And the future looks good. In only 5 years, we'll have flying cars and hoveboards. In nine years we'll have life-like replicants that will work as laborers in dangerous off-world environments. Let's hope they don't decide to fight back. 

So it's 2010 and it officially sounds like we're living in the future. Twenty-Ten. I guess it's a pretty big deal. I originally wanted to write up a "best of the decade" list of music albums, but there are too many. Do I limit it to ones I listened to as they were released, or do I include ones from the early-mid 2000s that I have only discovered recently? So many options. So I'm not doing that.

Instead, I decided to focus only on 2009 and create a party mix CD of some of my favorite tunes from the past year:

Jeff's 2009 Party Mix

1. Röyksopp - Röyksopp Forever
2. The Golden Filter - Solid Gold
3. Black Moth Super Rainbow - Tooth Decay
4. Simian Mobile Disco - Audacity of Huge
5. Calvin Harris - The Rain
6. Danger - 00:01
7. MSTRKRFT - 1,000 Cigarettes
8. Boys Noize - Starter
9. Huoratron - Gbay
10. Infected Mushroom - End of the Road
11. Dan Deacon - Snookered
12. Condo Fucks - Shut Down, Part 2
13. Street Sweeper Social Club - Promenade
14. Them Crooked Vultures - Gunman
15. The Flaming Lips - Watching the Planets

Oh and look, somebody hosted it right here, and it's totally not even on my web server, completely absolving me of any legal issues. How convenient! Total playing time comes in at just under 70 minutes, so you can burn it to a CD which everyone totally still does.

And now for some miscellaneous fun statistics for the past year:

Top 10 Google Queries

1. php date
2. zenses
3. totom
4. foobar
5. wamp
6. sabnzbd
7. adsense
8. edmonton ab
9. zend framework
10. totallies

I can never remember how to format various dates in PHP, I guess.

Top 10 Last.fm Artists

1. Nine Inch Nails (821 plays)
2. The White Stripes (561 plays)
3. Atmosphere (350 plays)
4. The Beatles (285 plays)
5. The Smashing Pumpkins (278 plays)
6. Infected Mushroom (270 plays)
7. The Flaming Lips (269 plays)
8. Modest Mouse (264 plays)
9. Beastie Boys (264 plays)
10. Brothers Backword (179 plays)

No surprise here, except for maybe The Beatles being so high up there. I decided to listen to every single one of their albums chronologically since they were all remastered in 2009. It was neat. I might do it again.

Top 10 Last.fm Songs

1. The White Stripes - It's My Fault For Being Famous (29 plays)
2. Danger - 00:01 (feat. Vyle) (27 plays)
3. The White Stripes - Astro (26 plays)
4. Röyksopp - Röyksopp Forever (24 plays)
5. Danielson - Did I Step On Your Trumpet (24 plays)
6. Infected Mushroom - End Of The Road (22 plays)
7. Street Sweeper Social Club - Clap For The Killers (20 plays)
8. Nine Inch Nails - Not So Pretty Now (20 plays)
9. Jane's Addiction - Chip Away (20 plays)
10. Peter Bjorn and John - Young Folks (20 plays)

This list differs quite a bit from my 2009 Party Mix album mostly because a lot of these songs weren't released in 2009. Go figure!

I wrote 34 blog posts. My website had 5,719 visits, 9,920 pageviews, and 4,276 unique visitors. I sent 92 emails. I wish I had more stats. I basically wish everything kept incredible stats and let me see them. How many tweets have I made in 2009? How many people did I befriend on Facebook? How many people did I remove as a friend? How many gigabytes did I download? I guess I could keep track of these things myself, but that's way too much work and requires way more discipline than I'm prepared to invest.

Anyway, here's to living in the future.

