sudomasochism

I know you run your new albums through Picard, but have you done “regression tagging”? I’ve been spending a little time retagging my massive music library in groups of letters. Most of it is already tagged, so Picard picks up it quickly and i notice that 50% have modifications (e.g. updated year, misspellings, etc)

Also, i did the unthinkable: I cleared all album artwork. That’s right, I selected all 45,000 songs and checked the artwork field with nothing in it and clicked save. It took a few hours to remove them all. I think there were some problems because Picard has an option to embed the artwork in tags (?) I don’t like the sound of it and i think iTunes didn’t like it either.

One other good thing about regression tagging is that I was able to find broken/incomplete albums. Not that I am planning on completing them, but it’s definitely an easy way to find that stuff out.

If it were not for Dead Can Dance, specifically Lisa Gerrard, I would be positively impervious to the acceptance of the mystical and sometimes haunting chants of Kitka. This morning on my way to work, WUWF (88.1 FM) advertised that Kitka would be performing live in Niceville, FL on the 22nd of February. At the time, I had been unaware of their existence. The short clip they aired was enthralling and after hearing, I was on a mission to hear and learn more about this all-woman vocal ensemble. It just so happens they have material on magnatune: a non-evil supplier of DRM-free digital music. I won’t delve into the specifics of magnatune, but excited was I to find out they carried Kitka.

I’d hate to say that Kitka is perfect for the holiday season and nothing else, but it seems that way for the time being. Their medieval sounds are reminiscent of clips you might hear in an ethnic film set back in those times. Wintery, isolated, and desolate yet hauntingly beautiful and mystical. Full of angelic harmonious beauty.

I’m so excited to have Kitka in my library. Hopefully they will remain as something I can listen to in hopes of filling a part of my soul that might be empty.

I can’t end this post without thanking Lisa Gerrard for her incomprehensible, poetic glossolalia and opening me up to the ethereal side of music.

I’ve made a few improvements to the Last.fm Tagger. Namely, the ability to cleanly abort the tagging process. Other features include displaying a count of tracks selected in iTunes, as well as the number of unique artists in that selection.

As always, you’ll need the wonderfully awesome RubyOSA gem installed.

Download it now.

I’ve once again improved my little Last.fm script for use with RubyOSA. It needed updating badly. There were quite a few things bugging me.

What’s new:

• Nice console messages telling you what’s happening.
• Support for skipping over identical genre’s.
• Ability to continue or abort tagging process. So if you don’t like that tag, type ‘n’.
• Use -q to subdue tagging confirmations.
• Full UTF-8 support, as well as proper URL escaping.

Download it now! And have somewhat useful genre’s to choose from.

I will tackle cleaning it up later. Add me to your RSS reader if you want script updates.

Remember, you can get RubyOSA with the Last.fm Tagger here.

I finished a v0.1 of my eMusic.fm Greasemonkey script. What it does is pretty simple. On an album page, it will pull the 10 most popular tags from last.fm and inject them into the page below the description.

I found myself looking at last.fm for a particular artist to see what the community has labeled it as. This provides a more insightful look into artists you may not be aware of.

Download my eMusic.fm greasemonkey script

I spent the majority of my later teenage years overdosing on computers and music… making music, that is. A few times a year, I find myself listening to the so-called music I made. It really reflected who I was: a kid obsessed with meta-consciousness, psychedelics, alternate realities, and generally anything weird.

So I present to you one track I made while traveling:

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