Are Seven

I’ve been in a very Muxtape place these days, starting up a couple Muxtapes over the weekend and rededicating myself to regularly updating the Are Seven Muxtape.

In short (though that first paragraph was a single sentence, so really, it was already in short), Muxtape has become my favorite social and music stop.  But while one of its most attractive features is its simplicity, that doesn’t mean I can’t have a wish list for features for them to add in:

• An activity meter of muxes you’re a fan of. Muxtape has been adding in tons of new features, but they’re missing the one they crucially need: something like the Facebook’s news feed.  It’s all fine and well to add muxes that you’re a fan of, but you need some way to know when they’ve been updated besides subscribing to individual rss feeds.  It also needs something on each muxtape that says when it was last updated.  I’ve set up a Twitterfeed for my Muxtape so it should start showing up in Twitter and Friendfeed, but there needs to be a better way to see Muxtape activity.
• Speaking of, there’s a fantastic tool called Muxtape Stumbler that does exactly what Muxtape should do: give the top Muxtape and allow you to search on band or song, finding exactly the mixes that you’re looking for.  Just since I heard about Muxtape Stumbler, I’ve found a number of songs by searching or looking at the top songs and artists that I never would have found simply by clicking around Muxtapes.  It needs to be on the site itself.
• Muxtape needs an improvement in the uploading process.  It’s all fine and well to go one at a time, but they need to add in at least the ability to choose and upload more than one at a time, and preferably drag and drop uploading. Plus, it would be nice to delete one song and add another on the same screen instead of having to go back and forth.
• Better controls.  Yeah, it’s great to just have play and stop, but it would be really nice to have volume control and the ability to scan through a song.  I think that it would be possible to add in better control while not giving up the simplicity.

There’s tons of other social music stuff out there, and if I had a little more time, I’d start up a blog examining more of these technologies that tread the line between music and the social web.

• Hype Machine.  Most people already know about Hype Machine, an aggragator of music blogs that’s pretty much the first stop (maybe only MySpace is in competition) when there’s a band you’re curious about.
• favtape.com. It’s looks like a ripoff of Muxtape, but it’s actually a little more like Hype Machine, scouring the web and getting full versions of songs.  It’s a great place to hear songs you’re curious about from beginning to end, especially if you’re curious to hear whatever’s on iTunes top 100.
• last.fm. It’s by far and away my favorite social music network, though it has a number of its own flaws. The software that sends what you’re playing from your iTunes to the network isn’t the easiest thing in the world to update, and it doesn’t always send every song to your profile.  Still, it’s a great way to see what your friends are listening to.
• imeem.com. I’ve never really had the patience to get into Imeem, but it’s one of the fastest-growing social networks.  You can hear plenty of songs and create a robust profile of your own, but it seems to require a lot of patience to get it up and running, and I ran into a lot of frustration in that you can listen to full songs on the site, but only embed 30-second sound samples on a website.  Sometimes.  It’s frustrating.
• iLike.com.  It’s a lot like last.fm, but I just haven’t warmed to it as much.  It does allow you to publish your iTunes playlists to webpages, but they really need to get better control over what playlists to show and what not to.

All these things are a lot like blogs: I wish everyone did them, so I could know what everyone is listening to.

Any social music sites you’re into?  If you’re on any of these sites, add me as a friend.  You can probably figure out my username.

It happens sometimes that a band records a song on a shoestring budget in a crappy studio and it somehow becomes a minor hit in spite of off-key vocals and sloppy performances. The attention gives the opportunity to re-record it, but it always runs a risk of watering down the charms of the first version, even while it fixes the flaws.

It’s both surprising and completely unsurprising that the re-recording is usually a letdown. You imagine that the band is really happy with it, having spent the last X months cringing at the mistakes of the first one, but to the fans, it pales in comparison. As a result of the number of times that I’ve been disappointed with a new version of an older favorite, I usually cringe when I see that a song’s been re-recorded.

