Well, another weekend, another 5 bucks spent on iTunes Music Store :-) ... As a method of relaxing this Saturday, and Gods know I needed it, I decided to rate my music collection. When my hard disk crashed a few months ago (re: bad motherboard/ RAM stick) I lost everything on it, but was able to retrieve my music collection from my iPod.
Unfortunately, the method I chose* of retrieving the tracks meant that while the tags stayed intact, my ratings were lost ... and so were a lot of automatic playlists. I've slowly worked on rebuilding the ratings but so far, I've done about 1500 of 2200 tracks. I decided to tackle Classic Rock yesterday, and in the process rediscovered my love of The Beatles. I've been listening to too much electronica these days. Gotta return to my roots and all that ...
Of course, my roots are Hard Rock (my first love was GnR, in the heady days of Appetite for Destruction and Use Your Illusion), but you know what I mean!
- Because by Anthony Way & Vanessa-Mae ... a song from the amazing cover album, "In My Life", put together by George Martin. If you are a Beatles fan, you must own this album. That is all.
- In My Life by Sean Connery ... by far one of the best covers of a Beatles song I've ever heard. Sean Connery gives a weary, contemplative reading of this song, which is really quite touching. It makes you wonder why the Beatles, in all their youth, would pen a song as contemplative as this.
- Layla (Unplugged) by Eric Clapton ... going down memory lane, I got mugged by the recollection of this song. I mean, this is a shining example of how heavy airplay can kill a good song. It's kinda like ... well, Mike knows the discussions of pop vs. art that he's conducted on his blog, but ... this is Clapton dammit! Appreciate the music! I had to put up with gaggles of girls swooning at the song's romance instead, and constant lovey-dovey crap on MTV. Made me sick. Of course, you'd never see the electric version of Layla get that kind of attention!
- Hide and Seek by Imogen Heap ... slumming around the electronica section of iTMS these past few weeks brought this song to my attention ... it's been the bestseller for ... a month, I think. Heavily synthed female vocals, nothing else. A treat to listen to.
- Crossroads by Rush ... Cream ... covered by Rush ... power-trio heaven, if you ask me.
I was going to watch Aeon Flux, but it got a pretty mixed bag of reviews that I wasn't sure I wanted to spend the time in a crowded theater. Of course, next week is Narnia and the week after is King Kong. I highly recommend everyone get a copy of the original and bone up on the 1933 version over the next couple of weeks!
I'm thinking of buying the Chronicles of Narnia compendium ... I remember absolutely loving Prince Caspian and A Horse & His Boy ... of course, that was over 15 years ago! Damn, I'm old.
Oh, the other major highlight of this weekend was an amazing 6 hour WoW marathon, a complete clearing of the Molten Core, including Ragnaros. I think this was the first time we tried it. I was glad I managed to stay awake for Rags (it was around 2:30am when we finally killed him!) One of the downsides to flying to Atlanta every Sunday afternoon is that I can't participate in Sunday's raids (or Tuesdays or Thursdays, for that matter). And thus far, Archon's MC runs have stopped 2 bosses short of Rags on Saturday (the defeat of the penultimate boss starts 2 hour timer to kill Ragnaros). While Archon has killed Rags about 4 or 5 times thus far, it was my first time there. I have a screenshot somewhere, but no time to fix & upload it :p The exquisite execution of the encounter that I saw last night was just ... breathtaking! For more details on the tactics & forethought necessary, click here.
Anyway, my flight to Atlanta is in 3 hours and I have to start packing :p
* Plug your iPod in, but don't accept the message to sync with iTunes. Then, in iTunes, click on Edit-> Preferences-> iPod, and check "Enable Disk Use". the iPod is now an external hard disk with all the tracks displayed as files (I think the folders are hidden though, so you'll have to turn that on). The teack names are gobbledegook, but once you copy all the songs to your PC, add them to iTunes. That'll fix the naming problem, and rearrange them into the proper folder structure. Like I said before, you lose your track rating. You also lose your playlists, and the iTunes Playlist of Recently Added will have ALL tracks in it.
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