It’s just a jump to the left…

As of now, new content will be posted at a dedicated domain and under a new name. If anyone actually tracks this site on RSS or bookmarked, please update to goodsouldepartment.com.

It’s almost as barebones over there, but it’s time for that to change. Hope to see you soon.

Who’s a clever boy, then?

Visitors that have read the bio on this blog may remember mention of a time at the start of the century when hominids awoke to not quite monolithic silver and white slabs, around which I declared to a friend that there was no need to carry around 5GB of music. Who on earth needed to carry hundreds of tracks, never mind thousands. Oh, how foolish was I?

That error in thinking was corrected within months, but now I’ve stepped it up to another level of obsession. Thanks to a quest for musical rediscovery spurred on by iTunes’ Genius feature, I recently succumbed to the acquisition of a 120GB iPod classic. Beneath its charcoal exterior (Apple calls it black, but its surface isn’t as deep and shiny as Agent Cooper’s damn fine coffee) is enough capacity that finally carries my entire iTunes library, at least after converting it from Apple Lossless to MP3. That’s, umm, over 12,000 tracks, though some are duplicates due to my obsessive tendencies towards more than a handful of artists. You can never have enough bags, shoes and mixes of Can’t Get You Out Of My Head.

Before anyone gets the wrong idea, I use Apple Lossless as a backup measure rather than being swollen with aspirations of ever belonging to the group of people called audiophiles. Last year I discovered a double album that had succumbed to some kind of icky effect that made the data side of the discs look like magnified snowflake patterns. Ignoring that they were material goods, this was a rather alarming event.

Anyway, back to the iPod. Lovely shiny iPod. If only Apple has been able to introduce a 320GB or higher capacity iPod, or at least allow models other than the shuffle to transcode songs upon transfer, then I wouldn’t need to maintain two libraries. Even better, though the vast majority need only to keep their library at one quality, why not package high and low quality versions up into one file. That would also benefit HD and SD video (buy a TV show in HD and you get both by default – one for your big screen, the other for your iPod). iTunes treats their separate files as different episodes, so you have to manually indicate the SD version is not new even after watching the show in HD.

What’s up with the classic’s wheel and, on a related note, why the unpredictable alphabetical shortcuts that seems to crop up when you’re not expecting it, and not when you really want to nip to the end of the alphabet? It’s like someone invented the physical wheel, decided it was good for a few years, then thought that society could cope with a downgrade to straight planks of wood, rather than carve a well-formed arc to get travellers from A to Z within their lifetime. If the shortcut fails to kick in, try scrolling through a list of hundreds of artists. Takes a while, doesn’t it?

Bitching aside, it’s nice to have all of my music in one tiny box as my musical moods change faster than Samantha Jones’ boyfriends. I was tired of picking and choosing favourite tracks from albums to squish onto an old 30GB model only to find that I’d rather listen to the tracks that were discarded. Of course they’re long forgotten by the time I arrive home, and I’m buggered if I’ll rely on a Smart Playlist to fill her up. Otherwise I was heading for a disk full of hideous PWL-era Kylie remixes with a side order of Paula Abdul to really get me dancing in the street.

Hey, Straight Up is pure, enjoyable late ’80s tat. Don’t try to publicly shame me as I’m quite capable myself. Besides, I bet there’s far worse in your library. What’s that CD with the blue and pink spine? Betty Boo’s Boomania? Well, okay, I have that one too. Shush, and pay attention.

You’re probably questioning the need to carry around so much music. It’s over a month’s worth of listening… even accounting for delays on the Tube, the battery expire after just over a day.

All of these tracks are tied into Genius, and after some recent forays into Genius and Party Shuffle in iTunes, I felt it was time to rediscover rarely heard tracks. Genius came up with some excellent suggestions on the way into work earlier this week; David Byrne’s Lazy was followed by Björk’s Play Dead and Goldfrapp’s Felt Mountain. Even Opus III’s It’s A Fine Day was a welcome departure considering the seed, but Sophie Ellis-Bextor’s Murder on the Dancefloor was a step too far.

If your Genius feature remains switched off, I beg of you to turn it on. That way we can all look forward to better playlist generation and, unless you’re even more musically unstable than I am, maybe we can avoids these little hiccups. Quickly, now. Before my iPod uncovers that What Is Love? lurking in all 10.5mm of its depths.

iTunes and App Store search now working [UPDATED]

Update
All of the items discussed below can now be found from the search box.

Tetris is available in the UK. It's just a little awkward to reach.

