Category: Music

I am not a big music fan. My music tastes are far from developed and original. But still once in a while I feel like sharing a tune. This category is mostly used for my rare music moments.

H-blockx – The Power

H-blockx – The Power is really just that – The Power.  Whenever my mp3 player in the car hits this song, I play it over and over.  When I am tired, sad, or depressed beyond reason, I put this on and my mood is changed instantly.  It has the power.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BwK4R1pvHTQ]

WhiteSnake in Nicosia, Cyprus

The other day I went together with a few friends to the WhiteSnake rock band concert in Nicosia.  It was the same venue and more or less the same setup as for the concert of the legendary Deep Purple back in 2005.  Except that:

  • the sound was really crap this time
  • WhiteSnake is not Deep Purple by any means – much more commercial, less passionate
  • both video and photo cameras were not allowed, so no pictures
  • there was much more advertising for the event, and the place was crowded
  • there was a warm-up band, which actually performed better than WhiteSnake at certain times

A few things that I was thinking about during the concert:

  • we need more beers
  • “F*ck this” and “F*ck that” in between the songs doesn’t suit the romantic mood of many songs.  Like, “Is this love?”
  • we need more beers
  • like we have SEO – Search Engine Optimization on the web, some over-commercialized bands probably have CCO – Concert Crowd Optimization.  Pointing fingers to random people in the crowd, waving, shouting “Let’s make some f*cking noise!”, and other attempst to engage the audience strongly suggest that.  Plus a few other things.
  • we need more beers
  • “Ozzy!  Bring back Ozzy!  Ozzy rocks!”
  • “Smoooooke on the water!  Fire in the sky!”
  • we need more beers

Overall, I did have a good time with all the noise, beers, and fooling around.  But I won’t be going to the next WhiteSnake event.  One is just enough.

P.S.: If you want to see pictures, Flickr can help you out – thanks to small size of modern cameras and huge disregard to rules by rockers all over the world.

mp3 collection maintenance

I have a rather large MP3 collection.  The directories and files are named correctly more or less, but ID3 tags used to be a mess until very recently.  Two applications helped me to bring some order in that mess.

EasyTag, a GUI application, that helped me to fix lots of broken and add lots of missing comments to my MP3 files.  The smart thing about this program is that it can figure out a lot of data from the names of the files and directories, and that it can grab and replicate partial data from within the albums.

The second program that I wanted to mention, I just found out about today (thanks to Michael Stepanov’s delicious bookmarks).  It’s called tag2utf.  It’s a little Python script that converts the encoding of ID3 tags from koi8 or cp1251 (two most widely used Russian encodings) to utf8.  It’s very easy to install (the only requirement my system needed was python-eye3d library, which exists in Fedora repository) and use.  Just run it from the command line with no parameters and it will recursively look in the current directory for any files that have ID3 tags in non-utf8 encoding.  It will then give you a choice of two encodings to select from (koi8 or cp1251), a “skip” option, and a “manual” option.  All you will have to do is take a quick look at the files, and chose to either convert them from one of the two options, skip them or convert manually one by one.  You will have to make this choice for every directory with non-utf8 files.  Optionally, you can specify on the command line which directories to scan.  In case you need to convert from some other non-Russian encoding to utf8, the script is trivial to modify.

Both tools are excellent pieces of software.  It took me practically no time at all to fix my mp3 collection.  Now I can search it better, and all files display nicely in any mp3 player.  Brilliant stuff!

Elvis, Beatles, Nirvana, then who?

Matthew Sidney Long brings up an interesting point with a challange:

Please name me a band over the past 10 years who has come close to Nirvana in sheer impact and talent since Kurt put shotgun to mouth above garage in 1994? (and, I’m not talking about some indie band that hardly anyone listens to or some ring-tone fueled, Top-40 creation who no one will remember in 6 months. I’m talking IMPACT here, people. Combining art AND commerce. Both big AND authentic. Dig?).

My pick would be Rammstein, of course.  That’s the band that made an impact.  I don’t know if it was as strong as Nirvana’s or not, but I think it was pretty close.  As always, I very biased and subjective.

While I was trying to come up with the band, I had a thought about the strength of an impact.  And, as much as I love Nirvana, I have to admit that it was nowhere near the scale of Elvis and Beatles.  There were a few others in between that were larger than Nirvana too.

If Rammstein isn’t as big of an impact as Nirvana, maybe it has to something to do with my theory of sources.  Back in the days of Elvis and Beatles, there were much less sourcse of music available to an average listener, than it was in the days of Nirvana.  Think number of albums, songs, bands, radio stations, television, top-X lists and hit parades, music awards, DJs, Internet, peer-to-peer, mp3s, music shops, etc.  So, each band had a chance of producing a bigger impact back then.  In the last 14 years, since Nirvana, the number of sources only grew.  So, each band these days has even less of a chance to impact the world.

Either that, or the music industry is broken.  Or both.