I just got Anberlin’s latest album, “New Surrender”.  I was pretty lukewarm about “Cities” and Danielle just about hated it.  We both loved “Blueprints for the Black Market” and “Never Take Friendship Personal”.  This album is a return to the sounds and lyrics of those first two albums.  I loved it upon first listen.  Danielle summed it up best, “It’s like their first two albums, but more mature.”  I’ve only started listening to it for the second time, so I’m still picking up the lyrics.  What I’ve heard so far continues their tradition of poetic lyrics that take a few listens to fully appreciate.  If you’ve been on the fence about this album after hearing “Cities”, definitely get “New Surrender”.  If you liked “Cities” and hated the first two albums, you probably won’t like “New Surrender”.

One of the killer features of Songbird is that when you view web pages with MP3s, it presents a very easy way for you to download the songs.  I noticed on my last.fm home page that there were a few free MP3s available for download, so I decided to test this out.

I went to the Birdhouse because that seemed to be the way to type in an address to go to.

Last.fm is getting close to relaunching their site and I was invited to participate in the beta program.  I think the new design has some great new features and I wanted to share it with you so you could get excited about it too.

Here’s the main page as it appears now:

The most important thing to notice is how cluttered it is.  Look at the proposed layout under beta:

It’s been a really long time since I last looked at Songbird. In fact, according to my blog, the last time I checked it out was version 0.2 back in October of 2006. The UI certainly has a bit more polish. I submitted some bug reports on their Bugzilla about Metadata problems with WMAs and problems with podcasts. Eventually, I just got frustrated and stopped using it. I updated to version 0.4 a while back, but it still seemed a bit unstable. With Rhythmbox and Amarok meeting my needs on Linux, and with me hating Windows Media Player so much, I’ve pretty much stopped listening to music on my Windows computer.

Back in High School I got The W’s Fourth from the Last album and one of my favorite tracks was titled “Hui”.  I thought that, like some of the other songs on the album, it was just a nonsensical song and that calling the thugs on the beach “The Hui” was just because it sounded really funny.  Well, I finally found out that the song was about a real-life gang of surfers called Da Hui.  They get a brief mention in the Local Surfers section of the Surfing article in Wikipedia.  Interestingly, The Offspring also wrote a song about “da hui”.  Well, I’ll certainly think of that song differently next time I hear it!

I’ve noticed for some time now (yet, despite what I thought, have not blogged about) that when I listen to all my music on random, it doesn’t appear to really be random. It’s mostly random, but not random enough as I noticed some songs coming up more often than they should. At first I chalked this up to the fact that humans are horrible at figuring out stats and how often things should occur. But then I had somewhat concrete proof, I had some artists with lots of songs and those artists were being played less than artists with just a few songs. Recently I found the culprit - when Rhythmbox plays random songs, it weights the songs you like heavier so they appear more often.

I’ve already spent around $11 on Amazon.com’s MP3 download store. Why? Because they are selling MP3s of my favorite artists without any digital restrictions management (DRM). This is what has been keeping both my wife and I away from iTunes. Oh yeah, and the songs are cheaper than iTunes! It appears that all of the day’s Top downloads are $0.89 and the rest are $0.99. On iTunes the DRM-free songs are $1.89 or something like that. Looks like Apple’s going to need to do a price drop or there’s going the be a mass exodus to Amazon.com.

Often the biggest gripe people have about CDs is that they are two or three hit singles packaged with a bunch of crap to justify selling it to you for $12 or more. I’ve felt that way many, many times. The phenomenon is a large part of the reason behind models like iTunes. In fact, the record companies STILL don’t get it - that’s why they offer you a discount if you buy the whole album vs the singles. One day they’ll learn that artists should only release their good songs. People will buy them a la carte.

A while back (6 mo to a year ago), I tried Rhythmbox and found it too buggy for me. I absolutely hated it. I loved Amarok so I used that within KDE, but it took forever to load within Gnome. So what was I to do? Ever since Fedora started packaging Mono, I’ve been using Banshee. But I find it extremely slow, less featured than Rhythmbox, and without Podcast support. I hate iTunes, so my podcast support has been coming from Songbird. However, they have a really annoying bug that makes using it for podcasting horrible. (I’ve filed a bug report, but no fixes yet) Here’s an example of what the podcasting interface looks like: (click the image to see it full size)

(all of these are pictures of Relient K, even in the sections when I’m talking about other bands)

My wife and I went to the Relient K concert yesterday in Baltimore. We were the oldest people there as I’ve been following them since their first album (which came out around 8-10 years ago), while many of these kids just started listening to them ever since they started getting airplay on Mtv. The opening act, Sherwood, was actually really good. I like them a lot. Their style sounds pretty similar to Relient K. Pretty happy music overall. Some girls in front of us knew every word and were bootlegging the performance on tiny video cameras. I’d buy their CD if I had some extra cash. The second group, Mae, was not so good. At least, I didn’t like them. Unlike the other two groups, they didn’t have the same type of sound and their singer, in my wife’s opinion, couldn’t sing. We took their set as an opportunity to go outside and get some fresh air. It was funny to see all the parents there.