(Originally posted 10 September, updated 14 September)
Spore Origins isn’t the only EA game that appeared on the UK’s App Store this week. Tetris is there, but you won’t find it through the search box.

Search for Electronic Arts and the only application returned is Spore Origins. Try Tetris and you’ll get Spore and a few other puzzle games, but not the one that you want.

I found it by fluke. Visit the Spore page and click the link to see all apps from Electronic Arts — I know, you’ll be expecting to only see Spore, but Tetris will mysteriously appear as well. Alternatively, here’s a shortcut.

Bizarre. What the hell causes this? I wonder what else has slipped under the radar.

Anyway, one less reason to carry my DS around. Bring on SimCity. Hopefully someone will release a game in the style of Advance Wars, too.

Update
This affects other content too. Search for Star Trigon. using the search box or a Power Search and there are no results. Search for Namco in the search box and you get Pac-man and Ms. Pac-man.

Do a Power Search for the same and the right group shows the same two games even if you click to see all results. In the left pane that lists matching publishers, click Namco and you’ll see Star Trigon in addition to them.

A direct search for Tetris reveals it in the US store, but the issue with finding Namco’s game is present there. Good luck finding Laminar’s X-Plane, too.

All is not well.

Direct link: Star Trigon
Direct link: X-Plane 9

Eureka! New music, at last

Actually some that’s a couple of years old already, and some that dates back much further to 1973! Discovery of the newer stuff is all thanks to iTunes 8, which plucked an overlooked gem from my library and led to further refreshment.

Almost without fail I pick up The Word, partly because it’s cover CDs are an excellent way to discover new music, much like the Playlist discs that HMV used to give away with select purchases.

Just like thousands of other people I’ve just updated to iTunes 8 and swiftly sent data about my music to Apple to make use of the new Genius features. I can’t remember the track I used to seed an early playlist that lifted Midlake’s Roscoe from my library, where it languished on a Word album from a couple of years ago, but I’m already glad of Genius playlists. The end result probably isn’t what Apple hoped for, though.

The financially unhealthy combination of sample tracks on the band’s website, my previous whinge about needing new music and a steadfast love of shiny 12cm discs stirred me to make an impulse purchase of 2006 album, The Trials of Van Occupanther. It’s a lovely album that ought to keep my ears busy for at least a couple of weeks. They’ll also get some work from other recent purchases: Dennis Wilson’s Pacific Ocean Blue and Emiliana Torrini’s Me and Armini, and a John Cale compilation that, bar two or three songs, has also been neglected until Paris 1919 came up on shuffle a few days ago.

It turns out that Midlake are on Bella Union, the same label as the marvellous Laura Veirs. I fell in love with her music after an even more reckless purchase a couple of years back that was based entirely on the librarian-esque looks of Year of Meteors and vague recollection of a website posting that compared her to Suzanne Vega, but with observations of city life replaced with oceanic imagery. Just a little, I can see where that comment came from.

Since discovering Veirs, I’ve done further investigation of the label’s signed acts before but never got around to buying more of its albums. I have a feeling that’s about to change.

So here’s to aurally fruitful spending. If you haven’t already heard Year of Meteors then it’s worth checking out for the worrisome Spelunking. Veirs’ most recent full album, Saltbreakers, is softer and an easier route into her material with gentle harmonies and vocal contributions from her band. I saw her touring for this album twice last year, first with the band and a second time, building magnificent live samples with a Loop Station to retain the harmonies despite being on her own. She’s already toured the UK once this summer, but I recommend catching a performance if she returns any time soon.

Fat Actress

What a delightfully dour performance Kirstie Alley gave as Rebecca Howe in Cheers. Last week I picked up season six on DVD for just a few quid. The further I get through it, the more I’m reminded of how utterly brilliant her performances were.

Cheers had a great ensemble cast from the beginning, though Carla (the superb Rhea Perlman, who I saw in Boeing Boeing a while back) was, for me, the one thing that lifted it above other sitcoms. Yet it’s the addition of Alley that really got me hooked on the programme when I was… oh, maybe a whole decade old.

Ah, old school sitcoms. Even before the titles roll, the bit at the beginning of each episode that proudly declares that “Cheers is filmed in front of a live studio audience” is a perfect setup for a 20-odd minute nostalgia trip.

This has been a brief gushing of fandom from yours truly.

By the way, the title of this post isn’t just me being rude for the sake of it. Here are a couple of clips from Alley’s latest TV series. It’s not quite Cheers. Not even Veronica’s Closet, in fact, but how I wish I could look half as sexy trying to squeeze into my jeans on a morning…