There’s exceptions, though.

Black Kids, “I’m Not Gonna Teach Your Boyfriend How To Dance With You”

download | buy the album mp3s at Amazon

When the music blogs jumped all over this song last fall, I fell for it, but not too hard. It was irresistable and fun and stuck in my head whether I wanted it there or not, but it was also pretty sloppy and sounded like what it was: a band pretty new to recording. But still, there was an engaging energy to it, it certainly didn’t lack hooks, and it had one of the best song titles of recent memory.

When I first heard the album last week, I put it immediately to this song and…couldn’t tell whether it was re-recorded or not. It was almost exactly the same length and started similarly, but it was just slightly different. All of the flaws were polished off in a way that might make a skeptic suspect Pro Tools, but it appears to just be a re-recording, but one that keeps all of the original version’s qualities while getting rid of its, um, unrequested quirks.

The full album from Black Kids is out on Tuesday, and it’s the party album of the year. Not that there’s a lot of competition for that title.

The Fine Tune Friday staff had the week off last Friday for the 4th of July. They were supposed to do a make-up post the next Saturday, but they were hungover still drunk. I really should fire them, but they do good work when they actually get around to it.

Bonnie “Prince” Billy, “So Everyone”

download | buy album mp3s at Amazon

My theory on the reason why Bonnie “Prince” Billy is mostly only loved in music geek circles is because, if you don’t have it on a high enough volume, it ends up sounding almost ambient, just floats by without really registering. Turn it up and pay attention, though, and it’s pretty rewarding.

Not to say that it isn’t a little weird, because it is. There’s some bizarre arrangements, cracking and meandering vocals and other things that would make some people say, “What the hell are we listening to?!” It adds up to something that has both character and beauty.

And all of that adds up to this song: “So Everyone” starts with something that on the surface is fairly nondescript, but deeper listening reveals a fantastic opening line (”I know my way around the world, it’s a circle and it starts and ends”), before it flowers into a gorgeous chorus with a harmony that varies when the chorus comes around again. And what seem to be really, really smutty lyrics.

Added to my library in the last couple weeks:

• Simple Minds, Live In The City of Light, which I finally ripped for reasons that will become clear sometime soon.
• The Avett Brothers, Emotionalism, on the recommendation from my friend Rebecca.
• Wolf Parade, At Mount Zoomer. Sounds better each time it turns up. Which is a surprise.
• A Certain Ratio, Early. I finally find it in mp3 form, though they’re not great quality. But I’d been looking for a while.

And you?

I’m a glutton. I want to take in everything at once in huge gulps. I’m not even done with one bite before I want another one.  I should stop to savor, but I just have a hard time with self-control.

I have the same problem with music.  I want to listen to everything at once, and in the days when I listened to CDs, I would listen to a minute or two of one song before that reminded me of another song that I wanted to listen to immediately.  I would listen to music for hours, but rarely, if ever, finish a full song.

Things are a little bit different now that I’m totally digital. The fact that iTunes won’t mark a song as played until it’s reached the very end of the song means that I’ll listen to a full song so that I can give it credit, which satisfies the part of me obsessed with stats.

But things are also a little different now in that I can no longer look at a few hundred CDs and decide what to listen to, and no longer have a car with 10 CDs that I never change out, meaning that it’s harder to get to know songs very well.  If I don’t like things right off the bat, I have all of my favorite music right in my iPod to listen to.  It’s too tempting to just switch something off if it doesn’t immediately impress.

I’ve turned to playlists made in iTunes to help me discover and re-discover music and to allow me to be a total glutton, to just open up my ears and let the music slide in.  Now that my library’s over 21,000 songs, I need to be reminded of what I haven’t listened to, and with the speed at which I’m adding stuff, I need something that will force me to re-listen to things; to give them a chance for a while and let them sink in.

