the cloudy lining

Although I was thrilled to get the free CDs from Freecycle, there is one downside -- going through them all. There's a decent amount of stuff that I like and want to keep. But there's a lot more that I don't. And then there are the CDs that are somewhere in between.

The inbetweens are these discs where I kind of like the music -- or maybe think I should -- but just don't find it interesting. So there may be a riff here or a passage there that I like and that makes me think, ooh, I should hold on to this. But then I realize that I won't really miss it at all if I don't keep it.

A case in point is what I have playing now, an Ella Fitzgerald compilation, as part of a "Priceless Jazz Collection" series. I think I'll keep this one. But there are lots of others. Some are big names that just aren't my thing -- Frank Sinatra, U2, Janet Jackson. Not all, of course.

But the bigger burden is the endless pile of stuff that just doesn't interest me. Of course, I could just not bother to listen to everything, and give away lots of them on sight. But poor ol' anal-retentive me won't do that, since there could be something decent disguised as dreck. And in fact, I have a come across just that a couple of times.

One example of that is The Shoes of the Troubador, a quirky, catchy collection of (mostly) original songs from a Long Island singer named Michael Soloway. I'd like to include a picture of the cover art, but I can't find it on the intertubes, and technical issues are preventing me from providing a scan. At any rate, it has a picture of Soloway, dressed as a court jester (except for his very modern leather shoes), and sporting an Amish-style mustacheless beard. He's playing a lute while sitting at the base of a building that (I suppose) is supposed to look all medievally. I really dreaded putting that on, and was trying to figure how long a listen I had to give it to be fair. But it's actually quite enjoyable. He's no Dave Edmunds, mind you. But he's good.

Anyway, the major point is that I see these boxes of CDs, and I know I should go through them. And there are times when I really just want to listen to stuff I already have on iTunes. Or I just want some Dr. Feelgood.

Yeah, I know I sound like an ungrateful brat. Sorry.

cd annoyance: bad placement of divisions between tracks

I was listening to a CD I got through Freecycle. It's The Bobby Darin Story.

It's generally a good CD. Pretty much what you'd expect -- a compilation of Bobby Darin songs. As near as I can tell (though I'm not bothering to look it up), it was a CD reissue of an old compilation.

But my one big complaint concerns the first track: "Splish Splash." (As an aside, I'll note that for some reason whenever I think of that song I can't help picturing Anson Williams as Potsie Webber singing it at Arnold's.) It's preceded by a spoken introduction in which Darin talks of how he got his career started. Now I assume that the intro is there because it was on the record that was being reissued. What annoys me about it is that they didn't separate the introduction from the song -- it's one track with both.

In terms of ripping this into my iTunes library, there's the complication that I have three options:

1. Take "Splish Splash" from another CD (assuming I have it on another disc -- I think I do, but I'm not sure offhand, and I'm too lazy to check my database);
2. Take "Splish Splash" complete with the introduction. That's not the worst thing in the world, I'll admit. But it offends my sense of aesthetics; or
3. Use software to edit the track and remove the introduction. But my anal-retentive side won't let me do that unless I also create a new CD with the intro-less version and enter that CD in my database.

By the by, this isn't the first time I've had issues with where the track breaks are placed on a CD.

• On the first reissue of Nick Lowe's Pure Pop for Now People the break between "Nutted by Reality" and "36 Inches High" was placed a little to early, so if you listen to music out of the album order (either by shuffling a disc, putting it on a mix disc, or (as I do), by putting an entire iTunes library on shuffle play), "Nutted by Reality" ends abruptly while "36 Inches High" begins with a half-second of echoing guitar.
• "Weird Al" Yankovic's album, Off The Deep End, has a hidden track called "Bite Me." It's a few seconds of cacophony after ten seconds of silence at the end of "You Don't Love Me Anymore," which is the last listed track. The idea is that someone who has the album on may forget to turn off the stereo after the final track. So, ten minutes after the album seemingly ended there is a sudden burst of noise. Of course, this was accomplished by making the final track last about 14 minutes.
• On some reissues of the Monkees album, Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn and Jones, Ltd. the spoken word "Peter Percival Patterson's Pet Pig Porky" is part of the same track as "Pleasant Valley Sunday," while in other rereleases there's a track break between them.
• Lots of concert albums seem to have incorporated questionable decisions as to where to split tracks. If, for example, between songs X and Y, the singer talks to the audience, and says something along the lines of "Now, we'd like to do a number that has special meaning for me. It's called Y," then it's best to try to get that patter in as the beginning of the track for Y rather than at the end of the track for X. When you're listening on shuffle, it just works better.

Part of my issue with this stuff, I'll admit, has to do with my anal-retentive side and how I keep my CD database. I should probably post about that at some point. The short of it is that my database is relational, and any given track can appear on more than one album. Take, for example, "Tempted" by Squeeze. That track was originally on their East Side Story album. It also appeared on their compilation, Singles, 45's and Under. It's also appeared on other Squeeze compilations, and a bunch of various artists compilations as well. My database identifies these as all the same track. Aside from helping me to know what I have, it also makes it easier to avoid putting more than one copy of a given track into iTunes. Also, of course, it lets me fiddle with music and databases. Assuming, hypothetically, that some other album has an alternate mix of "Tempted," or a live version thereof, those are listed as different tracks. Note that it's not all science. If a remastered version comes out, I don't treat that as a different track if they didn't change the mix. Mea database, mea praecepta.

