Everyone's making their "best of" lists for 2008, and I'm not going to be any different. The obvious choice for me would be a favorite albums list, because as some people might know from previous posts, my music collection is one of my primary obsessions.  So in a somewhat particular order, these are the albums that helped me get through many work days, hours of driving, and 52 lazy weekends.

1. Nine Inch Nails - Ghosts I-IV

I'll get the obvious out of the way first and start with this one. For sale on the Nine Inch Nails website as a digital-only version for $5 or as an ultra-deluxe limited edition version for $300, this was a 2-disc album containing 36 entirely instrumental songs. There are no official videos for this album, but there was a partnership with YouTube to allow fans to create their own custom videos, sort of like an online film festival.

2. Nine Inch Nails - The Slip

Another obvious one for me, this album was released for free online in digital form as a gift for the success of Ghosts I-IV. It saw a physical release on CD and Vinyl, but was limited to 250,000 copies worldwide. Many critics said it was Trent Reznor's strongest work since The Downward Spiral in 1994.
 

3. Atmosphere - When Life Gives You Lemons...

Everyone teases me for listening to rap music, but they don't know what they're missing. Atmosphere released several small EPs the past year, but their strongest was definitely this album. I was somewhat disappointed with their previous full length album so I didn't have the highest expecations for this one, but my doubts were erased when it was released.
 

4. Portishead - Third

This album made both Last.fm and Pitchfork's best album lists from 2008. It is their first studio album since 1997, although I was never a fan until this year.

 
 

5. MGMT - Oracular Spectacular

Another favorite on Last.fm, also one of the catchiest albums I've heard in a long time. This is MGMT's first full length album and is sure to be played in my car for a long time.

Embedding for any of their videos is disabled so just watch it directly here.
 

6. Hot Chip - Made In The Dark

This album fits into my "silly electronic music" phase that I've been in recently, along with several other albums released in the past couple years. This is the only one making the list, since it's the only one released in 2008.

 

7. Justice - †

Another electronic album, although not really that silly. Somewhat similar to Daft Punk in style, this one is best enjoyed when played very loud with a lot of bass.


 

8. Man Man - Rabbit Habits

I first heard of Man Man when I saw them opening for Modest Mouse. Their genre is hard to describe, so I'll just quote Wikipedia: "Their musical style has been described as Viking-vaudeville, Manic Gypsy Jazz. Man Man is known for their exuberant live performances. When performing, the members of the band dress in white outfits and wear war paint."

Their albums really don't do the band any justice. You have to see them live.

 9. Why? - Alopecia

Another favorite weird band of mine, Why? is from the primarily hip-hop record label Anticon, although their genre is described as psychadelic pop. Alopecia is the strongest and my favorite album of theirs to date.

 
 

10. Restiform Bodies - TV Loves You Back

Yet another weirdo band from Anticon, Restiform Bodies is an experimental hip-hop group. I don't really know what else to say about them other than they're probably an acquired taste.


 

Honorable Mentions

• Crystal Castles - Self Titled
• Ratatat - LP3
• Beck - Modern Guilt
• Ghostland Observatory - Robotique Majestique
• Ladytron - Velocifero

That's it for 2008. I am not very good at reviewing things, I just know what I like, so I'm sorry if some points weren't as thought out as you'd like. GET OFF MY BACK.

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The only thing I've ever bought on iTunes was a Smashing Pumpkins compilation called Rarities and B-sides. It was a 114 song compilation of hard-to-find songs spanning their entire career from 1989 to 2000. Some songs weren't that rare, but there were a few that I otherwise would have no chance of hearing unless I paid over $300 for a used vinyl copy of Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness on eBay. Anyway, the compilation was only around $10-$20 at the time and was exclusively for sale on the iTunes store. So I bought it.