The first playlist is a little complex, but it’s one of my favorites.  I call it Recent Radio, and it’s the substitute for listening to CDs in my car.  It takes everything from the current year, won’t play anything I’ve listened to in the last few days, makes songs move off of the list after two months, but keeps the songs that I’ve rated three songs or above in for four months (to provide a little more of that “this songs reminds me of this year” spice).  The recipe takes three different playlists, thanks to iTunes not allowing for “unless” statements in their playlists.

Playlist One: “Radio all”
Match all of the following rules:

• Year is 2008 (or whatever the current year is, obviously)
• Date Added is in the last 2 months
• Last Played is not in the last 4 days
• Rating is not 2 stars
• Rating is not 1 star (so that I can remove anything from the playlist that I don’t want to hear anymore)

Playlist #2: “Radio Select”
Match all of the following rules:

• Year is 2008
• Rating is greater than two stars
• Last Played is not in the last 4 days
• Date Added is in the last 4 months

Playlist #3: “Recent Radio” (this is the one that combines the two)
Match any of the following rules:

• Playlist is “Radio All”
• Playlist is “Radio Select”

These playlists give me a fantastic stroll through all of the music from the year, forcing me to listen to stuff that I might otherwise ignore.

But what about the thousands of other songs in my library?  There’s tons of stuff in there that I love, but my constant curiosity about new music keeps me from really listening.  For this, I recently came up with my “Random Neglected” playlist:

• Last played is not in the last 12 months
• Rating is not one star
• Rating is not two stars
• Limit to 100 items
• Skip count is in the range 0 to 8
• Last skipped is not in the last 3 months

It’s extremely simple, but even as I listen to it now, I get huge spoonfuls of songs that I haven’t listened to in at least a year.  It takes in my Never Played playlist as well, and gives me an incredible overview of my library, while not taking in some of the stuff that I’ve given more than enough attention to. UPDATE: I found that I was having trouble when, if I skipped over a song, it stayed on the playlist, so I added in the last two conditions, so that if I skip a track, it expires from the playlist and doesn’t show up again for another six months.

Obviously, you could change these playlists to suit your own tastes.  If you aren’t as into new music as I am, you could simply remove the “Year is 2008″ from the Radio playlists and just have a good overview of the music you’ve added in.  You could decrease the time of the neglected playlist to let a little more in.

I’m telling you this only because it’s extremely important and could well save your life one day.  I hope to God you read the whole thing.

It was inevitable. The cannibalization has started. I started up another music blog and I end up writing about the song that’s been on my mind all week, which means I’d only be repeating myself on Fine Tune Friday and nobody wants that. The song I would have been writing about was the irritating-but-irresistible “If This Hat Is Missing I Have Gone Hunting” by Get Well Soon, but I already wrote about it.

Instead, enjoy another nice slice from the same album, a song called “I Sold My Hands For Food So Please Feed Me”, a song that isn’t irritating at all, but is actually really lovely. It reminds me a little of Radiohead’s “Let Down”, which is maybe a little bit too much of a comparison stretch, since that’s one of my favorite songs of all time, but it’s in the same vein. Enjoy.

download

New to my library this last week:

• Mates of State, Re-arrange Us. Nothing we haven’t heard before from these folks, but nice all the same.
• Sigur Ros, Med sud I eyrum vid spilum endalaust. I think I might be one of the few people who like Sigur Ros more with each album they release. I never got into the first one too much, but each release has hit me harder. This one is great.
  
• Bonnie “Prince” Billy, Lie Down In The Light. A combination of recommendations from Pitchfork, Christian, Thomas and good ol’ Limo Crazy’s Muxtape made me cave and buy it. It’s great.
  
• Various, Ken Burns Jazz - The Story Of America’s Music. As I slowly plow through this, I finally broke down and bought the whole thing on Amazon. I’m sure that jazz purists would laugh at anyone learning about the history of jazz through Ken Burns, but…I love it. It’s a nice capsule.
• Girl Talk, Feed The Animals. More short-attention-span mashups that’s…pretty much exactly the same. A whole lot of fun, but not a whole lot more.
  

