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Feb 15

Book Review: The World in Six Songs by Daniel Levitin

by Chris Billows in Hobby Heedings 0 comments
An ambitious title if there ever was, The World In Six Songs by Daniel Levitin, attempts to explain how music is so integral to human evolution that the entire human experience can be mostly summarized in six meta-songs. Daniel Levitin captured lots of imagination and excitement with his previous book ‘This Is Your Brain On Music’ so expectations were relatively high. Unfortunately, he did not deliver on two levels: 1) This book was not as well received as his first book, and 2) This book did not accomplish what it claimed to do. I have always been intrigued when I see writers attempt to take a complex topic and try to simplify it. Daniel Levitin makes his own attempt by saying that entire human experience can be captured in six different songs: friendship, joy, comfort, knowledge, religion, and love. Each has a different function, but all serve to bind us together and make us stronger as a species. He reinforces the truism that music is what makes us human. While I can’t disagree with him, music is only one function that makes us human, an important one, but not the only one. I can’t help but feel that because Levitin […]

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Dec 27

Enjoying iTunes via Statistics Year 2

by Chris Billows in Hobby Heedings 3 comments
Last year at this time I posted about how it is possible to analyze your iTunes library and generate some statistics about it. Well, another year has come and gone and I have been listening lots to my iPod Touch. I have discovered and rediscovered a ton of great music and love how iTunes helps me to organize my hobby. I use two different programs to run the statistics. The most polished one is called SuperAnalzyer and it creates some wonderful statistics and graphs. SuperAnalzyer PDF Document The other program is a fabulous little script written by Scott Yanff. iTunes Statistics Text Document These statistics were taken late December 26, 2010 of my personal library. It is a snapshot of a year of iTunes use and listening. After listening to a song a couple of times I will assign a rating to it. Some changes of note: 12,626 songs has grown to 21,108 songs with over 8,400 songs being added to the library. This is kinda a slow down mostly because I had imported most of my CD collection in the previous year. I have also begun purchasing albums and songs through iTunes so the physical CD collecting is going […]

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Oct 18

Lesson Six in Using iTunes: Playlists

by Chris Billows in Hobby Heedings 0 comments
A powerful feature of iTunes is its ability to create custom playlists of your songs. You can create playlists of particular genres, years, and anything else you have listed in your tags. As I stated in Lesson Five, having information in your tags/comments section that relates to an artist’s city of origin or listing the names of? their earlier bands can all be searchable and thus become the basis of a playlist. I extensively use Playlists to create music lists to listen to. In a future post, I will list how I use playlists to queue music to rate and to organize my songs to further polish them. My playlists operate like an instrument that makes me feel just like a musician, fluidly allowing me to play great music. Here is an introduction to Playlists courtesy of Apple. But one of the most sophisticated playlists I have ever found is listed here. Check them out.

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Oct 04

How To Evaluate Computer & Video Games As Art

by Chris Billows in Hobby Heedings 1 comments
In response to a couple of blog posts, Growing Up Games and Games vs Art, I feel compelled to respond with my own perspective about how to evaluate Computer Games as Art. Computer Games is a medium that is criticized for being immature and adolescent. Games are seen as being full of violence, escapism, and lacking any maturity. As an avid fan, investor in a computer games company, and an amateur philosopher, I wondered why do Computer Games get saddled with these labels. After some thinking, I feel that there are three related reasons: 1) Computer Games are relatively new form of entertainment and communication medium. 2) And because of #1, Computer Games possess its fair share of adolescent content. 3) And because of #2, Computer Games do not possess the sophisticated traits consistent with Art. So let’s start with the first reason. My read of 20th century history is that all new entertainment mediums start off being criticized for being frivolous. When Movies were first created, they were seen to be superfluous compared to theater. The first movies were not documentaries, but skin flicks that were used in various naughty arcades. Movies started off as pure bawdy entertainment, but […]

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Jun 13

Lesson Five in Using iTunes: Polishing The Tags

by Chris Billows in Hobby Heedings 0 comments
One of the things I appreciate about iTunes is the fields you can use to add extra tags to your songs. As we discussed earlier most people use Genre as their default sorting system, but that is just tapping the surface of what you could get out of your music collection. If you have an extensive library, it would be worth your while to ‘polish’ these song tags so that you can create some great play-lists. Here are some essential tags you might want to consider using: Date – Should be the date of the song’s release, not the date of the album release. This is especially important when it comes to greatest hit compilations. Having the correct date allows you to listen to an artist’s evolution as a musician. Location – I put this in the Grouping header. I put the city, state/province, and country that the artists/band was born/formed in. Having a location can allow me to listen to bands from California or from Scotland. Other Info such as Member of XXX Band – I put this in the Comments header. When I do a search for the Police, I will also see my albums by Sting, Andy […]

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Mar 03

Lesson Four in Using iTunes: Categorizing with Music Genres

by Chris Billows in Hobby Heedings 6 comments
Okay, we have imported, rated, and ran statistics on iTunes. But as your library gets bigger, it becomes more and more difficult to find artists and songs. Thankfully, iTunes uses the Music Genre as its basic sorting system which makes it easier to find the style of music you want to listen to. Default Music Genres include: Classical, R&B, Rock, Jazz, etc. These are fine if you have 40-50 artists from diverse musical backgrounds, but what happens if you listen primarily to one genre of music? What do you do if you are a serious collector and listener of music and are frustrated with the standard labels? What do you do when you have over 100 artists and 10,000 songs? This blog post is meant to address that challenge. To start with there are have been three approaches to what a Music Genre is: 1) People Ignore It. Some people say that Musical Genres are too presumptuous of a field to use. They are indignant that the label ‘pigeon holes’ artists unfairly. That is partially true. Led Zeppelin is considered to be the earliest hard rock/metal band even though they played some folk inspired music. Are they British-Blues? Hard Rock? […]
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