Skip ahead a couple years to present day, I find myself wanting to listen to those old songs again. The only problem is that in the past few years, I've reformatted my computer several times and I seem to have misplaced the files. No biggy, right? I'll just go back to the iTunes store and download them again. Wrong. Not only is the album now only available in the US, but the entire compilation now costs a whopping $119. Even if I lived in the States, I'd have to make a fairly serious financial decision if I wanted to listen to these songs again. Yeah, there are 114 songs, but even still, how do they honsetly justify this? It is just some digital files. I don't even get a fun booklet to flip through, here.

Curious if I could find the album anywhere else, I checked out Amazon. Turns out they do sell it, but the price isn't much better:

Price: $103.85
Album Savings: $8.91 compared to buying all songs

Thanks for the great deal, Amazon.

I am glad I only made this mistake once, and I seriously feel bad for people whose entire music collections are composed of digital downloads, especially if they contain DRM. I am reminded of an incredibly appropriate xkcd comic, and it's the same reason why I still buy CDs. Even without DRM, the whole system is incredibly flawed.

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I have created the single most distubing MP3. I took the audio from a video of a baby laughing in slow motion and combined it with a song by a drone-metal band called Sunn O))). I think it's the greatest thing I've ever done. In my entire life. Listen to it here.

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My last few posts have been music oriented and I have no intention of breaking that pattern with this one. Since I got my new Zune and finished ripping, downloading, and retagging my entire music collection, I decided to see if there were any essential albums I was missing out on. I took a look at Pitchfork's list of top 100 albums from the 1990s, and downloaded the top 50. Pitchfork kind of has a reputation of being a little pretentious at times, so I expected that there would be a lot of albums I had never heard of before, but to my surprise there were a few that I had already owned. Go me.

I spent yesterday's Random Crossfade Playback Wednesday listening to everything at once, just so I could get a general idea of what I was getting myself into. As expected, it ranged from pretty okay to pretty bizarre. I intend to spend the next few weeks listening to every album from beginning to end, deleting those I don't care for, and eventually buying those that deserve to stay in my collection. Maybe in the next few months I will tackle the remaining 50 albums from the list.

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I am a fan of making odd smart playlists in iTunes. My most recent creation was "ONE HOUR OF SHORT SONGS", which consisted of all the songs in my library between one second and one minute in length, equaling exactly one hour.

With those rules, iTunes was able to create me a playlist with 111 songs. I will listen to it today, exactly once.

Poetic.

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I've heard about quite a few cases where you can sync up otherwise unrelated songs and movies resulting in a piece of film that seems completely and eerily intentional. The most famous of these sync-ups is called Dark Side of the Rainbow, which syncs up Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon with The Wizard of Oz. I've always dismissed these kind of things as people just looking too deeply into it, like this one interpretation of Fight Club and Radiohead's The Bends:

Anyway, I ran into this sync-up of a scene from Fantasia 2000 and Tool's 10,000 Days which I feel is pretty neat. I've never seen the original Fantasia nor this remake in 1999, but I basically have to now because it looks really cool. The song isn't bad, either.

I may be more interested in these kinds of things now, but I'm sure it helps if you are familiar with at least the song or the movie. That is probably one reason why I've never been too curious about Dark Side of the Rainbow.

So I guess that means tell me some that you might know about, and I will watch them. Or I won't.

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Before you read this post, I must warn you that it is very TEXT HEAVY. It is text heavy because i am VERY PASSIONATE about this issue. Now that you have been warned, you may continue reading:

I got a new Zune 80GB MP3 player recently, and I've had a couple months to get really familiar with it. So far I've been pretty pleased with everything, but my only issues are with the software. As I expected, Microsoft only lets you use their software to sync your music between your player and PC. That means, even if you don't like it, you are stuck with it. Some people have developed a utility that lets you sync using WMP11 or iTunes, but it is kind of buggy and (I'm hoping) still in development. I am willing to live with using the Zune software, since it is fairly easy to use, except it behaves rather poorly when it comes to tags.

