My annual review of what I’ve most enjoyed listening to during the last 12 months, and my albums of the year.
My albums of 2014
Tag: Music
The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke
For all these years that I’ve been a fan of the rock band Queen, and Queen II (1974) is one of my favourite albums of theirs, I had no idea that the song “The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke” was actually describing a painting by English artist Richard Dadd.
The painting took Dadd nine years to complete, from 1855–1864, and is only 54 x 39.5 cm in size. You can read more about the history of The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke on Wikipedia.
This video shows us Freddie Mercury’s guided tour through the painting.
The next time I’m in London I must go look for it in the Tate Britain collection.
I’ve found my perfect music player: MusicBee
For as long as I can remember that I’ve had an internet-enabled PC (I got a Windows 98 machine in late 1999) I’ve been using WinAmp for listening to music. Last week I moved to the lesser-known MusicBee and it is perfect for my requirements. I can’t believe just how good MusicBee is.
Your mileage may vary
I had a long conversation with a friend of mine on Facebook the other day about how everybody’s music player requirements are different. A lot of factors influence your decision about a digital music player, e.g.
- How much music you have.
- How/if you tag your music.
- When you listen.
- Where you listen.
- On which device(s) you listen.
- Whether you need to share your collection with other devices on the network.
- Whether you prefer visuals (e.g. album art) or text-based interfaces.
- etc.
How I used WinAmp
I used WinAmp primarily for two things:
- Listen to music.
- Rip CDs to MP3 format.
I used WinAmp like a CD player (I’d load one album and listen to it) or a radio (I’d load it all 23,000+ files and listen to them on shuffle). I used very few other features to be honest.
A while ago WinAmp switched off its access to the Gracenote database. That’s a service that allows you to query the names of the album title and tracks of a CD you are ripping to MP3 (other formats are available). For my 195 metal CDs project that’s pretty important to me.
It was time to try to find something else that might let me make the most of my music collection: find stuff that I’d not listened to in a long time, better make use of my tagging of albums (I use the excellent mp3tag).
The contenders
Despite how popular it is to listen to music on a computer, there are surprisingly few mainstream players:
- Amazon Music / Cloud Player
- Apple iTunes
- foobar2000
- Microsoft Windows Media Player
- Spotify
- Tomahawk
- VLC media player
- WinAmp
I opened Windows Media Player… and promptly shut it down again. I then reached for foobar2000, which a number of friends had warmly recommended to me. “I think you’ll love it,” said one. I didn’t last much more than an hour with it.
Tomahawk was installed, and then uninstalled within an hour too. I liked the idea but I don’t share music playlists with friends, I don’t need to find out what other artists sound like the one I’m listening to. I didn’t need all the connected stuff, I just wanted to better manage what I had.
I then tried Apple iTunes for a few days. I’d used iTunes as my main player at work for a while but I found it too bloated and quite unintuitive in places and so returned to WinAmp. What I liked about iTunes this time was the albums view.
But what I found frustrating was how it handled metadata and artwork.
MusicBee
Which was when I found MusicBee and it is perfect for me. Within an hour I had customised the user interface to just the way I would like it:
- I’m using the beautifully clean DarkGREEN Metro skin, which I find highlights the artwork.
- I have lists of genre, artist and album on the left-hand side.
- In the middle I have a grid of album artwork (very similar to how iTunes handles it).
- On the right I have playlist and other metadata displayed.
Having pulled in my entire music collection, I discovered errors in the way that I had tagged some of the music, and how few tracks had album artwork embedded.
A few hours later, staying within MusicBee, I had a lot of the tagging sorted out, and MusicBee even pulled in the missing album artwork for the rest of my collection.
This would have taken me weeks to sort out using WinAmp and mp3tag, or iTunes on its own.
Android remote
Update: This Android app no longer exists
My last PC had an infrared remote control for my Creative soundcard; I’ve kind of missed that with this PC. I discovered that some kind chap has written MusicBee Remote for Android which is also clean and simple.
Conclusion
This hasn’t been a full review, just an immediate ‘gush’ about how wonderful this music player is.
I really couldn’t imagine going back to WinAmp now. Already this has helped me discover a number of CD box sets that I ripped to MP3 and then completely forgot to listen to all the way through.
