Listening to ambient music with eMusic, iTunes, and an iPod
Posted on | March 15, 2007 | 1 Comment
A system for uncovering and then getting back to the stuff I actually like
I’m going to detail the process by which I acquire, manage, and listen to ambient music. I don’t think there’s anything particularly brilliant or even clever about the way I handle things. And parts of it are a bit messy, especially to the librarian in me. But maybe this might be useful to readers trying to deal with large amounts of music.
Most everything I listen to these days comes from my eMusic Premium account which gets me 90 downloads for $19.99. I’m grandfathered in to the old rate, as now they offer only 75 downloads a month at $19.99. For my purposes, this is a pretty reasonable deal. So, after I grab my tracks, here’s what happens:
All of the tracks are imported into and labelled “ambient” in iTunes. The music lives on a 2 year old 15″ Apple PowerBook, and is backed up to a 250GB Lacie external Firewire harddrive. A smart playlist is populated for each month’s downloads, where anything downloaded within the current month and labelled ambient is automatically added. The playlist is synched to a 1G 4GB iPod Nano.
As I listen to music, the tracks that stand out to me are rated from 1 to 5 stars. When synching the iPod with the PowerBook, my recent track plays are sent to last.fm. I like the idea of having this data on the network rather than locked inside iTunes. I only wish there was a more powerful way to connect the two. The rating system works as follows:
- 1 star means I’m not interested in hearing the track again.
- 2 stars is essentially meaningless, though slightly more meaningful than no rating. 2 stars means I don’t really like it, but it’s not bad enough to throw out. I may end up hearing it again and making a decising to raise or lower the rating.
- 3 stars means I definitely would like to hear the track again.
- 4 stars means I think the track is oustanding.
- 5 stars means the track is basically as good as it gets for me.
I then create playlists based on stars. I’ll fill the iPod with the 3 star or greater playlist, which means by definition the 4 and 5 star tracks are transferred. If I’m feeling like I want to listen a bit more broadly, I’ll listen to the 3 star playlist. If I’m in the mood to hear familiar, favorite tracks, I’ll play the 5 star playlist.
This has been a fairly useful way of uncovering music I like and finding it again for later listens. The rating system also forces me to be a bit more of an active listener, which in turn helps me refine my preferences and gives me things to talk about on this site.
Soundtracks, Part 2: Hilmar Orn Hilmarsson & Sigur Ros, Angels of the Universe
Posted on | March 8, 2007 | No Comments
Note: This is part two of an n part series.
Read part one: Soundtracks, Part 1: Michael Brook, An Inconvenient Truth
Angels of the Universe by Hilmar Orn Hilmarsson, with contributions form Sigur Ros.
This record makes me feel like I’m in Iceland. And I’ve never been to Iceland. I’ve been wanting to go to Iceland for at least five years now, since I saw an Iceland Air flight & hotel package advertised on the web. I almost went. And then things in my life changed. Since then, I’ve seen no less than a half-dozen travel shows on Iceland, the partying in Reykjavik, the hot springs, the trips out into the frozen wasteland. I still want to go. This record reminds me of that each time it comes up in a playlist.
I’ve listened to this record the past few winters, walking to and from the subway, through wind and snow and ice and rain and burning ears. I wish I could track each listen, but I’m confident I didn’t give any of these tracks a listen between April and October. It just sounds cold and bleak. And I mean it sounds cold and bleak in only the very best way.
There’s something kind of hopeless and inevitable about most of the tracks on the record, and I find this really comforting. It’s mostly string arrangements with the odd, spare guitar or violin melody floating through the middle of it all.
I recommend this soundtrack highly. I think a lot of people probably pick it up because of the Sigur Ros contributions to the last two tracks, which are rather nice. But the first fifteen Sigur-Ross-free tracks are really what make the work worth your attention.