Dear Ticketmaster,
I just bought tickets to see Street Dogs open for Tiger Army and you offered me a free sampler disc from iTunes. Bloc Party, Finger Eleven, and a Kaiser Chiefs single I didn’t even know about? Right on!
Thanks,
BrockLi
Dear Internet,
Could you all please get the hell off iTunes Music Store so I can get the second season of Always Sunny?
Hearts, Brock
For those of you who were interested, I posted my quick and dirty hack to fix my iTunes playlist woes. It won’t re-create the playlists, but I got the information I wanted.
And yes, I know it can be done in a few lines of Perl, but I know PHP much better than Perl, so this was the quickest (and easiest) way for me to do it.
I finally bought Tiger for my laptop a month or two ago. Rather than upgrading, I opted for the format-reinstall; I tried out all sorts of crap when I first got the thing, so there was a lot of stuff floating around that I didn’t know about, and I figured it would be nice to start fresh.
In the process, of course, I lost all my data. I backed up my music and some leftover notes and files from classes, but there doesn’t seem to be an easy was to re-establish my iTunes library. It’s worked out OK for the most part - I did keep the MP3’s, but I haven’t been using my laptop for music much lately anyway.
The one thing I didn’t think about was my playlists. I’ve had playlists for every quarter going back into 2003, with the songs that I heard a lot at the time. As I’ve surely mentioned before, my mind makes incredibly strong associations between songs and events or periods of time. As such, it was nice to have these playlists that were the soundtrack to my life at the time.
The library XML file was in my backup, so I can sift through that to find the information I want. Unfortunately, the playlists are stored in there as lists of track IDs, so doing it by hand would involve searching this huge text file for the ID I need, for a few hundred individual tracks.
Looks like it’s time to figure out the quickest way to parse XML…
If you don’t have iTunes installed, or haven’t signed up for the Music Store, you should do so just to get the free songs every week. They typically post two every Tuesday, and I always like one (if not both) of them.
The single this week was Munich, by Editors (the British ones - apparently there’s another band with the same name that’s causing some confusion on the iTMS). It’s very Interpol-y, and I’ve listened to it a bunch of times since I got it the other day. Go grab it - I mean, it’s free, so why not?
On the other hand, you can skip Gary Nichols, because he’s a little girl.
I just went buck wild on my music collection and deleted about 3 of the 19.5 GB I had. I really just want to keep it under 18.5 so it all fits on the iPod, but once I got going I figured I may as well clean things out right. A decent chunk of my collection is comprised of music I’ve never heard, from compilations I’ve downloaded or bands that friends recommend. I was dropping 20 songs at a time from groups I’d only heard once or twice and didn’t care for.
One of these days I’ll go through it all and really clean house, but it’s tough. There are a lot of older songs on there that I don’t really care for, but remind me of high school or friends from home or things like that. I feel guilty deleting music that feels like part of my history, the same way I can’t delete people from my buddy list even if I haven’t seen or spoken to them in three years.
When Pepsi switches from an iTunes promotion to a sports gear promotion
This wouldn’t bug me if they didn’t use similar ten-character codes for both promotions. I didn’t realize the iTunes promo had ended until two of my codes were refused and I took a closer look at the bottle. Bastards.
As of right now, exactly 1000 of the 3784 songs in my iTunes playlist have ratings. I don’t know how seriously other people take the rating system, but I don’t particularly - I mostly use it to weed out music I don’t like. I’ve downloaded whole albums because I liked a single, or grabbed whole collections from bands that have been recommended to me, so I’m trying to go through my collection and clean out the crap I don’t want. It wasn’t a big deal until I had too much music for my 20GB iPod, but the whole thing is down around 18.5GB now.
Also, I can’t for the life of me figure out why Type Key isn’t working. As far as I can tell, clicking on the Type Key sign-in link for comments just gives the illusion of browser activity for 30 seconds. I don’t get an error, it never goes to another page, nothing. If anyone has seen more reasonable behavior with comments on this site, please let me know. I’m cruising various forums and stuff, trying to find an answer, but no dice so far.
UPDATE: It occurred to me that I should try the Type Key thing in IE, just to see what happens. It makes it as far as the Type Key login page (good sign!), where I can enter my user name and password. Upon submitting the information, I am inundated with porno pop-ups (better sign!) Lucky for me, I just make a Windows XP Service Pack 2 boot disk this evening, so I’m going to re-build my machine tomorrow or early next week (I’ll be home for the weekend). Once I’ve got a clean slate, I think I’ll get Apache set up and migrate this site to my desktop.
