray, which is fairly close to the middle. It's a little surreal, though, going through your whole music collection comparing every album to an album that you kind of like, but don't really feel strongly about.

It's even more surreal later on, when you get to questions like, "Which do I like better? Straight Outta Compton or Music for Airports?"

Whoa.

It's not, "Just touch my dreams before you leave me, baby"?

I... guess cheek makes more sense, but I think I still like "dreams" better.

Well. That was an unholy pain in the ass, but it seems to have been resolved without incident, finally.

I have been ripping my CD collection, so that I can burn it all to CDs in MP3 format, to play in the car. I've made it through over 200 CDs, so far.

I just realized that my car stereo can't read ID3V2 tags. All my MP3s have ID3V2 tags, but no ID3V1.

I found 4 shareware programs that claimed to be able to solve my problem. Each one of them I found through a link that didn't tell me they were shareware. The two that would actually solve my problem were crippled such that they couldn't effectively help me. (One wouldn't do batches larger than 10 unless I registered, the other was going to credit itself in the comments unless I registered.) I couldn't see paying $20 (or more!) to use a program once, especially when the task I needed to perform was something I could probably write a program to do in an hour or two. There were more shareware programs out there, but I stopped looking after those four and started looking specifically for freeware.

Finally, I found the right selection of terms to feed Google, and found MP3 Book Helper. Freeware, and it does precisely what I need. Huzzah!

Hmm. Apparently, Emusic is on to my cunning plan to download as much as I can before they switch the account types. They've chosen to fight back by making the service extremely unreliable. So far, I've had the download client crash twice three times; the download client occasionally hangs on a track forever, but if I cancel it and download it again, it will go through (here's a hint, guys - paying customers appreciate timeouts, no matter how patronizing they are); at one point it went to "connecting to peer" no matter which song it was downloading; and in the "more bizarre than problematic" file, I've got several tracks in the queue right now that are listed as slightly over 1GB each. That last doesn't affect the actual download, though. The whole thing would be a lot easier to stomach if they checked to see if a song existed before downloading it, instead of saving the same damn track again with a (1) after it. Then I could just throw the whole album back in the queue and let it fill in the gaps.

I'm determined to get my 4,000 tracks out of them, though. This only strengthens my resolve. I'm assuming every other subscriber to the service is taking exactly the same attitude, and that's probably why the system sucks so much right now.

And on that topic... I was thinking about whether or not the new system is a good deal. A quarter a track is a pretty good price compared to a lot of albums, depending on what kind of music you like. Music For Airports is $15 at Amazon, $1 through Emusic (except that they don't have it, but it's the only full-length album with only four tracks on it I could think of.) Bad Religion 1980-85 is $17 through Amazon, and $7 through Emusic (plus the cost of a CDR blank if you're into that sort of thing.) It's still not a bad deal compared to current CD prices, and maybe Emusic is going to be getting better artists under the new model. It mostly seems awful because the initial offering was "Get a boatload of music you might hate on the cheap!" Now, the offering is "Get two or three albums a month for less than you'd pay Amazon.com. Oh, and 90% of our catalog is people you've never heard of; sorry."

Ok, I'm just going to give up getting anything out of Emusic today... I managed to squeeze 80-85 out of them while I wrote this, but now I'm getting errors downloading about half the tracks I go after. Bleah. So, yeah, I'd amend my earlier note - I only appreciate timeouts if you push the failed song to the back of the queue.

Well, so much for Emusic:

Unless you visit the link below: [] and notify us of your intention to cancel your subscription prior to November 8, 2003, your EMusic subscription will convert into EMusic Basic. Under EMusic Basic, you will be billed $9.99 per month for access to the service with no minimum monthly commitment, but you will be limited to no more than 40 downloads during your monthly billing cycle.

That's 40 tracks, not 40 albums. They have a premium service, but it's almost as dumb - $50 for 300 tracks. I guess the up side is that we can (I hope) get 4,000 tracks out of them before they turn us off - 2,000 in October, and another 2,000 before November 8.

Sure, $10 for 40 tracks is still an attractive price, but not with the selection Emusic has.

What REALLY sucks is, if you go to the site right now, there's NO WAY to find out how many tracks you can download per month at the $9.99 rate. They took out all the "unlimited download" references - but left in the "unlimited burning," which is truly misleading, since you can only burn tracks for your own personal use - sure, it's really important to me that I could burn 900 copies of a track. And no reference to the 40 track limit at all.

Oh well. I should be able to fill up 10 more CDs full of MP3s if I'm lucky, and really some of the stuff I've gotten has already made what I've had to pay worthwhile.

The hell?

Pop stars and punk bands alike are piping their voices through the hardware, which corrects and improves their vocal pitch during concerts and on records.

I'm sorry, I know I generally argue against broad "You're not really punk if..." categorizations, and I'm as tired of "What is punk?" arguments as anyone, but fuck.

If you're faking being in key, you're not punk. Call them whatever you want, but punk is the wrong word.

Still, the newer punk bands, such as Sum 41 and Good Charlottes, would sound awful if they weren't corrected with an autotuner.

Fuckers. They're all fuckers. The bands for participating in this bullshit, and whoever it is out there that had the gall to suggest there's anything wrong with a "punk" band sounding awful.

I can almost forgive a pop singer for doing this live - nothing makes Britney's discerning fans crankier than 439Hz at 130dB, I'm sure. Doing it on a CD, I can live with, as long as it clearly sounds like overproduced bullshit to begin with. But for a "punk" band to do this live? I just hope they don't honestly believe that they're punk.