So the Songbird sings.

City 17

I have reinstalled Half-Life 2 to relive some of my best memories. Nothing quite like feeling like the saviour of the world against a remarkably effective rendition of a dystopian police force while wearing the good old HEV suit.

No More, I Swear!

I got quite frustrated with iTunes yesterday. I’ve basically been putting up with all the tiny faults because it was convenient in a way since it went with my iPod. You might know of course that I’ve been having issues. Well, recently, it’s become a bit more erratic, and after the recent update, I lost complete albums. It appears that they were completely corrupted because I couldn’t play the files in other media players either. (Thankfully they were albums that I had backed up and it was convenient to restore them. I didn’t have to dig out CDs or anything like that.)

There have a few other varieties of splicing corruption, but I’m too lazy to talk about it here.

Yesterday, a random error sprang up and kept springing up and refused to go away. I read a bit about the problem after a Google, but realised that a line had been crossed.

So I decided to give Songbird a spin and quickly went to download it. [via Songbird] So far it seems reasonably functional, with a few problems here and there. It lacks a couple of things I feel like I should see but don’t, although that must surely be attributed to its youth. After spending an hour or two with it, though, I’m reasonably happy. It runs faster (of course), is more well-organised, and hopefully won’t be giving me any of the headaches of iTunes.

A few quibbles, though: I noticed first of all that some songs (that play completely okay in other media players) end up with some awful distortion. I also was unable to navigate within a few tracks; I tried jumping some twenty seconds and the whole song became silence. There were rare occasions of skipping and noise, and it wasn’t as if I was doing anything memory-intensive. And it starts up slow sometimes, but that’ll probably be a memory issue on my computer’s part.

I haven’t done much else but play a few tracks, so I can’t comment much. I’ll be trying to load up my iPod with it soon, and will mess around with the library management too.

In any case, we’ll see where this goes. I’m sure I’ve had enough of iTunes, though, and am lucky that I’m using the non-Touch iPod, which is syncable in Songbird.

Kuwata!

Keisuke Kuwata performing Clapton’s Change The World. [via YouTube]

Lists

2666 has been named as TIME‘s book of the year. [via TIME]

Just so you don’t have to click through the whole fiction list…

1. 2666, Roberto Bolaño
2. Lush Life, Richard Price
3. American Wife, Curtis Sittenfeld
4. Anathem, Neal Stephenson
5. Unaccustomed Earth, Jhumpa Lahiri
6. Personal Days, Ed Park (which has a cute cover that I thought was difficult to read)
7. The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows
8. When Will There Be Good News?, Kate Atkinson
9. The Graveyard Book, Neil Gaiman
10. The Widows Of Eastwick, John Updike

I’ll definitely be picking up 2666, and if I can fit it in to my tiny budget, The Graveyard Book.

I was also a bit surprised not to see The Dark Knight on the movies list considering the hype and the fact that the film was actually relatively competent. It was good to see Synecdoche, New York at No. 2 since I intend to watch that as soon as I can get my hands on it.

On another note, 30Rock and The Colbert Report both made the list for TV Episodes (at 8 and 7 respectively). Elsewhere, Vampire Weekend made it to the Top Albums list at 5.

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Wonky iTunes

Really Crazy

I’ve never been one to complain about iTunes. In fact, I quite like it, contrary to the opinions of many friends. Recently, though, it’s been hard to maintain that stance.

You see, my iTunes is going insane. Seriously. Like an angry panda. It started quite a long time ago when it wouldn’t play some tracks completely. They would always skip to the end after reaching a certain point. I assumed I had bad sectors or bad files. Then the problems disappeared for a while. I thought that maybe it was just acting up.

Then cover art began to disappear. Not completely, of course. That would be too obvious. My iTunes Evil Edition is far more devious than that. They started to disappear from select songs within albums. In other words, the album art would suddenly not show up in my iPod.

I thought it had something to do with the fact that I had loaded up my iPod library on an Eee PC and maybe it just screwed up the cover art.

I found out I was wrong when more cover art began to disappear. I hadn’t changed a thing.

Then just last week, I had trouble editing ID Tag information. With some files, the information would be lost forever and I appeared to have some form of file corruption because the files when replaced by exactly the same ones from my back-ups would turn out to be a tiny bit smaller. Like 0.01MB smaller. I’ve since learnt that this happens when I change ID Tag information in bulk. Specifically cover art information. And it only happens to one or two files in a lot of ten to twenty. When it happens, I can’t change any information on the tag.

And just yesterday, I noticed some inconsistent genre labelling which wouldn’t happen since I label everything by the lot. But it happened. Like they refused to be changed along with them others.

I did correct them, but it was unnerving to see.

Today, I played one of my favourite albums, only to see that the second track had mysteriously been pushed to the last. This occurred only on my iPod. It’s still the second track on my iTunes.

…

I’ll have to see where this goes. There are few things on this earth that make me glum to see, and angry pandas are one of them.

The Graveyard Book…

…has been published. [via Neil Gaiman's Journal] Congrats to Mr. Gaiman, and I look forward to reading it soon. After I get tomorrow’s test out of the way first, of course, and then make my trip down to the bookstore.

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