Gotten anything good lately?

I have pretty mixed feelings on highly retro sounds, especially when that sound is of the ’60’s. Choosing to recreate a past sound both shows a love of the history, but it also shows a lack of creativity. Isn’t there a way to show your love for a time of the past but also update it with the intervening times and sounds an personal creativity?

Still, there’s plenty of times when a retro sound hits so nicely and beautifully that it doesn’t really matter. Maybe it’s not the new sound and steps forward that are always so impressive, but it’s still a sound of affection.

Pete Molinari, “I Don’t Like The Man I Am”

download
I don’t know much about this song. It was on the Mojo compilation about “new soul”, and it was one of the few that I hadn’t heard that I liked. This song really stood out in it’s comforting simplicity. It’s like so many country or blues songs when you know exactly how the tune is going to go and how the melody is going to resolve, and the fact that it goes just as you think it would feels great. It’s a beautiful tune.

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Added to my library:
My eyes were bigger than my ears this week. I found plenty of time to download, but little time to listen. But here’s what’s in the “To Listen” pile:

• Sprites, “Wish I’d Kept A Scrapbook”, which is a Tullycraft cover, bringing last Sunday’s show to a nice little point.
• Coldplay, Viva La Vida or Death And All His Friends. Sounds pretty nice, though guess which way they headed when faced with the fork in the road that goes in the direction of sounding more like U2 or forging their own path? Buy it at Amazon.
• Get Well Soon, Rest Now Weary Head You Will Get Well Soon, which I found via 3voor12. It’s a little like combining Beirut (the band, not the city) with Lambchop (the band, not the puppet or the food), and I can’t quite decide yet if I like it or not, but they’re competing with Mogwai for best song titles of the year. Samples: “I Sold My Hands For Food, So Please Feed Me”, “If This Hat Is Missing I Have Gone Hunting” and “Witches! Witches! Rest Now In the Fire”. Listen over at 3voor12.
• Brian Eno, Another Green World, which I bought after hearing “The Big Ship” on Limo Crazy’s Muxtape. What a beautiful song. Buy it at Amazon.
• Hemme Fatale, “Silent Sleepover”. Fun Human League/Ladytron-type stuff that I found over at Fluxblog. Get it at Fluxblog.
• The Fairline Parkway, A Memory of Open Spaces. I love it now that, when a friend writes and tells you that they have a new album out, you just got and buy it immediately, instead of thinking, “Well, I guess I have to wait until the next time they play. Buy it at Amazon.
• Douglas Armour, “The Light of a Golden Day, The Arms of the Night”. Nice indie dancepop found over at Fluxblog, a site that I’m happy to be reading again. Get it at Fluxblog.

I’ve always told people that I like melodies that you can follow with your hand. Some people understand what I mean and others don’t. It’s a little bit like reading music, where you can see the notes moving up and down the staff, showing wide melodic movement and variation of the notes. I can’t really read music besides seeing that notes are indeed moving up and down, so I just kind of do the same thing with my hand, watching the melody move. I’m a little weird.

Fleet Foxes, “Tiger Mountain Peasant Song”

download | buy mp3 from Amazon
The Fleet Foxes record has been kind of a surprise. The EP was okay, but the album is brilliant. The constant comparisons that they get are to Neil Young or My Morning Jacket, but I find that their brand of Americana is more melodic and earthy than either of those acts, the anti-rockist choice of Americana: more closely related to bluegrass and hymns than to guitar rock.

“Tiger Mountain Peasant Song”s title kind of plays this hand a little heavily, but the melody rescues it. It starts as a nice but relatively unremarkable song before it’s lifted into loveliness by the chorus, from the first swooping line (”Dear shadow, alive and well), to the questioning note of the finish.

FTF is in summer repeats. Well, sort of. For those of you who feel that nothing should be repeated, that music should only be new, new, new and nothing but, you’re going to be a little disappointed that today’s installment features a band already featured. The rest of you will wonder what the hell the big deal is, while those of us who fifteen years ago would feel a panic attack at the very thought of including the same band twice on a mix tape totally understand.

