A – Hi-Fi Serious

Track listing

1. Nothing
2. Something’s Going On
3. 6 O’Clock on a Tube Stop
4. Going Down
5. Took It Away
6. Starbucks
7. The Springs
8. Shut Yer Face
9. Pacific Ocean Blue
10. The Distance
11. W.D.Y.C.A.I.
12. Hi-Fi Serious
13. Asshole

Here’s A’s third album, Hi-Fi Serious. Overall I think it’s better than Monkey Kong. It starts out hard and heavy with “Nothing” and loses a bit of steam from there on. An excellent example of Britpop.

Buy this album

A – A vs Monkey Kong

1. For Starters
2. Monkey Kong
3. A
4. Old Folks
5. Hopper Jonnus Fang
6. Summer On The Underground
7. Warning
8. If It Ain’t Broke, Fix It Anyway
9. I Love Lake Tahoe
10. Don’t Be Punks
11. Down On The Floor
12. Jason’s Addiction
13. Miles Away
14. Getting Around
15. She Said
16. One Day
17. If it Ain’t Broke (Live)

I’ve had this for a few years now. As with many of my more recent CD acquisitions, I’ve never really given this a good listening to, preferring instead to cherry pick the tunes which stuck in my head on the first listen. In this case, we’re talking about tracks 1, 3 and 4. Overall it’s not a bad effort. Britpop isn’t my absolute favourite genre so take that for what it’s worth. It’s definitely worth a listen.

Buy this album

A Slight Hitch

My DVD burner blew up (not literally, thank goodness) just as I was finishing the “E”s. This is a small problem as my MacBook’s internal CD-RW isn’t in the greatest shape either. This means I’ll need to switch to my PC, which DOES have a working DVD burner, even if it’s a few years old. It also means I’ll need to re-think my encoding process.

To date I’ve ripped with iTunes and encoded using iTunes-LAME, an iTunes script which calls the LAME encoder to compress the WAVs I rip. Now I think I’ll have to start using EAC with LAME. Which makes me wonder if I shouldn’t just start over? I’ve not heard any real problems with the earliest MP3s I encoded, but I’m hearing a bit of static (from the dying drives) in the most recent. I just don’t want to mess around with trying to find out where the static starts showing up in the library. All the PC needs is a new case fan and a power supply (the existing PS is making a horrible whining sound). Guess it’s time to take a trip to Fry’s.

The plan

Hi there. I’m Bruce. How ya doin’? I’m OK, but I’m getting old. I hate that, I really do. You get hair where there should be be hair, you get random aches and pains…you know, it’s a little like puberty without the horrible social awkwardness and acne.

I turn 41 on 5 April 2008, and on that magical date something very stupid will happen. I’ll start listening to my entire CD collection. I don’t know how long it will take, because I’ve got something like 1,300 CDs on the racks behind me. I’m going to try and keep track of it all with Last.FM, although frankly I’m not a big fan for various reason. Still, needs must do, and they’re the only game in town as far as I can see. It’ll take as long as it takes, and at the end of the year I’ll be able to take a look at my stats and see exactly how many tracks I listened to from which artists and…um, well, I don’t really know what I’ll do with that information. Preserve it for posteriority, I suppose. I’m also going to watch my entire DVD collection, which numbers in the low hundreds, I think. I haven’t actually counted. No way to keep track of that apart from just writing it down, I’m afraid.

And that’s where this blog will come into play. Since my own memory is fairly unreliable, I’ll use this as a means to keep track of who, what, when and what I thought afterward.

I plan to import my CDs to my MacBook using iTunes. Using an application called iTunes-LAME, I will encode the CDs to nice clean MP3s. I plan to start this process this week following a full backup and re-install of MacOS X. For some reason iTunes has started crashing when I insert an audio CD, hence the reinstall.

The DVDs I guess I’ll just watch in the bedroom on our TV. Or maybe I’ll encode them using Handbrake and watch them in iTunes. That might be fun. We’ll see.

So that’s it for now. See you in a month!