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There are a few nice and shiny services out there that offer automatic MP3 re-tagging, but I have never found one that does everything I want. The fully automated solutions really scare me, and others require that you use iTunes. I'm sure they work fine for the majority of people (in fact a lot of them work on both PC and Mac), but I wanted something a little more powerful. For a long time it's been a dream of mine to find a program that can query the Last.fm database and re-tag my music (specifically genres) using their accurately crowd-sourced information. I even went so far as to hobble together my own PHP script that did this, but it was clunky and I am not very proud of it (so I won't be posting it here). This dream came true when I found MusicBrainz Picard Tagger.

Right out of the box, Picard will scan your music library and find the proper band names, album titles, release dates, and song titles for your music. It will also find all kinds of extra information such as the publisher, country of origin, catalog number, and barcode for specific albums. If you agree with the information it suggests, you can click "Save" and rest easy knowing you're on your way to MP3 tag bliss.

So what's this about Last.fm tags? Picard Tagger supports plugins, and more specifically, there is a plugin called LastFMPlus. LastFMPlus extends Picard's tagging capabilities to include very specific genres, grouping (more broad genres), moods (happy, sad, trippy), occasions (summer, driving), and more. What's even better is Picard will perform searches on a per-track basis, so you don't have to worry about artists or albums that cover more than one genre. There is a pretty detailed tutorial on how to install and use it on their website, but it's been down for me more than once, so I've hosted the tutorial myself which you can download right here. I've also hosted the plugin myself, which can be downloaded here. Their tutorial doesn't cover everything and assumes you already know how to use Picard, so I'll quickly go over the main points so you don't have to read any more than you already are.

Installation & Setup

After you've downloaded Picard, install it but don't open it yet. Download the LastFMPlus plugin and extract it to the plugins folder within your Picard installation directory. Once you've extracted it, there should be a lastfmplus folder in the plugins folder. Within that, there should be two python (.py) files. If you're hardcore, you could open these in a text editor and modify the plugin yourself, but you probably won't need to.

Run Picard and do what any self respecting geek would do first: open the options. You can click through and enable and disable whatever you like, but in order to enable the plugin, you'll have to click Plugins and enable Last.fm Plus. You can also enable other useful plugins that came bundled with Picard, like Disc Numbers, which will properly tag multi-disc albums. When you're done, click OK to close the options panel, and then open it back up again. Next to Plugins on the left side, there should be [+] icon indicating there's more underneath that menu item. Go ahead and click that to reveal the Last.fm Plus plugin options. You can play with these settings or leave them all at default, but what you have to do is go over to the 2nd tab and click the bold "Load Defaults" button at the bottom. Now click OK.

Let the tagging begin

Now you're ready to really get started. Picard has two main windows: the left side which shows you unmatched files, and the right side which shows you songs that are ready to tag. Use the toolbar buttons at the top to add individual files or an entire folder to the left window. Once they are listed, click "Cluster" to group them by album. If you're tagging individual songs, there's no need to cluster. If you already have fairly well tagged music, you can select which songs from the left window that you want to look up and click "Lookup". The selected songs will be moved to the right side and let you know it's "loading album information". A few seconds later, you should be able to see which, if any, of your selected songs were found. There will be a rectangular meter next to the matched songs indicating how well your song was matched to the one in the database. If it was a perfect match, you'll see a fully green meter. You can right click on the song in the right window and inspect its details to see the custom tags that were added by LastFMPlus. If you're happy with the results, select the song(s) you want to save and click "Save".

If your tags are a mess or the "Lookup" button is finding incorrect matches, there's still hope. Picard uses fingerprinting to determine the origin of your music even if you have completely incorrect tags or no tags at all. Add your music to the left window as you normally would, except click "Scan" instead of "Lookup". It takes a little longer than usual, but it will more than often find a match. There were a few cases when, despite proper pre-existing tags, "Lookup" failed to properly find a match, but "Scan" did. 