Headlights, “On April 2″

download | buy mp3 from Amazon
“Cherry Tulips” was the first song to catch my ear on the Headlights lovely indiepop drop Some Racing, Some Stopping, but this one has easily become my favorite song on the record. The loping melody here is highly whistleable and perfectly suits singer Erin Fein’s voice, and the choice of the snare hits is a excellent match for the popping vocal and guitar, proving that sometimes the simple choice is the best one. The song hasn’t really left my head all week.

Added to my library this week…
It was a busy week for the staff of the Download department in my computer. I had one of the biggest hauls of a New Release Tuesday that I’ve ever had in the digital world. Now that I’m all (well, mostly) legal with my downloads, Tuesdays have started meaning something again.

• Fleet Foxes, Fleet Foxes. I’m really surprised by how fantastic this record is. I was a little underwhelmed by the EP, but was overwhelmed by “White Winter Hymnal”. This record shows that the “White Winter Hymnal” was more of an indicator of the quality of the record than the EP.
• The Cool Kids, Bake Sale. Yeah, it’s more retro rap, but they’ve gone a little past that just by making the beats really hard. Sounds great.
• Spiritualized, Songs in A&E. Didn’t really strike me on first listen, though, to be fair, I was playing it quietly while I was doing other things. It has a samey quality to it, almost like the songs are all in one of two keys. What? Really? Oh, right.
• Ladytron, Velocifero. It’s nice enough, but I know that Ladytron will never come close to matching 604. Which is a little sad.
• Various, Mojo Presents the Changing Man. The Paul Weller-inspired Mod comp that came with the most recent edition of Mojo. I usually let these comps turn up on my Never Played playlist. In other words, haven’t heard any of it yet.
• Douglas Armour, “Fall Apart Again”. Found on Fluxblog. Some nice pop/indie stuff of the kind that Fluxblog is great for finding.
• The Pastels, “Nothing To Be Done”. We’re playing a cover of it at the Sprites show on July 15th at the Red and Black. I figured I should probably have it in my library.

If you looked over in my list of blogs in the right column yesterday, you may have noticed (only one of you noticed) a blog called Naive Harmonies. It’s not just any blog; it’s one done by me and my friend and former office mate who’s given name is Limousine Crazy, but who is better known by the nickname “Dave”. We just launched it yesterday, which is why there’s still champagne all over the bow.

A music blog is something that we’ve been talking about doing for a long time, but since we’ve stopped sharing an office, we’ve missed the conversations we were able to have on an hourly basis, so we whipped this up to share our over-analysis of everything we’ve been listening to. It’s us asking each other, “Have you heard ____?”, but in public.

We’re keeping it slow for the moment; not wanting to the standard blog burnout that comes with doing too much too soon. But I think we’re both looking forward to seeing where it goes. For now, it’s two posts a week and then a Muxtape at the end of the month to catalogue our favorite songs of the month. That’s the plan so far, but it’s really only a matter of time before it comes huge and gets the Russian mafia involved.

I’ll still be doing my Fine Tune Fridays and writing about music here, but that’s a new outlet. Let’s see where it goes.

www.naiveharmonies.com

Nutshell: Use MSN’s SkyDrive and/or Wordpress.com to create an inline mp3 player (like the one I have on this site) on any site or blog, even non-Wordpress.com blogs without any hosting fees. UPDATE: I found that you can use Google Pages to host the swf and the js files that you download from the original creators of the player. Details below.

You’ve seen the little grey music players all over the web. They’re probably the best music player out there, and you’ve coveted them, only to find after a search that you have to have hosting space for the player in order to make it work. And besides that, you need hosting space for the mp3s you’d be serving up with the player anywhere. But there you are, with zero hosting space and no desire to cough up the money to pay for some. Looks like you’re out of luck. Until now.

