World War Z is my pick this week in both book and audiobook form. I have been listening to the audiobook which is fantastic. Not only is the book read, they actually got a number of fairly well known actors including Alan Alda to do the different voices of the characters. This adds to the "realism" of the book. The book itself is a history of a war between humans and zombies. While I am not really a zombie fan, this book is more about the human condition after the war. This makes it really compelling to read. The reason I recommend both the audiobook and regular book is that the audiobook is an abridged version, so you can get the whole thing by reading.
Archive for September, 2008
-
2008 So Far
With a week left in September, I figured this would be a good time to plead for more music to listen to so I am be as well versed as possible in my best of 2008 list. Here is the music I have listened to so far:
3 Na Massa - 3 Na Massa
All India Radio - Fall
Beck - Modern Guilt
Bill Dixon with Exploding Star Orchestra - Bill Dixon with Exploding Star Orchestra
Bon Iver - For Emma, Forever Ago
Breathe Owl Breathe - Ghost Glacier
British Sea Power - Do You Like Rock Music?
Coldplay - Viva la Vida
Death Cab For Cutie - Narrow Stairs
Dengue Fever - Venus on Earth
Fleet Foxes - Fleet Foxes
Frightened Rabbit - The Midnight Organ Fight
Gnarls Barkley - The Odd Couple
Goldfrapp - Seventh Tree
Grand Archives - The Grand Archives
Jim Noir - Jim Noir
Matmos - Supreme Balloon
MGMT - Oracular Spectacular
Nine Inch Nails - The Slip
No Kids - Come Into My House
Nomo - Ghost Rock
Okkervil River - The Stand Ins
Portishead - Third
Ra Ra Riot - The Rhumb Line
Ratatat - LP3
Santogold - Santogold
Shearwater - Rook
Sigur Rós - Með suð í eyrum við spilum endalaust
Spiritualized - Songs In A&E
Sun Kil Moon - April
The Dodos - Visiter
The Helio Sequence - Keep Your Eyes Ahead
The Last Shadow Puppets - The Age Of The Understatement
The Walkmen - You & Me
Throw Me The Statue - Moonbeams
Vampire Weekend - Vampire WeekendI am planning on listening to the following already, so if you have other suggestions, please add them in the comments:
TV on the Radio - Dear Science
Kings of Leon - Only by the Night
Mogwai - The Hawk is Howling -
iTunes 8 Observations
I am not calling this a review mainly because there are a bazillion of those out there. Instead I wanted to share my observations from iTunes 8 and it's new features.
Views
I do like the new Grid View. Cover Flow never made too much sense to me other than looking flashy. I never used it to navigate my music, so the addition of the Grid View helps me out. I like how you can group by Artist, Album, etc for the Grid View and each of those settings remain for different playlists. If you like organizing one playlist by Artist and the next by Album, the Grid View will keep each of those settings. The only qualm I have with the changes is that the standard list view feels cramped. They took some spacing out between albums and added gridlines between everything. I would have left the standard view alone personally.
Genius
The biggest new feature is Genius. This basically comes in two varieties, the Genius Sidebar and the Genius Playlists. Because they are unique things, I will tackle them independent of each other.
Genius Sidebar
The Sidebar takes the song you have selected, then goes to the iTunes Store to find other albums and songs by that artist you don't have. It also suggests other songs you might like by other artists that you don't have. This seems like a nice feature, however in practice it is kind of annoying. First, you can't hide any grouping of information, so if you don't want to see other albums by that artist you are out of luck. The Sidebar needs to have a way of customizing what information comes up. Second, if a song isn't in the iTunes Store, it returns generic results. It would be nice if it could at least look at the genre you have listed to narrow it down a little. Even better, instead of relying on the iTunes Store for information, go check sources like CDDB or something to get info. Most of the time I have the Sidebar hidden. It takes up a bunch of real estate and just isn't useful for me.
Genius Playlists
This is a really cool feature. You choose a song in your library, click the Genius Playlist button and it searches your library for songs that would go with it. If you have added the correct meta information into your music, you seem to get pretty good results. I have been pleased with my experience so far and am pretty close to moving my Shuffle to a Genius Playlist instead of 5 Star Songs. My one real concern with it is that it uses the default iTunes genres. If you have organized your music with unique genres, such as Ska, Punk, Emo and Indie, those will need to be re-genred as Alternative to take full advantage of Genius. Not a huge deal for me, but for some of you, it might be. This isn't to say that Genius won't work without this, just that it works better if you make the change.
New Visualizer
Last, we have the new visualizer. I don't really use the visualizers much, but this one is pretty cool. It runs smoothly on my Macbook and has some interesting effects. A nice added touch, but not one that will likely rock your world.
Overall iTunes 8 is a polished product. I look forward to Genius making some strides in the future. If anything, this version of iTunes gives people something to look forward to in new versions if iTunes, better and more complex Genius functions, and that is worth it in itself.
-
Wordle
Wordle.net is the early pick this week. It is a site that allows you to make text diagrams of word collections that look really cool. Think of it as a tag cloud that makes art. You can paste in your own text and then there are quite a few settings from color to font to how you want the text to be arranged. It then generates your Wordle for you which you can save and share with the world. I took my iTunes collection and generated one for the artists weighted by album. A tip if you want to group words together, use a tilde (~) instead of a space as that will act as a space for you. That is how I was able to get band names to stay grouped. If you make one, feel free to post your Wordle in the comments.
-
SoundUnwound
This might end up being a false pick in a year, but the concept is cool so I thought I would go with it. Amazon and IMDB are basically sponsoring a wiki for music, including artists, labels, etc. It is called SoundUnwound and allows anyone to edit the site, much like the Wikipedia. The biggest difference is that the changes do have to be approved by the SoundUnwound group before going live. The cool part is that this content will also be used on artist pages on Amazon too. The interface is pretty nice and eventually this could be the source for music information on the web. Only time will tell, but having IMDB and Amazon on board will give it some credibility.