That wasn't so bad

With my 1000+ album music library, Picard was unable to find proper tag information for about a dozen of them. One of the downsides is that if the album isn't in Picard's database, then you can't use the LastFMPlus plugin to at least get proper genre information. Even with this limitation, a 1.2% failure rate is something that I'm willing to live with. Not to mention it even found some rarer bootlegs that I wasn't expecting it to find. I also had some bizarre matches with a few albums, specifically in cases when it finds matches across multiple releases of the same album (like deluxe editions), so I had to manually move around the matched tracks so that they made up a single complete matched album. You also might have problems finding albums if you're searching for them on (or before) their release date. This is because Picard uses a user-contributed database, so if nobody else has added that album before you, it's not going to pull any matches. This is a good opportunity for you to contribute!

So it's not perfect, but it's damn good. It has satisfied my need for perfect tags the most out of any solution I've tried, and it allows a wide range of customization. Now we can all create incredibly specific playlists depending on any mood or occasion. 

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Anyone with an internet connection for more than a few days has probably come across a parked domain. There are so many parked domains now, legitimate websites are forced to accept ridiculous alternate spellings like Flickr or Digg or whatever else. Today at lunch I went to fun.com to find that, surprise surprise, it was also parked. I decided to perform a little experiment by pretending I was a completely ignorant internet user who was innocently looking for some free music. I clicked the first drop-down and selected "free music". Oh dear.

I eagerly clicked the first result that was presented to me and it brought to FreeMusicConnection.com. I was greeted with a very low bitrate song playing in the background and an animated Flash intro. After clicking "Skip Intro and Take Me to My Music!", I suddenly had a form to fill out. I'm sure they just need a little info and I would be on my way to FREE MUSIC.

So secure.

I guess now everybody knows my password is "Gordon". Please don't tell anyone, guys. Also, at least they're up front with you about how little they respect your privacy!

After filling out the form with fake information, I came to a screen asking to verify my phone number. Rats. I guess they're too smart to let bogus sign-ups get past them. The scary part, though, was in the fine print:

The Service is available to customers of Rogers Wireless, Bell, Fido, Sasktel, Telus, MTS Mobility and Virgin Mobile for a monthly fee of $5.00/week.

Yup. $20/month for FREE MUSIC if you weren't careful enough to read the fine print. Sadly, my relationship with FreeMusicConnection.com was at an end, but I wasn't ready to give up my search.

Back at fun.com, I found another site offering free music, this time it was EZ-Tracks.com. Upon clicking, I had to mute another low bitrate song playing in the background of a flash animation. EZ-Tracks didn't force me to fill out a form before I knew what my options were, which was nice, so clicked a few songs in their "Top Song Downloads" section. Before attempting to download, I checked out some of the comments at the bottom of the page. This was for Snoop Dogg's "Drop It Like It's Hot":

wow i would like to drop it like its hot too. because i am hot and sexy

Sounds reasonable. This one was for Queen's "We Are The Champions":

I think this song is very cool to listening to if you are happy

I was sold. I clicked "Download Now" and I was prompted to enter my email address. I gave them a fake one, and I was brought back to the exact same screen that FreeMusicConnection.com sent me to earlier, asking me to verify my phone number. I guess I wasn't getting any free music today.

Just out of curiosity, I clicked their Terms & Conditions and I found this gem:

Many of the songs available through the Service are performed by their original artists. Notwithstanding the foregoing, you understand and agree that most of the available songs are performed by other musicians in the style of the original artists.

I am pretty certain that the only people that get reeled in by these offers are naive moms that just don't know any better. I weep for them.

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Yeah, this is another post about managing my digital music collection. It's a doozy.

I have been an iTunes user for years, but it was only recently that I decided to force myself to switch to another music library application. I've tried a few over the years, including Winamp and more recently Songbird, but I felt they all seemed to lack some pretty basic functionalty that a picky user like myself just needs. Winamp was alright, but its lack of drag-and-drop always bothered me. I liked how iTunes let me drag a song directly from my playlist window to an MSN contact so I could easily initiate a file transfer. Songbird is open source and seemed to have an abundance of features, but it ended up using even more RAM on my computer than iTunes did. A music library application does not need to use more than 150-200 MB of RAM when it would be better off spent by another application that is better suited for it. I could go on about why I like to have a buffer of free RAM versus the "unused RAM is wasted RAM" argument, but I won't.