If you fancy a rediscovering your music collection and are a Windows user then I wholeheartedly recommend MusicBee.
Everything is a Remix
Everything is a Remix is a series of four short documentaries by New York-based filmmaker Kirby Ferguson about how so many new things (music, technology, ideas) are actually inspired and influenced by what has happened before it.
I’ve had this on my “Must blog about this…” list for the last few years. I kept meaning to blog about it after part four was released and… well, I forgot. Sorry.
The Song Remains the Same
Part 1: The Song Remains the Same (7′ 17″) examines Led Zeppelin. Did they just rip off other people’s material, admittedly within legal bounds, and remix it to their own ends and success or was there more going on there? It’s a nice introduction, with plenty of examples, to the series.
Remix Inc.
Part 2: Remix Inc. (9′ 47″) looks at movies. In the last ten years of the 100 most popular films 74 are either sequels, remakes of earlier films or adaptations of comic books, novels, video games, etc. “Transforming the old into the new is Holywood’s greatest talent,” Ferguson notes. Standard elements are appropriated, transformed and subverted to create something new. And yes, Star Wars is in there. A lot.
“Creation requires influence. Everything we make is a remix of existing creations, our lives, and the lives of others”
—Kirby Ferguson
After the credits roll Ferguson goes on to briefly look at Quentin Tarantino, and in particular Kill Bill.
The Elements of Creativity
Part 3: The Elements of Creativity (11′ 16″) opens with the words, “the act of creation is surrounded with a fog of myths […] but creativity isn’t magic.” Ferguson talks about copying and emulation. The greats, whether in music, literature or comedy, started by copying others and then slowly tinkering with them to create something new. The most creative leaps are when different ideas are combined.
“The basic elements of creativity are:
copy, transform, and combine.”
—Kirby Ferguson
To explore this Ferguson looks at computers, begins with the kings of copying: Xerox and its role in bringing the Apple Macintosh to the mass market as a home appliance.
Following the credits Ferguson asks the question: if some of these great inventions, such as Sir Tim Berners-Lee creating the World Wide Web, hadn’t happened then would the world be a vastly different place today? He argues not. Often when something amazing is created there are often others working on something very similar at the same time.
System Failure
Part 4: System Failure (15′ 26″) is the final part of the series. It begins with Luca (the Last Universal Common Ancestor) which is a core element in understanding evolution’s work of copying, transforming and combining. Culture does something similar, not through genes but memes (ideas, behaviours, skills).
Ferguson looks at the legal aspect of ideas. The law seems to think that ideas can be protected, that the boundaries around them are tidy. But in reality they are tangled and interdependent. For most of our history ideas were free. They could be copied and built upon but the market economy changed that. Our ideas could be bought and sold.
When we copy we justify;
when others copy we vilify.”
—Kirby Ferguson
Having briefly looked at issues surrounding intellectual property and copyright laws he goes on to explore the fuzziness of software patents and litigation that has led to conflict rather than creativity and progress.
Ferguson ends with the challenge that to address the problems of today we (not corporations or governments) need to come up with the best ideas, we need them now and we need to spread them. Maybe this focus on over-protecting our ideas isn’t the best way forward, and given the evidence perhaps it’s not even accurate to say that anyone’s idea is unique and original: after all everything is a remix.
It’s an interesting idea. It certainly holds a lot of weight in my experience. Something to explore further I think, in many areas of life perhaps: web development, writing, politics, music…
Incredibox — interactive human beatbox
Well, after that epic political post about the Scottish independence referendum yesterday, here something a bit more fun to put a smile on your face, or give you something to listen to while you’re up all night listening to the results programme on the telly.
I can’t believe I’ve not blogged about Incredibox before. It’s fantastic and never fails to cheer me up!
Incredibox is an interactive beatboxing web application (that requires Adobe Flash) where you drag and drop different symobls onto the chaps as they appear from the right. The symbols tells them what to sing, with categories split into beats, effects, melodies, voices, and other things depending on which version you play around with. You then just chop and change to create new combinations and new tunes.
I love it, and there are now three versions. Version three is linked to above, here are the other two:
