Music Hath Charms To Soothe The Savage… Shopper?

While out recently at a large chain retailer fond of sending out coupons every week, I started paying attention to the background music. I did this mainly because it gave me an opportunity to tweak my lovely and talented coblogger and spouse. As I pointed out at the time, you know your alternative-music street cred has bottomed out when the big box is playing the greatest hits off your iPod. I figure I get to make snide comments like this because the world will have gone seriously weird when the tunes on my iPod are showing up as background music outside of head shops and record stores. The latest additions to the playlist include such friendly, happy music as Combichrist, Suicide Commando, and Static X. Well, that and the Katy Perry CD. But I haven’t added that to the device because I’m waiting on new computers before I rip it. I think that CD alone blows my credibility to shreds, but I’m old and tired and don’t care much.

I could insert the obligatory old guy rant about how music today sucks and how you should get off my lawn. Instead, I’ll just reference Sturgeon’s Law and note that the old days had a whole bunch of crap being produced as well. Those of you who are even older will have to do the legwork on your own decade of choice and figure out just how much talent-free dreck made it up the charts and into inescapable ubiquity.

In other musical news, if you have a high tolerance for crap and want to hear the sound of a career imploding, go listen to the new album from Panic At The Disco. Note the lack of exclamation point, a signal that they have changed their musical style to be less exclamatory or some such nonsense. What they’ve really done is go in a direction that is almost completely unmarketable, as well as being just bad. Not that I care, as I only listen to them when J is driving. It’s just amusing to listen to a career dying.

Speaking of iPods, one of my issues with Apple, besides their lack of support for FLAC format files, was the godawful piss poor software interface they like to call iTunes. I avoided it for a long time by running Rockbox. However, Rockbox had some bugs features issues I got tired of dealing with on a fairly regular basis. So I uninstalled it and went back to using the default interface. The default includes iTunes. It annoys me no end that Apple won’t let me simply drag and drop files. So, I got rid of iTunes. I’m using MediaMonkey Gold. This has the added benefit of not needing to keep two separate directories for the different file types. MediaMonkey converts on the fly between FLAC and MP3 when I drop the song into the device. It ain’t quick at doing so, but it does it automatically. If you’re loading up the podling for the first time, it will probably take all night. After that, an album or two doesn’t take that long.

On that note, I'm off to await my insurance check so I may buy new computer hardware.