So although I have been fairly pleased by iTunes over the years, I was starting to get a little annoyed by the sluggish interface, especially when scrolling through a library of 8000+ songs. Add album art into the mix, and your RAM usage skyrockets while the interface gets even more sluggish. So I decided to finally make the switch to a little piece of software called foobar2000. Foobar2000 is an application that you can tell was made by programmers. The interface is ugly, menu items are hard to find, and there are no handy "getting started" wizards when you first launch it. The appeal of it, though, is its blazing speed (launches in about 2 seconds), low RAM usage (15-25 MB with over 9000 [har har] songs) and most importantly, the fact that you can customize anything in the application. The difficult part is figuring out how.

Ugly as sin.

Foobar has a fairly active community of programmers constantly making and updating components that add all kinds of features and tools to the application. One of the first things I did was download a custom UI component (columns UI) that let me create an interface that closely matched iTunes. There are numerous UI components available, some that can completely reskin the player. I also changed the color scheme to something that was a little easier on the eyes. It's not quite as slick as other applications but it does the job nicely.

Much better.

So now to the reasons why foobar is a complete dreamboat:

• Complete customization of the interface - Besides being able to customize where interface items are laid out, I wanted to see how many songs were inside each of my playlists, as well as how many hours, minutes, and seconds each playlist was. I made it show me. I wanted to see the codec and bitrate of the file I was playing in the status bar. I made it show me. You can pretty much do anything you want.
• File format support - Besides the standard MP3, foobar will also play pretty much anything you throw at it. If you find a format that isn't natively supported by foobar, you can be pretty sure somebody made a component that adds support for it. AC3 is one example.
• Folder monitoring library - Instead of dragging files into foobar to add them to your library (like iTunes), you can tell foobar to monitor one or many folders on your PC and it will add them to the library automatically. Delete a file from the folder, it gets removed from your library. You can also tell it to ignore certain file types.
• X to X file conversion - Want that FLAC file converted to OGG? You can do that. Though that is a little obscure of an example, I've found myself needing to convert AC3 files (ripped from a DVD) to MP3 a few times.
• Mass tag/rename/move - Pretty self explanitory. You can retag, rename, or move large amounts of songs at once. Format the target file names however you like using built in variables. Have it sort files into an organized folder structure based on artist and album tags.
• Statistics - With an optional component, you can keep track of ratings, play counts, and dates songs were last played. By default, your tags are not modified. A nice option for those (like me) that hate when applications sneakily rewrite your tags.
• Autoplaylists - These are basically the same as Smart Playlists in iTunes, except probably a little more powerful. You can literally write your own queries that are actually quite similar to SQL. If you want a list of songs from the 90s that you haven't listened to in the past week, you can achieve it with: NOT %last_played% DURING LAST 1 WEEK AND (date GREATER 1989 AND date LESS 2000).
• Album art - Displays album art embedded in files or saved externally (folder.jpg in Windows).

It even lets me drag-and-drop songs into MSN. It's pretty much perfect for me. A few other features worth mentioning are gapless playback, keyboard shortcuts, and yes, it can scrobble to Last.fm.

The only gripe I have with it, is that it doesn't have built-in searching of album art, and it can't import album art downloaded by iTunes. For this, I had to download a separate application called Album Art Downloader (accurate name), which can search an entire directory for missing artwork (if you tell it to look for folder.jpg files). Once it's figured out what you're missing, you can get it to search various online sources (Google, Amazon, Last.fm, Discogs...) for artwork and automatically save it to the appropriate directory. The awesome part is, its possible to integrate into foobar if you download the foobar COM server component.