I have a bit of an obsession when it comes to my music being encoded and tagged exacly how I want. I spent a good portion of the past couple months re-ripping, re-downloading and re-tagging my entire music collection so I could have it just right, and I am happy to be finally done (so is Billie). When I finished, the last thing I did was set my entire music folder to read-only so that nothing could ever modify it without my knowledge. I right clicked on the folder, looked at the properties, and saw that there were 3594 files total. I deleted my previous iTunes library, dragged in my fresh new read-only folder, and confirmed that it had imported exactly 3594 songs. It did, and I was happy. +1 for iTunes.

The next step was to perform the same process with the Zune software. After dragging everything in, it told me there were 3592 songs total. Awesome. Two missing, now only if I knew which ones it decided to ignore. I deleted everything from the Zune software and tried again. 3592. Every time. I was forced go through album by album until I found the missing two songs. Eventually I narrowed it down to a song from Mezzanine by Massive Attack and another song from Rated R by Queens of the Stone Age. The problem was duplicate song names. In the case of Mezzanine, track 5 and 11 were both called Exchange and (Exchange), and I guess the Zune software wasn't smart enough to distinguish the two, even though they were correctly tagged with separate track numbers, and the 2nd even had brackets around it. On Rated R, the problem was with Feel Good Hit of the Summer which was is the first song on the album, but also included as the first song on a bonus disc. I guess the Zune software wasn't smart enough to distinguish between disc number tags, either. I was forced to (with great pain) rename the songs so that the software could realize they were indeed separate songs.

After confirming that both the Zune software and music folder contained exactly 3594 songs, I synced them with my Zune and again, confirmed that it contained 3594 songs as well. I quickly browsed through my Zune to make sure that it had correctly imported all of the album art (another thing I am terribly picky about), which it had, but another tag related issue was brought to my attention. The Zune software actually was smart enough to sort multi-disc albums properly, in the expected order of disc 1, track 1-10 first, then disc 2, track 1-10 second, however, the software installed on the Zune likes to do it a little differently. Instead of what you'd expect, it sorts it as track 1, track 1, track 2, track 2, etc., mixing disc 1 and 2 while completely ignoring the disc number tag. My only option in this case is to rename the 2nd disc as "Album Title (disc 2)", which is really ugly. Since I only have a few albums with more than one disc, I decided to leave them as they were and hope that Micorosft fixes the problem in a new patch, although it baffles me as to why the software on the PC and the software on the Zune player would behave so differently.

The next step in my epic journey was to copy all of the songs from my Zune to my computer at work. I figured that since I had already taken care of the tag issues, it would be a breeze. I dragged everything to my PC, and did a quick check to see how many songs it had found. 3592. AWESOME. I checked the Massive Attack and Queens of the Stone Age folders, and saw everything was there. I haven't had the time to narrow down the problem this time, but I dragged everything into iTunes anyway. I wasn't surprised to see that iTunes managed to import 3618 songs. Somehow during the process of copying everything from my home PC to my Zune to my work PC, 24 extra songs were fabricated out of nothing. I'd like to hear these songs, but it'll have to wait for another day to figure out what they are.

On the plus side, the Zune software didn't overwrite any of my tags, despite a quick scare when I noticed some differences between how it displayed "featuring" artists. I specifically formatted all songs featuring another artist to be written as "Feat. Some Guy", but the Zune software, for reasons currently unknown, displays them somtimes as "Ft. Some Guy" or "feat. Some Guy". After checking the tags, I found that they were untouched, and it was just the software that was displaying them differently, and inconsistently. Why. It also "forgets" the album art and release year when displaying your library on a PC other than the one in which you originally imported the songs. And again, after checking the tags, everything appears how it should be.

After browsing a few forums, I noticed other Zune owners are having similar (and other, more annoying) problems as me. Hopefully Micorosft takes notice and does the right thing.

In somewhat related news, I watched this video with Adam Savage from Mythbusters over the weekend. He talks about his obession with various things, and if you think I am too obsessed with trivial things like MP3 tags, then watch this video.

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