Yes, I finally figured out a way to host your mp3s in a free file storage so that you can link to them in this player that comes standard with a wordpress.com blog with no hosting fees.

Prerequisite: you need to have an account on MSN’s SkyDrive. It offers 5 GB of free storage space, which, for you, means 5 GB of room for your music files. That’s a lot.

Go to skydrive.live.com and sign in with your Hotmail or Live account. Create one if you don’t have one, obviously. Actually, it’d probably be smart at this point to create a separate account, just in case, but it’s probably not a big deal.

Create a new folder in the public space that will host your files.

- OR -

Select the “Music” folder that’s there by default, then select “Permissions” and change it to “Anyone on the Internet”.

That’s one of the steps here that you only have to do once. You’re going to add your music files that you’ll share to this folder, so you need to make sure that the whole internet can access it, see. Then, to store an mp3 here and get the URL:

Upload your file into this folder

In the “Music” folder view, click on the file you want to embed so that you’re looking at the view of the file itself.

Right-click on the “Download” button at the top of the page and select “Copy the link location”. That’s your URL. I remove the “?download” from the end, but it seems to work even if you don’t.

On your Wordpress.com blog, go into the post and type:

[audio big_long_crazy_skydrive_url.mp3]

And then it appears–as if by magic!–on your blog.

But…what if you don’t have your blog in Wordpress.com?

UPDATE: There are two options here, one (the new one) being to upload the necessary swf and js files to Google pages (pages.google.com, which you can use with your google name). I’ll try to update this post soon with full instructions on that, but in the meantime, here’s the other option:

Oh, you tricky bastard. You figured it out. If you don’t have a Wordpress blog, that means you don’t have access to that nice little audio player, huh? Well, you can get that player anyway, but it means that you have to find somewhere to host the swf file that runs the whole show, and you’re right back at square one.

Do this: go get a Wordpress.com blog. No, you’re not switching your blog’s host; you’re just going to be borrowing the swf from Wordpress. All you have to do is start one up and leave it there with the “Hello World” post. Don’t have to post, don’t have to do nuthin’.

In your blog (Blogger or wherever), fire up a new post, select the “Edit HTML” view (because you’re copying in code, and paste in this snippet of code.

<object type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” data=”http://WORDPRESSBLOGNAME.wordpress.com/wp-content/plugins/audio-player/player.swf” id=”player11240701” height=”24″ width=”290″><param name=”movie” value=”http://WORDPRESSBLOGNAME.wordpress.com/wp-content/plugins/audio-player/player.swf”><param name=”FlashVars” value=”playerID=npmrvsy&soundFile=COPY_FILE_URL_HERE“><param name=”quality” value=”high”>
<param name=”menu” value=”false”><param name=”wmode” value=”transparent”></object>

Then you need to change a few things, listed above in bold. Change:

1. “WORDPRESSBLOGNAME” to whatever you named your Wordpress.com blog
2. id to a name that is unique. I call it player and then give it today’s date, followed by a two more digits in case I have more than one player on one day.
3. copy in the mp3’s URL where it says “COPY_FILE_URL_HERE” (remembering to leave that trailing quote mark).

Once you have your own blog name in there, the only things you have to change each time you paste in the code is the player name and the mp3 you want it to play. Again, if the id isn’t unique, it’ll get all confused if there’s more than one player on a page with the same id. So remember to change that each time.

That seems like one huge, hot mess of instructions, but it isn’t really. I just gave you more specifics than you really need. Once you get your SkyDrive account, your entire set of instructions for Wordpress is:

1. Upload the file
2. Copy the URL
3. Put it in your post

For non-Wordpress blogs, there’s a few more steps, but it’s still easy

1. Paste the object code into a blog post
2. Upload the file
3. Copy the file’s URL
4. Paste the file’s URL in the appropriate place in the code
5. Change the object code’s id to something unique

And there you have it. Well, until Wordpress and/or MSN close the loopholes.