The thing that turns people away from foobar the most is how much time and effort that needs to go into configuring it to look and function exactly how you want. Since components are all made by third party developers, the options interface for most of them are all different, adding that extra level of complexity. Luckily there are plenty of people online in forums willing to help you out.

oh my god options

I guess my point is that if you're looking for that perfect player for your music, you're probably going to have to make it yourself. Most of the work is done for you, you just need to spend a few hours customizing it to meet your needs. It'll be worth it.

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Anyone who knows me nowadays knows that I am a pretty big Nine Inch Nails fan. What most probably don't know is that I actually only really became a fan around 2005, about the time With Teeth was released. I remember reading an article about how Trent Reznor was mad that a radio station leaked two new songs from his album (his first new album in 6 years), and how fans' first impressions of it were ruined by listening to a low-quality radio recording. To "get back", or maybe to prove a point about how first impressions are important, Trent ruined the ending of Million Dollar Baby which had just opened in theaters. A movie I hadn't seen yet, but wanted to. I was a little cheesed, but I thought it was funny, and I decided to download With Teeth and give it a shot.

Nine Inch Nails - Rexall Place, Edmonton, AB - 7.28.08 - photo by Warrren Hrycun

My first impression was that the album was "okay". I had been aware of NIN as a band (if you can call one guy a band) for years, seeing as they were fairly popular in the mid-late 90s, but I never actually gave them a chance. I gave With Teeth a few more listens, though, and it started to grow on me. It wasn't until several months later that I decided to buy The Downward Spiral on a whim when I saw it for $9.99 at HMV. I was out of town at the time (Billie's brother's wedding), so without a CD player, I had to wait until I got back home to listen to it. Unknown to me at the time, I had just planted a seed that was soon to grow into a full blown obsession.

In the next 3-4 years, I managed to track down not just all of their full length albums, but each of their singles and EPs as well, which usually contained many good remixes. It was easy to keep track of which albums I was missing, due to a convenient little numbering system for each release called Halos. Each release (with a couple rare exceptions) was given a Halo number. Their first single was Halo 1, and their very last release to date is Halo 27. In 2005 they were only at Halo 19, but I still had quite a bit of collecting to do. To this day, the only ones I am missing are 12 and 15. One being a rare out of print VHS tape, and the other being an also out of print, three-part single that usually sells for $80 per-part on eBay.

Nine Inch Nails - Rexall Place, Edmonton, AB - 7.28.08

My obsession took another turn for the worse when I bought a record player some time in 2007. Now I had the need to go back and buy all of my absolute favorite albums on wonderful vinyl (Billie was initially opposed to this idea, but she's now somewhat grown fond of collecting records). I held back a little bit, partly due to the rarity of many older NIN albums on vinyl, but I eventually managed to find copies of every full length album, including Broken and The Fragile which have never seen repressings beyond their original release. My absolute prized possesion that came from all of this has to be the ultra-deluxe limited edition of Ghosts I-IV that was released in 2008. It's pretty awesome, you guys.

By now you're probably wondering why I'm sharing all of this, and if you're still reading, here's why: It has been recently announced by Trent himself that the current NIN tour is going to be their last. Their last forever? Nobody knows, but at least their last for a long, long time. In the short time that I've been a fan, I have been lucky enough to see them live three times. Once in 2005, and twice in 2008, and they were by far the favorite concert experiences I've had. Though I am probably a little biased. Just a little.

Single tear.

So here is where my obsession ends, or at least slows down, for now. Trent prematurely announced he was in talks with HBO to pitch an original TV series revolving around the story of the album Year Zero, but that was a while ago and there hasn't been much news about it in some time. I guess I am lucky to have enjoyed new NIN music in the short time it was available, seeing as though the older fans commonly had to wait 4-6 years between each album prior to With Teeth's release. At least now other fans and I can follow Trent on Twitter to see what he's up to. I guess it's time to play the waiting game.

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