Tag Archives: internet radio

General, Uncategorized

An Apparent Fact About Repetition

1 Comment

I like to “treat myself” to an 80s internet radio station at work on Fridays.  I know that if I listened more often than that, I would get sick of the songs within a week or two at the most and then I’d have to find something else.

But there’s something else I’ve noticed about a healthier dose of musical repetition: seems that if you hear a song *just* enough– enough to know it very well, maybe you’ve committed most or all of the lyrics to memory, even if it’s not a good song, you’re going to come to enjoy it.  I think this is why I have such an affinity for the 80s music.  Even though a lot of Billboard’s biggest hits are not what I would ordinarily think of as “good songs,” I’ve listened to them so often they are virtually automatic earworms.

I was just singing along to “Seasons Change” by Expose a minute ago.  What the hell else could that be all about?

Anyway, enjoy your Friday, and if you get random 80s lyrics texted to you by me on ANY Friday– you now know what it’s all about.

General, Uncategorized

Fair Play For All

Leave a comment

At work, I usually listen to an Internet radio stream from here or there (or even here), but sometimes I have a hankerin’ to play my own mp3s that I’ve downloaded from my collection at home or brought in my some other means.  I don’t like iTunes or Windows Media Player, so it’s been something of an experimental journey to find a good alternative player.

I messed around for a while with Jajuk, a java-based, cross-platform media player.  It wasn’t bad, but there were certain aspects of the GUI that I wasn’t very font of.  Often, if I just wanted to listen to one specific album at a time, VLC did the job very effectively.  But there were a few ‘CDs’ on which it was having trouble reading the tags.  I didn’t have the time or interest to try to solve that problem.

I revisited Songbird instead.  I’ve had it installed as a means of testing the ‘subscription’ functionality of our podcast.  While the ‘bird still doesn’t seem to handle that feed the right way, the current 1.0.x version has come a long way from when the project was first announced (in Internet time, approximately a thousand years ago).  I built a small “library” from the tunes I have on this harddrive, and one of the coolest things about the software (like any Gecko-based product) is the extensibility that you can get through plugins and add-ons.  There seems to be a large and continually expanding array of options that you can tack on to your Songbird player; they’ve come on a lot faster than I expected.  If you’re so inclined, give it a look.  If I can get a “album shuffle” plugin, I would consider switching from Amarok at home…

K, I’m going to go back to listening to this record that I produced, back when I was a record producer…