Bossa Nova For The Win

I've consulted with the cats and they agree. There are three types of people: people who are going to see Nouvelle Vague in concert, people who don't know they need bossa nova covers of 80's classics, and people who aren't truly children of the 80's. Me? I'm in the first category. How about you?

Amazon's "Daily Deal"

You know what can really fill in the "I've always meant to buy that" gaps in your music library? (Anybody who said Zune Pass get out. I'm the designated smart-ass here, damnit!) The answer I was looking for is the Amazon "Daily Deal" MP3. Last week you could get Led Zeppelin IV for $1.99, today it's Exodus by Bob Marley and the Wailers.

"But Tim," you may wail, "how do I find out the Daily Deal every day without annoying spam or what-have-you?" Oh foolish reader. Get yourself a Twitter client and follow Amazonmp3. Most days the Daily Deal is crap, but that's the cool thing about it being Daily, you can ignore it and maybe the next day it's something you want. Most days it isn't, but $2 for a full album of legal MP3's at 256k with no DRM? Even if that only works one day a month it's a steal when it happens.

If you're an iTunes user and you don't use the Amazon MP3 store, check it out. The downloader can automatically copy files into iTunes, the tracks have album art and solid meta-data. They work great on all of my devices (heck, they work on the 360, which is only true of iTunes Plus tracks)

Look, there's random and then there's *too random*

So my iPhone has a fair chunk of my music, but it can't hold anywhere near all of it. I've been preparing for a "small" iPod for a while, rating songs and getting comfortable with Smart Playlists so I had an easy way to tag "here is the best stuff". My iPhone has a few key artists - everything I have by the Beatles or Jonathan Coulton, plus a few "by hand" playlists that incorporate most of my Norah Jones, Sarah McLachlan and a few others. It also has everything in the "My Top Rated" smart list which is anything with 4 or 5 stars in iTunes. As of right now I have 6913 tracks in iTunes, 5088 of which are unrated. Of the 1825 rated tracks 226 are in "My Top Rated". I let the phone take "My Top Rated" out for a shuffle spin today.

It led off with Bugs Bunny from the Bugs Bunny on Broadway CD - What's Opera, Doc? OK, that's a bit eclectic but I'll defend the four star rating there, this is a classic piece of culture. Even as the final Looney Tunes sting fades away it launches into … Roger Waters playing Another Brick in the Wall Part Two live from the In the Flesh set. This is not a segue you can take smoothly.

Fine though, I can roll with the Pink Floyd or it wouldn't be on there. After that it switched to Aqua's Barbie Girl. Now this is really stretching the definition of coherent playlist well past breaking. I mean Bugs Bunny to Pink Floyd to Aqua in three songs? That's not eclectic, that's psychotic.

After that it settled down and played Depeche Mode with Black Celebration, which it followed up with MC Frontalot's It is Pitch Dark. OK, that's spanning like 20 years of my life, but I can see that I likely played Infocom games while listening to DM. The last track on this little odyssey was Oingo Boingo's Gray Matter, which again, I can go from a song about Zork to a song about brains with a minimum of twitching. Shuffle mode, you have redeemed yourself. FOR NOW! But the double secret probation mode will remain in effect until further improvement is observed.