Now, the issue for me, is that if the mix is the same but there's some issue with track breaks -- the end of the song cut off on one issue (see first bullet), an additional thing that's not part of the song but part of the track on one album (see second bullet), or some other thing like it, that screws me up. It also bugs me with issues of deciding whether a track is what I call "mixworthy" (i.e., worthy of being ripped from my CD collection into my iTunes library.

freecycle jackpot! (part 2)

Technically, it wasn't Freecylce. But the idea's the same. A friend's husband is doing carpentry in a house in East Hampton. The ownerwants to sell the home, and wanted it emptied. He didn't want to bother selling things. So our friend posted on facebook all this free stuff that was in need of new homes. We're talking bicycles, furniture, art, clothing, ceramic tile. And, of course, the subject of this post: Two big metal CD stands full of CDs.

There were fewer discs than the last haul (which I wrote about here). But this was more closely aligned to my taste. As before, there are a few discs that I already have (e.g., Schoolhouse Rock Rocks, Saturday Morning Cartoon's Greatest Hits and Elvis Costello's Blood & Chocolate), and I'll be passing these duplicates along.

There are some that I'm reasonably confident I won't like (Christina Aguilera, Ricky Martin). But I'll give them a listen just in case.

There are a lot of CDs that I'm excited to be getting. Three are as follows:

• Black 47 -- Home of the Brave: I have Black 47's debut, Fire of Freedom, and I've loved it ever since buying it. The combination of rock and rap with Celtic influences was fresh and innovative when it came out, and it's still a great listen. But for some reason I never bought any of their other material. I read a review of one other album. That was a very positive review, but it was clear that the reviewer loved the album before hearing it, so I didn't put much weight in it. Now, I guess I'll find out how the followup to HotB was.
• Blink 182 -- Enema of the State: I saw a couple of their videos years ago, and thought the songs were catchy. I never did buy any of the albums, though. I guess I was waiting to get one for free.
• Various Artists -- Pure Disco 2: There's a bunch of great tracks on this: "Last Dance," "Upside Down" and "Play That Funky Music." But the big thing for me is that The Weather Girls' "It's Raining Men" is represented. I had the single back in the days of vinyl, and have missed it since I don't have it on CD. Or, rather, I didn't until today.

I will say there's one thing frustrating here. I found there are a bunch of jewel cases that have the insert and everything, but no disc. There are others with the disc but no booklet. And there are some with the wrong disc in them. I suppose that makes sense since this is all coming from some single guy's home. On the other hand, more than half of the discs (including the three listed above) are still factory-sealed.

By the way, As I write this, I am listening to Songs in the Key of Springfield, a collection of music sequences from The Simpsons TV show.

freecycle jackpot!

I hit the Freecycle jackpot, Saturday. Someone gave us boxes and boxes of CDs and DVDs. We're talking well over a thousand CDs and over 250 DVDs.

In terms of musical style, this load is all over the map. There are old pop standards like Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra. There are pop singers from the rock era such as Neil Sedaka and Neil Diamond. There's rap. There's heavy metal. There's country. There's classical. There are a bunch of Chinese and Japanese CDs. There's lots of Jewish music, lots of Christmas albums, and I've noticed one album of "Arabic Exotica." There are soundtracks, and compilations. There are albums of big name stars -- Madonna, Elvis Presley and The Beatles. There are local artists who produced their own CDs.

And, as if to complete the joke, there is an album of Gregorian chants.

I've started going through these, first separating the ones I know I'm not keeping -- duplicates, albums I already have, etc. After that, I'll be listening to the discs to decide what to keep and what to pass on. Then I'll be enterring the ones I keep into my database. Yes, I am anal-retentive enough to keep a database of my CDs. That may or may not be the subject of future posts.

There are occasional Freecycle posts where people are giving away CDs. But they generally get snapped up pretty quickly. You pretty much have to be lucky enough to see the post right after it goes up. In this case, we got lucky that my wife saw the adds just as they were posted.

I've gotten CDs through Freecycle before. There's a guy on Long Island who works in the music business (I'm not sure in what capacity), who occasionally gives away CDs. What was interesting about this guy is that he wanted responders to tell him what styles they liked, and he would then give them bags of CDs (maybe a dozen or so) that were specifically picked for them. I got CDs from him a couple times and I remember picking up and seeing lots of bags on his porch, each labelled with the name of an intended recipient.

I also remember one woman who posted that whe was giving away 500 CDs. She gave me several boxes that had many, many copies of about 5 different CDs. I ended up giving away a lot of the discs to a friend at work who was working on a sculpure and needed multiple copies of a CD. It didn't matter what CD, as long as they were all the same.

And there was one guy from Flushing who was moving in with his girlfriend and needed to get rid of a huge collection of CDs, DVDs, records, tapes, comic books, and other media. I suspect his girlfriend made it clear that, while he could move in with her, his stuff couldn't. He didn't want to bother making personalized packages, and he didn't want to have an endless stream of people coming in and picking through a slowly-dwindling collection. He wanted it all gone at once.

This giveaway was like that last one. A woman had boxes of stuff that she wanted out. On the way over I was guessing that this was a matter of divorce, or a death. Or maybe her son moved out and left stuff behind. But no. She explained that she had been running an eBay business, but was quitting it and this was her remaining inventory.

So maybe what I have to thank is the ongoing cultural shift away from physical CDs and toward digital downloads. I assume that cultural shift makes CDs less attractive to eBay buyers. I, of course, am a dinosaur -- I'm not really comfortable with having music without the CD. I can listen to things on a iPod, and I use iTunes to listen to songs that I have ripped from my CDs. But I gotta have that CD or it doesn't feel right.